Hi, everyone. I haven't been around in a while, partly because I've been busy. Also, the recent selections don't interest me as much as other books I plan to read. However, I just ordered On Being Certain.

Anyway, here are a bunch of suggestions. I'm midway through the first book, but they all sound promising.

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Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

Roach is not like other science writers. She doesn't write about genes or black holes or Schrodinger's cat. Instead, she ventures out to the fringes of science, where the oddballs ponder how cadavers decay (in her debut, Stiff) and whether you can weigh a person's soul (in Spook). Now she explores the sexiest subject of all: sex, and such questions as, what is an orgasm? How is it possible for paraplegics to have them? What does woman want, and can a man give it to her if her clitoris is too far from her vagina? At times the narrative feels insubstantial and digressive (how much do you need to know about inseminating sows?), but Roach's ever-present eye and ear for the absurd and her loopy sense of humor make her a delectable guide through this unesteemed scientific outback. The payoff comes with subjects like female orgasm (yes, it's complicated), and characters like Ahmed Shafik, who defies Cairo's religious repressiveness to conduct his sex research. Roach's forays offer fascinating evidence of the full range of human weirdness, the nonsense that has often passed for medical science and, more poignantly, the extreme lengths to which people will go to find sexual satisfaction.

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Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point by Elizabeth Samet

Azar Nafisi meets David Lipsky in this memoir/meditation on crossing the border between the civilian world of literature and the world of the military during 10 years of teaching English at West Point. Samet's students sometimes respond to literature in ways that trouble her, but she lauds their intellectual courage as they negotiate the multiple contradictions of military life. Considering the link between literature and war, Samet insightfully explores how Vietnam fiction changed American literary discourse about the heroism of military service. Beyond books, Samet also examines how televised accounts of the Iraq War have turned American civilians into war's insulated voyeurs, and discusses the gap separating her from the rest of the audience watching a documentary on Iraq. Lighter, gently humorous sections reveal Samet's feelings about army argot. She has been known to ask her mother to meet her at 1800 instead of at 6:00 p.m., but she forbids the use of the exclamation Hooah!(an affirmative expression of the warrior spirit) in her classroom. Samet is prone to digressions that break the flow of great stories, like an account of her West Point job interview. But this meditation on war, teaching and literature is sympathetic, shrewd and sometimes profound.

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Looks: Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined by Gordon Patzer

From Publishers Weekly
Here is a book whose title says it all. Written by an academic expert on lookism who is also director and founder of the Appearance Phenomenon Institute, this volume is an exhaustive examination of how the handily summarized PA (for personal attractiveness) gets you everywhere, from the better job and the better spouse to the better verdict at your criminal trial. Beginning with early evidence of lookism in history, Patzer analyzes preferential treatment given to pretty people from beautiful babyhood onward. While consumers of women's magazines might not find as much new information as other readers, Patzer refers to dozens of studies, articles and investigation to prove his thesis. Yet Patzer's volume doesn't offer much in the way of solutions, apparently because you've either got it or you don't. While Patzer does criticize the overzealousness of the media, reality television and unethical plastic surgeons, he only devotes one chapter to personal affirmations to help deal with and fight back on image obsession. Although he concludes by proclaiming the reader's newfound awareness of lookism's pervasiveness is a step forward, one can't help seeing the weakness in a conclusion that leaves the reader with little more than a well-argued reminder of our culture's shallow side.

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The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel Solove

"A timely, vivid, and illuminating book that will change the way you think about privacy, reputation, and speech on the Internet. Daniel Solove tells a series of fascinating and frightening stories about how blogs, social network sites, and other websites are spreading gossip and rumors about people''s private lives. He offers a fresh and thought-provoking analysis of a series of wide-ranging new problems and develops useful suggestions about what we can do about these challenges."-Paul M. Schwartz, professor of law, University of California Berkeley School of Law (Paul M. Schwartz 20080201)

"No one has thought more about the effects of the information age on privacy than Daniel Solove."-Bruce Schneier, author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World (Bruce Schneier 20080101)

"As the Internet is erasing the distinction between spoken and written gossip, the future of personal reputation is one of our most vexing social challenges. In this illuminating book, filled with memorable cautionary tales, Daniel Solove incisively analyzes the technological and legal challenges and offers moderate, sensible solutions for navigating the shoals of the blogosphere."-Jeffrey Rosen, author of The Unwanted Gaze and The Naked Crowd (Jeffrey Rosen )

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Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet by Ian McNeely


Here is an intellectual entertainment, a sweeping history of the key institutions that have organized knowledge in the West from the classical period onward. With elegance and wit, this exhilarating history alights at the pivotal points of cultural transformation. The motivating question throughout: How does history help us understand the vast changes we are now experiencing in the landscape of knowledge?

Beginning in Alexandria and its great center of Hellenistic learning and imperial power, we then see the monastery in the wilderness of a collapsed civilization, the rambunctious universities of the late medieval cities, and the thick social networks of the Enlightenment republic of letters. The development of science and the laboratory as a dominant knowledge institution brings us to the present, seeking patterns in the new digital networks of knowledge.

Full of memorable characters, this fresh history succeeds in restoring the strangeness and the significance of the past.

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Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy by Ted Nace

From Publishers Weekly
Nace nurtured Peachpit Press from a home-based operation, writing and publishing computer guides, to a business worthy of acquisition by the Pearson conglomerate. The experience inspired him to study the nature of corporate power. He offers a breezy summary of the legal history surrounding the formation of corporations and the parameters of their power, putting an anti-corporate spin on the American Revolution and discussing how the early republic limited corporate power by enabling state governments to issue restrictive charters. But the tight controls didn't remain in place: after the Supreme Court's decision in an 1886 case involving the Santa Clara Railroad, corporations were assumed to be the legal equivalent of people entitled to equal protection under the law and, in subsequent cases, were guaranteed a growing range of constitutional rights. One of Nace's central arguments is that Santa Clara doesn't mean what everybody thinks it means: the original decision doesn't take any stand on whether corporations have constitutional rights; the question comes up in a subsequent version of the decision, but the Chief Justice acts as if it had been resolved in earlier decisions. Although Nace blames the Court's reporter for the shift in emphasis, he illustrates how another justice, Stephen Field, was already buttressing politicians' and financial titans' efforts to eliminate all restraints on corporate power, making their legal supremacy inevitable. Later chapters examine how corporations continue to wield their influence to prevent the government from regulating them too closely, but while the book offers plenty of details about the problem's existence and deftly introduces it, it offers little more than generalities about where to go from there.

Grim: Why is being religous and green such an abstract idea?

I'm not sure what you mean by abstract here...does it mean that examples of muslim, buddhist, evangelical, mainstream protestant, orthodox jewish, roman catholic, indigenous african, navaho, bhakti hindu practices directed at concrete, actual, real ecological hazards...that these kinds of carefully described, critically examined and judiciously compared projects are too abstract?

Since the majority of the planet's population self-identify as some sort of religious adherent...and since turning the tide of ecological devastation will require changing the hearts, minds, practice and ways of life for these great many religious adherents...then multiple, concrete examples from various religious traditions will be an essential tool...perhaps indispensable.

Hi Julian....I think the Reinventing Knowledge book looks like a delicious read...good choice!

Religious as a group yes, but when these people drive the SUV home at the end of the night they are very much individuals.

I think it is a mistake to confuse a group with a collection of individuals.

Perhaps a reading of Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind by David Berreby can show us how these notions of group are just an outward show of solidarity and mean little in the personal confine of the mind.

Most books, well written, researched and thought out, are stuck trying to make a busted notion work - that notion is that evertything begins with one sort of patriarchy or other (and patriarchs have worked mightily to create that illusion for the past 4K years) - may I suggest a smaller volume which might cut to the roots of so many ills. It is called How Can I Get Through To You?- Closing the gap between men and women - by Terrance Real - ISBN 0-684-86877-6 - the book helped me sort through many of the tactics, brutalities and strategies for keeping us afraid and at war with each other ...

Two ideas:

Rumspringa: To Be or Not To Be Amish

Tom Schachtman explores the experiences of Amish teens as they sample the "outside" world before deciding whether to be baptized into the Amish church and commit to its lifestyle. In doing so, he explains the Amish faith and rules (ordnung), and the positive and negative aspects of their culture. He also examines the often romanticized views that many Americans--particularly Evangelicals/Fundamentalists--have of the Amish.

Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy

This is by Jeffrey Feldman and I think his title is self-explanatory.

So when do we usually begin the voting?

Given that today is 9/11, I'll make one more suggestion.

The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America

Susan Faludi has written a brilliant, unsentimental, often darkly humorous account of America's nervous breakdown after 9/11. The intrusions of September 11, she observes, broke the dead bolt on our protective myth, the illusion that... our might makes our homeland impregnable... and women and children safe in the arms of their men.Drawing on political rhetoric and accounts from the New York Times and the major networks, as well as Fox and talk radio, her book makes clear just how sexually anxious Americans became in the aftermath of that terrible day. But the tragedy had yielded no victorious heroes, so the culture wound up anointing a set of victimized men instead: the firemen who had died in the stairwells of the World Trade Center.The woman's role, she argues, became that of victim. Husbands had lost wives, but it was on the surviving wives of September 11 that America's grief was fixed. When some widows-the Jersey girls-rejected the victim's role by asking pointed questions about governmental incompetence, they were quickly ostracized by the press.After September 11, we read that Donald Rumsfeld had been a wrestler at Princeton-and that became his legend in news accounts. Even the president clearing brush in Crawford, Tex., became the stuff of legend in the National Review, which juxtaposed Bush's refreshingly brutish demeanor with the way the president sizes up the situation and says, 'You're mine, sucker.' A late chapter on Jessica Lynch rehearses how the myth of the imprisoned woman rescued by male warriors was manufactured by the government and the media. But I wish Faludi had appraised the more important Abu Ghraib scandal. Arguably, the photographs of Private Lynndie England standing over naked Arab men shocked many of us out of any remaining childish belief in our own heroism. The last third of the book traces how the American male's determination to see himself as protector (and the woman as dependent) derives from colonial Puritan wars against the Indians and the cowboy conquest of the West. In the end, Faludi judges our invasion of Afghanistan to be inept and tthe war in Iraq disastrous. It is essential, she says, not to confuse the defense of a myth with the defense of a country. A nation given to childish fantasy ends up with a president dressed like Tom Cruise, a chest beater in a borrowed flight suit.

Thanks for the suggestion Julian, I'd be interested in discussing this book.

Thanks also for your previous suggestions, they're the kind of topics I'm interested in, and they cover very different subjects.

This one would appeal to me: http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Knowl ... 036&sr=1-1

There aren't enough suggestions in this thread to create a poll yet so please join this discussion and help us find our next non-fiction book. It is VERY helpful if you look over the book suggestions made by other members and comment on whether or not you would participate in a discussion of each book. A book suggestion by one member with no other members saying they too would enjoy reading and discussing that book stands little chance of seeing itself on a poll.

Seeing as several people have shown an interest in environmentalism I'll add the following book to our small heap of suggestions:

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America (Hardcover)
by Thomas L. Friedman

http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Flat-Crowded- ... F8&s=books

Product Description

Thomas L. Friedman's phenomenal number-one bestseller The World Is Flat has helped millions of readers to see the world in a new way. In his brilliant, essential new book, Friedman takes a fresh and provocative look at two of the biggest challenges we face today: America's surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11; and the global environmental crisis, which is affecting everything from food to fuel to forests. In this groundbreaking account of where we stand now, he shows us how the solutions to these two big problems are linked--how we can restore the world and revive America at the same time.

Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world's middle class through globalization have produced a planet that is "hot, flat, and crowded." Already the earth is being affected in ways that threaten to make it dangerously unstable. In just a few years, it will be too late to fix things--unless the United States steps up now and takes the lead in a worldwide effort to replace our wasteful, inefficient energy practices with a strategy for clean energy, energy efficiency, and conservation that Friedman calls Code Green.

This is a great challenge, Friedman explains, but also a great opportunity, and one that America cannot afford to miss. Not only is American leadership the key to the healing of the earth; it is also our best strategy for the renewal of America.

In vivid, entertaining chapters, Friedman makes it clear that the green revolution we need is like no revolution the world has seen. It will be the biggest innovation project in American history; it will be hard, not easy; and it will change everything from what you put into your car to what you see on your electric bill. But the payoff for America will be more than just cleaner air. It will inspire Americans to something we haven't seen in a long time--nation-building in America--by summoning the intelligence, creativity, boldness, and concern for the common good that are our nation's greatest natural resources.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded is classic Thomas L. Friedman: fearless, incisive, forward-looking, and rich in surprising common sense about the challenge--and the promise--of the future.