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What non-fiction book should we read next? (probably in Oct. & Nov.)

Collaborate in choosing our next NON-FICTION book for group discussion within this forum. A minimum of 5 posts is necessary to participate here!
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etudiant
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I ran across something interesting in the bookstore a few days ago.

Empire of Illusion, by Chris Hedges, discusses what I think is a timely topic: the decline of literacy, and parallel rise of the type of superficial trash culture all too apparent today on TV and elsewhere.

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-L ... 611&sr=1-1
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Thank you etudiant. :smile: I just suggested that book about an hour ago so I'm happy to see you mentioning it too. It seems a fitting book for us here at BookTalk.org as we all aspire to be as well-read and literate as possible.
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etudiant wrote:I ran across something interesting in the bookstore a few days ago.

Empire of Illusion, by Chris Hedges, discusses what I think is a timely topic: the decline of literacy, and parallel rise of the type of superficial trash culture all too apparent today on TV and elsewhere.

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-L ... 611&sr=1-1
That sounds like a good one to read. When I first joined Booktalk, we were reading one with a similar theme, Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason. I was quite disappointed with that book, so I'd be williing to give another author a shot.

Another suggestion. John Krakauer is a fine non-fiction writer. He changes course from his adventure-based books in his new one, Under the Banner of Heaven. From the Randon House website:

Jon Krakauer's literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this "divinely inspired" crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. Along the way, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America's fastest-growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five "plural wives," several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamentalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers, and preach that any day now the world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.

Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism's violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.
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Under the Banner of Heaven is a book I've been wanting to read and from all the suggestions within this thread it is my top choice. Thanks, DWill. :smile:
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Sorry, I didn't realize that suggesting books on religion were a "no-no" for this study. Therefore, I would like to suggest a very quick but very interesting book. That is "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl" by Timothy Egan. I learned a lot reading that book and it is well worth spending your time on.
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Leona, I've just looked up that book on Amazon and I think it's a good choice for a non-fiction book. I was even talking about this piece of history with my parents the other day... more like they were educating me because I knew nothing about it. This book sounds like it offers something that would be great to learn about; although I don't know how much discussion it would generate. I also recollect that BT has a page limit and I want to say it's 300. This book numbers 340 pages. If it's allowed in, it will have one of my votes for sure.

http://www.amazon.com/Worst-Hard-Time-S ... 151&sr=8-2
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We don't have a page limit just some guidelines. 340 is fine if people are excited by the book.
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Chris OConnor wrote:Under the Banner of Heaven is a book I've been wanting to read and from all the suggestions within this thread it is my top choice. Thanks, DWill. :smile:
I've read this book and I think it would make a great choice. Krakauer is a great story teller and he winds in a pretty good history of the Mormon church.
-Colin

"Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish." -Mark Twain
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The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Drawing on evolutionary psychology, Skeptic publisher and Scientific American contributor Shermer (Why People Believe Weird Things) argues that the sources of moral behavior can be traced scientifically to humanity's evolutionary origins. He contends that human morality evolved as first an individual and then a species-wide mechanism for survival. As society evolved, humans needed rules governing behavior-e.g., altruism, sympathy, reciprocity and community concern-in order to ensure survival. Shermer says that some form of the Golden Rule-"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you"-provides the foundation of morality in human societies. Out of this, he develops the principles of what he calls a "provisional ethics" that "is neither absolute nor relative," that applies to most people most of the time, while allowing for "tolerance and diversity." According to the "ask-first" principle, for instance, the performer of an act simply asks its intended receiver whether the act is right or wrong. Other principles include the "happiness" principle ("always seek happiness with someone else's happiness in mind"), the liberty principle ("always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind") and the moderation principle ("when innocent people die, extremism in the defense of anything is no virtue, and moderation in the protection of everything is no vice"). Shermer's provisional ethics might reflect the messy ways that human moral behavior developed, but his simplistic principles establish a utilitarian calculus that not everyone will find acceptable. 35 b&w illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

If God is dead, said Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, then everything is permitted. Without religion, in other words, there can be no morality. This has been the position taken by religious conservatives as long as there have been religions, and it is Michael Shermer's principal target in The Science of Good and Evil. Shermer's new book is the final volume in a trilogy that began with Why People Believe Weird Things and continued with How We Believe, a critical survey of religious belief systems and their rationales.

It would not be unreasonable to conclude from Shermer's books and his past that he is obsessed with religion. Indeed, he makes no secret of it: He was, in college, a fundamentalist Christian, taking a degree in psychology and biology from Pepperdine University, a fundamentalist fortress in the hills above Malibu. Then at some point he turned on the beliefs of his youth and became the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the director of the Skeptics Society, which he still runs. He calls himself an agnostic now, and an evolutionary psychologist. If he has a god, it is Charles Darwin. In 1999 Shermer co-hosted a 12-part series on the Fox Family Channel called "Exploring the Unknown" and devoted it to debunking everything from the Shroud of Turin to spontaneous human combustion. He has made himself into one of the leading spokespersons in the country for the rational scientific approach toward questions of belief and the unknown. That's quite a switch for a man who cut his intellectual teeth on the Bible.

But Shermer does, as a result, know his enemy, and it gives him a decided advantage in writing a book such as this, which aims to demonstrate that we don't need God at all to be moral human beings, that in fact human evolution has built a tendency toward moral behavior into our brains. We are moral by nature. He draws upon the work of anthropologists with so-called primitive peoples to make his case, showing that man in a state of nature does not, as Hobbes claimed, behave as if life were a matter of all against all. Rather, Shermer marshals research showing that altruism, cooperation, mutual aid, attachment and bonding, concern for the community and other moral behaviors appear not only among tribal humans but in great-ape societies and among dolphins, whales and other large-brained mammals as well, none of which, as far as we know, is monotheist. Since the doctrine of natural selection cannot account for this behavior -- there is no selective advantage to a creature in being altruistic, for example, sacrificing itself for the good of the group -- he turns to the controversial concept of group selection, which most strict Darwinists abjure, and quotes Darwin himself in support: "There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection." "Better" tribes, then, tribes with a greater adherence to principles of justice and altruism and courage, would displace "worse" or more "evil" tribes, and therefore morality would evolve, and natural selection could indeed account for the universal appearance among human beings of moral goodness.

It is an easy step from there to believe in a gradual improvement over time in the moral standards of humankind, and Shermer takes that step. He believes in moral progress and thinks things are getting better. All we need, he seems to believe, is more reason: more Enlightenment. He devotes much of the rest of his book to promoting his own secular system of morality -- "provisional morality" in his words -- that stands somewhere carefully unspecified between complete moral relativism and the absolute systems of dos and don'ts espoused by various religions. He thinks there are fundamental moral rights and wrongs that hold in almost all situations, but he is wary of absolutism in all its forms. He believes in uncertainty. Nothing is either simply good or bad. Pornography, for example: Yes, of course, anything that depicts the physical abuse of men or women or tries to make us believe that women really like being raped is a bad thing. But not all pornography is like that. We can't simply condemn pornography. His arguments have a common sense feel to them. They seem perfectly reasonable, middle of the road. Let's take everything case by case, he says, and not get carried away. He is all for moderation.

It is, in a sense, unfortunate that this should be so, for it may explain why the book, despite its highly charged subject matter, lacks passion. Or it may just be that Shermer is not an eloquent writer. His prose is flat and has a tendency to shift tone and fall into the demotic at odd moments ("bass ackward" is the worst instance), as if he were unclear who his audience is or as if he were writing for television. The result is that he is not entirely convincing. He is a meliorist, but he never persuaded me that human beings had become "better" -- better behaved, less filled with hate, less murderous -- since the Greeks, say, or since World War II. He is always ready to attack his bête noir, religious absolutism, but there is little evidence in the book that he is well versed in the long, contentious history of moral philosophy or the subtleties of the current philosophical debates about abortion rights or most of the other issues he takes on. He's in the unhappy position of trying to establish a moral system that is itself rather unsystematic and ad hoc. His system, if that's the word for it, comes across as reasonable -- but perhaps too reasonable, and too relaxed to compel adherence. I finished the book well-disposed toward Shermer himself, clearly a seeker who has found the best answers he can find in skepticism and a purely rational approach to life, but who seems never to have encountered genuine evil face-to-face or seen tragedy up close and personal. The book lacks, in short, a certain emotional depth, and that is precisely what we want when dealing with intransigent moral issues.

Reviewed by Anthony Brandt
-Colin

"Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish." -Mark Twain
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Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

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How about Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Amazon.com Review
Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.
Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel's Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.

The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won't ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter's best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet Gödel, Escher, Bach remains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century's best for anyone who's interested in computers and their potential for real intelligence. --Richard Dragan

Topics Covered: J.S. Bach, M.C. Escher, Kurt Gödel: biographical information and work, artificial intelligence (AI) history and theories, strange loops and tangled hierarchies, formal and informal systems, number theory, form in mathematics, figure and ground, consistency, completeness, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, recursive structures, theories of meaning, propositional calculus, typographical number theory, Zen and mathematics, levels of description and computers; theory of mind: neurons, minds and thoughts; undecidability; self-reference and self-representation; Turing test for machine intelligence.
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