1st Quarter NONFICTION Book Suggestions

MadArchitect

Another suggestion, although I'm not terribly sure what category this would fall under. I'd say "cultural studies" is probably the best description of the book, at least from what I know of it.

Heirs of General Practice, by John McPhee

I have basically three reasons for recommending this book:
1) I was reminded of the book -- which I own, but haven't yet read -- while reading the article "A Doctor For the Future" from the New York Times Magazine (there's a link to the article in this thread.)
2) John McPhee is one of my favorite non-fiction writers, and I think you all owe it to yourselves to take a sample of his work. To briefly sing his praises, he is an expert at translating his own passion for a topic into language that makes that passion understandable -- and infectious -- to the reader. I would love the opportunity to engage McPhee in an author chat.
3) My grandfather was a General Practicioner, and I grew up in an atmosphere that constantly reminded me of his importance to the community, so I have some personal investment in the subject. I would bet that there are one or two other people in the forum with similar personal ties.

Review
“A sensitive portrayal of the heart of family medicine—the personal relationships between family physicians, their patients and families—and an accurate representation of the special challenges of family practice and the reasons for its recent renaissance.”—John P. Geyman, M.D., chairman, Department of Family Medicine, University of Washington and editor, Journal of Family Practice

Book Description
Heirs of General Practice is a frieze of glimpses of young doctors with patients of every age—about a dozen physicians in all, who belong to the new medical specialty called family practice. They are people who have addressed themselves to a need for a unifying generalism in a world that has become greatly subdivided by specialization, physicians who work with the “unquantifiable idea that a doctor who treats your grandmother, your father, your niece, and your daughter will be more adroit in treating you.”

These young men and women are seen in their examining rooms in various rural communities in Maine, but Maine is only the example. Their medical objectives, their successes, the professional obstacles they do and do not overcome are representative of any place family practitioners are working. While essential medical background is provided, McPhee’s masterful approach to a trend significant to all of us is replete with affecting, and often amusing, stories about both doctors and their charges.

Chris OConnor

Quote:
I wouldn't go so far as to say I'd never read Franken, but I think the whole genre of humor-infused political commentary -- including writers like Michael Moore and Maureen Dowd -- is unlikely to spark any sort of productive discussion. It's more likely to cause a series of pointless little partisan squabbles, which I'd rather not see in BookTalk.

Well said.

marti1900

I've been mining the book suggestion archives. I remember seeing many great suggestions in the past, but we seem to have lost a lot in the hack.

Anyway, here are several suggestions from previous recommendations. You can read the full descriptions by reading the Book Suggestions Archives forum. Perhaps we could reconsider some of these prior recommendations that were not picked in the final voting.

Inventing the People, by Edmund S. Morgan

Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, by Howard Gardner

The World is Flat-- a Brief History of the Twenty First Century, by Thomas Friedman

A Brief History of Everything, by Ken Wilber

Full House by Stephen Jay Gould

Looking For Spinoza, by Antonio Damasio

These all have appeal to me, while really none of the current suggestions ring my chimes, no offense to Mad for his excellent suggestions.

Marti in Mexico

marti1900

I'm also reading Reinventing Capitalism by Howard Bloom. Well, the draft, anyway. And it's pretty interesting, and I think shoul provoke a lot of discussion.

I believe the actual published book is now available?

Marti in Mexico

tarav

I think it's a good idea to look at past book suggestions, as Marti suggested. However, Looking for Spinoza was a past poll winner. It was an interesting read. Marti, if you're interested in that book, I suggest going into the archives and reading the threads. I also own a copy of that book and would be happy to discuss it with you through our inboxes if you choose to read it.

MadArchitect

A few general comments: I forgot to mention earlier that I would not be adverse to reading "Freakonomics", though it wouldn't be my first choice. I'm been trying to read more economics lately, but I'd prefer to read some more classical expositions before digging into something potentially controversial like "Freakonomics". It's certainly one I'll consider voting for if it makes the ballot, though.

Also, I picked up a book on the Haitian revolution today, which should more or less sate my appetite for Haitian history. I'll still read along if the other book gets picked, but don't go including it on the nomination lists just for little ol' me.

GOD defiles Reason: Since this is our first quarter to be more inclusive to theists than before, I'm not strongly disagreeing with that except to say that this is the suggestion thread going through the suggestion process and not yet in the selection and voting process.

Good point, and I should qualify my earlier statements by saying that it's not my intention to suppress any suggestions. It's just my understanding that Chris wants us to discuss the pros and cons of each suggestion so that we're more informed going into the actual selection process. That's really the best way we, as non-moderators, have of voicing our input into the process of narrowing down the suggestions into the five nominations that make it on the final ballot.

It's up to each of us individually to keep our discussions productive rather than pointless little squabbles. We can do that no matter who the author is, if we choose to do so.

That's a good point as well. My concern is simply that we pick a book that encourages that.

marti1900: Inventing the People, by Edmund S. Morgan

Glad that you brought this one back up. I was reading the first few chapters when I made the suggestion, and while I said that I would probably be finished with the book before by the time the Q4 reading selection was decided, I got distracted by a dozen other books and haven't made much progress since then. Which is simply to say that, I'd still be reading along with everyone else if this book ended up getting picked for the Q1 reading.

Full House by Stephen Jay Gould

No! I've had more than my fill of the Olsen twins, thank you kindly.

(Kidding.)

pctacitus

Imperial Grunts : The American Military on the Ground by Robert D. Kaplan

www.amazon.com/gp/product...s&v=glance

I have read the first couple chapters and am hoping to share this with you guys so I am holding off. Kaplan is known as someone higher ups read (particularly since Colin Powell gave one of his books to Bill Clinton in the early 90s). I know some have read at least one of his books, among them "Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece" (2004); "Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos" (2002); "Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus" (2000); "The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War" (2000); "An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future" (1998); "The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century" (1996); "The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite" (1993); "Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History" (1993); "Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan" (1990); and "Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind the Famine" (1988). Just read this excerpt or watch his booktv indepth interview and decide for yourselves.

www.booktv.org/indepth/in...chedID=339

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE

CENTCOM

YEMEN, WINTER 2002

With Notes On Colombia

“Yemen was vast. And it was only one small country. . . . How to manage such an imperium?”

In November 1934, when the British traveler and Arabist Freya Stark journeyed to Yemen to explore the broad oasis of the Wadi Hadhramaut, the most helpful person she encountered was the French aesthete and business tycoon Antonin Besse, whose Aden-based trading empire stretched from Abyssinia to East Asia. Besse, dressed in a white dinner jacket with creased white shorts, served excellent wine at dinner, and was described as “a Merchant in the style of the Arabian Nights or the Renaissance.”1 In December 2002, when I went to Yemen, the most helpful person I encountered was Bob Adolph, a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Special Forces, who was the United Nations security officer for Yemen.

Adolph, whose military career had taken him all over the world, had the chest of a bodybuilder and a bluff, bulldog face under wire-rim glasses and a creased ball cap. I spotted him on the other side of passport control, waiting in the dusky warehouse under fluorescent lights that functioned as the Sana‘a airport.

Because of their own al-Qaeda problem, the Yemenis were suspicious of anyone with a Pakistani visa inside his passport. I was pulled over by a man smoking a cigarette and wearing a torn sweater and slippers. Adolph, seeing that I was making no progress, ambled over to him, speaking in bad but passable Arabic, gritting his teeth each time he made a point. Others were also haggling with customs and passport officers. It was a typical third world scene: confusion and a cacophony of negotiation in place of fixed standards.

After more of Adolph’s pleading, I got back my passport. We headed for the parking lot. It was 2 a.m. Two beggar boys grabbed my bags and put them in the Land Cruiser. Adolph slipped them half a dollar in riyals. I was relaxed. The Arab world, while afflicted by political violence, had little or no common crime. In this sense, Islam had risen to the challenge of urbanization and modern life, and was a full-fledged success.

“This is the most democratic state in Arabia. For that reason it’s the most dangerous and unstable,” Adolph said, explaining that when Western-style democracy replaced absolute dictatorship in places with high unemployment rates and weak, corrupt institutions, the result was often a security vacuum that groups like al-Qaeda could take advantage of. “I’ve drawn up multiple evacuation plans for the U.N. staff here, updating calling-tree lists,” he went on. “If the place goes down during the night, I can have all our people in Asmara the next day in time for brunch at the InterContinental there. The trick is to keep doing favors for people in the army, the police, and the tribes, and never call them in, until you need them to get your people out.”

He veered to avoid another head-on. “Notice the way people drive here, you’ve got ten-year-olds propped up on phone books driving Granddad around town. Forget about rules and licenses. Keep all of your cash in different pockets. Despite all of the guns, ready cash always gives you more power in Yemen than a gun. Everybody in this country is a businessman, and a good one.” His tone was commanding, didactic.

It was the last night of Ramadan. Though a few hours before dawn, the streets were noisy and crowded, and gaily strung with lights. Sana‘a resembled a fairy-tale vision of Arabia, with basalt and mudbrick buildings festooned with colored glass fretwork and gypsum friezes. I recalled my first visit to Yemen in 1986.

Back then, the diplomats and other area specialists had assured me that with the discovery of oil in significant amounts, the Yemeni government would soon have the financial wherewithal to extend its power into the countryside, ending the feudal chaos. The opposite had occurred. To placate the sheikhs, the government bribed them with the newfound wealth, so oil revenues strengthened the medieval periphery rather than the modernizing capital. Kidnappings of foreign tourists erupted in the mid-1990s, as the sheikhs got greedy and sought to further blackmail the government. The government also had to compete with wealthy Wahabi extremists from Saudi Arabia and with al-Qaeda, who sometimes had more money with which to influence local Yemeni tribal leaders. With al-Qaeda targeting oil vessels off the Yemeni coast, maritime insurance rates had gone up, reducing sea traffic and consequently the amount of money from oil exports, so the regime had less money for bribes. The foreign community feared that a new wave of kidnappings might lie ahead.

For al-Qaeda, Yemen was a conveniently chaotic, culturally sympathetic country in the heart of Arabia, so much more desirable than far-afield, non-Arab Afghanistan. It might just be a matter of chipping away at the regime.

In downtown Sana‘a, I noticed that people were not wearing the cheap Westernized polyesters that signify the breakdown of tribal identities under the pressure cooker of urbanization. They still wore white thobes with checkered keffiyahs or Kashmiri shawls, with the men sporting jambiyas (ornamental curved daggers) in the middle of their belts.

“It’s tribal everything,” another U.S. military source would explain to me. “The ministries are fiefdoms for the various tribes. It’s a world of stovepipe bureaucracies. All the information flows to the top and none of it is shared along the way, so that only [President Ali Abdullah] Saleh knows what is going on. As for the furious demands from the Americans to fight bin Laden, we Americans are just another crazy tribe that Saleh holds close to his chest, and balances against the others. Same with al-Qaeda. Saleh has to appease and do favors for everyone to stay in power.” Yeah, I thought, whichever dog is closest to biting him, he feeds.

Adolph told me that the Yemeni government controlled only about 50 percent of the country. A high-ranking Western diplomat in Yemen would hotly dispute that claim, telling me that Saleh controlled “all the main roads, oil fields, and pipelines,” which, I countered, was less than 50 percent of the country. “Well,” the diplomat huffed, “he controls what he needs to control.” If that was the case, I thought, then why was there such a problem with al-Qaeda in Yemen at the time of my visit? The difference between Adolph and this diplomat was not in their facts, or even in their perceptions, it would turn out. Rather, like the Marine lieutenant colonel I had met briefly at Camp Pendleton, Adolph didn’t know how to be subtle, or how to dissemble. He was brutally, refreshingly direct. Dealing with him saved time.

Inside the galloping Land Cruiser, Adolph knocked off the most recent security “incidents” in the country. His apartment building had been the scene of a gun battle between the son of a highly placed sheikh and government forces, with four people “KIA” (killed in action). Several more had been killed during a firefight between the al-Haima and Bani Mattar tribes outside Sana‘a. Two bombs had exploded near the homes of government officials in the capital. In nearby Ma’rib there had been an attempt to assassinate the regional governor, Abdullah Ali al-Nassi, when tribesmen blocked the road and opened fire on his vehicle. The reasons for all this violence remained murky. As for al-Jawf and other areas on the Saudi frontier, there had been so many bombings and gun battles that Adolph hadn’t bothered to investigate or keep count. All this was a prelude to the assassination of a leading Yemeni politician and the murder of three American missionaries.

Adolph, trained as a hostage negotiator by Great Britain’s New Scotland Yard, told me what to do in case I was kidnapped: “Don’t protest. Be submissive. Show them pictures of your family to establish a relationship. After the first few hours, ask to see the sheikh. If they take you to meet him, it’s all right. It’s an authorized kidnapping, for the sake of convincing the authorities to give the tribe a new road or water well. They’ll tell you the negotiations should be completed in a few days; figure two months. Foreigners have been known to gain weight in the course of being held hostage in Yemen. Each family in the village will host you for a while, to divide the cost of your food. But if they don’t take you to see the sheikh the first day, start to worry. Then it may be an unauthorized kidnapping, and it’s okay to think of ways to escape.”

He slowed the vehicle as we got closer to his apartment in a wealthy area of Sana‘a where many expatriates lived. High walls, armed guards, and concertina wire were everywhere: the paraphernalia of paranoia.

I was headed for Injun Country, Adolph told me. He meant the desert wastes of northern Yemen abutting the Saudi border, a border that the Yemeni government was attempting to demarcate, even as local tribesmen were blowing up the new border markers. The next day I had an appointment with a sheikh who could provide me with guards and a guide, a sheikh for whom Adolph had done favors.

Sheikh Abdulkarim bin ali Murshed, forty, looked older than he was: something not uncommon in a country where extreme poverty and a high birthrate literally sped up time. Well over half of the people in Yemen hadn’t been born when I had first visited sixteen years before. From his father, Sheikh Murshed had inherited control of one hundred thousand Khawlan tribesmen who lived east of Sana‘a. They were part of the Bakil tribal confede...

“…the great events in life come from the books, rather than the people, one comes across.” - Robert D. Kaplan, Mediterranean Winter: the Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece

tarav

I would read Marti's suggestion of Full House by Gould. I would also read/re-read any of Gould's books.

pctacitus

Isn't Gould dead?

“…the great events in life come from the books, rather than the people, one comes across.” - Robert D. Kaplan, Mediterranean Winter: the Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece

Chris OConnor

Yes.

Mr. Pessimistic

But his books are not....

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Chris OConnor

Under the Banner of Heaven by by Jon Krakauer

We discussed reading this book recently. I think with adding multiple nonfiction books we should give this one a shot. I can't picture this topic not making for some great discussion material.

Amazon.com
In 1984, Ron and Dan Lafferty murdered the wife and infant daughter of their younger brother Allen. The crimes were noteworthy not merely for their brutality but for the brothers' claim that they were acting on direct orders from God. In Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer tells the story of the killers and their crime but also explores the shadowy world of Mormon fundamentalism from which the two emerged. The Mormon Church was founded, in part, on the idea that true believers could speak directly with God. But while the mainstream church attempted to be more palatable to the general public by rejecting the controversial tenet of polygamy, fundamentalist splinter groups saw this as apostasy and took to the hills to live what they believed to be a righteous life. When their beliefs are challenged or their patriarchal, cult-like order defied, these still-active groups, according to Krakauer, are capable of fighting back with tremendous violence. While Krakauer's research into the history of the church is admirably extensive, the real power of the book comes from present-day information, notably jailhouse interviews with Dan Lafferty. Far from being the brooding maniac one might expect, Lafferty is chillingly coherent, still insisting that his motive was merely to obey God's command. Krakauer's accounts of the actual murders are graphic and disturbing, but such detail makes the brothers' claim of divine instruction all the more horrifying. In an age where Westerners have trouble comprehending what drives Islamic fundamentalists to kill, Jon Krakauer advises us to look within America's own borders.

Jeremy1952

Gladwell mentions Gift of Fear and quotes De Becker in "blink". So I'm not the only one seeing a connection!

MadArchitect

Krakauer's a reputable writer, and I'm sure the book is well-researched. My only concern is that, given the true crime focus of the book, it's likely to skew any understanding of Mormonism derived from it. If it gets picked, maybe we should run a optional, concurrent reading that's specifically about the doctrives and development of Mormonism -- in the interest of balance.

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