Nominations for our 2nd Quarter 2005 book selection

Chris OConnor

Make your nominations for our 2nd Quarter 2005 book selection here.

For those not paying attention, and you know who you are,

we have switched to reading/discussing a new book every quarter, which means one book every three months. We'll be done with, "The Battle for God," on March 31, 2005, and beginning our new selection on April 1, 2005.

Please be sure to include an explanation for why you think your suggestion would be ideal for a BookTalk selection. Do not just post a book title. You'll greatly enhance the chances of seeing your suggestion on the next poll if you put some effort into selling us on your book.

You should at least copy and paste a description of the book from Amazon.com. No need to type an essay as to why the book is so wonderful. Just do something to educate us on what the book is about and why you would like the community to read it. Please limit your suggestions to just a few. Thank you and drive safely.

Important Note:

As with our 1st Quarter 2005 poll, this upcoming poll will be conducted using the new polling method. Each qualified BookTalk member will be allowed 3 total votes. They can assign their 3 votes however they see fit. In other words, if there are 3 books on the poll they can assign their 3 votes evenly over the 3 selections, or all 3 on one book, or 2 on one and 1 on another. The choice is theirs.

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 1/5/05 9:41 pm

yellowlight · Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2005 1:01 am Post subject: suggestion

as a "newbie", I feel a little anxious about being the first for a book suggestions, but maybe no one else has had time to read the post as the thread is relatively new. So here goes:

"Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History" by
Erna Paris

It's about reconciliation of countries and citizens with horrific atrocities caused by their own actions - i.e. America and slavery; Japan and WWII; South Africa and apartheid; Germany and the Holocaust;

Here is the criteria for my selection:
1) able to purchase from Amazon.com
2) fairly inexpensive (in the bargain books)
3) I looked through past suggestions started from the very beginning - history books were suggested generically quite often
5) I had not even heard of this book - but the synopsis instantly peaked my interest and I will probably buy it anyway
6) Got great reviews by numerous publications
7) Maybe a book about ethical dilemmas might evoke good discussions

no matter what the selection, I am sure that I will enjoy reading and participating.

pctacitus

The Friar and the Cipher : Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone.

www.amazon.com/exec/obido...7RAL16H02H

From the Inside Flap

A compulsively readable account of the most mysterious manuscript in the world, one that has stumped the world’s greatest scholars and codebreakers.

The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious tome discovered in 1912 by the English book dealer Wilfrid Michael Voynich, has puzzled scholars for a century. A small six inches by nine inches, but over two hundred pages long, with odd illustrations of plants, astrological diagrams, and naked women, it is written in so indecipherable a language and contains so complicated a code that mathematicians, book collectors, linguists, and historians alike have yet to solve the mysteries contained within. However, in The Friar and the Cipher, the acclaimed bibliophiles and historians Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone describe, in fascinating detail, the theory that Roger Bacon, the noted thirteenth-century, pre-Copernican astronomer, was its author and that the perplexing alphabet was written in his hand. Along the way, they explain the many proposed solutions that scholars have put forth and the myriad attempts at labeling the manuscript's content, from Latin or Greek shorthand to Arabic numerals to ancient Ukrainian to a recipe for the elixir of life to good old-fashioned gibberish. As we journey across centuries, languages, and countries, we meet a cast of impassioned characters and case-crackers, including, of course, Bacon, whose own personal scientific contributions, Voynich author or not, were literally and figuratively astronomical.

The Friar and the Cipher is a wonderfully entertaining and historically wide-ranging book that is one part The Code Book, one part Possession, and one part The Da Vinci Code and will appeal to bibliophiles and laypeople alike.

About the Authors:
Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone are a husband-and-wife writing team and authors of Out of the Flames, a Booksense 76 Selection. They have also written three books on their book-collecting pursuits: Used and Rare, Slightly Chipped, and Warmly Inscribed.

From Publishers Weekly
The Goldstones, bibliophiles and authors of Out of the Flames and other books, offer a witty biography of controversial 13th-century Dominican friar Roger Bacon, whose Opus Majus "presented a way of thinking, of approaching science, that is virtually unsurpassed in the thousand years since its creation." According to the Goldstones, by challenging the accepted view of the Bible as the source of literal truth, it opened a schism between religion and science. The Church's response, recounted here, was filled with political intrigue, heroes and villains, and enough twists and turns to keep readers immersed. But this book's highlight is the story of a mysterious book discovered in 1912 and named for its owner, Wilfrid Voynich. The manuscript has a coded text enhanced by hundreds of illustrations depicting exotic plants, astronomical phenomena and strange "strings of tiny naked women cavorting in a variety of fountains, waterfalls, and pools." Various experts have attributed the manuscript to Bacon—but as it has kept its secrets from some of the world's greatest cryptanalysts, including some in the CIA and England's MI-8, as well as the largest supercomputers in the world, the attribution remains speculative. But these efforts make a compelling story for readers of the history of science and of code breaking. B&w illus.

…[T]o ignore the classics is ultimately to weaken the very foundations of our society. - James Atlas, Book Wars: What it Takes to be Educated in America

Murray Graham

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Regards,
M. Graham

Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage among his books.
For to you kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring,
but to him they are but toys of the moment,
to be overturned with the flick of a finger. -- Gordon R.Dickson

Mr. Pessimistic

Sorry Murray, this was book 4 I believe!

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

Mr. Pessimistic

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

Part two of Guns, Germs and Steel!

Quote:
Amazon.com
Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass-half-empty follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse uses the same factors to examine why ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argues, particularly when combined with society's response to (or disregard for) the coming disaster. Still, right from the outset of Collapse, the author makes clear that this is not a mere environmentalist's diatribe. He begins by setting the book's main question in the small communities of present-day Montana as they face a decline in living standards and a depletion of natural resources. Once-vital mines now leak toxins into the soil, while prion diseases infect some deer and elk and older hydroelectric dams have become decrepit. On all these issues, and particularly with the hot-button topic of logging and wildfires, Diamond writes with equanimity.
Because he's addressing such significant issues within a vast span of time, Diamond can occasionally speak too briefly and assume too much, and at times his shorthand remarks may cause careful readers to raise an eyebrow. But in general, Diamond provides fine and well-reasoned historical examples, making the case that many times, economic and environmental concerns are one and the same. With Collapse, Diamond hopes to jog our collective memory to keep us from falling for false analogies or forgetting prior experiences, and thereby save us from potential devastations to come. While it might seem a stretch to use medieval Greenland and the Maya to convince a skeptic about the seriousness of global warming, it's exactly this type of cross-referencing that makes Collapse so compelling. --Jennifer Buckendorff

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

CSflim

I second Collapse by Jared Diamond. I haven't yet read Guns, Germs and Steel, but hopefully I will be able to get it read before we start the second quarter.

Chris OConnor

I third Collapse. Can you "third" a nomination?

Chris

MadArchitect

Assuming that no one wants to nominate one of the books I suggested in the "Permanent Thread" (and I will refrain from nominating them, since their authorship is of a, shall we say, controversial nature -- I'll gladly second them should anyone else be interested in accepting the challenge of pitting the skills of a freethinker's community against those of an acknowledged theist)...

Assuming that, I nominate Natural Goodness, by Philippa Foot. It has, among others, the virtue of being short: a scant 136 pages, compared to the 300+ that seems to be par for the book selection course. Here's the discussion from the publisher's webpage:

Description
Philippa Foot has for many years been one of the most distinctive and influential thinkers in moral philosophy. Long dissatisfied with the moral theories of her contemporaries, she has gradually evolved a theory of her own that is radically opposed not only to emotivism and prescriptivism but also to the whole subjectivist, anti-naturalist movement deriving from David Hume. Dissatisfied with both Kantian and utilitarian ethics, she claims to have isolated a special form of evaluation that predicates goodness and defect only to living things considered as such; she finds this form of evaluation in moral judgements. Her vivid discussion covers topics such as practical rationality, erring conscience, and the relation between virtue and happiness, ending with a critique of Nietzsche's immoralism. This long-awaited book exposes a highly original approach to moral philosophy and represents a fundamental break from the assumptions of recent debates. Foot challenges many prominent philosophical arguments and attitudes; but hers is a work full of life and feeling, written for anyone intrigued by the deepest questions about goodness and human. Reviews
"Natural Goodness is an exciting and provoking book, more interesting than most books in moral philosophy....What she has given us both in this book and elsewhere deserves nothing but intellectual and moral gratitude."-- Alasdair MacIntyre, Philosophical Quarterly

"One of the most fascinating ideas in ancient philosophy--that there is a close relation between human happiness and virtue--has been largely neglected in modern philosophy. In this highly significant book, Philippa Foot revives that idea, rooting it in an understanding of human goodness as depending on the nature of our species. In more than one sense, it is a work of great integrity. Beautifully and economically written, and powerfully argued, it will become a classic of modern moral philosophy."--Roger Crisp
Product Details
136 pages; 3 halftones; 0-19-926547-X
About the Author(s)
Philippa Foot is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, Honourary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Loricat

Like yellowlight, I'm a newbie -- but I'm excited about being involved in the next round of discussions. I second (or third?) a couple of the books already nominated, as they are on my 'to read' list: the Erna Paris and the Jared Diamond.

My recommendation is the latest by Jane Jacobs, author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and "Systems of Survival". She is a definite Big Picture thinker, and is able to distill ideas into simple, broad concepts. From the Amazon website:

Quote:
Written when this legendary author of classics including The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations had already entered her 80s, Dark Age Ahead draws on a lifetime of astute observation to identify factors such as the erosion of community and family and the lack of public fiscal accountability as the true harbingers of an unhealthy cultural base. Jacobs, whose own formal education ended with a high school diploma and a year-long unpaid Depression-era apprenticeship at a Pennsylvania newspaper, identifies the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next as vitally important, and sees the trend towards replacing intellectual mentorship with what she calls "credentialing" at universities and other institutions of higher education as very dangerous indeed. "My impression is that university-educated parents or grandparents of students presently in university do not realize how much the experience has changed since their own student days, nor do the students themselves, since they have not experienced anything else," Jacobs writes. "Only faculty who have lived through the loss realize what has been lost. A vigorous culture capable of making corrective, stabilizing changes depends heavily on its educated people, and especially upon their critical capacities and depth of understanding."

What I would like to see is whether her arguments and world view would hold up under the scrutiny of the minds here at BookTalk.

Lori

Chris OConnor

Ok folks, the time has come to post the new book poll to determine our 2nd Quarter 2005 book. Please visit the permanent book suggestion thread to see if there are any books you would like to see on the poll. Not all nominations can or will be added to the poll, but they will be considered.

Permanent book suggestion thread.

A separate thread will be created for the new poll, but make your nominations right here in this thread. Thanks.

Chris


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