Meet this month’s Book Club (and inaugural Skepchick Book Club) author Katherine Stewart. She will be discussing her new book (and signing Kindles?), “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children” at our usual time and place (7 PM Monday evening at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square.) We’ll be a week late this time, on May 7, 2012, but it’s worth the wait!

At last month’s SitP, we had an author as our guest and we asked a lot of fantastic questions. Let’s do it even better this time! Check out her web site and read this sample (from a NY Times op-ed), or better yet read the whole book. It is interesting and important even if it is scary enough to be a Halloween selection.

See the previous post for more about the book.

RSVP on our Facebook event page.

Update: Katherine Stewart will be joining us for our first ever author visit to a BSBC meeting. Don’t miss it!

P.S. I got Mary Roach’s autograph (times 2) last night. She would have signed my Kindle as well, but we couldn’t find a Sharpie. Someone remember to bring a Sharpie to Book Club!

Our next book will be The Good News Club by Katherine Stewart. It is the story of how the Christian Right is attempting to use America’s public school system to proselytize our children and (as intended collateral damage) destroy the education system itself.

Stewart was not much concerned when a “nondenominational Bible study program” showed up as an after-school activity at her daughter’s public elementary school, but as she learned more, she became deeply worried. She discovered it was “just one small part of a much larger story that should be of concern to anyone who cares about the future of public education – or indeed the future of secular democracy – in the United States.”

In a strategy very reminiscent of the Discovery Institute’s promotion of Intelligent Design as a wedge issue to subvert the teaching of evolution in the public schools and insert religious doctrine into our science classes, an organization called the Child Evangelism Fellowship has been organizing “Good News Clubs” in elementary schools across the nation and around the world, to indoctrinate children (as young as possible; they start in kindergarten) in fundamentalist Christian ideology.

Thanks to a duplicitous Supreme Court decision (Good News Club v Milford Central School, 2001) based on the dubious proposition that 5-year-olds could clearly distinguish events and programs sponsored by their schools from those carried on in the schools (after hours, at the same time and often in the same rooms as legitimate after-school programs)and conducted often by teachers or teacher’s aides, sectarian religious groups must be granted the same access to public school property as any other outside community groups such as art and music programs, boy and girl scouts, community service organizations, and so forth.

While the adult club organizers aren’t allowed to proselytize on school grounds (except to children whose parents have given explicit written permission), nothing prevents the children from doing so, as they are encouraged to do by the clubs. The conflicts engendered between the children, the bullying and the shaming and the destruction of friendships, and subsequently the conflicts between their parents and within their community, can rapidly destroy the public spirit that supports the schools, causing people to cease to volunteer for school events, stop attending PTO meetings and stop supporting school fundraisers, and generally promote hatred and intolerance, as happened in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle in 2008. But this is all well and good to the religious right.

In 1979, Jerry Falwell made the agenda transparent: “I hope to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we don’t have public schools,” he said. “The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.”

The first chapter of the book tells the story of the events in Seattle then and after. In the second chapter, Stewart attends a national convention of the CEF. Apart from drawing parallels to a multilevel marketing scheme, this chapter lacks the diverting whimsy of Jon Ronson’s attendance at Bohemian Grove and Bilderberg Group gatherings. It is all deeply disturbing. Their goal is to establish Good News clubs at all 65,000 public elementary schools in the US within the next 24 years. They are already in 3500 schools, about 6% penetration. They have a very detailed strategy for extending their reach. The casual bigotry, racism and homophobia exhibited at the convention is also horrifying.

I’ve only read the first two chapters so far, but skipped ahead to find out if there were any local connections to the book. I found two. The CEF’s target city in the fall of 2010 was Boston. Did anyone here notice? Did you have any run-ins with them? They do try to stay under the radar, at least until it’s too late. The second local connection is that Katherine Stewart attended the John D. Runkle School in Brookline, where our own Liz teaches!

We will be meeting at our usual place, the Harvard Northwest Science Building, 52 Oxford St, Cambridge (unless the weather is nice, in which case we’ll be meeting under the Giant Green Pepper, just north of Harvard Yard, between Memorial Hall and the Science Center) from 3 to 5 PM on Saturday, May 19th.

Please sign up at our Facebook event page (unless you’d rather not, but it does give us some idea of how many people to expect.) If you sign up to the Boston Skeptics Facebook group and then register for the event, you will get notified of any changes of schedule and of future events (maybe, it seems to be acting strangely at the moment.) So far as I know, we’ve never denied anyone membership who requested it, but who knows, you might be the first! I also (sometimes) attempt to Tweet reminders shortly before the event, though I have been remiss at this recently.

UPDATE: don’t bother with Facebook. They’ve broken it in such a way as to make it completely useless for group events like the Book Club and Skeptics in the Pub meetings.

The Good News is that we’ve joined the 21st Century, when everything changes. The Boston Skeptics Book Club has formed the nucleus of the Skepchick Book Club. Read Mary’s post to see how it all will work. Basically, there will be an on-line gathering to discuss the same book the day after our meeting. Everyone (local or distant) is invited to attend and discuss! Virtual snacks and drinks provided.

Announcing two free local skeptical events!

Mary Roach will be receiving the “Annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism” from the Harvard Secular Society and the American Humanist Association on Wednesday, April 25 at the Harvard Science Center.

Mary is the reigning record-holder as 3-time Boston Skeptics Book Club author (Spook, Packing for Mars and Stiff.) Maybe I can get her to autograph my Kindle?

Tickets (free) and details are available from the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy.

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On Saturday, May 12, the Cape Ann Skeptics will be sponsoring Skepticamp Cape Ann in Gloucester. This one day, free event will be from 9:30 until 4:00 in LaTrattoria, a downtown Gloucester restaurant. See their web site for full details.

A few of us ventured into the wilds of New Hampshire for the Granite State Skepticamp last October, and had a great time. Gloucester is closer and has many fewer bears, so I highly recommend it.

UPDATE: Due to scheduling conflicts, we’ve decided to postpone the next book club meeting until April 7.

In honor of Evacuation Day, March 17, our next book will be That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion by Rachel Herz. Since Evacuation Day is better known as St Patrick’s Day, we will be celebrating by including a fine selection of disgustingly green colored, but delicious snacks.

I usually forget to promote the snacks in my Book Club announcements, possibly due to the fact that books usually involve parasites, corpses, zombies, medical experimentation or nasty chemicals, but they are a highlight of the meetings. Today, Mary brought delicious, low-fat, low-calorie chocolate chip muffins. (I ate four.) Please bring a snack or your appetite or both. We always have left-overs, so don’t feel shy if you just come and eat (and discuss the book, of course. Or just sit in the corner and be amused by the obscure Star Trek references that always sneak in.)

Back to the book… I haven’t started to read it yet[*], but according to the Amazon description, it “tackl[es] such colorful topics as cannibalism, humor, and pornography.” How could it go wrong? The few reviews so far are all very positive. It was just published in January (“That book is so two weeks ago”), so unfortunately there’s no paperback edition yet, so if you are poor, think of it as an opportunity to get up close and personal with your local library.

Date: April 7, 2012
Time: 3:00 to 6:00 (ish) PM
Location: Unless it is spectacularly nice out, the first floor conference room at the north end of the Northwest Science Building at Harvard. (52 Oxford St, Cambridge MA.)

Please feel free to RSVP on our Facebook event page if you’re not socialmediaphobic.

[*] Actually, I have, thanks to Kindle’s instant gratification mode. The 2nd paragraph of the Preface contains a description of the National Rotten Sneakers Contest. I think we have a winner!

Our next book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It is the story of HeLa cells, the first immortal cell line which has been and continues to be used extensively in many fields, including cancer research, vaccine development and testing, AIDS, aging, genetics, and the effects of radiation on living cells. It is also the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor African American woman raised as a share-cropper on a Virginia tobacco farm who died a horrible death from cancer at age 30 in 1951. It is also the story of her family who only found out about the source of the HeLa cell line many years later. (Informed consent was apparently never sought or obtained.)

The book promises many topics for discussion, including medical history, cutting edge cancer and vaccine research, medical ethics and the exploitation of poor people for medical research, history of the underclasses in America, the importance of science education, and the current health care situation. (Many of Henrietta’s descendants can’t afford to receive the treatments derived from her cells, should they develop those diseases!)

Skloot worked with the Lacks family, particularly with Henrietta’s daughter Deborah to obtain their side of the story and to help them in their personal search for answers.

The book has received excellent reviews, both on-line and from friends, and I am looking forward to reading it.

We will be meeting on Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 3 PM, most likely in the same conference room in the Northwest Science Building at Harvard that we have used recently.

The world didn’t end two weeks ago, but it could happen at any time!

Our December book (if we survive that long) will be Phil Plait’s Death From the Skies.

We will be meeting at our usual winter quarters, in Harvard’s Northwest Science Building, 52 Oxford St, Cambridge, at 3 PM Saturday, December 3. We’ll either be in the cafeteria on the 1st floor at the south end of the building, or in the conference room at the north end.

Mary posted directions last month.

Sign up on the Facebook event page if you are so inclined.

Meanwhile, for your further enterrortainment, here’s the short version of the book.

Important Update! Note date and time change.

Our next book club meeting will be on Saturday, November 5 at 5 PM at one of the usual places. (Today, we met indoors in a nice conference room with left-over bagels at the far end of our usual building, due to scheduling conflicts and iffy weather.) Stay tuned for updates.

We decided to change the time to 5 PM date to November 5 so that people could attend both the Granite State Skeptics Skepticamp and the Book Club meeting.

Our book is going to be 3-time winner Mary Roach’s Stiff, in honor of Halloween.

Since John wrote a nice summary last week about the last book we read (The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensics), I’m just going to amend that with information for our next meeting.

We are reading Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore, and we are meeting again on September 24th at 3pm. If it’s nice weather, we’ll meet in our usual spot on Harvard Yard, and if not I’ll give details on our colder weather location.

Our book club meeting this month is again at the usual place and time, 3 PM Saturday August 13 on the lawn just north of Harvard Yard, between Memorial Hall (the big ugly pseudo gothic building) and the Science Center (the big ugly modern building that looks like a flight of giant stairs to nowhere.) It’s supposed to be warm and sunny, but if it rains, we’ll move indoors to the cafeteria of the Northwest building up Oxford Street just past the museum.

The book is about the birth of forensic science (CSI: Lyon, as in Lyon, France, circa 1894.) I’m about 1/2 way through, the prime suspect is about to go to trial, and is attempting an insanity defense. It’s a pretty compelling story, all the more so because it’s true. The author alternates chapters between the story of the criminal, Joesph Vacher, and the history of forensics, mostly focusing on Professor Lacassagne of the Lyon Medical School, who was the leading forensic scientist of the time.

Last Boston Skeptics’ Book Club Meeting, we met up to discuss Jon Ronson’s latest book The Psychopath Test. Personally, this book has been one of my most favorite non-fiction books that I’ve read this summer.

The beginning is a little strange and non-psychopathic in that it explores the curious case of Being or Nothingness, a book penned by an unknown weird person and sent out to various scientists. While he’s researching that subject, he walks by the office of a psychologist who specializes in psychopaths, and that’s what starts his odyssey with Broadmoor (a famous psychopath facility in the UK) and “Tony”, a man who says he faked mental illness to escape prison, but in fact he has been incarcerated longer at Broadmoor than his original sentence. When Jon confronts the psychiatrists about Tony’s fake mental illness, they tell Jon that they know Tony faked it, but in fact that is exactly what a psychopath would do, which is why he’s been locked up in Broadmoor so long. I won’t say what happens to Tony, but Jon finishes up his tale in the book.

Jon also writes about the book’s namesake, the Psychopath Test developed by psychiatrist Bob Hare. Before the ‘70s, Bob worked in a prison and used electric shocks and disturbing images to discern the psychopaths from the regular criminals. However, ethics reforms forbade this inhumane treatment, so he developed a non-violent checklist instead. Jon ends up getting trained on how to use the checklist and tries it out on a CEO known for his ruthless boardroom behavior. The CEO ends up twisting almost every point and reframing it as a leadership quality. (Funnily enough, he gives this interview in his mansion, which is filled with stuffed or gilded predators and giant oil paintings of himself.)

Jon also covers 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracy theorists, a mistaken profiler, and the abundance of misdiagnoses of childhood bipolar disorder (which is under hot debate as to whether it actually exists) and the preventable death of one child who died at age 4 of an overdose of her bipolar meds because her parents would give her some when she would get “annoying”.

If you’re looking for a quick, intriguing summer read, pick up this book. Jon always has an excellent skeptical eye and a knack for presenting his subjects in a sympathetic light. (At one point I was even feeling good that the scientologists exposed a bad psychiatrist! Not for long though.)

The book we’re reading now is The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science. Our next meeting is Saturday, August 13 at 3pm, hopefully out in Harvard Yard if the weather is nice, but stay tuned for details!

Also, if you have any suggestions for books, please leave them in the comments. (And if you were at the last meeting and suggested a book, write that in the comments too, because I forgot to write down the excellent books that everyone suggested!)