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What Non-Fiction book should we read in Aug., Sept. and Oct. 2018?

Collaborate in choosing our next NON-FICTION book for group discussion within this forum. A minimum of 5 posts is necessary to participate here!
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Chris OConnor

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What Non-Fiction book should we read in Aug., Sept. and Oct. 2018?

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What Non-Fiction book should we read in Aug., Sept. and Oct. 2018?

Please post non-fiction book suggestions in this thread ONLY if you are an active BookTalk.org member with 10 or more posts on the BookTalk.org forums AND you fully intend to participate in the book discussion.

If you're an author wanting to promote your book on BookTalk.org we welcome you here on BookTalk.org but not in this particular thread. Please share your books in the Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book! forum.

So what non-fiction book do you think we should read and discuss during the 90-day period of August, September and October 2018? Holy smokes I cannot believe how fast this year is going. :shock:
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Chris OConnor

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Re: What Non-Fiction book should we read in Aug., Sept. and Oct. 2018?

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To find the book I'm suggesting I started on the BookTalk.org Book Awards page and scrolled down and clicked on the Pulitzer Prizes link. I then clicked the Prize Winners link at the very top of the page since my goal was to find a book that had great reviews. I scrolled down to the General Nonfiction section and read about the winning book and the finalists.

And this is where I found the finalist The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us, by Richard O. Prum.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SMITHSONIAN, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL

A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world.

In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature?
Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum—reviving Darwin's own views—thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons—for the mere pleasure of it—is an independent engine of evolutionary change.
Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time.
The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.
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Re: What Non-Fiction book should we read in Aug., Sept. and Oct. 2018?

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Looks very interesting. Mate choice / sex attraction also explains the ridiculous horns that some beetles grow. Beauty is certainly in the eye of the beholder...
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Re: What Non-Fiction book should we read in Aug., Sept. and Oct. 2018?

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Although I haven't participated in the discussion yet, I am enjoying our current selection Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. So I suggest we continue with his previous book Homo Deus A Brief History of Tomorrow. I expect it has some fascinating predictions. If we do select this, we should probably pick two books to discuss so we don't get too narrow...

After writing a book about the past and another about the future, Harari has a new book coming out in September about the present time.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
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Re: What Non-Fiction book should we read in Aug., Sept. and Oct. 2018?

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Homo Deus A Brief History of Tomorrow will work for me but my brother said he didn't enjoy it as much as Sapiens. I'd want to read the reviews and see how most people rated Homo Deus.
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Re: What Non-Fiction book should we read in Aug., Sept. and Oct. 2018?

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Another suggestion...

Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even If the Universe Doesn't

A psychiatrist presents a compelling argument for how human purpose and caring emerged in a spontaneous and unguided universe.

Can there be purpose without God? This book is about how human purpose and caring, like consciousness and absolutely everything else in existence, could plausibly have emerged and evolved unguided, bottom-up, in a spontaneous universe.

A random world--which according to all the scientific evidence and despite our intuitions is the actual world we live in--is too often misconstrued as nihilistic, demotivating, or devoid of morality and meaning. Drawing on years of wide-ranging, intensive clinical experience as a psychiatrist, and his own family experience with cancer, Dr. Lewis helps readers understand how people cope with random adversity without relying on supernatural belief. In fact, as he explains, although coming to terms with randomness is often frightening, it can be liberating and empowering too.

Written for those who desire a scientifically sound yet humanistic view of the world, Lewis's book examines science's inroads into the big questions that occupy religion and philosophy. He shows how our sense of purpose and meaning is entangled with mistaken intuitions that events in our lives happen for some intended cosmic reason and that the universe itself has inherent purpose. Dispelling this illusion, and integrating the findings of numerous scientific fields, he shows how not only the universe, life, and consciousness but also purpose, morality, and meaning could, in fact, have emerged and evolved spontaneously and unguided. There is persuasive evidence that these qualities evolved naturally and without mystery, biologically and culturally, in humans as conscious, goal-directed social animals.

While acknowledging the social and psychological value of progressive forms of religion, the author respectfully critiques even the most sophisticated theistic arguments for a purposeful universe. Instead, he offers an evidence-based, realistic yet optimistic and empathetic perspective. This book will help people to see the scientific worldview of an unguided, spontaneous universe as awe-inspiring and foundational to building a more compassionate society.
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Re: What Non-Fiction book should we read in Aug., Sept. and Oct. 2018?

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I will be reading "New Power" by Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans,

https://www.amazon.com/New-Power-Works- ... 0385541112

with or without the BookTalk group. I'm not sure it is as discussable as the others that have been suggested so far, which look pretty good to me.


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