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We need non-fiction book suggestions for our next discussion!

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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Saffron

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Re: We need non-fiction book suggestions for our next discussion!

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DWill wrote:I've missed out on a number of science classics and would like to catch up. My suggestion is The Double Helix, by James Watson.
It's a great read, plain and simple
I read this book in college and did think it was a great read. It is fairly short and a fast read -- which is saying a lot coming from one of the slowest readers on the planet.

In response to Chris' quarry:
I think maybe a little bit lighter of a topic for a change might pull people back in. Some of the recent non-fiction selections have been pretty heavy duty and I suspect to many intimidating. It also seems to me that many of the discussion get very polarized. I find discussions hard to break into. Personally, I l find it much more enjoyable if there is a bit more give and take.
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Re: We need non-fiction book suggestions for our next discussion!

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I have to agree with Saffron on this, Chris. Something lighter for non-fiction may attract more people. Someone made the comment of "being in the kiddie pool while the rest were swimming in the deep end". And a book on a popular topic such as environment, global warming, whatever, seems to attract people as those are topics one hears in the media all of the time. That said, even though the book on the healthcare system is not up my alley, being here in Germany, it may actually attract people as it is a pertinent topic.
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Re: We need non-fiction book suggestions for our next discussion!

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I also agree that a lighter book might do us some good. This sort of suggestion is one I cannot implement all on my own. We need some book suggestions that might be more universally appealing. I'm hoping some of you might step up, after having read Saffron's suggestion, and present some book ideas that might help us attract more participants.
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Re: We need non-fiction book suggestions for our next discussion!

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Here are just a few quick ideas:

1. The book DWill suggested The Double Helix is an easy and fun read.

2. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky (Amazon 4 1/2 stars)

3. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven R. Johnson (Amazon 4 stars)

4. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks

Anybody interested in any of these????
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Re: We need non-fiction book suggestions for our next discussion!

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If we want fun nonfiction, which I agree is a good idea, how about The Tipping Point, Bliink, or Gladwell's new one, whose title I forget. Then there is Freakonomics or Leavitt and Bubner's recent Superfreakonomics.

I think one factor that helps with participation is easy access to the book. How many times have we heard a member say, "My book hasn't arrived yet," and then not hear from that person again? So, availability at the library or at least down at the Books-a-Million could be important. I'm not that inclined to buy every book I want to read (cheap and limited bookshelf space), so I really like ones I can easily borrow.

Back to the fun theme, a memoir might work. A couple of the many that could be considered:

The Music Room, by William Fiennes

"The Music Room is, at one level, a portrait of Fiennes’s broad-moated house, the source of his belonging, and his upbringing there until the age of 17 when he leaves to teach in north-east Brazil. “I had a castle to explore whenever I wanted.” His school friends are enthralled by the spiral staircases, battlements, secret rooms, “swords you could pick up and wield two-handed”, and suits of Spanish armour which his mother conditions with WD40. Fiennes’s father regards his family as stewards looking after the house “on behalf of everyone who might one day appreciate it”, and it is their youngest son’s gift to make the castle feel as much our inheritance as it is his. We fish with him for pike. We eavesdrop on guides taking the Women’s Institute along the Groined Passage. We peer down on to his parents judging the Yorkshire Dales Caravan Club knobbly-knees competition. We stand beside him, at the age of five, in the Great Hall watching the Christmas Morecambe and Wise Show being filmed, and Eric Morecambe walking over to greet him, adjusting his spectacles and barking, “Hello! Are you married?”

Left to his own devices, Fiennes often ends up in the music room from which, at night in bed, he hears his mother playing the viola, “each scale like someone coming up the stairs then going down them again on second thoughts”. He can’t keep his hands off the Wittner metronome that she uses to find a tempo. The metronome’s sliding weight transforms the music room into “a world that turned at whatever speed you judged appropriate”, veering from the “lugubrious” to the “berserk”. Increasingly, both weight and tempo are set by his brother Rich, 11 years older and epileptic. Around this figure and his mood swings, the family tread on tiptoe, holding their breath, waiting for an outburst of “unpredictable bolshiness” or “ingenuous warmth”.

Stalin's Children:, by Owen Matthews

"Owen Matthews has an extraordinary story to tell, spanning three generations of his own family, all caught up with the cataclysmic events of Russia in the 20th century. He came to know Russia well while working as a journalist in Moscow in the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet system, but his Russian roots go much deeper and further back. Indeed, his most famous ancestor helped Catherine the Great to suppress the Pugachev rebellion.


Matthews's maternal grandfather, Boris Bibikov, was a Party man, a true believer in the great Bolshevik experiment which would bring about a new person, homo sovieticus. As one of the leaders at the giant Kharkov Tractor Factory, he would organise "storm nights" of labour, accompanied by brass bands, in an effort to fulfil the near-impossible targets. He further demonstrated his commitment to the cause by naming his elder daughter "Lenina". But by the time his second daughter, Owen's mother, was born, he was starting to have doubts about the methods employed by Stalin, particularly when they resulted in the terrible famine of 1931-2. Those doubts led him to back the more moderate Sergei Kirov at the All-Union Party Congress in 1934. Three years later, Stalin took his revenge.

Bibikov's arrest and summary execution wrecked the lives of his family, as was always the case for the relatives of "enemies of the people". His wife Martha was sent to the camps, and his two young daughters became virtual orphans. That Lyudmila, Owen's mother, survived at all is something of a miracle, her will to live triumphing over everything from measles to near-starvation. "Simple Soviet people are everywhere performing miracles". As Matthews points out, this phrase from a Russian popular 1930s song, though usually sung with irony by his mother when faced with some bureaucratic stupidity, actually had a profound influence on her attitudes and behaviour.

Having endured life in Soviet orphanages, she finally made it to Moscow University – which is where she encountered Mervyn, Owen's father, at that time a postgraduate student from Oxford. Their ensuing love affair and six-year separation were documented in their letters, at least one a day. Lyudmila and Mervyn – or Mila and Mervusya, as they called each other – had set out to perform yet another miracle, that of overcoming Cold War intransigence to attain their goal of marriage and an exit visa.

There are many moments of almost unbearable poignancy in Stalin's Children, but perhaps one of the saddest aspects is the way Mila and Mervusya's great romance seemed to fizzle out once their struggles were finally over. The journey had become more important than the destination. As Matthews writes: "though the letters are full of pain, I think that they also describe the happiest period of my parents' lives". Married life in a rather dreary England was a far cry from outwitting the KGB "goons" in Moscow, and Matthews has clearly been quite surprised himself by what he has learned of his parental history."
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Re: We need non-fiction book suggestions for our next discussion!

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I am not sure if this one has been nominated or discussed, but The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby is one of my all time favorite non-fiction books. It is social commentary, circling the ever growing problem of anti-intellectualism in America. The New York times has a review of it: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/books/11kaku.html

Excerpt from article - There are few subjects more timely than the one tackled by Susan Jacoby in her new book, “The Age of American Unreason,” in which she asserts that “America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism.”

This book is probably the best social commentary I have read to date. It illustrates Americas need to achieve higher standards of learning, and is completely accurate in all accounts. Definitely worth the read. If you like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, you will love love love this book.
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hmrush wrote: If you like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, you will love this book.
We did read this one a while back, hmrush (see list below, about 1/3 way down). I'm interested in your appraisal of it, because though I admired Freethinkers, I thought Jacoby was way off her stride in Unreason. I also liked Postman's book.
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Re: We need non-fiction book suggestions for our next discussion!

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My other (lighter) suggestion would be a book by James Surowiecki entitled "The Wisdom of Crowds".

Smart people often believe that the opinion of the crowd is always inferior to the opinion of the individual specialist. Philosophical giants such as Nietzsche thought that "Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups". Henry David Thoreau lamented: "The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest member." The motto of the great and the ordinary seems to be: Bet on the expert because crowds are generally stupid and often dangerous. Business columnist James Surowiecki’s new book The Wisdom of Crowds explains exactly why the conventional wisdom is wrong. The fact is that, under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups don’t even need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision. Why? Because, as it turns out, if you ask a large enough group of diverse, independent people to make a prediction or estimate a probability, and then average those estimates, the errors each of them makes in coming up with an answer will cancel themselves out. Not any old crowd will do of course. For the crowd to be wise it has to satisfy four specific conditions, but once those conditions are met, its judgment is likely to be accurate.
Surowieki concentrates on three kinds of problems. The first are cognition problems (problems that are likely to have definitive answers, such as: "How many books will Amazon sell this month?"). The second are problems of coordination (problems requiring members of a group to figure out how to coordinate their behaviour with one another) and the third are problems of cooperation (getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together-- despite their selfishness). The brilliant first half of the book illustrates this theory with practical examples. The second half of the book essentially consists of case studies with each chapter talking about the way collective intelligence either flourishes or flounders. Much of this part deals with business topics such as corporations, markets and the dynamics of a stock-market bubble.

Surowieki has an engaging, direct style defending his surprising central thesis in entertaining ways by, for example, talking about laying bets on football games and political elections; traffic jams; Google; the Challenger explosion and the search for a missing submarine. The Wisdom of Crowds is an entertaining book making a serious point and by the end of the superb first half the reader has been made to accept that, while with most things, the average is mediocrity, when it comes to decision-making the average results in excellence. --Larry Brown
Last edited by oblivion on Mon Feb 22, 2010 1:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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I came across this one, Value of Nothing, by Raj patel, and would like to throw it into the mix. It argues that "we must abandon our appetite for perpetual economic growth or face extinction" (The Week , Feb. 26, p. 20)

The Value of Nothing: Why Everything Costs So Much More Than We Think, by Raj Patel, HarperCollins, 250 pages, $26.99

(Excerpts from a review from the Globe and Mail)

“ Today's financial crisis is no mere anomaly," Patel argues.

“There's a widely shared opinion that normality will ultimately return to the world economy,” writes Patel, a renowned economist who divides his time among several institutions. “But it is a consensus view that rests on a narrative of [economic] bubbles being exceptions to the standard.” If our assumptions about the stability and wisdom of markets were flawed, as former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan famously admitted to U.S. Congress in 2008, “then our faith in a gentle return to earth is misplaced, for there is not, and never has been, any solid ground beneath our feet.”

Patel argues that our problem isn't just the size of our stimulus package, but a deep misapprehension about the relationship between society and economy that dates back well before the great crash of 2008. And, more to the point, it is our propensity to over-value destructive things – such as financial derivatives and crude oil – and under-value truly valuable things – such as sustainable food production, our global climate and other so-called externalities that market society has often neglected. This results not only in bad outcomes, but “indelible inequalities in power.” In other words, if today's quest to regain yesterday's growth fails under the stress of 21st-century challenges, it likely won't be Wall Street paying the price.

Consequently, today's financial crisis is no mere anomaly, Patel argues, but a continuation of a struggle over resources, property and government that dates back to the privatization of common lands in the early decades of England's Industrial Revolution. “The perpetual quest for economic growth has turned humankind into an agent of extinction, through the systematic undervaluing of the eco-systemic services that keep our Earth alive,” he writes. “In short, the consumer economy takes a great deal for granted, for free, and is constitutionally unable to pay for it.”

With epic scope, The Value of Nothing poses a spirited exploration of everything from the influence of market extremist Gary Becker of the Chicago School of Economics (and contemporary of Alan Greenspan) to social movements on food sovereignty and participatory budgeting that show us what real democracy is, or should be, about. Even the Dalai Lama's views on economic justice are tied into Patel's own views about how to fix things (hint: more democracy and more activism).

What I like about this book is that is a work of engaged ideas, particularly Patel's investigation into the consciousness of market society. (“Seeing the world through markets not only distorts our sense of our selves, but projects our disability onto everyone else.”) What I like less is the book's nascent ideological assumption that readers, alongside governments and financial elites, need to be disabused of any attachments to markets or private property. We're told that it is corporations, not people, who are to blame for the great environmental disasters of our time, despite the fact that, at last count, the planet boasted approximately 600-million climate-killing automobiles and a great many more drivers. Private property and sustainability may seem fundamentally incompatible, an assertion that is interesting but lacks proof.

Patel also rejects the use of market-based tools like carbon pricing to combat things like climate change. In other circumstances, this might be a tremendous statement of principle, but given that we have relatively little time to reshape whole economies in the face of advancing climate change – and eliminate vast energy and environmental subsidies in the process – rejecting carbon pricing or any other solution tainted by capitalism seems, well, a little precious.

Patel's arguments are well-crafted and will likely, and predictably, find agreement among many who will purchase the book. But his real contribution is something bigger than another attack on neo-liberalism and the Chicago School of Economics. This is someone who has done field work around the world, listened prolifically to non-experts, and come away with a political modality that isn't just ideology, but speaks to human flourishing itself. “The opposite of consumption isn't thrift,” says Patel. “It's generosity.”

Gordon Laird is the author of The Price of a Bargain: The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization.
Last edited by DWill on Tue Feb 23, 2010 10:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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