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The following books were proposed for the discussion during the summer of 2004. At the June 3rd, 2003 meeting a vote was held and Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was selected. Everyone had two votes: the first choice got 2 points, the second choice got 1 point. The number of votes received is now listed.
| Title | Author | Estimated Price | Submitted by VOTES RECEIVED |
| Perfectly Legal | David Cay Johnston. | $25.95, hard back | Fred Sage (1) 3 |
| Notes with submission: How the super rich screw the rest of us. How a major company, by renting a PO box in bermuda saved 70 million. The covert campaign to rig our tax system.? Review from Amazon.com: Most Americans would agree that they are duty bound as beneficiaries of our democracy to pay taxes, and the majority of us do pay?-exorbitantly. But what about those who do not pay their fair share? David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, here reveals how fairness and equity have eroded from the American tax system. Johnston describes in shocking detail the loopholes our government provides the "super rich"--from private individuals to profitable corporations?-to hide their wealth, to defer or evade tax payments, and to pass the bill to law-abiding middle-class Americans. The loss in revenue "imposes a severe cost on honest taxpayers" through reduced services, increased federal debt, and a weight on the middle class that threatens to impede its ability to achieve upward social mobility. | |||
| Democracy in America | Alexis deTocqueville. | $10.00 paperback | Fred Sage (2) 2 |
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Notes from inside Flap Copy: From America's call for a free press to its embrace of the capitalist system, Democracy in America--first published in 1835--enlightens, entertains, and endures as a brilliant study of our national government and character. Philosopher John Stuart Mill called it "among the most remarkable productions of our time." Woodrow Wilson wrote that de Tocqueville's ability to illuminate the actual workings of American democracy was "possibly without rival." For today's readers, de Tocqueville's concern about the effect of majority rule on the rights of individuals remains deeply meaningful. His shrewd observations about the "almost royal prerogatives" of the president and the need for virtue in elected officials are particularly prophetic. His profound insights into the great rewards and responsibilities of democratic government are words every American needs to read, contemplate, and remember. From America's call for a free press to its embrace of the capitalist system Democracy in America enlightens, entertains, and endures as a brilliant study of our national government and character. De Toqueville's concern about the effect of majority rule on the rights of individuals remains deeply meaningful. His insights into the great rewards and responsibilities of democratic government are words every American needs to read, contemplate, and remember. Over one hundred and sixty years since its publication, and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America remains one of the best books written on the nature of democratic man and the character of democratic society. Blessed with an extraordinary talent for perception, de Tocqueville expertly examined the heart of American democracy, and brilliantly documented the impact of our fundamental principles upon the American world view. A page doesn't go by in either the 1835 or 1840 volumes where de Tocqueville fails to yield splendid insights into the democratic condition. Throughout, he lists both the positive (innocent, optimistic, gregarious) and negative (moralistic, self-centered, racist) aspects of the American ethos with amazing aplomb. | |||
| The Federalists Papers | Alexander Hamiltor, John Jay, James Madison, et al | $6.50 paperback. | Fred Sage (3) 0 |
| Review from Amazon.com: For those newly awakened to American politics, nothing is more important than the Federalist Papers. The federal government now violates almost every principle of government, and every rationale for its existence, as given by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. From a government of limited and enumerated powers, celebrated by these Founders, we now have a government that, in the belief of most and the frank admission of many, is a government of unlimited power. They would call this tyranny, and say why. Americans sleep through it, waiting for the check in the mailbox. | |||
| Rainbow's End "The crash of '29". | Maury Klein | $16.95 paperback | Fred Sage (4) 0 |
| Review from Amazon.com: The first serious account of the Crash of 1929 was Only Yesterday, by Frederick Lewis Allen, published less than two years after the event and still in print. Disappointingly, Klein's effort is almost a chapter-by-chapter retelling of Only Yesterday, adding some research from the last 70 years but lacking Allen's firsthand knowledge and writing skill. Klein (The Life and Legend of Stephen Jay Gould) is an academic historian. His prose is pleasant enough, but he dashes hope of depth or rigor with the claim that the Crash cannot be explained by economics, or indeed by any observable historical forces, but by a change in national mood. This assumption permits him to focus on such topics as baseball batting averages, flagpole sitting and hemlines between 1900 and 1928. He also explores the "irrational exuberance" fostered by the period's colorful Wall Street personalities, men like Sunshine Charley Mitchell, the great, attention-seeking bond trader who headed National City Bank. Provocatively, he also observes the period's preoccupation with escape newly available through the automobile, the motion picture, sports and television and its economic impact.Yet Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts analyzed the culture of the period more effectively in The Day the Bubble Burst. (Oct. 29)Forecast: There are many books on the 1929 market crash, but John Kenneth Galbraith's innovative and engaging The Great Crash of 1929 easily remains the best account for the general reader; those already knowledgeable about the Crash will find this account wanting. Klein is a prominent business historian, however, and the topic should garner some review coverage and sales. | |||
| Nickle and Dimed | Barbara Ehrenreich | $13.00 paperback | Fred Sage (5) 4 |
| Review from AmazonLife in low wage America. This was a best seller.Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at $6 to $7 an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet. As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl," trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at $675 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as "Some people work better when they're a little bit high." In Minnesota, she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test. | |||
| Dark Age Ahead | Jane Jacobs | $23.95 hardback | Bernard Mendonca (1) 4 |
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Review from Amazon (Publishers Week): Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities forever transformed the discipline of urban planning by concentrating on what actually helped cities work. Unencumbered by generations of fatuous theorizing, Jacobs proposed a model of action that has left a positive mark in neighborhoods all over the world. Her latest salvo, Dark Age Ahead, is, despite the pessimism of many of its conclusions, also positive, less a jeremiad than a firm but helpful reminder of just how much is at stake. Jacobs sees "ominous signs of decay" in five "pillars" of our culture: family, community, higher education, science and "self policing by the learned professions." Each is given a detailed treatment, with sympathetic but hard-headed real-world assessments that are often surprising and always provocative and well-expressed. Her chapter on the decline of the nuclear family completely avoids the moral hand-wringing of the kindergarten Cassandras to place the blame on an economy that has made the affordable home either an unattainable dream or a crippling debt. Her discussion of the havoc wrought by the lack of accountability seems ripped from any number of headlines, but her analysis of the larger effects sets it apart. A lifetime of unwasted experience in a number of fields has gone into this short but pungent book, and to ignore its sober warnings would be foolish indeed. | |||
| Who Are We? | Samuel P Huntington | $26.00 hardback | Bernard Mendonca (2) 0 |
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Review from Amazon.com (Publishers Weekly): In his seminal The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington anticipated the United States' battle with militant Islam. Here he turns his laser on America-or, rather, America as he thinks it ought to be. Despite its clinical tone, this book is an aggressive polemic whose central argument-that America, at heart, has been and in many ways should remain a Christian, Anglocentric country-wouldn't be out of place on many a conservative radio station. The author seeks at length to prove that the American Creed, which he defines as a Protestant-influenced ideology modeled on the British system, was the founders' original intent and remains America's best course. He then turns to many of the usual subjects-the imperiled primacy of English, the dangers of immigration and multiculturalism-to make his case. He argues that a growing divide between the patriotic working class and "denationalized elites" will lead to internal fissures. Where those findings can lead is another question. For instance, he predicts a movement of white nativism.This movement while not "advocating white racist supremacy" would still believe that the "mixing of races and hence culture is the road to national degeneration." The book is also marred by a number of self-contradictions; for example, Huntington draws heavily on the founders to make a nationalist case even as he acknowledges that notions of Americanism (as opposed to allegiances to individual states) became popular only after the Civil War. Exhaustively researched and occasionally inspired, this polemic remains more often filled with colorless and ineffectual writing that will provide evidence for the converted but do little to persuade the doubters. | |||
| Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire | Chalmers Johnson | $13.50 paperback | Klaus Kasper 10 THE WINNER |
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From the publisher:
The term "blowback," invented by the CIA, refers to the unintended
consequences of American actions abroad. In this incisive and controversial
book, Chalmers Johnson lays out in vivid detail the dangers faced by our
overextended empire, which insists on projecting its military power to every
corner of the earth and using American capital and markets to force global
economic integration on its own terms. From a case of rape by U.S.
servicemen in Okinawa to our role in Asia's financial crisis, from our early
support for Saddam Hussein to our conduct in the Balkans, Johnson reveals
the ways in which our misguided policies are planting the seeds of future
disaster. In a new edition that addresses recent international events from
September 11 to the war in Iraq, this now classic book remains as prescient
and powerful as ever.
Review from Amazon.com: If the 20th century was the American century, the 21st century may be a time of reckoning for the United States. Chalmers Johnson, an authority on Japan and its economy, offers a troubling prognosis of what's to come. Blowback--the title refers to a CIA neologism describing the unintended consequences of American activity--is a call for the United States to rethink its position in the world. "The evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of the Cold War, the United States largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation," writes Johnson. "The world is not a safer place as a result." Individual chapters focus on Okinawa (where American servicemen were accused of raping a 12-year-old girl in "Asia's last colony"), the two Koreas, China, and Japan. The result is a liberal-leaning (and Asia-centric) call for the United States to disengage from many of its global commitments. Critics will call Johnson an isolationist, but friends (perhaps admirers of Patrick Buchanan's A Republic, Not an Empire) will say he simply speaks good sense. All will agree he is an earnest voice: "I believe our very hubris ensures our undoing." | |||
| Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment | James Gustave Speth | $24 hardback | Art Smoot
1 |
| Review from Amazon.com (Publishers Weekly):In this timely book, Speth, dean of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, sounds the alarm on the seriousness of the global environmental crisis. Although he contends that it is not too late to avert disaster, he stresses that we are running out of time and that we can't afford to let current trends continue. He acknowledges that there have been a few hopeful developments, such as the ban on ozone-depleting chemicals around the world, but overall, he argues that little has been accomplished by a plethora of international conferences, negotiations, action plans and treaties. The failure, for which he says the U.S. must take much of the blame, stems from a focus on the symptoms rather than on the underlying causes of environmental degradation, such as population size, affluence and technology. He underscores the necessity of achieving sustainability-living off nature's income rather than consuming its capital-and lists eight transitions that are necessary to redefine and redirect growth on a global level. Speth, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, founder of the World Resources Institute and an adviser on environmental issues for presidents Carter and Clinton, is well qualified to present a wake-up call on the environment in this thorough and reasoned book. Unfortunately, his somewhat dry recital of the facts may put off some potential readers-that is, today's youth. In a final and particularly useful chapter, he lists organizations and Web-based resources. | |||
| Good Muslim, Bad Muslim : America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror | Mahmood Mamdani | $24.00 hardback | Steve Brown 2 |
| From Inside Flap Copy: In this brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen? Mamdani dispels the idea of ?good? (secular, westernized) and ?bad? (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are ?good? Muslims readily available to be split off from ?bad? Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This book argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America?s embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam. Mamdani writes with great insight about the Reagan years, showing America?s embrace of the highly ideological politics of ?good? against ?evil.? Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the ?moral equivalents? of America?s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a provocative and important book that will profoundly change our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today. | |||
| 1912 : Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs -The Election That Changed the Country | James Chace | $25.95 hardback | John Rushton 2 |
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From Salon.com: The year 1912 constitutes a defining moment in American history. Of the four men who sought the presidency that year -- Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs -- not one of them had definitively decided to run after the congressional elections of 1910. Wilson, who had just been elected governor of New Jersey, had long hoped that someday the White House would be his, but all his experience had been as a college professor, and later a president of Princeton. He had been a noted theorist of congressional government, never a practitioner. Debs had run for president on the Socialist ticket twice before. His firm commitment to social and economic justice targeted him once again as the favorite of Socialist voters, but he himself was weary of campaigning, often too sick to do anything but speak. His thrilling oratory, however, made him invaluable in the struggle against the excesses of industrial capitalism. Taft, the reluctant incumbent, might well have abandoned the field of battle in 1912 and taught happily at Yale Law School while hoping for an appointment to the Supreme Court. Roosevelt, though lusting after the power of the presidency, still expected to support Taft. TR, after all, had shown himself to be a consummate politician during his two terms in office and appreciated the potency of the party organization. If Taft could have approached his former mentor directly, confessed his anxieties about dealing with a Congress so dominated by right-wing Republicans that he was finding it impossible to fulfill the reformist policies of TR, he might then have urged Roosevelt to run for a third term. This would have prevented Roosevelt from challenging him for the presidency that Taft had so often loathed. Had the charismatic Roosevelt received the Republican nomination, he almost surely would have won. He, far more than Taft, was in tune with the progressive spirit of the time. The Republican Party, in his hands, would likely have become a party of domestic reform and internationalist realism in foreign affairs. With his heroic virtues and condemnation of materialism, Roosevelt represents the road not taken by American conservatism. | |||
| "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide | Samantha Powers | $17.95 paperback | Sherri Wolff 4 |
| From ENotAlone.com: During the three years (1993-1996) Samantha Power spent covering the grisly events in Bosnia and Srebrenica, she became increasingly frustrated with how little the United States was willing to do to counteract the genocide occurring there. After much research, she discovered a pattern: "The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred," she writes in this impressive book. Debunking the notion that U.S. leaders were unaware of the horrors as they were occurring against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, and Bosnians during the past century, Power discusses how much was known and when, and argues that much human suffering could have been alleviated through a greater effort by the U.S. She does not claim that the U.S. alone could have prevented such horrors, but does make a convincing case that even a modest effort would have had significant impact. Based on declassified information, private papers, and interviews with more than 300 American policymakers, Power makes it clear that a lack of political will was the most significant factor for this failure to intervene. Some courageous U.S. leaders did work to combat and call attention to ethnic cleansing as it occurred, but the vast majority of politicians and diplomats ignored the issue, as did the American public, leading Power to note that "no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on." This powerful book is a call to make such indifference a thing of the past. --Shawn Carkonen | |||
| Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions | Clyde Prestowitz | $26.00 hardback | Paul Silver 4 |
| From Amazon.com (Publishers Week) As the worldwide outpouring of post-9/11 sympathy for America has given way to worldwide anti-American protests, Americans are asking why the world hates us. This nuanced but unsparing book gives a bill of particulars. American high-handedness has exacerbated tensions in hot spots from the West Bank to the Korean peninsula. American unilateralism has sabotaged a host of international agreements on such issues as land mines, biological weapons and the International Criminal Court. America preaches free trade while protecting its steel, textiles and agriculture from foreign competition. America, Atkins argues, runs a wasteful, SUV-centered economy while it rejects treaties on the environment and global warming. America's self-proclaimed role as champion of democracy flies in the face of its history of installing and supporting dictators in countries from Indonesia to Iraq. Most of all, Atkins says, the world fears America's overwhelming military might, now ominously paired with a doctrine of "preempting" the emergence of rival powers. These problems have been much discussed of late, but Prestowitz, author of Trading Places, pulls them together into a comprehensive and historically informed survey of contemporary U. S. foreign relations. Although he forthrightly calls the United States an imperial power, Prestowitz, a former Reagan Administration trade official, is by no means anti-American. He insists that America's intentions are usually good, and that the world likes and admires Americans when they live up to their own ideals. Still, his is a damning portrait of the United States as seen through the angry, bewildered eyes of foreigners: selfish, erratic, hypocritical, muscle-bound and a bad citizen of the world. | |||