Let the adventure begin. Join the Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club led by Sean R. Corbin, a PSPL Librarian.

The group meets the 3rd Thursday of the month September through May in the Cornelia White Community Room at the Welwood Murray Memorial Library in downtown Palm Springs from 2 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

To receive meeting information and/or join the email list for the Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club, please contact Sean R. Corbin in advance of the meeting.

2025 / 2026 Season at the WMML

September 18, 2025: Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum

October 16, 2025: Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green

November 20, 2025: Cher: The Memoir, Part One by Cher

December 18, 2025: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

January 15, 2026: Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground by Kurt Gray

February 19, 2026: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

March 19, 2026: A Troubled Oasis: A Critical History of Palm Springs, California by Ronald Isetti

April 16, 2026: Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

May 21, 2026: The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe by Jeremy Lent

Most titles are available as Downloadable Audiobooks and/or eBooks from PSPL.

Assisted Listening Devices (ALDs) are instruments designed to amplify sounds to make it easier for persons who are hearing‑impaired to enjoy a library program.

Anyone who requires an auxiliary aid or service for effective communication, or a modification of policies or procedures to participate in a program, service, or activity of the City of Palm Springs, should contact the ADA Coordinator, as soon as possible but no later than 48 hours before the scheduled event.

September 18, 2025 

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum

—From the Pulitzer-prize winning author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them

—"A masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism...clear-sighted and fearless.”—John Simpson, The Guardian

We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc., aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

October 16, 2025

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green

—“The real magic of Green’s writing is the deeply considerate, human touch that goes into every word.” –The Associated Press

—″Told with the intelligence, wit, and tragedy that have become hallmarks of the author’s work.... This is the story of us.” –Slate

Tuberculosis has been entwined with hu­manity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John be­came fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequi­ties that allow this curable, preventable infec­tious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.

In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis. 

November 20, 2025

Cher: The Memoir, Part One by Cher

—The extraordinary life of Cher can be told by only one person...Cher herself.

After more than seventy years of fighting to live her life on her own terms, Cher finally reveals her true story in intimate detail, in the first of a two-part memoir.

Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. The only woman to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has been lauded by the Kennedy Center.

She is a lifelong activist and philanthropist.

As a dyslexic child who dreamed of becoming famous, Cher was raised in often-chaotic circumstances, surrounded by singers, actors, and a mother who inspired her in spite of their difficult relationship.

With her trademark honesty and humor, Cher: The Memoir traces how this diamond in the rough succeeded with no plan and little confidence to become the trailblazing superstar the world has been unable to ignore for more than half a century.

Cher: The Memoir, Part One follows her extraordinary beginnings through childhood to meeting and marrying Sonny Bono—and reveals the highly complicated relationship that made them world-famous, but eventually drove them apart.

Cher: The Memoir reveals the daughter, the sister, the wife, the lover, the mother, and the superstar.

It is a life too immense for only one book.

December 18, 2025

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

—2005 National Book Award Winner for Nonfiction

— From one of America’s iconic writers and the author of Notes to John, comes a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. 

January 15, 2026

Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground by Kurt Gray

—"A riveting read...Overturns widespread assumptions about why we’re divided and reveals how we can come together."—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times best-selling author

It’s easy to assume that liberals and conservatives have radically different moral foundations. In Outraged, Kurt Gray showcases the latest science to demonstrate that we all have the same moral mind—that everyone’s moral judgments stem from feeling threatened or vulnerable to harm.

We all care about protecting ourselves and the vulnerable. Conflict arises, however, when we have different perceptions of harm. We get outraged when we disagree about who the “real” victim is, whether we’re talking about political issues, fights with our in-laws, or arguments on the playground.

In this fascinating and insightful tour of our moral minds, Gray tackles popular myths that prevent us from understanding ourselves and those around us. While it is commonly believed that our ancestors were apex predators, Gray argues that for the majority of our evolutionary history, humans were more hunted than hunter. This explains why our minds are hard-wired to perceive threats, and provides surprising insights on the scientific origins of our values and beliefs. Though we might think ourselves driven by objective reasoning, Gray unveils new research that finds our moral judgments are based on gut feelings rather than rational thought, and presents a compelling reminder that we are more alike than we might think.

Drawing on groundbreaking research, Gray provides a captivating new explanation for our moral outrage, and unpacks how to best bridge divides. If you want to understand the morals of the “other side,” ask yourself a simple question—what harms do they see?

February 19, 2026

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

—“A terrific book...Powerful and persuasive.” —Fareed Zakaria

—“Spectacular…Offers a comprehensive indictment of the current problems and a clear path forward…Klein and Thompson usher in a mood shift. They inspire hope and enlarge the imagination.” —David Brooks, The New York Times

From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.

To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next gener­ation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and pre­serves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.

March 19, 2026

A Troubled Oasis: A Critical History of Palm Springs, California by Ronald Isetti

This is a revised and enlarged version of A Troubled Oasis: A Critical History of Palm Springs. The key chapter on the tragedy of the Section Fourteen "urban holocaust" when minorities were evicted from the center of the city in the 1960s, has been updated in light of a tranche of new, revelatory documents published online by city officials in the spring of 2023. However, all of the chapters have been enriched by greater detail, new subjects, and deeper research, making this new edition practically a new book. A critical perspective has been maintained, eschewing the boosterism of traditional municipal histories. This comprehensive study should appeal to anyone who wants to know more about the history of Palm Springs, from the prehistoric times of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians to the present day.

April 16, 2026 

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

—An unexpected, energetic look at world history on sea and land from the bestselling author of Salt and The Basque History of the World

—“Every once in a while a writer of particular skill takes a fresh, seemingly improbable idea and turns out a book of pure delight. Such is the case of Mark Kurlansky and the codfish.” –David McCullough, author of The Wright Brothers and 1776

Cod, Mark Kurlansky’s third work of nonfiction and winner of the 1999 James Beard Award, is the biography of a single species of fish, but it may as well be a world history with this humble fish as its recurring main character. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod, frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply of cod. As we make our way through the centuries of cod history, we also find a delicious legacy of recipes, and the tragic story of environmental failure, of depleted fishing stocks where once their numbers were legendary. In this lovely, thoughtful history, Mark Kurlansky ponders the question: Is the fish that changed the world forever changed by the world's folly?

May 21, 2026

The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe by Jeremy Lent

—"A profound personal meditation on human existence and a tour-de-force weaving together of historic and contemporary thought on the deepest question of all: why are we here?"— Gabor Maté M.D., author, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

As our civilization careens toward climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. The dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has been invalidated by modern science.

Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity's age-old questions–Who am I? Why am I? How should I live?–from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom.

The result is a breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world. It offers a compelling foundation for a new philosophical framework that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on a flourishing Earth.

The Web of Meaning is for everyone looking for deep and coherent answers to the crisis of civilization.