Suggest NON-FICTION books for our next official discussion

Chris OConnor

Suggest NON-FICTION books for our next official discussion

What would you like to read and discuss next? Please provide a link to where we can learn more about your suggestions on Amazon.com. Cool

DWill · Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2008 8:35 pm Post subject:

I came across this book review in The Week (which as I've said before is my favorite magazine).

The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head
by Raymond Tallis
(Yale, $2 Cool

There’s an awful lot going on in your head, says physician and poet Raymond Tallis. A liter of saliva accumulates in your mouth every day without your notice. Mucus forms in the nasal passages and waxy cerumen in the ears. You yawn and blink involuntarily. You blush when you least want to signal embarrassment. Of course, the head is also the place we do our thinking, the “capital” of our “first-person world.” But it’s hard to imagine exactly how our electrical impulses come to be experienced as thought. “Earwax is in my head,” Tallis muses. “But are my thoughts in my head?”

Tallis’ playful new book is on one level “a wonderful treasury of stupefying facts,” said Michael Simkins in the London Mail on Sunday. He aims first and foremost to make his readers “astonished tourists of the piece of the world that is closest to them,” and he succeeds in illuminating what’s extraordinary about such everyday acts as speaking, sneezing, spitting, breathing, sweating, laughing, and smiling. But his larger objective is to examine where the self resides, said Andrew Robinson in New Scientist. Tallis is “exasperated by brain worship”—the faddish use of neuroscience to explain all facets of human experience. “Selves require bodies as well as brains, material environments as well as bodies, and societies as well as material environments,” he tells us. And the body has agendas over which the brain has no control.

The Kingdom of Infinite Space will “make you see yourself not just in a new light but from a dozen new angles,” said Adam Begley in The New York Observer. It’s merely a bonus that Tallis’ writing is “witty and densely allusive,” and reading it is an “aesthetically pleasing experience in itself.” Sometimes he’s “a bit too pleased with himself,” said Jane O’Grady in the London Guardian. But Tallis’ exuberance proves contagious when he’s stalking the thin line between the external world and inner experience, and he reminds us throughout of the glory of being human.

Saffron · Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2008 8:45 pm Post subject:

Great suggestion DWill. At first I wondered if there would be enough to discuss, but just reading the last paragraph of your post got me thinking of questions and ideas.

Grim · Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2008 11:30 pm Post subject:

I would like to suggest:

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

http://books.google.com/books?id=aJJnHwAACAAJ&dq=bad+money&client=oper a

[ "Phillips explains that these are the fruits of what he calls the "financialization" of the United States: the decline of manufacturing and the rise of finance as the central driver of the nation's GDP. It is not a change Phillips believes happened by chance. Former Nixon White House strategist and political and economic critic Kevin Phillips, whose latest book BAD MONEY: RECKLESS FINANCE, FAILED POLITICS, AND THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM explores the role that the crumbling financial sector played in the now-fragile American economy."

"In 1969, he published THE EMERGING REPUBLICAN MAJORITY, which forecasted a major shift to the right in electoral politics - a prediction that has been remarkably accurate."

"If you read only one book on the route to this financial meltdown, I recommend this one: BAD MONEY: RECKLESS FINANCE, FAILED POLITICS, AND THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM. The author, Kevin Phillips, has a history of being way ahead of the curve. As a young man working for Richard Nixon, he wrote THE EMERGING REPUBLICAN MAJORITY, a book that uncannily predicted how the GOP would regain power in Washington. Kevin Phillips saw our current crisis coming a long time ago. And in one book of historical insight after another, laid out the clues he was tracking. As recently as last spring in the AMERICAN PROSPECT magazine, Phillips wrote that what he thought was about to happen would be "unusual and potentially tragic."

In the preface of his book, he has written that these things usually come to fruition in August and September. And sure enough, here we are coping in September with the effects of bad money."

- Bill Moyers ]

Some work by the author:

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082023

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09192008/profile.html

Highly seasoned author on a topic that is very relevant to the current economic events that everyone obviously should have (and many obviously did) see coming for sometime now. Should be a great introduction to a failing system, Kevin Philips who is described as having the potential to see through the crisis and offer hope on the horizon many may have trouble picturing just now.

DWill · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 10:55 am Post subject:

Phillips seems to be an interesting guy. I've heard his name for years but have never read one of his books. Saw him on Bill Moyers the other night. He is one who might be as free as possible of partisan blinders. He can't be classified at this point as either liberal or conservative. Good recommendation.

Saffron · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 12:04 pm Post subject:

Kevin Phillips was on the Diane Rehm show today. Here I'll post a link to it.

Dissident Heart · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 3:09 pm Post subject:

I was able to catch Kevin Phillips on Bill Moyers and listen to him on Diane Rheams this morning: a very important voice in exposing the corruption, fraud and delusion that has gripped our elected officials and their directing economic masters. I think reading his book right after Bacevich's "Limits of Power" could very well lead to Booktalk members rallying for revolution!

I would rather we take a different approach in sequence after Bacevich's essential criticality of a flawed system...and read a book that challenges us to imagine what sort of economic system to we want...one that doesn't simply say what's wrong (and Bacevich's text is more than just that) but that carefully, methodically and thoughtfully tries to answer: if not this system, then what?

I think Michael Albert's Parecon: Life Beyond Capitalism is precisely that sort of book. Here is the link to the entire book on-line, and you can see for yourself if it delivers the goods http://www.zmag.org/zparecon/pareconlac.htm

I am not an economist, but I think every citizen has an obligation to understand the fundamentals...and, more importantly, to be able to support an economy that reflects their values and principles. I think Albert's Parecon will provide ample opportunity for us to imagine the kind of economy we desire and are willing to support.

Grim · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 9:36 pm Post subject:

Excellent advocation, I have been effectively swayed.

Bananadance

Except how can you get a hard copy?

Weep

bohemian_girl · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 8:41 am Post subject:

I haven't been a member for very long so I'm sorry if this has already been done or discussed.

I thought maybe In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I haven't read it yet but am planning to at some stage and have heard good things about it.

http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Blood-Truman-Capote/dp/0679745580
Amazon.com Review
"Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks.

Chris OConnor · Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 10:37 pm Post subject:

I'm looking through the new releases and can't find anything too exciting.

Chris OConnor · Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2008 11:15 pm Post subject:

Please read the below reviews and descriptions and let me know what you think of this book suggestion. When I was a child I spent about a year living in a Mormon foster home. The story of how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormonism) started is fascinating and would inspire some great conversation here on our forums.

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
by Jon Krakauer
http://www.amazon.com/Under-Banner-Heaven-Story-Violent/dp/1400032806/ ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227068008&sr=1-1

From Wikipedia
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (ISBN 1-4000-3280-6) is a book of investigative non-fiction written by best-selling author, Jon Krakauer, and first published in July 2003. It is a juxtaposition of two stories: the formation and evolution of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and a modern-day double murder committed by Ron Lafferty and Dan Lafferty, brothers who subscribed to a fundamentalist version of Mormonism, in the name of God. The Laffertys were former members of a very small splinter group called the School of the Prophets, led by a man named Robert C. Crossfield (also known by his prophet name Onias). They also accepted many beliefs of those that left the original Church when it ceased the practice of polygamy in the 1890s and call themselves fundamentalist Mormons. The book examines the ideologies of both The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the apostate polygamy-practicing groups, such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ("FLDS").

Amazon.com Review
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.

From Publishers Weekly
Using as a focal point the chilling story of offshoot Mormon fundamentalist brothers Dan and Ron Lafferty, who in 1984 brutally butchered their sister-in-law and 15-month-old niece in the name of a divine revelation, Krakauer explores what he sees as the nature of radical Mormon sects with Svengali-like leaders. Using mostly secondary historical texts and some contemporary primary sources, Krakauer compellingly details the history of the Mormon church from its early 19th-century creation by Joseph Smith (whom Krakauer describes as a convicted con man) to its violent journey from upstate New York to the Midwest and finally Utah, where, after the 1890 renunciation of the church's holy doctrine sanctioning multiple marriages, it transformed itself into one of the world's fastest-growing religions. Through interviews with family members and an unremorseful Dan Lafferty (who is currently serving a life sentence), Krakauer chronologically tracks what led to the double murder, from the brothers' theological misgivings about the Mormon church to starting their own fundamentalist sect that relies on their direct communications with God to guide their actions. According to Dan's chilling step-by-step account, when their new religion led to Ron's divorce and both men's excommunication from the Mormon church, the brothers followed divine revelations and sought to kill, starting with their sister-in-law, those who stood in the way of their new beliefs. Relying on his strong journalistic and storytelling skills, Krakauer peppers the book with an array of disturbing firsthand accounts and news stories (such as the recent kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart) of physical and sexual brutality, which he sees as an outgrowth of some fundamentalists' belief in polygamy and the notion that every male speaks to God and can do God's bidding. While Krakauer demonstrates that most nonfundamentalist Mormons are community oriented, industrious and law-abiding, he poses some striking questions about the closed-minded, closed-door policies of the religion-and many religions in general.

Ophelia · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2008 7:46 am Post subject:

This is a title given by Robert Tulip in the After Tamerlane forum:

Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said.
Here is a review from the New York Times.

Robert Tulip · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2008 6:34 pm Post subject:

Thanks Ophelia, great review. Culture and Imperialism also addresses Camus and Conrad, with strong focus on themes discussed in the Booktalk threads on Heart of Darkness and Exile and The Kingdom.
Robert


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