BOOK Club: Nominations for JULY Book

[CrispyQ]

Let's run this through mid-month, polling sometime around the 17th.

You can nominate only one book but you can second as many titles as you like.

Guidelines:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=209&topic_id=1152

[pstans]

1. The Long Emergency by Kunsterl

"The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century" by James Howard Kunstler

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=557qTnZBGu&isbn=0871138883&itm=1

[HuckleB]

2. The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us And What to Do...

The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About Itby Marcia Angell

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375508465/qid=1118271080/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/002-2219264-0369620?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

"Many Americans have wondered why prescription drugs have become so expensive while advertising for those drugs seems to grow exponentially. Former New England Journal of Medicine Editor Marcia Angell has some answers. The pharmaceutical industry, according to Angell, is fraught with corruption and doing a disservice to customers, the federal government, and to the medical establishment itself. In The Truth About the Drug Companies, Angell explains how a huge portion of the revenue generated by "Big Pharma" goes not into research and development but into aggressive marketing campaigns to sell their product. She describes how, even though the drug companies claim that it costs them an average of 802 million dollars per drug to develop new medicines, that figure is obscenely inflated since it factors in marketing as well as expected interest the company would have received had they invested the money in the open market. Meanwhile, Angell says, most of the R & D work is done by colleges and universities funded by the government. There are also problems with the drugs themselves, Angell indicates, since a majority are "me-too drugs", slightly modified versions of existing products which meant to address concerns of consumers most likely to spend money on pharmaceuticals. Thus, the market is filled with remarkably similar drugs to treat depression and high cholesterol while potentially life-saving medicines for diseases afflicting third-world countries are discontinued because they aren't profitable. In the books most damning passage, Angell tells of the high-priced junkets offered to doctors, ostensibly offered as educational opportunities that seem to constitute little more than bribes. The prognosis for reform is a grim one, Angell indicates, due to the massive cash reserves and lobbying efforts of "Big Pharma." Indeed, that lobby was hard at work trying to discredit her claims immediately upon the book's publication. But for anyone who's paid a pharmacy bill, The Truth About the Drug Companies is a fascinating read."


This looks like a great read, and it would be a nice change of pace, IMHO. I have started it, but had to return it to the library, and it would be fun to read it along with some others while discussing it.

Salud.

[lenidog]

3. Here is my nomination

House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
by Craig Unger

[HuckleB]

4. I'll second that.

[meppie-meppie not]

17. I would third that

[AnnInLa]

5. I just finished 2 books which I am sure

you all have already read, but I am a little behind...(my fiction reading seems to interrupt the non-fiction reading.) I really enjoyed Blinded by the Right by David Brock and No Logo by Naomi Klein. When a book is decided on, please post in GD!

[CrispyQ]

7. Will you please select one of the two titles to nominate?

And glad to have your input!!

Thanks! :hi:

[meppie-meppie not]

18. I second "Blinded by the Right"

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. Here's a few I've just finished.

"The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble" Malcolm Balen
About a giant pyramid scheme that almost brought down the British Governent and George I in the early 1700's. Very good read about blind greed, capitalism, and corruption.

"Bury the Chains" Adam Hochschild
The long, very long, fight to end the English slave trade and slavery in the British Empire. Well written and fascinating story of the heroic (and not so heroic) men and women who kept fighting despite the massive opposition of the slave holding interests in the West Indies and their bought and paid for allies in Parliament.

"Japan at War - An Oral History" Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore Cook
Not for the weak of heart or stomach. First person accounts by Japanese soldiers and civilians of WWII. Mostly about the incredibly brutality visited on the lands that the Japanese conquered, particularly China. And, the horrors that occurred on Saipan and Okinawa during the battles there. It underscores the lack of acknowledgement by the Japanese to what the Japanese did in WWII. Nor does it let the Americans off the hook, who responded with equal brutality.

"I Will Bear Witness" - Victor Klemperer

Actually I just read it for the second time. Absolutely gripping day by day diary of a non-religious German Jew professor of French Literature in Dresden. From 1933 - 1945. He was married to an "Aryan" so managed to avoid the concentration and death camps. There's no heaps of bodies, no brutish guards shooting people, no torture, none of the usual tales of starvation and "medical experiments. Yet, it is, IMHO, the most vivid and horrifying picture of fascism I've ever read. Klemperer considered himself a patriotic German, had converted long before Hitler to Christianity (though an agnostic) and thought that Zionism was destructive and backwards. He was a "conservative" politically and rather nationalistic and was, at first, convinced that the "good" Germans would soon rid themselves of Hitler.
Bit by bit, humiliation by humiliation, he came to see the full horror of what was going on. The best thing about the book(s) (two volumes) is the sheer humanity of it. He spares no one, particularly himself, in his diaries. He tells of stealing potatos and bread from neighbors. Of being too humiliated to venture out when "the Star" is decreed and relying on his sometimes ill wife to do the shopping and take the risks of the black market and being relieved when others are chosen for the "transports to the East". Just keeping the diary was an act of heroism (he would have been killed if it were discovered) yet he reveals himself as completely human.
The best thing about his diaries is that it answers the question often asked, "Why didn't the Jews resist?". Quite simply, in the police state that existed, there simply was no way.
Read it! It will scare the hell out of you because of the parallels to our own society. Without melodrama or hyperbole it shows how easily fascism can take hold in a supposedly "decent" country.

[CrispyQ]

8. Please select one of the titles for nomination, ok?

Glad to have your input!!

Thanks! :hi:

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

10. Sorry. "I Will Bear Witness" is my selection.

[terrya]

9. "Collapse" by Jared Diamond.

And I second "Blinded by the Right" by David Brock

If both have already been selected for previous months, my apologies. I'd like to be a part of your book club. This is my first time. :-)

[Richardo]

13. I've wanted to read "Collapse" so I'll second terrya...

Have you read "Guns Germs & Steel"? That's another one on my list.

[terrya]

14. No, but I've heard of it.

Not yet.

I figure "Collapse" is still on the NYT Best Sellers list, so it's still a pretty popular book.

[mctrotter5]

11. Nominate The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib

The book is all the memos and legal "advice" put forward by the White House to support torture, it includes the Taguba Report. It is guaranteed to show in detail how the Bush administration has violated the deepest moral and ethical mandates of our country. The only interpretation in the first few pages, the rest is the memos and reports themselves. It is a huge book, got it from my local library. It is edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel with an introduction by Anthony Lewis. It is published by Cambridge Press. This is not light reading. The Taguba and the Internation Red Cross Report are very distrubing. I can not believe any Republican can look themselves in the mirror after reading these reports.

[jwirr]

12. Is there a place on DU that I can bookmark so I

can join in the book club every day?

[erpowers]

15. A World Restored

It was written by Henry Kissinger. In it he mainly talks about what Revoluntionary powers/orders attack the international order. It might be an interesting book. I do not think one has to be a Kissinger supporter to find the book interesting and thought provoking.

[Sequoia]

16. Read this: "Son of the Rough South", by Karl Fleming

This man was THERE during the Civil Rights Movements and covered most of the events at that time. He grew up in a Methodist orphanage in eatern NC, and became a reporter. Did a stint at Asheveille Citizen Times and went on to work for Newsweek. As a white man, he was targeted by other whites, as being a traitor to "the Southern way of life". He interviewed people such as James Meredith, Billy Grahm, and Martin Luther King, Jr.



From Booklist
Fleming will forever be remembered as the Newsweek reporter who was photographed after being severely beaten in the Watts riots of 1966. In this memoir, he recounts the long road that led to his reporting on race relations and the incendiary social issues that exploded that day. He was born in 1927 in a poor, bleak North Carolina community and raised in an orphanage when his mother could no longer afford to take care of him. Fleming left college early to begin life as a reporter with a small-town newspaper, covering the police beat with a cynical police chief who mistreated blacks. It was Fleming's first hint that, having grown up in an orphanage, his sympathies were with the underdog. He went on to cover the turbulent racial changes in the South, including James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers. In this stunning memoir, Fleming offers the perspective of a poor white boy witnessing the racial turbulence that changed the U.S. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
(Amazon.com)

EXCELLENT!!!

[DemExpat]

19. Locking

as requested.