7,189 books
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28,379 voters
Tom
https://www.goodreads.com/tomjtanguaygmailcom
“Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?”
― Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
― Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
“In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.”
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
“Failure to summon forth the courage to risk a nondogmatic and nonevasive stance on such crucial existential matters can also blur our ethical vision. If our actions in the world are to stem from an encounter with what is central in life, they must be unclouded by either dogma or prevarication. Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.”
― Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening
― Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening
“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
“This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Exceptional Books
— 2576 members
— last activity Sep 20, 2025 02:26PM
This book club is ONLY for books that are WRITTEN VERY WELL and have a GREAT STORY LINE. We ask that each member shelve at least 2 exceptional books ...more
Tom’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Tom’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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