Official Poll - 1st Quarter '05 (Jan/Feb/Mar) Book Selection

Chris OConnor

1st Quarter 2005 (January - February - March)

Official Book Selection Poll

This is the Official Poll for selecting our very first book for 2005. Please note the new change in reading periods. We're going to be reading and discussing a new book every three months, as opposed to the past schedule of one every two months. Hopefully this new pace will give us all more time for ordering, receiving, reading and discussing our book selections. Some of our books are rather intensive and two months just isn't long enough for a quality discussion.

Please read this entire post before you cast your vote. There are some new changes that you should understand before you vote.

1. Please do NOT vote if you have not made at least 10 posts to our forums.

2. And please do NOT cast a vote yourself if you don't plan on reading and discussing the book.

3. This is the new change in how we vote. Please pay attention. Instead of only having one vote you now have a total of three votes. You can use your three votes however you see fit, which could mean assigning all three votes to one of the book choices, or distributing the three points over the book choices according to your own interest level for each book.

With this new polling process all you should do is make a brief post to this thread telling everyone how you wish to distribute your three votes. I will do an example post following this instruction post so you can get an idea of how you vote.

It is inevitable that some people will either forget to cast all three votes or will not have read this entire post. They will simply vote on one book. If this happens I will be assigning all three of their votes to the one book they selected.

Please do not change your vote after you have cast it. Periodically, during the polling period, I will tally the votes and make a summary post.

I'm not sure how we will handle things if someone sees the need to change their vote after they have already cast it. Perhaps each voting period should be an open discussion, and we allow members to change their votes at any time during the polling process. Maybe someone makes a post explaining why they think Book A should win the poll...and they influence other members to change their votes. Is this such a bad thing? I'm not sure yet. Comments right here in this thread would be appreciated.

We have 3 choices in this poll. Please think hard about what book will be the most educational, entertaining, and worthy of discussion. No matter which book wins we will be asking either the author, or a representative of the author, to be our guest in the BookTalk chat room.

NOTE:

We will need 2 discussion leaders that are willing to be very active in the reading and discussion of the winning book. If you are up to the task please let us all know right in this forum by making a post and stating your interest in the position.

Please don't nominate yourself if you will not be active. Being active means checking the forum just about every day and making posts regularly. Regularly means a few times each week at the minimum.

Being a discussion leader does not entail being an authority on the subject matter or defending the author's position. You simply need to attempt to stimulate discussion. Interested? Let us know!

Here are our 3 book choices for 1st Quarter 2005, or January, February and March:

The Battle for God - by KAREN ARMSTRONG

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
About 40 years ago popular opinion assumed that religion would become a weaker force and people would certainly become less zealous as the world became more modern and morals more relaxed. But the opposite has proven true, according to theologian and author Karen Armstrong (A History of God), who documents how fundamentalism has taken root and grown in many of the world's major religions, such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Even Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism have developed fundamentalist factions. Reacting to a technologically driven world with liberal Western values, fundamentalists have not only increased in numbers, they have become more desperate, claims Armstrong, who points to the Oklahoma City bombing, violent anti-abortion crusades, and the assassination of President Yitzak Rabin as evidence of dangerous extremes.
Yet she also acknowledges the irony of how fundamentalism and Western materialism seem to urge each other on to greater excesses. To "prevent an escalation of the conflict, we must try and understand the pain and perception of the other side," she pleads. With her gift for clear, engaging writing and her integrity as a thorough researcher, Armstrong delivers a powerful discussion of a globally heated issue. Part history lesson, part wake-up call, and mostly a plea for healing, Armstrong's writing continues to offer a religious mirror and a cultural vision. --Gail Hudson

Product Description:
In our supposedly secular age governed by reason and technology, fundamentalism has emerged as an overwhelming force in every major world religion. Why? This is the fascinating, disturbing question that bestselling author Karen Armstrong addresses in her brilliant new book The Battle for God. Writing with the broad perspective and deep understanding of human spirituality that won huge audiences for A History of God, Armstrong illuminates the spread of militant piety as a phenomenon peculiar to our moment in history.

Contrary to popular belief, fundamentalism is not a throwback to some ancient form of religion but rather a response to the spiritual crisis of the modern world. As Armstrong argues, the collapse of a piety rooted in myth and cult during the Renaissance forced people of faith to grasp for new ways of being religious--and fundamentalism was born. Armstrong focuses here on three fundamentalist movements: Protestant fundamentalism in America, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, and Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and Iran--exploring how each has developed its own unique way of combating the assaults of modernity.

Blending history, sociology, and spirituality, The Battle for God is a compelling and compassionate study of a radical form of religious expression that is critically shaping the course of world history.

Gulag : A History - by ANNE APPLEBAUM

Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Nearly 30 million prisoners passed through the Soviet Union's labor camps in their more than 60 years of operation. This remarkable volume, the first fully documented history of the gulag, describes how, largely under Stalin's watch, a regulated, centralized system of prison labor-unprecedented in scope-gradually arose out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. Fueled by waves of capricious arrests, this prison labor came to underpin the Soviet economy.

Applebaum, a former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, draws on newly accessible Soviet archives as well as scores of camp memoirs and interviews with survivors to trace the gulag's origins and expansion. By the gulag's peak years in the early 1950s, there were camps in every part of the country, and slave labor was used not only for mining and heavy industries but for producing every kind of consumer product (chairs, lamps, toys, those ubiquitous fur hats) and some of the country's most important science and engineering (Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program, began his work in a special prison laboratory).

Applebaum details camp life, including strategies for survival; the experiences of women and children in the camps; sexual relationships and marriages between prisoners; and rebellions, strikes and escapes. There is almost too much dark irony to bear in this tragic, gripping account. Applebaum's lucid prose and painstaking consideration of the competing theories about aspects of camp life and policy are always compelling. She includes an appendix in which she discusses the various ways of calculating how many died in the camps, and throughout the book she thoughtfully reflects on why the gulag does not loom as large in the Western imagination as, for instance, the Holocaust.

Product Description:
The Gulag—the vast array of Soviet concentration camps—was a system of repression and punishment whose rationalized evil and institutionalized inhumanity were rivaled only by the Holocaust.

The Gulag entered the world’s historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own original historical research, Anne Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. It is an epic feat of investigation and moral reckoning that places the Gulag where it belongs: at the center of our understanding of the troubled history of the twentieth century.

Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the country’s barely habitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Union’s time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned.

But the Gulag was not just an economic institution. It also became, over time, a country within a country, almost a separate civilization, with its own laws, customs, literature, folklore, slang, and morality. Topic by topic, Anne Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure, in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West.

Gulag: A History will immediately be recognized as a landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.

So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance - by Gabriel Zaid, Natasha Wimmer

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
"The human race publishes a book every thirty seconds," writes Mexican author and consultant Zaid. How can the average reader keep up with even a fraction of the latest new releases, let alone the multitude of classics stretching all the way back to Homer and Plato? The prospect is daunting to even the greatest bibliophile; furthermore, Zaid argues, people seem more interested in writing books than reading them (a recent survey shows 81% of Americans feel they should write a book). Though frustrated by this state of affairs, Zaid takes a philosophical perspective on the state of book publishing today, claiming that the industry doesn't always recognize one of its greatest strengths: its overwhelming diversity. In the publishing industry, a book that appeals to just a few thousand readers stands a good chance of getting published, whereas the commercial film industry and other mass media must function almost exclusively on a mega-budget scale. He celebrates the small printings that appeal to segmented clienteles, specialized niches, and members of different clubs of enthusiasts because "just a few thousand copies, read by the right people, are enough to change the course of conversation, the boundaries of literature, and our intellectual life." Not a groundbreaking book, but an appealing, meditative collection of thoughts and observations on the book industry and the state of literature in the early 21st century.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description:
In So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid offers his thoughts and observations on the literary condition: a highly original analysis of the predicament that readers, authors, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and teachers find themselves in today—when there are simply more books than any of us can contemplate. In this brief collection of essays, Zaid combines the business savvy of a management consultant, the meditations of a poet, and the sense of humor of an unrepentant reader.

Again, you get 3 votes! Make a post telling everyone how you wish to distribute your 3 votes.

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 12/17/04 1:54 am

Chris OConnor

Example 1:

I'm casting 1 vote for "The Gas We Pass," and 2 votes for, "How To Fight Your Way Out of An Orange."

Example 2:

All 3 for "The Gas We Pass."

Example 3:

I'd like my 3 votes distributed evenly over all 3 choices. I can't make my mind up and they all look good. Whatever wins...I will read.

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 12/17/04 2:05 am

pctacitus

I'd like to place two votes for Gulag by Anne Applebaum and one vote for So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid.

Current vote total:

2 votes - Gulag : A History - by ANNE APPLEBAUM

1 vote - So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance - by Gabriel Zaid, Natasha Wimmer

0 votes - The Battle for God - by KAREN ARMSTRONG

…[T]o ignore the classics is ultimately to weaken the very foundations of our society. - James Atlas, Book Wars

Edited by: pctacitus at: 12/17/04 2:03 am

Chris OConnor

My vote...

2 votes - Gulag : A History

1 vote - The Battle for God

0 votes - So Many Books

Chris OConnor

By the way...this new polling process is a discussion. You are free to attempt to sell people on your book choice. If you simply want to cast your vote you are free to do so, but if you would like to post some comments go for it. We're a discussion community and we're all wanting to read a book that stimulates some intense discussion. So speak your mind!

Chris

Jeremy1952

3 votes: The Battle for God - by KAREN ARMSTRONG

I don't really care about the Gulag. I do care about the publishing business... but it doesn't seem especially earth shaking.

I'm attractted to Armstrong's book on two counts. The first is the general interest of the topic to me; the other is the likelyhood that we (Ms Armstrong and me) have dramatically different points of view. I am not, for starters, convinced about the premise. And I make a conscous effort to read material by authors with whom I disagree ("Not in Our Genes", "Wonderful Life"), when I can find such that appear worth reading... "Darwin's Black Box" will never cross my reading desk.

If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. Daniel Dennett, 1984

jjacobs43

Yea - I have 10 posts and can do my first vote on Booktalk!

My vote...

2 votes - The Battle for God
1 vote - Gulag : A History

Chris OConnor

I love this new method for voting! By the way, it was Eric that introduced this new voting method. Thank you Eric.

Chris

MichaelangeloGlossolalia · Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 6:15 pm Post subject: The Battle for God

3 votes for The Battle for God

Mr. Pessimistic

My Vote

2 for Battle for God
1 for So Many Books

So far:

4 Votes for "GULAG"

8 Votes for "Battle for God"

2 Vote for "So Many Books"

VOTERS...please update total with each post!

Mr. P.

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

I came to get down, I came to get down. So get out ya seat and jump around - House of Pain

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

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

ginof · Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2004 12:42 pm Post subject: Official Poll - 1st Q 05

Well, I REALLY wanted to vote for "The Gas we Pass"

Unfortunately, I decided to get serious for a moment. I don't think the publishing book is really appropriate for this forum (no offense to those that do), and the Goulad sounds too depressing for the grey months ahead. I just finished 'God against the gods' which discusses a similar topic, but in a different time period, so I think that 'Battle for God' is where my three votes should go.

Mr. Pessimistic · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 2:27 pm Post subject: Re: Votes

My brain has been all fuzz lately!

Mr. P.

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

I came to get down, I came to get down. So get out ya seat and jump around - House of Pain

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

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

Tiarella · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 2:43 pm Post subject: Re: Votes

I'll put all 3 towards Battle for God as the Gulag is running second and I'm not at all interested in that.

Otherwise I'd've put a vote towards Too Many Books, which also interests me.

But I'm not actually voting for Too Many Books, oh ye vote-counters! :lol

Three votes for Battle for God!

We don't want a Washington-state Governor's-race vote-counting type of battle here, do we?


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