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Suggestions for the Spring of 2006.

TitleAuthor Information Submitted by
The United States Of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy T. R. Reid List Price: $25.95 ($15.57 at Amazon) Paul Silvers
Paul Silvers writes: Here is another suggestion for our next book. Just finished the first two chapters. It's well written, timely, interesting, disturbing, controversial, instructive and occasionally lighthearted. A good read and I believe a book that will generate lively discussions.

From Publishers Weekly While 'old Europe' is most often portrayed as more bark than bite in its differences with the current U.S. administration, NPR commentator and former Washington Post European bureau chief Reid finds the E.U. as a whole 'determined to change a world that has been dominated by Americans.' The opening chapters quickly summarize everyday Europeans' love-hate relationship with the States, the legacies of the 20th-century wars, and the creation of the Euro. The center chapters present GE as a case study in transatlantic trade gone wrong ('Welch's Waterloo') as well as other snafus that show Europe attempting to dominate market share of everything from cell phones to pharmaceuticals. A chapter detailing what's left of Europe's welfare states is followed by a relatively bleak assessment of Europe's armies, and the spin that the E.U. is betting on economic 'soft power' for eventual global dominance. The concluding chapters warn that the U.S. ignores Europe's new 25-nation strong union at its economic and political peril, but also draw attention to Europe as a huge, tariff-free market and potential sharer of global burdens. There's little surprising here, but Reid's primer on recent U.S. European relations genially summarizes an evolving, if often reluctant, partnership

China, Inc 'How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World ' Ted C. Fishman Hardback Fred Sage
From Amazon.com : China has the world's most rapidly changing large economy, and according to Ted Fishman, it is forcing the world to change along with it. 'No country has ever before made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once,' he writes, in China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World. China is currently the largest maker of toys, clothing, and consumer electronics, and is swiftly moving up the ladder in car production, computer manufacturing, biotechnology, aerospace, telecommunications, and other sectors thanks to low-cost, high-tech factories. China is also where the world is investing. In 2004, for instance, the city of Shanghai alone attracted over $12 billion in direct foreign investment, roughly the same amount as all of Indonesia and Mexico received. In tracing China's ascendancy over the past 30 years (with annual growth of an astonishing 9.5 percent), Fishman presents a flood of fa cts, figures, forecasts, and anecdotes and examines the implications of this unprecedented growth for China, the U.S., and the rest of the world.

Calling China's huge population 'arguably the greatest natural resource on the planet,' Fishman details how hundreds of millions of peasants have migrated from rural to urban areas to find manufacturing jobs, providing an unlimited, low-wage workforce to power China's economy. In the process, this shift has changed both Chinese culture and the global business climate in significant ways. Simply put, American companies can't compete with wages as low as 25 cents an hour and lack of regulation and oversight, so are forced to move their operations to China or completely change the focus of their business. And it's not just a problem for the U.S.--even Mexico is outsourcing to China. Though it remains to be seen whether this will truly be the 'Chinese Century' as Fishman asserts, China, Inc. is a brisk and informative look at why so many American corporations, and American jobs, are heading to China. --Shawn Carkonen "

American Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century Kevin Phillips 480 pages hardback $16 at Amazon Bob Goddard
Bob Goddard writes " We get religion and politics, money and oil -- and that's just in the subtitle! From Amazon: From Ancient Rome to the British Empire, Phillips demonstrates that every world-dominating power has been brought down by a related set of causes: a lethal combination of global over- reach, militant religion, resource problems, and ballooning debt. It is this same axis of ills that has come to define America's political and economic identity in the past decade. "
Great Decisions: 2006 Foreign Policy Association $15 + S/H John Rushton
John Rushton writes " This is a publication with various articles on Foreign Policy. They include: 'Human Rights in an Age of Terrorism', 'Turkey', 'UN Reform', 'The U.S. and Iran', 'Energy Resources', 'Brazil', 'Global Health Pandemics and Security', and 'China and India: Partners or Competitors'. "
Collapse:How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Jared Diamond $20 paperback Art Smoot
From the Penguin Group: " As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society's apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana. "
Paris 1919 : Six Months That Changed the World Richard Holbrooke Hardback, $23 on Amazon John Rushton
From Publishers Weekly A joke circulating in Paris early in 1919 held that the peacemaking Council of Four, representing Britain, France, the U.S. and Italy, was busy preparing a 'just and lasting war.' Six months of parleying concluded on June 28 with Germany's coerced agreement to a treaty no Allied statesman had fully read, according to MacMillan, a history professor at the University of Toronto, in this vivid account. Although President Wilson had insisted on a League of Nations, even his own Senate would vote the league down and refuse the treaty. As a rush to make expedient settlements replaced initial negotiating inertia, appeals by many nationalities for Wilsonian self-determination would be overwhelmed by rhetoric justifying national avarice. The Italians, who hadn't won a battle, and the French, who'd been saved from catastrophe, were the greediest, says MacMillan; the Japanese plucked Pacific islands that had been German and a colony in China known for German beer. The austere and unlikable Wilson got nothing; returning home, he suffered a debilitating stroke. The council's other members horse-traded for spoils, as did Greece, Poland and the new Yugoslavia. There was, Wilson declared, 'disgust with the old order of things,' but in most decisions the old order in fact prevailed, and corrosive problems, like Bolshevism, were shelved. Hitler would blame Versailles for more ills than it created, but the signatories often could not enforce their writ. MacMillan's lucid prose brings her participants to colorful and quotable life, and the grand sweep of her narrative encompasses all the continents the peacemakers vainly carved up. 16 pages of photos, maps.

Product Description: Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize
Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize
Between January and July 1919, after _the war to end all wars, men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices! of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War. A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created_Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel_whose troubles haunt us still. "

Revolutionary Wealth Alvin and Heidi Toffler Hardcover, 512 pages, $27.95, Knopf Art Smoot
Art Smoot writes " I saw an interview on CSPAN with Toffler and it sounds interesting. From Random House's Web site: Revolutionary Wealth is about how tomorrow's wealth will be created, and who will get it and how. But twenty-first-century wealth, according to the Tofflers, is not just about money, and cannot be understood in terms of industrial-age economics. Thus they write here about everything from education and child rearing to Hollywood and China, from everyday truth and misconceptions to what they call our _third job__the unnoticed work we do without pay for some of the biggest corporations in our country. They show the hidden connections between extreme sports, chocolate chip cookies, Linux software and the _surplus complexity_ in our lives as society wobbles back and forth between depressing decadence and a hopeful post-decadence. "




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