We are happy to announce the list of books for the fourth season of the McNaughtan’s Non-Fiction Book Club, which will begin in April 2019. Find the full list below, and if you would like to support an independent bookshop, all of the books will be available for purchase at Typewronger Books, which we are currently hosting in our gallery space.
The meetings will take place once a month on Thursdays, and run from 6.30 to 8pm.
If you would like to receive reminder notices and announcements of new schedules sign up to the book club mailing list:
We look forward to welcoming you at our book club!
18 April, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes’s still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about as recently as three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion, and indeed our future. And don’t be put off by the unwieldy title, the book is lucidly and captivatingly written.
23 May, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life. William Finnegan first started surfing as a young boy in California and Hawaii. Barbarian Days is his immersive memoir of a life spent travelling the world chasing waves through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa and beyond. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography, Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, a social history, an extraordinary exploration of one man’s gradual mastering of an exacting and little-understood art. It is a memoir of dangerous obsession and enchantment.
20 June, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About World Politics by Tim Marshall
All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Yes, to follow world events you need to understand people, ideas and movements – but if you don’t know geography, you’ll never have the full picture. In ten chapters, using maps, essays and occasionally the personal experiences of the widely travelled author, Prisoners of Geography looks at the past, present and future to offer an essential insight into one of the major factors that determines world history.
18 July, How Music Works by David Byrne
How Music Works is David Byrne’s bestselling, buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Drawing on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators – along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists – Byrne shows how music emerges from cultural circumstance as much as individual creativity. It is his magnum opus, and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.
22 August, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were the members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. As the death toll climbed the FBI took up the case and began to uncover one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history. Exposing the turbulent history of the relations between whites and the Osage Nation over the course of more than a century, this bestselling book provides a disturbing look at the deep-seated prejudices that continue to cast a shadow over the United States.
