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Suggestions for the Fall of 2009.
| Title | Author | Information | Submitted by |
| Currently we are starting a new list. Please make suggestions for the next book. | |||
| The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It | Paul Collier | Amazon $16.25 | Jo Noble |
| Fluent, thought-provoking book. David Smith, The Observer Rarely can a book on this subject have been such a pleasurable read. David Smith, The Observer Every politician should read this. Simon Shaw, Irish Mail on Sunday. There are hundreds of books on development but none as well written and authoritative as Paul Collier's 'The Bottom Billion' Edmund Conway, Daily Telegraph Every politician should read this. Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday This is a short book, but one which brilliantly challenges conventional views about development and aid. Nick Rennison, Sunday Times This extraordinarily important book should be read by everyone who cares about Africa. Max Hastings, Sunday Times A splendid book... rich in both analysis and recommendations... read this book. Martin Wolf, Finacial Times It will change the way you look at the tragedy of persistent poverty in a world of plenty. Martin Wolf, Financial Times Set to become a classic. His book should be compulsory reading for anyone embroiled in the thankless task of trying to pull people out of the pit of poverty. The Economist An arresting, provocative book. If you care about the fate of the poorest people in the world, and want to understand what can be done to help them, read this book. If you don't care, read it anyway. Tim Harford, author of 'The Undercover Economist' " | |||
| Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World | Tracy Kidder | Amazon $11 | Orah Elron |
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Tracy Kidder is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of the bestsellers The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, and Home Town. He has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the _master of the non-fiction narrative._ This powerful and inspiring new book shows how one person can make a difference, as Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it.
At the center of Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur _genius_ grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life's calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This magnificent book shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer_brilliant, charismatic, charming, both a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti_blasts through convention to get results. Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that 'the only real nation is humanity' - a philosophy that is embodied in the small public charity he founded, Partners In Health. He enlists the help of the Gates Foundation, George Soros, the U.N.'s World Health Organization, and others in his quest to cure the world. At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope, and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb _Beyond mountains there are mountains_: as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too. Mountains Beyond Mountains unfolds with the force of a gathering revelation,_ says Annie Dillard, and Jonathan Harr says, _[Farmer] wants to change the world. Certainly this luminous and powerful book will change the way you see it. | |||
| Invisible Hands | Kim Phillips-Fein | hardcover paperback | Marc Sobel |
| marc sobel writes " tells the story of the growth of the conservative movement from New Deal to Reagan " | |||
| The Nine: The Secret World of the Supreme Court | Paul Tognetti | $22 | Art Smoot |
| From Publishers Weekly on Amazon It's not laws or constitutional theory that rule the High Court, argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women guided by political intuition. New Yorker legal writer Toobin (The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson) surveys the Court from the Reagan administration onward, as the justices wrestled with abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, gay rights and church-state separation. Despite a Court dominated by Republican appointees, Toobin paints not a conservative revolution but a period of intractable moderation. The real power, he argues, belonged to supreme swing-voter Sandra Day O'Connor, who decided important cases with what Toobin sees as an almost primal attunement to a middle-of-the-road public consensus. By contrast, he contends, conservative justices Rehnquist and Scalia ended up bitter old men, their rigorous constitutional doctrines made irrelevant by the moderates' compromises. The author deftly distills the issues and enlivens his narrative of the Court's internal wranglings with sharp thumbnail sketches (Anthony Kennedy the vain bloviator, David Souter the Thoreauvian ascetic) and editorials (inept and unsavory is his verdict on the Court's intervention in the 2000 election). His savvy account puts the supposedly cloistered Court right in the thick of American life. (A final chapter and epilogue on the 2006-2007 term, with new justices Roberts and Alito, was unavailable to PW.) (Sept. 18) Copyright _ Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. " | |||
| We can have Peace in the Holy Land | Jimmy Carter | $27 | Paul Weisskopf |
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President Carter has been a student of the biblical Holy Land all his life. For the last three decades, as president of the United States and as founder of The Carter Center, he has studied the complex and interrelated issues of the region's conflicts and has been actively involved in reconciling them. He knows the leaders of all factions in the region who will need to play key roles, and he sees encouraging signs among them.
Carter describes the history of previous peace efforts and why they fell short. He argues persuasively that the road to a peace agreement is now open and that it has broad international and regional support. Most of all, since there will be no progress without courageous and sustained U.S. leadership, he says the time for progress is now. President Barack Obama is committed to a personal effort to exert that leadership, starting early in his administration. This is President Carter's call for action, and he lays out a practical and doable path to peace. | |||
| In Defense of Food | Michael Pollan | $9 | Orah Elron |
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Amazon.com Review, January 2008: Food is the one thing that Americans hate to love and, as it turns out, love to hate. What we want to eat has been ousted by the notion of what we should eat, and it's at this nexus of hunger and hang-up that Michael Pollan poses his most salient question: where is the food in our food? What follows in In Defense of Food is a series of wonderfully clear and thoughtful answers that help us omnivores navigate the nutritional minefield that's come to typify our food culture. Many processed foods vie for a spot in our grocery baskets, claiming to lower cholesterol, weight, glucose levels, you name it. Yet Pollan shows that these convenient 'healthy' alternatives to whole foods are appallingly inconvenient: our health has a nation has only deteriorated since we started exiling carbs, fats--even fruits--from our daily meals. His razor-sharp analysis of the American diet (as well as its architects and its detractors) offers an inspiring glimpse of what it would be like if we could (a la Humpty Dumpty) put our food back together again and reconsider what it means to eat well. In a season filled with rallying cries to lose weight and be healthy, Pollan's call to action_'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.'--is a program I actually want to follow. --Anne Bartholomew "
See also Art Smoot's notes on "In Defense of Food". | |||
| Catastrophe | Dick Morris and Eileen Mcgann | $17 | Paul Weisskopf |
| Product Description - It's time to take back our country. Now. It's that simple. It's that urgent. So begins Dick Morris and Eileen McGann's latest and most important book. They say that we must act before President Barack Obama fully implements his radical political agenda. Because after Obama has won his war on prosperity and canceled the war on terror, it will be too late to regain our liberty or our security. At a time when we needed a pragmatic centrist to lead us out of recession, we got a doctrinaire socialist who wants to use the crisis to put the government in charge of the economy and enact European socialism here in the United States. Cars, banks-what's next? He will keep at it until Washington governs every major business in America and sets all our salaries. It's a catastrophe. Dick Morris and Eileen McGann saw the meltdown coming. In their book Outrage, they called out the house of cards that was Fannie Mae. In Fleeced, they went after the credit card companies, the subprime mortgage lenders, and the hedge fund billionaires who conspired to wreck the economy-and Barack Obama, whose policies, they predicted last summer, would 'trigger a stock market crash.' Now, in Catastrophe, Morris and McGann take a hard look at America in free fall-and at how Obama is transforming a vulnerable America into a socialist state. They tell the truth about Obama and his radical policies: He will destroy our health care system so that no one gets adequate care. He designed his bank rescue plan to pave the way for nation-alization of the banks and socialization of the economy. He firmly believes in government control of our major industries-he's already commandeered the banks and the automobile industry. He plans to reshape the political landscape to keep the left in power for decades by cooking the census, enfranchising illegal immigrants, muzzling talk radio, and coercing workers into unions. He is attacking those who fight terrorism while letting the terrorists go free. He gives aid to Hamas while Shariah Law threatens to take over America. He has repealed the Declaration of Independence and put us under a worldwide, European-dominated financial regulatory system. But Obama is not working alone. Morris and McGann spell out how Congress is complicit: How Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Charlie Rangel use special interests and special friends for their own enrichment and glorification. How Ted Kennedy Jr. is exploiting his father's health care power. 'This is no time for apathy or alienation or hopelessness,' Morris and McGann remind us. 'It's a time for action.' And that action must begin now-before it's too late. " | |||
| THRESHOLD: The Crisis of Western Culture | Thom Hartman | Non-Fiction | Linda Stelzer |
| Linda Stelzer writes " 'As the first decade of the twenty-first century close s amid economic collapse and the seeming ruin of the American Dream, Thom Hartmann 's THRESHOLD could not be more relevant. We've reached a moment of cultural recko ning. If we are to make progress toward a more stable future, not just economical ly, but culturally and environmentally--it will require a paradigm shift, an evolu tion in mainstream thinking. In his latest work, top talk-radio host and pr ogressive commentator Thom Hartmann defines three critical breaking points--econom ic, demographic, and environmental--that we've reached. In clear and impassioned prose, he bursts the yths and ideologies of religious fundamentalism, apitalism ru n amok, male domination, and miltarism that are draining our world of its natural and human resourses and exacerbating the suffering of millions for the benefit of the few.' I've read about half of this book and find it well worth reading and one that will lend itself to robust discussion. Hartmann's style is easy to read but thought provoking and he deals with world-wide issues and problems that shoul d engage BWAG. I heartily recommend it. " | |||
| Weapons of Mass Instruction | John Taylor Gatto | $25 | Art Smoot |
| A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling 'In this book, the noisy gadfly of U.S. education takes up the question of damage done in the name of schooling. Again he touches on many of the same questions and finds the same answers. Gatto is a bold and compelling critic in a field defined by politic statements, and from the first pages of this book he takes even unwilling readers along with him. In Weapons of Mass Instruction, he speaks movingly to readers' deepest desires for an education that taps their talents and frees frustrated ambitions. It is a challenging and extraordinary book that is a must read for anyone navigating their way through the school system.' - Ria Julien - Winnipeg Free Press John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of familiar schooling that cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a by-product of rote-memorization drills. Gatto's earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, put that now-famous expression of the title into common use worldwide. Weapons of Mass Instruction promises to add another chilling metaphor to the brief against schooling. Here is a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate, following high-level political theories constructed by Plato, Calvin, Spinoza, Fichte, Darwin, Wundt, and others, which contend the term _education_ is meaningless because humanity is strictly limited by necessities of biology, psychology, and theology. The real function of pedagogy is to render the common population manageable. Realizing that goal demands that the young be conditioned to rely upon experts, remain divided from natural alliances, and accept disconnections from the experiences that create self-reliance and independence. Escaping this trap requires a different way of growing up, one Gatto calls _open source learning._ In chapters such as _A Letter to Kristina, my Granddaughter_; _Fat Stanley_; and _Walkabout:London,_ this different reality is illustrated. John Taylor Gatto taught for thirty years in public schools before resigning from school-teaching in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal during the year he was named New York State's official Teacher of the Year. Since then, he has traveled three million miles lecturing on school reform. " | |||
| Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.) | Barbara Kingsolver | $10 | Art Smoot |
| Reviewed by Nina Planck - Michael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers 'putting food by,' as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field_local food and sustainable agriculture_is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ('the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners'), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national 'eating disorder' and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food_in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling_demands teamwork. (May)Nina Planck is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Bloomsbury USA, 2006). " | |||
| Free: The Future of a Radical Price | Chris Anderson | $12 | Art Smoot |
| In the digital marketplace, the most effective price is no price at all, argues Anderson (The Long Tail). He illustrates how savvy businesses are raking it in with indirect routes from product to revenue with such models as cross-subsidies (giving away a DVR to sell cable service) and freemiums (offering Flickr for free while selling the superior FlickrPro to serious users). New media models have allowed successes like Obama's campaign billboards on Xbox Live, Webkinz dolls and Radiohead's name-your-own-price experiment with its latest album. A generational and global shift is at play_those below 30 won't pay for information, knowing it will be available somewhere for free, and in China, piracy accounts for about 95% of music consumption_to the delight of artists and labels, who profit off free publicity through concerts and merchandising. Anderson provides a thorough overview of the history of pricing and commerce, the mental transaction costs that differentiate zero and any other price into two entirely different markets, the psychology of digital piracy and the open-source war between Microsoft and Linux. As in Anderson's previous book, the thought-provoking material is matched by a delivery that is nothing short of scintillating. (July) " | |||
| The Dumbest Generation | Mark Bauerlein | $10 | Paul Weisskopf |
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How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)
It's an irony so commonplace it's become almost trite: despite the information superhighway, despite a world of knowledge at their fingertips, the younger generation today is less informed, less literate, and more self-absorbed than any that has preceded it. But why? According to the author, an English professor at Emory University, there are plenty of reasons. The immediacy and intimacy of social-networking sites have focused young people's Internet use on themselves and their friends. The material they're studying in school (such as the Civil War or The Great Gatsby) seems boring because it isn't happening right this second and isn't about them. They're using the Internet not as a learning tool but as a communications tool: instant messaging, e-mail, chat, blogs. And the language of Internet communication, with its peculiar spelling, grammar, and punctuation, actually encourages illiteracy by making it socially acceptable. It wouldn't be going too far to call this book the Why Johnny Can't Read for the digital age. Some will disagree vehemently; others will nod sagely, muttering that they knew it all along. --David Pitt " | |||
| Great Decision 2010 | Various | $18 | Art Smoot |
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