FreeThinkers Book Club Archive
A compassionate community of free religious thought, inviting all people to rest, grow, and serve the world.
What's A Freethinker Book Club?
Two members answer your FAQ’s here. Content updates:
- This group continues to meet via Zoom
- Canadian Unitarians now have 8 principles
All Are Welcomed!
Westwood is a Unitarian Universalist Congregation that has been approved as a certified Freethinker congregation by the Unitarian Universalist Humanist Association.
The Freethinker book club at Westwood is an inclusive group that welcomes people of all races, genders, sexual orientations, ages, abilities and incomes to join in respectful discussion of the topics raised in the books we read.
The book titles are democratically selected by the members of the book club.
Selection of a particular book does not imply endorsement of the book’s perspective by Freethinker members or by the Westwood Congregation.
Books For Sept-May 2026-27
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness - November 25, 2026
- Author: Jonathan Haidt
- Reading Month:November 25, 2026
The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense - January 27, 2027
- Author: Gad Saad
- Reading Month:January 27, 2027
Drunk – How we sipped, danced and stumbled our way to civilization - February 24, 2027
- Author: Edward Slingerland
- Reading Month:February 24, 2027
Born a Crime - March 31, 2027
- Author: Trevor Noah
- Reading Month:March 31, 2027
Cancer Confidential - April 28, 2027
- Author: Charles Hayter
- Reading Month:April 28, 2027
19 Ways of Looking at Consciousness - May 26, 2027
- Author: Patrick House
- Reading Month:May 26, 2027
Pitch Night - June 23, 2027
Bring your potluck dish to share and your pitch for the booklist for next year!
- Author:
- Reading Month:June 23, 2027
Pitch a Book for Next Year’s FreeThinker Book Club
Make a Pitch for next year’s Freethinkers’ reads. We hope each of us will come with a book to pitch for the coming year. If we meet the same number of times next year as this year, we need to select 8 titles – pitch in eh!
For your pitch – try to check access – public library, cost, audio and e-reader etc. It is really fun to read reviews (for and against) your pitch on Goodreads.com
Of course it also helps to read the book, but as other nights- not necessary!
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will
- Author Robert M. Sapolsky
- Reading Year May 27, 2026
Tree: a Life Story
- Author David Suzuki and Wayne Grady
- Reading Year April 29, 2026
Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet
- Author Hannah Ritchie
- Reading Year March 25, 2026
Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools)
- Author C.P. Champion & Tom Flanagan
- Reading Year February 25, 2026
Who We Are: Four Questions For a Life and a Nation
- Author Murray Sinclair
- Reading Year January 28, 2026
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
- Author Andrea Wulf
- Reading Year November 26, 2025
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
- Author Anne Applebaum
- Reading Year October 29, 2025
The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters
- Author Timothy Caulfield
- Reading Year September 24, 2025
Annual “Pitch Night”
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Death is but a Dream- Finding Hope and Meaning at Life’s End
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I Am Malala:The girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taliban
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The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma
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The End of Race Politics
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The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (2023)
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Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High
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The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
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“Truth Telling”- 7 conversations about Indigenous life in Canada
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Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
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The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
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From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
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Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
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Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian reserve, a white town and the road to reconciliation
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Einstein’s Dreams
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The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
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The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership
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Five Little Indians
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Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible
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The Moral Landscape
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The Ministry of the Future
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The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
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Burning Questions
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Rez Rules: My Indictment of Canada’s Systematic Racism Against Indigenous People
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Irreversible Damage
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Prey Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights
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Restoring Democracy in an Age of Populists and Pestilence
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The Last Lecture
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How to Be an Antiracist
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Caste: The Origins of our Discontents
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How to Avoid a Climate Disaster; the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need
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A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency
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Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everybody
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The Gadfly Papers
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The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they communicate
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Brief Answers to the Big Questions
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Growing Pains
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Dance of the Dissident Daughter
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The Great Mortality
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The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity
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The Righteous Mind
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
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Last Child in the Woods
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How the West Really Lost God: A new theory of secularization
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Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions
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Justice – What’s the Right Thing to Do?
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The Little Prince
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Sapiens
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
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Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion edited
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True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism
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The God Delusion
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The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason
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