FASCINATING NONFICTION – FALL 2024 VIDEOS
Coordinators: Harriet Finkelstein
Fascinating Nonfiction is a history and philosophy course that explores books of a variety of subjects.
NOTE: To view a video click on the link below its description. Once the video window comes up (in a new tab), click on the start button to begin.
FASCINATING NONFICTION
The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson
Presenter: Bob Reiss
Presentation Date: September 11, 2024
At the heart of this story is a mystery that still confounds. How on earth did South Carolina, a primitive, scantily populated state in economic decline, become the fulcrum for America’s greatest tragedy [the Civil War]? And even more bewildering, what malignant magic brought Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line to the point where they could actually imagine the wholesale killing of one another?
FASCINATING NONFICTION
The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Journey to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning, by A. J. Jacobs
Presenter: Harriet Finkelstein
Presentation Date: September 25, 2024
Come meet A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Constitutionally (impersonated by Harriet Finkelstein). As politicians and Supreme Court justices wage a high stakes battle over how we should interpret the Constitution, A.J. Jacobs embarked on a year-long journey and his tale provides an entertaining and illuminating look into how this storied document fits into our democracy today.
FASCINATING NONFICTION
You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, by Walter Hickey
Presenter: Ruth Ward
Presentation Date: October 9, 2024
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Walter Hickey is a data journalist who covers pop culture. He claims that the average American spends more than a fifth of their life consuming media: watching movies and TV, reading books, and listening to music. We tend to dismiss this as mere diversion, as if when we walk out of a theater, we go back to being exactly who we were. But in reality, the media we consume — and the act of consuming — it affects people, culture, and the world in ways that are complex, profound, and unexpected. In this book, Hickey explores exactly how this thing we call “entertainment” has such a tremendous effect on us.
FASCINATING NONFICTION
Persecution and the Art of Writing, by Leo Strauss
Presenter: Paul Golomb
Presentation Date: October 23, 2024
Strauss (1899-1973) was an immensely influential and incredibly enigmatic political philosopher. Persecution was one of his most far-reaching books, representing a timeless and topical theme, as well as, I believe, an important insight into Strauss himself.
FASCINATING NONFICTION
Proust and the Squid The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf
Presenter: Larry Shapiro
Presentation Date: November 6, 2024
Many years ago I started reading Proust and the Squid because I was intrigued by the title. The book turned out to be much more than a history of reading, and I’ve never stopped thinking about it for long. It offers the best explanation I know of how the component parts of the brain operate to meet new challenges and why we don’t all read the same way. It starts with pattern recognition and the challenge of decoding a symbol, culminating in being transformed by what we read. It’s about learning and teaching, from Sumerian reading teachers 5,000 years ago to every parent who reads to children today. And what might be gained and lost when digital reading comes to dominate over books, because there is a neurological difference between the two ways of decoding.
FASCINATING NONFICTION
Navigations: The Portuguese Discoveries and The Renaissance by Malyn Newitt
Presenter: Paul Adler
Presentation Date: November 20, 2024
During the 15th and early 16th centuries, Portuguese sailors and explorers embarked on a series of ambitious, maritime voyages that would see them exploring vast areas of the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the coasts of West Africa to Brazil, India and beyond.
Navigations provides an objective re-examination of the events and factors that culminated in a series of significant and world-altering explorations by Dias, da Gama, Cabral and Magellan. It was the Portuguese who created the commercial and cultural networks which linked Asia with the newly discovered world of the Americas and laid the foundations for the global economies, population movements and scientific systems of the modern world.
FASCINATING NONFICTION
Rachel Carson: Her Life, Her Legacy
Presenter: Harriet Finkelstein
Presentation Date: December 11, 2024
Perhaps the finest nature writer of the twentieth century, Rachel Carson is remembered more today as the woman who challenged the notion that humans could obtain mastery over nature by chemicals, bombs and space travel than for her studies of ocean life. Her sensational book, Silent Spring, warned of the dangers to all natural systems from the misuse of chemical pesticides and questioned the scope and direction of modern science. Silent Spring was also very influential in initiating the contemporary environmental movement.
Will January 20, 2025, mark the beginning of the destruction of Rachel Carson’s legacy as well as the work of thousands of dedicated environmentalists?