2010-2011 Book List
MARTIN COUNTY LIBRARY SYSTEM
NON-FICTION BOOK CLUB
2010-2011 BOOK LIST
OCTOBER 25 – “Money, Money, Money”
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
Author: T.J. Stiles
(Paperback :)
Synopsis –Vanderbilt was the richest man in 19th-century America; at his death in 1877, he possessed, at least on paper, one-ninth of all the American currency in circulation. But like other corporate giants of his era and ours, he saw no reason to apologize for manufacturing and managing commodities everyone wanted and needed. “Vanderbilt was many things, not all of them admirable,” T. J. Stiles says in this perceptive and fluently written biography, “but he was never a phony. Hated, revered, resented, he always commanded respect, even from his enemies.”
Short Review:
Stiles, the author of a biography of Jesse James, writes with both the panache of a fine journalist and the analytical care of a seasoned scholar. And he offers a fruitful way to think about the larger history of American elites as well as the life of one of their most famous members. (Both taken from The New York Times, “Ruthless in Manhattan,” By Michael Kazin, Published: May 7, 2009)
Author Biography
T.J. Stiles is the author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic online, Smithsonian, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and taught nonfiction creative writing at Columbia University.
NOVEMBER 22 – “Can we learn from the past?”
Collapse: How Societies choose to Fail or Succeed
Author: Jared Diamond
(Paperback: Penguin Group, 2005)
Synopsis & Short Review – ''Collapse'' attempts -- to use history as a science to forecast whether the current world order will fail. To research his new book, Diamond traveled to the scenes of vanished societies like Easter Island, Norse Greenland, the Anasazi, the Mayans.
Diamond rightly warns of alarming trends in biodiversity, soil loss, freshwater limits (China is depleting its aquifers at a breakneck rate), overfishing (much of the developing world relies on the oceans for protein) and climate change (there is a strong scientific consensus that future warming could be dangerous). These and other trends may lead to a global crash: ''Our world society is presently on a nonsustainable course.'' The West, especially, is in peril: ''The prosperity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital.'' Calamity could come quickly: ''A society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power.'' (From: New York Times, “ 'Collapse': How the World Ends” By Gregg Easterbrook Published: January 30, 2005)
Author Biography
Born in Boston in 1937, Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Initially he specialized in conservation biology, studying bird diversity in New Guinea; in 1985 he won one of the early MacArthur ''genius grants.''
DECEMBER 27 – “How ‘this’ happened before”
Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World
Author: Liaquat Ahamed
(Paperback: Penguin Group, 2009)
Synopsis & Short Review - A grand, sweeping narrative of immense scope and power, the book describes a world that long ago receded from memory: the West after World War I, a time of economic fragility, of bubbles followed by busts and of a cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression.
Author Biography
Liaquat Ahamed has been a professional investment manager for twenty-five years. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York-based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as chief executive. He is currently an adviser to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group, is a director of Aspen Insurance Co., and is on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution. He has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge universities. Lords of Finance won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.
JANUARY 24, 2011 – “Another kind of slavery”
Slavery by Another Name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War IIAuthor: Douglass Blackmon
(Paperback: Perseus Publishing, 2001)
Synopsis & Short Review: “Slavery by Another Name” is a formidably researched, powerfully written, wrenchingly detailed narrative of the mistreatment of millions of blacks in America, mistreatment that kept African-Americans in shackles of the body and mind long after slavery had officially ended. (From St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 23, 2008 by Harper Barnes)
Author Biography
Over the past 20 years, Douglas A. Blackmon has written extensively about the American quandary of race, exploring the integration of schools during his childhood in a Mississippi Delta farm town, lost episodes of the Civil Rights movement, and, repeatedly, the dilemma of how a contemporary society should grapple with a troubled past. Many of his stories in The Wall Street Journal have explored the interplay of wealth, corporate conduct and racial segregation. As The Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief in Atlanta, he manages the paper’s coverage of airlines and other major transportation companies and publicly traded companies and institutions based in the southeastern U.S. Slavery by Another Name won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.
FEBRUARY 28 – “A Shared Birthday that changed the world”
Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life
Author: Adam Gopnik
(Paperback: Not sure of publisher)
Synopsis – In this captivating double life, Adam Gopnik searches for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution. Born by cosmic coincidence on the same day in 1809 and separated by an ocean, Lincoln and Darwin coauthored our sense of history and our understanding of man’s place in the world. Here Gopnik reveals these two men as they really were: family men and social climbers, ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers, grieving parents and brilliant scholars. Above all we see them as thinkers and writers, making and witnessing the great changes in thought that mark truly modern times.
Author Biography
Adam Gopnik (b. Aug 24, 1956) has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986. His work for the magazine has won the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism as well as the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting.
March 28 – “Backstory”
The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance
Author: Kristin Downey
(Paperback: First Anchor Books Edition, 2010)
Synopsis – Frances Perkins is no longer a household name, yet she was one of the most influential women of the twentieth century. Based on eight years of research, extensive archival materials, new documents, and exclusive access to Perkins’s family members and friends, this biography is the first complete portrait of a devoted public servant with a passionate personal life, a mother who changed the landscape of American business and society.
Author Biography
In 2008, Downey shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Washington Post staff for coverage of the campus slayings at Virginia Tech; she profiled two heroic professors--Liviu Librescu and Kevin Granata--who died protecting the lives of their students. She left the Washington Post last year to focus on finishing her biography of Frances Perkins, “The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience,” published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.
APRIL 25 – “Our World”
Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss
Author: Craig Pittman
(Paperback: University Press of Florida, 2010)
Synopsis –Short Review "This is an exhaustive, timely, and devastating account of the destruction of Florida's wetlands and the disgraceful collusion of government at all levels. It's an important book that should be read by every voter, every taxpayer, every parent, every Floridian who cares about saving what's left of this precious place." - Carl Hiaasen
Florida possesses more wetlands than any other state except Alaska, yet since 1990 more than 84,000 acres have been lost to development - despite presidential pledges to protect them. In this hard-hitting book, "St. Petersburg Times" investigative journalists Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite explain how taxpayers who think they're paying for wetland protection have been stuck with a program that creates the illusion of environmental protection while doing little to stem the tide of destruction. A potent combination of groundbreaking historical research and no-holds-barred reporting, this book portrays a landscape that has been compromised by greed, fear, and incompetence. (From Amazon.com)
Author Biography
A native Floridian, Craig Pittman has reported on environmental issues for the St. Petersburg Times since 1998. His work won the Waldo Proffitt Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism in Florida in 2004, 2006 and 2007, and a series of stories on Florida's vanishing wetlands that he wrote with Matthew Waite won the top investigative reporting award in both 2006 and 2007 from the Society of Environmental Journalists. (From http://www.tampabay.com/writers/craig-pittman)
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