- Discussions of nonfiction books selected by and for members of The Learning Center at Senior Citizens, Inc.
- The Learning Center
- Senior Citizens, Inc.
- 3025 Bull St., Savannah, GA 31405
- Thursdays
- 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.
- For more information or to share ideas, suggestions, or volunteer as a moderator, contact Marc Thomas
Suggestions for 2027
It’s time to start building next year’s calendar of books to be read. Please share any suggestions. We prefer books to be no more than about 300 pages of reading text (that is, excluding end notes, indices, appendices, etc.). We do not usually cover very recent books (unless they are available cheaply) and sometimes visit old classics.
Fall 2026
September 17 – What an Owl Knows
- What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds
- Jennifer Ackerman
- With their forward gaze and quiet flight, owls are often a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and foresight. But what does an owl really know? And what do we really know about owls? Scientists have only recently begun to understand in deep detail the complex nature of these extraordinary birds. Some two hundred sixty species of owls exist today, and they reside on every continent except Antarctica, but they are far more difficult to find and study than other birds because they are cryptic, camouflaged, and mostly active in the dark of night. Jennifer Ackerman illuminates the biology and natural history of these birds and reveals remarkable new scientific discoveries about their brains and behavior. She joins scientists in the field and explores how researchers are using modern technology and tools to learn how owls communicate, hunt, court, mate, raise their young, and move about from season to season. We now know that the hoots, squawks, and chitters of owls follow sophisticated and complex rules, allowing them to express not just their needs and desires but their individuality and identity. Ackerman brings this research alive with her own personal field observations about owls and dives deep into why these birds beguile us.
- Moderator: Marc Thomas
October 15 – Reading Dante
- Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity
- Prue Shaw
- The best and most eloquent introduction to Dante for our time. Shaw is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Dante. Written with the general reader in mind, Reading Dante brings her knowledge to bear in an accessible yet expert introduction to his great poem. This is far more than an exegesis of Dante’s three-part Commedia. Shaw communicates the imaginative power, the linguistic skill and the emotional intensity of Dante’s poetry―the qualities that make the Commedia perhaps the greatest literary work of all time and not simply a medieval treatise on morality and religion. The book provides a graphic account of the complicated geography of Dante’s version of the afterlife and a sure guide to thirteenth-century Florence and the people and places that influenced him. At the same time it offers a literary experience that lifts the reader into the universal realms of poetry and mythology, creating links not only to the classical world of Virgil and Ovid but also to modern art and poetry, the world of T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and many others. Dante’s questions are ours. What is it to be a human being? How should we judge human behavior? What matters in life and in death? Reading Dante helps the reader to understand Dante’s answers to these timeless questions and to see how surprisingly close they sometimes are to modern answers. Reading Dante is an astonishingly lyrical work that will appeal to both those who’ve never read the Commedia and those who have. It underscores Dante’s belief that poetry can change human lives.
- Moderator: Ted DiPadova
November 19 – A Measure of Belonging
- A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South
- Edited by Cinelle Barnes.
- These essays examine issues of sex, gender, academia, family, immigration, health, social justice, sports, music, and more. Kiese Laymon navigates the racial politics of publishing while recording his audiobook in Mississippi. Regina Bradley moves to Indiana and grapples with a landscape devoid of her Southern cultural touchstones, like Popeye’s and OutKast. Aruni Kashyap apartment hunts in Athens and encounters a minefield of invasive questions. Frederick McKindra delves into the particularly Southern history of Beyonce’s black majorettes. From the DMV to the college basketball court to doctors’ offices, there are no shortage of places of tension in the American South. Urgent, necessary, funny, and poignant, these essays from new and established voices confront the complexities of the South’s relationship with race, uncovering the particular difficulties and profound joys of being a Southerner in the twenty-first century.
- Moderator: Ann Fenstermacher
Prior Sessions
January 25 – American Midnight
- American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis
- Adam Hochschild
- A groundbreaking work of narrative history, American Midnight recalls these horrifying yet inspiring four years, when some brave Americans strove to keep their fractured country democratic, while ruthless others stimulated toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law—poisons that feel ominously familiar today.
- Moderator: Roger Gregory
February 20 – Artificial Intelligence
- Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
- Melanie Mitchell
- Interweaving stories about the science of AI and the people behind it, Artificial Intelligence brims with clear-sighted, captivating, and accessible accounts of the most interesting and provocative modern work in the field, flavored with Mitchell’s humor and personal observations. This frank, lively book is an indispensable guide to understanding today’s AI, its quest for “human-level” intelligence, and its impact on the future for us all.
- Moderator: Marc Thomas
March 20 – The Abolition of Man
- The Abolition of Man
- C. S. Lewis
- Why shouldn’t we always listen to only reason and cut out our emotions? Lewis argues that reason without emotion there is not a reality. He debunks arguments that the purest form of reason is instinct, that benevolent actions will be found through pursuing science, and that science will be the best moral compass for mankind to follow. Lewis argues that moral absolutes do exist and they are universal throughout all of time.
- Moderator: Beth Mowry
April 17 – Drinking in America
- Drinking in America: Our Secret History
- Susan Cheever
- Some nations drink more than we do, some drink less, but no other nation has been the drunkest in the world as America was in the 1830s only to outlaw drinking entirely a hundred years later. Both a lively history and an unflinching cultural investigation, Drinking in America unveils the volatile ambivalence within one nation’s tumultuous affair with alcohol.
- Moderator: Susan Beversluis
May 15 – TBA
- Options under discussion.
June 19 – Lessons from the Covid War
- Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report by the Covid Crisis Group
- Covid Crisis Group
- The Covid war showed Americans that their wondrous scientific knowledge had run far ahead of their organized ability to apply it in practice. Improvising to fight this war, many Americans displayed ingenuity and dedication. But they struggled with systems that made success difficult and failure easy. This book shows how Americans can come together, learn hard truths, build on what worked, and prepare for global emergencies to come.
- Moderator: Kate Johnson