Book Discussion on January 20, 2016
River Falls Public Library--Board Room
10:30 a.m.
As Program Director Ruth Wood mentioned at the last meeting of the River Falls Area Retired Educators' Association, we are reviving our book discussion group in the new year.
Rather than tackle a book, Ruth has chosen a few articles (and book chapter) that may be of interest to us. You can read all of them or just the ones that interest you. In any event, please join us to chat about issues that affect all of us in one way or another.
The readings can be accessed below with a click. Two copies of these articles have also been placed on reserve at the public library if that would be more convenient to you.
Aging and Retirement
Sharon Begley, in
The Brain in Winter, argues that what we think we know about our brains as we get older may not necessarily be true. The assumption that we lose brain cells after age 65 is proving not to be true at all.
Jeffrey Kluger,
The Surprising Power of the Aging Brain, also argues that the aging brain is much more resilient than we thought. Research shows that new cognitive systems are created as we age.
Ken Dychtwald explores ways in which baby boomers are changing the way we think about and experience old age and retirement in
Ageless Aging: The Next Era of Retirement.
Toni Antonucci and Alicia Tarnowski, their short article from
USA Today, focus on the importance of social supports in
A Network of Friends Crucial for Happiness.
Contemporary Issues
Children and grandchildren are growing up in a different world and in a different way than many of us did. Millennials--born between the 1970s and the late 1990s--are also shaping the world in unique ways. In
Help! My Parents Are Millennials, Katy Steinmetz describes what this generation believes, how they behave, and how they parent.
writer Walter Kern examines contemporary life in
If You're Not Paranoid, You're Crazy, especially in terms of all the agencies and entities that are keeping track of us overtly and covertly.
In a recent book entitled
Our Political Nature: The Contemporary Origins of What Divides Us, author Avi Tuschman includes a chapter called
The Universal Political Animal. Tuschman's thesis is that "political orientations are natural dispositions that have been molded by evolutionary forces."
William Deresiewicz explores what has happened to college education in recent years in his article
"The Neoliberal Arts: How College Sold Its Soul to the Market" in the September 2015 issue of
Harper's magazine.
Finally, novelist Joanna Scott writes an interesting article in
The Nation (August 2015) entitled
"Liberating Reading" in which she asks the question: "Who needs fiction?" In this age of so much information, do we need to read novels? Scott answers a resounding "yes."
