UFPPCS Monday night book discussion group marks the beginning of its second year with a new series, Digging Deeper VII: a four-week study circle examining five diverse works touching on a common theme: What key economic, environmental, political, and religious institutions are shaping the 21st century? -- Please print and help distribute this .pdf-format flyer....
WHAT: Study circle on 5 books on key economic, environmental, political, and religious institutions shaping the 21st century
WHO: Facilitated by member of United for Peace of Pierce County
WHEN: July 18 & 25 and August 1 & 8, 2005, 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m.
WHERE: Mandolin Café, 3923 South 12th St., Tacoma, WA
[Series flyer for printing (.pdf format).]
United for Peace of Pierce County Study Circle: July 18 & 25 and August 1 & 8
DIGGING DEEPER VII: THE SHAPE OF THE 21st CENTURY
For more than a year, United for Peace of Pierce County has been conducting Digging Deeper, a Monday night book discussion group, often in the form of a study circle around a group of books, copies of which participants read, pass around, and discuss. Topics of study circles have included peak oil, climate change, and the corporation, as well as abiding themes of war and peace. Continuing in this tradition, on July 18, 2005, Digging Deeper VII will begin a four-week study circle examining five diverse works touching on a common theme: What key economic, environmental, political, and religious institutions are shaping the 21st century?
--Lester R. Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (W.W. Norton, 2005): Falling water tables in countries that contain more than half the world's people and rising temperatures worldwide pose a far more serious threat [than terrorism]. Spreading water shortages and crop-withering heat waves are shrinking grain harvests in more and more countries, making it difficult for the world's farmers to feed 70 million more people each year. . . . Future security, Brown says, now depends on raising water productivity, stabilizing climate by moving beyond fossil fuels, and stabilizing population by filling the family planning gap and educating young people everywhere. The author is president of the Earth Policy Institute; his books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
--Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2005). Publishers Weekly: For Friedman, cheap, ubiquitous telecommunications have finally obliterated all impediments to international competition, and the dawning flat world is a jungle pitting lions and gazelles, where economic stability is not going to be a feature and the weak will fall farther behind. Rugged, adaptable entrepreneurs, by contrast, will be empowered. The service sector (telemarketing, accounting, computer programming, engineering and scientific research, etc.), will be further outsourced to the English-spoken abroad; manufacturing, meanwhile, will continue to be off-shored to China. . . . The last 100 pages on the economic and political roots of global Islamism are filled with the kind of close reporting and intimate yet accessible analysis that have been hard to come by. Thomas Friedman writes a regular column in the New York Times.
--Ron Hira & Anil Hira, Outsourcing America: What's Behind Our National Crisis And How We Can Reclaim American Jobs (AMOCOM, 2005). Publishers Weekly: More than an exposé, the book shows how outsourcing is part of the historical economic shifts toward globalism and free trade, and demonstrates the impact of outsourcing on individual lives and communities. The authors discuss policies that countries like India and China use to attract U.S. industries, and they offer frank recommendations that business and political leaders must consider in order to confront this snowballing crisis ― and bring more high-paying jobs back to the U.S. The Hiras are both Ph.D. economic policy specialists.
--Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (University of Chicago Press, 2003). It is tempting to view the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attacks as evil incarnate. But their motives, as Bruce Lincoln reveals in this insightful offering, were profoundly and intensely religious. . . . With great rigor and incisiveness, Holy Terrors sorts through the details and the religious rhetoric of September 11 ― in the highjackers instructions, George W. Bushs national address, Osama bin Ladens videotaped reply, and Pat Robertsons notorious interview with Jerry Falwell ― and examines their implications for our understanding of religion and its interrelationships with politics and culture. Lincoln teaches at the University of Chicago.
--Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002; paperback edition by Perennial, 2005). Publishers Weekly: An uncompromising and disturbing examination of 20th-century acts of genocide and U.S. responses to them. . . . In the face of firsthand accounts of genocide, invocations of geopolitical considerations and studied and repeated refusals to accept the reality of genocidal campaigns simply fail to convince, she insists. But Power also sees signs that the fight against genocide has made progress. . . . This is a well-researched and powerful study that is both a history and a call to action. Samantha Power directs Harvard Universitys Carr Center for Human Rights and is a former journalist.
MEETING SCHEDULE -- Mondays from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in July and August (July 18 & 25 and August 1 & 8) at the Mandolin Café, 3923 S. 12th St., Tacoma, WA.
Books are available for borrowing or purchase; there is no charge for participation. Contact Mark Jensen at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 253-756-7519, or Ted Nation at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 253-983-8997.
--United for Peace of Pierce County meets at 7:00 p.m. on 1st and 3rd Thursdays at First United Methodist Church, 423 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma, WA
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Digging Deeper, UFPPCs book discussion series, has been meeting weekly since July 2004. We have considered these books bearing on matters related to UFPPCs mission statement: "We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy": Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (Viking, 2004); Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties (Scribner, 2004); Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004); Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (Putnam, 2004); Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies (Free Press, 2004); David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Interlink, 2004); James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (Viking, 2004); Dana Priest, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military (Norton, 2003); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan Books, 2004); Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Free Press, 2004); Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Beacon, 2001); Robert McChesney, The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2004); Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Columbia, and Indochina (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Rahul Mahajan, Full Spectrum Dominance: US Power in Iraq and Beyond (Seven Stories Press, 2003); Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (Brassey's, 2004); Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (Simon & Schuster, 1991); Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (Metropolitan Books, 2004); Ross Gelbspan, Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis -- and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster (Basic Books, 2004); Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation (Three Rivers Press, 1999); Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003); Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubberts Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton UP, 2001); Amory Lovins et al., Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profit, Jobs, and Security (Rocky Mountain Institute, 2005); Mark Lynas, High Tide: The Truth about Our Climate Crisis (Picador, 2004); Brian M. Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (Basic Books, 2004); Patrick J. Michaels, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media (Cato Institute, 2004); Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton University Press, 2002); T.E. Graedel and Paul J. Crutzen, Atmospheric Change: An Earth System Perspective (W.H. Freeman, 1992); Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Harvard University Press, 2003); Douglas V. Hoyt & Kenneth H. Schatten, The Role of the Sun in Climate Change (Oxford University Press, 1997); Jim Wallis, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005); Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2004); Ted Nace, Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (Berret-Koehler, 2001); P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell University Press, 2003); Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (University of California Press, 1998); Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Back Bay Books, 2000); Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, The Selling of Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (University of Illinois Press, 1994); David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, 2nd ed., (Berret-Koehler, 2001); Elliott D. Sclar and Richard C. Leone, You Dont Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization (Cornell University Press, 2001); Ezra N. Suleiman, Dismantling Democratic States (Princeton University Press, 2003); Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Picador, 2002; orig. ed. 1999); John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler, 2004); Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (Broadway Books, 2002); Paul Roberts, The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (South End Press, 2004).