* Archived Book Suggestions *

Dissident Heart

I'm glad to have finally discovered this place!

Here's a list of books I think well worth discussing, and I'd love to find out what you think about them:

"Extraordinary Minds: Portraits of Four Exceptional Individuals (Amadeus Mozart, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi) and An Examination of Our Own Extraordinariness." by Howard Gardner.

"Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky" Ed. Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel.

"Idolatry" by Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit

"Spirit Matters" by Michael Lerner

Cheers!

Jeremy1952

Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky Ed. Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel.

Chomsky has come up a number of times; this sounds like an excellent place to dive in. Welcome aboard, Dissident, btw!

Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived. E.O.Wilson

Dissident Heart

Interview With The Author, Michael Albert

Parecon: Life After Capitalism

Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book, Parecon: Life After Capitalism, is about? What is it trying to communicate?

Michael Albert: Parecon: Life After Capitalism is about an economic system called Participatory Economics that seeks to accomplish production, consumption, and allocation to efficiently meet needs consistent with the guiding values: equity, diversity, solidarity, and self-management. When people ask what do you want for the economy, I answer: parecon.

Parecon features workplace and consumer councils, self-managing decision-making norms and methods, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning. This is a set of institutions very different from those of capitalism as well as from what has been called market socialism.

The book, Parecon: Life After Capitalism, first briefly examines existing systems, revealing their incompatibility with guiding values we hold dear. Then the book presents defining institutions for the new economy. It describes new institutions for workplaces, consumption, and allocation. Next the book details the daily life implications of the proposed new institutions. Finally, the book deals with a host of broad concerns people have registered on first hearing about this new vision: Would it really further our aspirations and values? Would it be productive? Would it violate privacy or subvert individuality? Is it efficient, flexible, creative, meritorious? And so on.

Can you tell ZNet users something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making the book what it is?

Michael Albert: Participatory economics has been around as a model for a little over ten years. Robin Hahnel and I developed it and have written about it in various venues. This new book is my best effort to motivate, describe, elaborate, and defend the vision.

In that sense, Parecon: Life After Capitalism emerges from many engagements over the years and reflects lessons from actual experience with work life, teaching, organizing, public speaking, dealing with questions in online forums on ZNet, and of course trying to work through the model in new ways as new insights, questions, and explorations arise.

Regarding the writing, I and many folks who helped me have prioritized making this book as accessible and compelling as we could. I am not the world's best writer, nor even in the top 600 million or so, but I plug away, and I did a lot of plugging on this book.

What are your hopes for the book? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve, politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book, what will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort?

Michael Albert: If everyone who reads this interview and all their friends and relatives and workmates don't go out and buy the book, soon – I will be wondering what I did wrong.

This book tries to answer the question "What do we want?", seriously, compellingly, and accessibly. So naturally I would hope all people concerned about a better world, and particularly a better economy, would read it.

As mentioned, I have been hard at work on developing and trying to make known participatory economics for over a decade, and the work is finally beginning to have impact. Parecon: Life After Capitalism in some ways climaxes that effort, and will hopefully bring it further along. The book will be published in many languages and has attracted considerable attention even before publication. There is diverse interest from many quarters. There is growing momentum for this economic vision, it seems.

In addition, times have changed quite a bit in the past decade. We have progressed from the heyday of market mania and Margaret Thatcher's famous claim that "There Is No Alternative," to a new time of deep travail and wondering about all things economic. Among progressives the World Social Forum inspired watchword has become "Another World Is Possible." Anti-globalization movements have taken the wind out of market complacency and are scrutinizing everything economic. People want to know from all kinds of activists, what is your alternative – and participatory economics is, I hope, a very good answer regarding at least the economy.

So, I hope the book Parecon: Life After Capitalism is going to propel this economic vision into much greater visibility than it has previously enjoyed. Of course, I hope the model will prove compelling and worthy, and thus be adopted widely. I have very high hopes indeed and I admit that I will be quite let down, in the sense of the question, if the book doesn't garner attention and provoke discussion, leading to either support for parecon, or, if not, then in lieu of that to development of some other better vision. I also hope the book will inspire people to address matters of kinship and gender, culture and community, political organization, ecology, and international relations, trying to generate vision in these realms as well. Life is not just economics, by any means.

The fact that we need serious, worthy, defensible, and comprehensible economic (and other) goals seems indisputable. That now is a good time to offer visionary aims for assessment, also seems indisputable. So of course I'd like to see Parecon: Life After Capitalism travel the world's roads and subways in the hands of the world's working populations. More realistically, I'd happily celebrate the book worming its way into wide enough visibility so that someone far more eloquent than myself writes a much better book that reaches still more widely, into those roads and subways, putting new vision into widespread left consciousness.

Parecon: Life After Capitalism
www.parecon.org/pelac.htm

Parecon: The Participatory Economics Project
www.parecon.org

Edited by: Dissident Heart at: 9/3/03 6:15 am

Chris OConnor

I am going to suggest that we pick some books that have won Pulitzer Prizes. The books are bound to be awesome, and we sure would benefit by having some of these authors as our guests.

www.pulitzer.org/

Here are some recent winners...

2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1998 We read this one already!
1997
1996
1995

Chris

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,for there you have been, and there you will always want to be." -- Leonardo da Vinci

bernt

Hi Chris,

Hi to all of you.

Maybe I 've already asked about this book but here goes again.

LOOKING FOR SPINOZA by Antonio Damasio
Harcourt, Inc., 2003, 355 pp.,
ISBN: 0-15-100557-5

From a review of it by © Charlie Dickinson May 1st 2003
website: www.efn.org/~charlesd

"Until recently, researchers seldom studied how feelings manifest themselves in neurobiological terms. Damasio's interest for exploring the neurological basis of emotion and feeling grew when he began to see patients with injury or disease to specific parts of the brain that, for example, left them without compassion. In considerable and well-illustrated detail, Damasio shows how emotions (which are displayed publicly) precede feelings (which are experienced privately). Far from the wholly ineffable and intangible experiences feelings are commonly thought, Damasio shows joy or sadness, as examples, generate patterns of brain activity recognizably associated with each feeling. "

I have read two books by him and find his views interesting. We have to take feelings more seriously while we stay science-minded. It could be that religions and religious and spiritual feelings are a kind of spin-off to a very basic human response so the superstitious interpretations are more a show off to impress the members of the established tradition. The interpretations are illusions but the source is real properties within our body that get misunderstood as supernatural forces outside of us.

In his book "How We Believe" by Michael Shermer he cite Vincent Sarich that the God within is what to fear cause the God outside of us does not exist but the God within motivates people to act on the interpretations they have of it'w will. That is why we have to take emotionas and feelings seriously. They have political consequences.

Bernt Rostrom
www.humanists.net/bernt_r...i-mind.htm

Jeremy1952

Well Hi to you to, bernt! I love Damasio's work. I've had the paperback of "Spinoza" pre-ordered since the book came out - I'm pretty sure it's not out in paper yet, and the hardback's a little expenseive. So of course I'd love to choose this one as a booktalk selection.

Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived. E.O.Wilson

pctacitus

Tim's idea about reading about Sokel's Hoax is a good one. Instead of a book by Sokel, what about an anthology of writings from different perspectives and countries about the hoax?

The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy by The Editors of Lingua Franca (Editor)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0803279957/ref=p d_sim_books_2/103-5408531-1059855?v=glance&s=books

May, 1996: physicist, Alan Sokal publishes his "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in the Duke University journal, Social Text, edited by Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross. The article's prose, heavy with quotations from Derrida, Harraway, Deleuze, and Lacan was also thick with poststructuralist buzz words. Sokal argued that gravity was a fiction society agreed upon but needed liberation from. Sokal then revealed in Lingua Franca that he had meant the article as a parody. Sokal's submission and subsequent revelation turned into a story about the "science wars" that made it to The New York Times. The Sokal Hoax documents the controversy with Sokal's article and revelation, the responses by the Social Text editors, and then reactions from the likes of Katha Pollitt, Stanley Fish, Bruno Latour, George Will, and many others. The volume ends with two post-hoax reflections from Andrew Ross and Sokal. No index or bibliography.
Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR

rhyser30

In passing today I came across Massimo Pigliucci's January 2004 Rationally Speaking regarding tolerance vs. respect. I was reminded of a wonderful work by Jonathan Rauch entitled "Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought." It really made me think about the responsibility we have in preserving free inquiry and criticism. I would recommend this book for future group reading and discussion. What do you think?

booklove488

Occasions of Sin:

A Memoir

By Sandra Scofield

"All this is to say that the events chronicled in "Occasions of Sin" have been churning in Scofield's imagination and ideation for a lifetime, and they moved her primally. We are graced as she attempts to confront their meaning, for she has insight and language strong enough to bring us along."
Art Winslow, former literary editor of The Nation writing in the Chicago Tribune

"Sandra Scofield writes with exquisite attention to detail, great compassion, and deep honesty. OCCASIONS OF SIN is a book that…validates memoir as a form."

–Pam Houston, author of

Cowboys Are My Weakness and A Little More About Me

"An aching memoir of a daughter’s need for her dying and eccentric mother’s love….This is a tale filled with longing and loss as well as a powerful sense of what it means to be holy and what it is like to sin."

--Mary Morris, author of

Acts of God

Chris OConnor

rhyser30

You might want to find it on Amazon.com and post a little bit about it. Sounds interesting. Just copy and paste a few reviews.

Chris

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them" -- Mark Twain

bernt

Hi Chris and all of you!

A better suggestion than "How we Believe" is Michael Shermer's latest book.

"The Science of Good and Evil".

Not that I have it but he takes up the sociobiology and evolutionary psychology of morality and that is what I like to support.

I am Bernt Rostrom Hudiksvall Sweden

I want to particpate in debating this. I will try to get a copy of the book.

Chris OConnor

I second the nomination for Shermer's latest book:

"The Science of Good and Evil"

Chris

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them" -- Mark Twain

Chris OConnor

We need a better nomination process. Any suggstions would be appreciated. The best place for this discussion would be in the BookTalk Development forum. I'm annoyed with many of our little images/pictures no longer being discplayed. There is no way to remedy this without deleting those posts, but then this forum would be ruined.

Chris

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them" -- Mark Twain

krishna42 · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 3:00 pm Post subject: Ken Wilber

I'd be interested in discussing Ken Wilber's book, A Brief History of Everything. It's certainly *not* an atheistic book, but it does have something to say about atheism. One of his claims is that atheism is actually a *stage* of spiritual development. I'm oversimplifying here, of course, so don't jump on the idea until you read him.

He makes a pretty convincing case against the strictly materialist viewpoint. He posits that there are four "quadrants" to reality with internal / external and individual / collective dividing the quadrants (thus "upper left" is interior-individual, or psychology). These four quadrants are really aspects of the same phenomenon which he calls "holons."

He has an interesting take on the differences among science, religion, and other ideas about the world: *everyone* gets something right. Thus he tries to figure out what religion *does* get right (and in his view there is some stuff, of course).

There's a good web site about his philosophy here:
www.worldofkenwilber.com

I'd be particularly interested in a strictly scientific / atheistic critique of the work. And again, please remember that I'm oversimplifying and perhaps even misrepresenting his ideas, though not intentionally, of course.

IndianAce · Posted: Fri Apr 16, 2004 11:56 am Post subject: Last of the Mughals

Hi,

I'd like to recommend "Last of the Mughals" by Airavat Singh, a free book available at www.airavat.com/Last_of_the_mughals.htm


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