Third Thursday Book Group

Free monthly daytime book discussion group on Thursday mornings that meets in the Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Library at the Washington DCJCC. Read current and classic fiction and non-fiction.

Thursday, May 20, 10:30 am
Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

"This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” So begins Fareed Zakaria’s blockbusting bestseller on the United States in the twenty-first century. How can Americans understand this rapidly changing international climate, and how might the nation continue to thrive in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.

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Thursday, June 17, 10:30 am
Adam Gopnick, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

On a memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. Gopnik shows us Lincoln and Darwin as they really were: family men and social climbers; ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers; the living husband, father, son, and student behind each myth. How do we reconcile Lincoln, the supremely good man we know, with the hardened commander who wittingly sent tens of thousands of young soldiers to certain death? Why did the relentlessly rational Darwin delay publishing his "Great Idea" for almost twenty years? How did inconsolable grief at the loss of a beloved child change each man? And what comfort could either find--for himself or for a society now possessed of a sadder, if wiser, understanding of our existence?

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For more information or to be added to the e-mail list, contact margalitr@washingtondcjcc.org or call (202) 777-3250.