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Kepler's invites you to register your Book Club with our store. As a registered Book Club you will receive these benefits:
- 15% discount on orders of five or more books (same title)
- Emails on Book Club picks, Book Club news and Recent Reviews
- We can arrange Author call-ins for your Book Club
- Your Book Club will be invited to our Seasonal Book Club Presentations, featuring local authors
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To Register your book club click here.
If you ever have questions, email us at bookclub@keplers.com
To see our list of suggested Book Club Summer Reading, Click Here.
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| Click HERE to see what other books our local book clubs are reading! |
Sina Herkelrath, Book Club Coordinator |
Big Ideas Meeting Group
Focusing on Science, Philosophy, and Technology
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Saturday, May 11, 4:00 p.m.
Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman 
Quants, physicists working on Wall Street as quantitative analysts, have been widely blamed for triggering financial crises with their complex mathematical models. Their formulas were meant to allow Wall Street to prosper without risk. But in this penetrating insider’s look at the recent economic collapse, Emanuel Derman—former head quant at Goldman Sachs—explains the collision between mathematical modeling and economics and what makes financial models so dangerous. Though such models imitate the style of physics and employ the language of mathematics, theories in physics aim for a description of reality—but in finance, models can shoot only for a very limited approximation of reality. Derman uses his firsthand experience in financial theory and practice to explain the complicated tangles that have paralyzed the economy. Models.Behaving.Badly. exposes Wall Street’s love affair with models, and shows us why nobody will ever be able to write a model that can encapsulate human behavior.
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Saturday, August 10, 4:00 p.m.
by David Orrell
For centuries, scientists have strived to predict the future. But to what extent have they succeeded? Can past events-Hurricane Katrina, the Internet stock bubble, the SARS outbreak-help us understand what will happen next? Will scientists ever really be able to forecast catastrophes, or will we always be at the mercy of Mother Nature, waiting for the next storm, epidemic, or economic crash to thunder through our lives? In The Future of Everything, David Orrell looks back at the history of forecasting, from the time of the oracle at Delphi to the rise of astrology to the advent of the TV weather report, showing us how scientists (and some charlatans) predicted the future. How can today’s scientists claim to anticipate future weather events when even thee-day forecasts prove a serious challenge? How can we predict and control epidemics? Can we accurately foresee our financial future? Or will we only find out about tomorrow when tomorrow arrives?
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First Friday Book Club
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Friday, May 10, 7:30 p.m.
Friday, June 7, 7:30 p.m.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.
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Daytime Fiction - & More - Book Club
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Sunday, May 19, 2:00 p.m.
A Good American by Alex George
Everything he’d seen had been unimaginably different from the dry, dour streets of home, and to his surprise he was not sorry in the slightest. He was smitten by the beguiling otherness of it all.
And so began my grandfather’s rapturous love affair with America—an affair that would continue until the day he died.
This is the story of the Meisenheimer family, told by James, a third-generation American living in Beatrice, Missouri. It’s where his German grandparents—Frederick and Jette—found themselves after journeying across the turbulent Atlantic.
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Sunday, June 23, 2:00 p.m.
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.
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Fiction Book Club
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Monday, May 20, 7:00 p.m.
Old School by Tobias Wolff
The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.
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Monday, June 17, 7:00 p.m.
Borderliners by Peter Høeg
Strange things are happening at Biehl's Academy when this elite school opens its doors to a group of orphans and reform-school rejects, kids at the end of the system's tether. But the school is run by a peculiar set of rules by which every minute is regimented and controlled. The children soon suspect that they are guinea pigs in a bizarre social experiment, and that their only hope of escape is to break through a dangerous threshold of time and space.
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Monday, July 15, 7:00 p.m.
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
Jake, hack writer and sponger, now penniless flat-hunter, seeks out an old girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her glamorous actress sister, Sadie. He resumes acquaintance with the formidable Hugo, whose ‘philosophy’ he once presumptuously dared to interpret. These meetings involve Jake and his eccentric servant-companion, Finn, in a series of adventures that include the kidnapping of a film-star dog and a political riot on a film set of ancient Rome. Jake, fascinated, longs to learn Hugo’s secret. Perhaps Hugo’s secret is Hugo himself? Admonished, enlightened, Jake hopes at last to become a real writer.
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Spanish Book Club (The Spanish Book Club does not meet in June or December.)
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Monday, May 20, 7:00 PM Note new date change!
Ilfigenia by Teresa De la Parra
Ifigenia: Diario de una seorita que escribi porque se fastidiaba (Diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored, 1924) is the first of two novels by the Venezuelan writer Teresa de la Parra (Paris, 1889-Madrid, 1936). Her second, much shorter novel, Las memorias de Mam Blanca (1929), was one of the few authored by a woman to be admitted to the Spanish American canon before the radical rereading of the tradition by feminists in the 1970s and 80s. Ifigenia, however, was long neglected, in part, due to the controversy it ignited when it first appeared and its subtle and even deceptive use of a first person narrative.
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