Q3 2007 Nonfiction Book Poll!

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 8:09 pm Post subject: Q3 2007 Nonfiction Book Poll!

Official Q3 2007 Nonfiction Book Poll!

Q3 2007 = July, August & September

Please read these directions BEFORE you vote!

How many nonfiction books will we be reading?

We'll be reading 2 nonfiction books in 3nd quarter of 2007. This poll will select 1 of the 2 nonfiction books for community discussion, while the Q3 2007 Freethinker Book Poll will select the other book. So we're reading a total of 2 nonfiction books where one is of general interest and the other advances issues of importance to freethinkers. Periodically, there will be some overlap of these two sections.

How long will the poll stay open?

This poll is opening on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 and will be closing on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007. This is a total of 10 full days.

Who can vote?

All active members are invited and encouraged to vote and participate in our book selection process, but please follow these simple rules:

Only cast a vote if you have 10 or more posts on our forums. If you don't have at least 10 you should have no problem jumping into some discussion threads and meeting this rather relaxed criterion. You can meet this requirement in one day.

Don't vote if you don't plan on participating if your book wins. Again, if you vote for a book and it wins we really hope you participate. You should not be influencing the direction of the community if you're not actively involved.

If you vote for a book and it does not win we still hope you read and discuss the winning book with us, but we understand if you opt to not participate. Please try to get involved no matter which book wins, as this is all about education AND entertainment. We can all learn from our book selections and from each other, and reading a book you typically would never have even picked up is a great way to expand your horizons and perspective on life.

How do I vote?

If you are an active member with 10 or more total posts AND you plan on participating in the Q3 2007 discussion if your chosen book wins THEN you are permitted to cast a total of 3 votes. You can use your 3 votes however you see fit, which could mean assigning all 3 votes to just one of the book choices, or distributing the 3 votes over the book choices according to your own interest level for each book. No half-votes assigned to books. ::204

You should make a brief post to this thread telling everyone how you wish to distribute your 3 votes.

Nothing further needs to be said, however you're welcome and encouraged to be as verbose as you like. Just make it crystal clear how you are voting.

It is inevitable that some people will either forget to cast all 3 votes or will not have read this entire post. They will simply vote on one book. If this happens I will be assigning all 3 of their votes to the one book they selected.

You are permitted to change your vote at any time during the voting period, but not after I close the poll. The poll is closed on the last day of the polling period as stated above. There is no gaurantee of what time the poll will close on the last day, so please do not wait till the last minute to vote.

This thread can and SHOULD be used as an open discussion of the books on the poll. You're welcome to try to sell people on a particular book, or dissuade them from another. I am asking you all to comment on the votes as you see them. Don't be shy...speak your mind. ::80

NOTE:

As always, we will need a discussion leader that is willing to be active in the reading and discussion of the winning book. If you are up to the task please let us all know in this forum by making a post and stating your interest.

Or, if you are only interested in being the discussion leader if your choice of books wins the poll, you can say so or just wait to see if it wins. But please consider volunteering!

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.

And here are our NONFICTION book choices for 3rd Quarter 2007 (July, August & September). Please read about all books before casting your votes. Think hard about which book will be the most educational, entertaining, and worthy of discussion. May the best book win!

Drum roll please...

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 6/16/07 10:08 pm

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 9:49 pm Post subject: Re: Q3 2007 Nonfiction Book Poll!

Book 1 Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
by Nathaniel Philbrick

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this remarkable effort, National Book Award–winner Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea) examines the history of Plymouth Colony. In the early 17th century, a small group of devout English Christians fled their villages to escape persecution, going first to Holland, then making the now infamous 10-week voyage to the New World. Rather than arriving in the summer months as planned, they landed in November, low on supplies. Luckily, they were met by the Wampanoag Indians and their wizened chief, Massasoit. In economical, well-paced prose, Philbrick masterfully recounts the desperate circumstances of both the settlers and their would-be hosts, and how the Wampanoags saved the colony from certain destruction. Indeed, there was a first Thanksgiving, the author notes, and for over 50 years the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims lived in peace, becoming increasingly interdependent. But in 1675, 56 years after the colonists' landing, Massasoit's heir, Philip, launched a confusing war on the English that, over 14 horrifying months, claimed 5,000 lives, a huge percentage of the colonies' population. Impeccably researched and expertly rendered, Philbrick's account brings the Plymouth Colony and its leaders, including William Bradford, Benjamin Church and the bellicose, dwarfish Miles Standish, vividly to life. More importantly, he brings into focus a gruesome period in early American history. For Philbrick, this is yet another award-worthy story of survival.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Few periods in American history are as clouded in mythology and romantic fantasy as the Pilgrim settlement of New England. The Mayflower, Plymouth Rock, the first Thanksgiving, Miles Standish, John Alden and Priscilla ("Speak for yourself, John") Mullins -- this is the stuff of legend, and we have thrilled to it for generations. Among many other things, it is what Nathaniel Philbrick calls "a restorative myth of national origins," one that encourages us in the conviction that we are a nation uniquely blessed by God and that we have reached a level of righteousness unattained by any other country.

It is a comforting mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The voyage of the Mayflower was a painful and fatal (one crew member died) transatlantic passage by people who knew nothing about the sea and had "almost no relevant experience when it came to carving a settlement out of the American wilderness." Wherever they first set foot on the American continent, it wasn't Plymouth, and it certainly wasn't Plymouth Rock. The first Thanksgiving (in 1621) was indeed attended by Indians as well as Pilgrims, but they didn't sit at the tidy table depicted in Victorian popular art; they "stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages -- stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown -- simmered invitingly." As for Priscilla Mullins, John Alden and Miles Standish, that tale is nothing more than a product of the imagination of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

These cherished myths, in other words, bear approximately as much resemblance to reality as does, say, the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. In Mayflower, his study of the Pilgrim settlement, Philbrick dispatches them in a few paragraphs. It takes considerably longer, and requires vastly more detail, for him to get closer to the truth about relations between the Pilgrims and the Indians. Popular mythology tends to focus on Massasoit, the chief of the Pokanokets who allied his tribe with the English settlers, and Squanto, the English-speaking Indian who formed a close, mutually rewarding friendship with William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Plantation for three decades. Some of what that mythology tells us is indeed true, but as Philbrick is at pains to demonstrate, the full truth is vastly more complicated.

Philbrick, who lives on Nantucket Island and has written often about the sea and those who sail it -- he won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2000 for In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex -- specializes in popular history, a genre often sneered at by academic historians but treasured by readers, who welcome its emphasis on narrative and lucid prose. He is not as graceful a stylist as the genre's most celebrated living practitioner, David McCullough, but his work is entirely accessible and gives every evidence of being sound scholarship. He appears to bring no bias to his work except a desire to get as close to the truth as primary and secondary sources allow, in refreshing contrast to the many academic historians who -- consciously or not -- have permitted political and cultural bias to color their interpretations of the past.

Because Philbrick is in search of the more factually complex and morally ambiguous truth behind essentially self-serving popular mythology, it is important to emphasize that he is not out to denigrate that mythology or those who embrace it. He celebrates the courage, resourcefulness and determination of many of the settlers, most notably Bradford and the remarkable warrior Benjamin Church; he acknowledges and describes in detail the many ways in which Pilgrims and Indians cooperated, in some cases to their mutual advantage; he pays particular tribute to Mary Rowlandson, the settler who was kidnapped by Indians and endured much hardship and privation but ultimately helped broker peace between Indians and Puritans.

He knows, though, that the story of the Pilgrims can't be reduced to doughty Englishmen and women in modest homespun and smiling Indians proffering peace pipes. Like the settlement of the West, the settlement of New England was hard, bloody and violent. If Indians made horrendous attacks on settlers -- many of those whom they killed were women and children -- the Pilgrims more than responded in kind. Many of the Pilgrims were pious folk, Puritans who crossed the ocean in hopes of worshiping as they wished -- they "believed it was necessary to venture back to the absolute beginning of Christianity, before the church had been corrupted by centuries of laxity and abuse, to locate divine truth" -- but like the settlers of Israel three centuries later, they were ready to fight when necessary, and they fought with zeal.

Encouraged by Longfellow and other mythologizers, we have tended to think of the Pilgrims as earnest, uncomplicated and rather innocent, motivated solely by religious faith and goodhearted in their dealings with New England's native population. There is a measure of truth to this, in that some settlers wanted to treat the Indians fairly and tried hard to live peacefully beside them, but they were also fiercely determined to gain a foothold in this new land and did not hesitate to act violently in order to gain one. The famous Mayflower Compact that they wrote and signed during the Atlantic crossing did contain a few of the seeds from which the United States and its democratic system eventually sprang, but the settlers were not especially democratic themselves. They disliked and suppressed dissent, enslaved Indians and shipped them off to brutal conditions in the West Indies and clung with such stubborn rigidity to their belief that they alone understood God's will that they were incapable of comprehending the Indians' very different culture.

The early years of Plymouth Plantation were exceedingly difficult but comparatively peaceful so far as relations with the many Indian tribes were concerned. Gradually, though, as English settlers moved ever deeper into New England and as Indians grasped the full extent of the threat to their established way of life, the settlers grew more belligerent, and the Indians grew more hostile. Indian raids on isolated settlements became more frequent and more brutal. The burning of Springfield in 1675, in what is now known as Massachusetts (after a tribe that was especially unfriendly to the Puritans), seems to have been the turning point. One prominent settler said it proved that all Indians were "the children of the devil, full of all subtlety and malice," a sentiment that many others came to share.

The ultimate result was an oddly forgotten chapter in American history: King Philip's War. Taking its name after the son of Massasoit who became chief of the Pokanokets, this dreadful little war started not long after the raid on Springfield and lasted for about two years, with gruesome consequences for everyone involved. Plymouth Colony lost eight percent of its male population -- by comparison, "during the forty-five months of World War II, the United States lost just under 1 percent of its adult male population" -- but these losses "appear almost inconsequential when compared to those of the Indians." The total Indian population before the war was about 20,000; by war's end, "at least 2,000 had been killed in battle or died of their injuries; 3,000 had died of sickness and starvation, 1,000 had been shipped out of the country as slaves, while an estimated 2,000 eventually fled to either the Iroquois to the west or the Abenakis to the north. Overall, the Native American population of southern New England had sustained a loss of somewhere between 60 and 80 percent."

It was a costly and entirely unnecessary war, brought about by Philip's vanity, Puritan stubbornness and a pervasive atmosphere of mistrust and misunderstanding. After the war finally ended, it quickly vanished from the public consciousness except in the places where it was fought: "Thanksgiving and its reassuring image of Indian-English cooperation became the predominant myth of the Pilgrims. . . . In the American popular imagination, the nation's history began with the Pilgrims and then leapfrogged more than 150 years to Lexington and Concord and the Revolution."

All of which is very much in the American grain. We like our history sanitized and theme-parked and self-congratulatory, not bloody and angry and unflattering. But if Mayflower achieves the wide readership it deserves, perhaps a few Americans will be moved to reconsider all that.

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 9:55 pm Post subject: Re: Q3 2007 Nonfiction Book Poll!

Book 2 The Evolution of Deadly Conflict in Liberia: From 'Paternaltarianism' to State Collapse
by Jeremy Levitt

Book Description
This book represents the first attempt to holistically document and analyze the causes of deadly conflict in Liberia from its founding to the present. It reconstructs and examines the root, operational, and catalytic causes of seventeen internal deadly conflicts that transpired in Liberia between 1822 and 2003, including the 1980 coup d’état against the Tolbert regime and the Liberian Civil War (1989-1997) (Great War). The book seeks to answer two primary questions: what are the historical causes of deadly conflict in Liberia, and to what extent has the evolution of settler nationalism contributed to the stimulation of conflict between settler and native Liberians?

To answer these questions, Levitt examines a continuum of circular causation among the state of affairs that led to the founding of the Liberian State, the evolution of settler authoritarianism and nationalism, and internal conflict. By analyzing these processes together, the causes of seventeen conflicts are revealed and thoroughly discussed. The book also has three major objectives: to determine the historical causes of deadly conflict in Liberia, in particular, the underlining historical phenomena responsible for birthing the Great War; to present an alternative framework to comprehend and examine the aged conflict dynamic between settler and indigenous Liberians, and within Liberian society itself; and to produce the first comprehensive study of deadly conflict in Liberia.

This book advantageously spans the fields of political science, history, international law, and peace and conflict studies; it is an excellent interdisciplinary choice.

Synopsis
Levitt (Florida International U. College of Law) documents and analyzes the root, operational, and catalytic causes of 18 internal deadly conflicts in the African country of Liberia from its founding in 1822 through the fall of the Charles Taylor regime in 2003, paying particular attention to the Great War (1989-1997). He argues that the authoritarian political apparatus introduced by the American Colonization Society and inherited by the colonizing settlers—mostly freed American slaves and their descendants—conflicted with the principles upon which the native village-states were based, permanently institutionalizing ethnopolitical conflict between settlers and native Liberians. Thus, he concludes, "Liberia's legacy of violent conflict is inextricably linked to its traditions of nationalism and authoritarianism."

About the Author
Dr. Levitt is an Assistant Professor of Law and the Director of the Center on International Law, Policy and Africa at DePaul University College of Law.

Chris OConnor

Book 3 Interventions
by Noam Chomsky

Vanity Fair, June 2007
"Unwavering political contrarian Noam Chomsky smart-bombs the U.S. military's global 'Interventions'. Shock and awe!"

Book Description
"Chomsky is a global phenomenon . . . perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet."-The New York Times Book Review

Interventions is Noam Chomsky at his best.

Not since his all-time best-selling title, 9/11, published in the Open Media series in 2001, have readers had a timely, short, easy-to-read, affordable Chomsky. Unlike 9/11, Interventions is a writerly work-a series of more than thirty tightly argued essays aimed at various aspects of US power and politics in the post-9/11 world. While critical of US military interventions around the globe, each piece in the book is in itself an intellectual intervention aimed at raising public ire about the consequences of US use of power at home and abroad.

Interventions' subjects span from 9/11 and the Iraq war to Social Security and Intelligent Design, South America and Asia, the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the election of Hamas, Hurricane Katrina, and the US concept of "just war."

According to BusinessWeek, "With relentless logic, Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us-and to discern what they are leaving out. . . . Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening." Chomsky's Interventions delivers what readers want: an accessible set of skeleton keys for opening up a wide range of global issues dominating today's political landscape.

Noam Chomsky is the critically acclaimed author of many books, including Hegemony or Survival, Imperial Ambitions, Failed States, Manufacturing Consent, and Media Control.

About the Author
Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 192

is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of theoretical linguistics made in the 20th century.

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 6/16/07 11:04 pm

Mr. Pessimistic

I will not be participating in the Non Fiction reading as none of these even remotely strikes my interest.

Mr. P.

But atheism is no more a religion than not playing chess is a hobby. - Robert Sawyer - Sci Fi Author

I'm not saying it's usual for people to do those things but I(with the permission of God) have raised a dog from the dead and healed many people from all sorts of ailments. - Asana Boditharta (former booktalk troll)

"The Sentient may percieve and love the universe, but the universe cannot percieve and love the sentient. The universe sees no distinction between the multitude of creatures and elements which comprise it. All are equal. None is favored...It cannot control what it creates and it cannot, it seems, be controlled by its creations (though a few might decieve themselves otherwise). Those who curse the workings of the universe curse that which is deaf. Those who strike out at those workings fight that which is inviolate. Those who shake their fists, shake their fists at blind stars." - Michael Moorcock in the "Queen of the Swords"

JulianTheApostate · Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 2:34 am Post subject: Re: Q3 2007 Nonfiction Book Poll!

3 votes for Noam Chomsky's Interventions

The two history books don't appeal to me, even though I read plenty of history. There are a few history books on my bookshelf that I plan to read first. Also, early colonial American and Liberia are not areas I'm particular interested in. Finally, it's not clear what we'd talk about.

I read some Chomsky in grad school, which was a while ago. Though his book is my favorite of the three, I may not participate even if it's chosen.

Out of all the good suggestions, why were these three selected?

George Ricker · Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 9:31 am Post subject: Re: Q3 2007 Nonfiction Book Poll!

I'll cast my 3 votes for Mayflower.

Of the three choices, this one seems most intriguing. I would like to revisit the book on Liberia later. I love Chomsky, but I doubt I would find much that's new in his book.

George

"Godlessness is not about denying the existence of nonsensical beings. It is the starting point for living life without them."

Godless in America by George A. Ricker

Chris OConnor

2 votes for Mayflower and 1 vote for Interventions.

riverc0il · Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 6:25 am Post subject: Re: Q3 2007 Nonfiction Book Poll!

3 for Mayflower.

I can't bring myself to read more US Policy critique books (not because I disagree with anything Chomsky has to say, but rather because I already completely agree and and sick of the subject). The Liberia books does not interest me.

thrush · Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 8:20 am Post subject: Re: Q3 2007 Nonfiction Book Poll!

I vote for Mayflower also.

Chris OConnor · Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 9:06 am Post subject: Re: Q3 2007 Nonfiction Book Poll!

Thrush, please read the first post in this poll thread. We have a few rules that are important to follow. Your vote shows you didn't take the time to read the thread at all, which means there is an increased probability that you will vote and then never even stick around to participate.

1. You are only allowed to vote after making 10 total posts to the forums. You have made 3 total posts as of the above post. This rule exists so that people passing through don't cast votes and influence our book selection when they have no real intention of sticking around, buying the winning books, and contributing on the forums.

2. You are supposed to cast 3 votes, not just 1.

Chris OConnor · Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2007 5:24 pm Post subject: --

Last call on votes!

Niall001 · Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2007 6:40 pm Post subject: Re: --

Your assumption was correct Chris.

Sorry, should have been more formal.

Full of Porn*

http://plainofpillars.blogspot.com


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