Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee
by Pamela Druckerman
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the
Unthinkable edited by John Brockman
No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality by Judith Rich Harris
I'd also be interested in The Kite Runner (suggested by Cathy)
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Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee
by Pamela Druckerman
Former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal now living
in Paris, Druckerman offers an anecdotal rather than a scholarly
exploration of the international etiquette of adultery. From American
prudishness about the subject to French discretion, and from Russian
vehemence about the obligatory affair to Japanese adherence to the
single marital futon, one factor rings true in all cases: people lie
about sex. Druckerman interviews numerous adulterers, starting with
the conflicted Americans who "gain status by radiating an aura of
monogamy" while sneaking around on the side; guilt more often than
not brings them to confession and absolution by therapy. Druckerman
is at pains to uncover reliable statistics about infidelity where
such research is suppressed, such as in Islamic countries or those
formerly Communist; in contrast, Finland demonstrates the best sex
research, e.g., clearly half of men there enjoy "parallel
relationships." Druckerman concludes from one study that people in
warmer climes cheat more (Scandinavia is the exception), while people
in wealthy countries tend to cheat less than those in poor countries
(exception: Kazakhstan). Druckerman found that the rules of sexual
cultures differ widely: adultery is the least dangerous social evil
in Russia, while in Japan, buying sex doesn't count as cheating.
Druckerman's work is quirky, digressive and media quotable.
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What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the
Unthinkable edited by John Brockman
From Copernicus to Darwin, to current-day thinkers, scientists have
always promoted theories and unveiled discoveries that challenge
everything society holds dear; ideas with both positive and dire
consequences. Many thoughts that resonate today are dangerous not
because they are assumed to be false, but because they might turn out
to be true.
What do the world's leading scientists and thinkers consider to be
their most dangerous idea? Through the leading online forum Edge
(www.edge.org), the call went out, and this compelling and easily
digestible volume collects the answers. From using medication to
permanently alter our personalities to contemplating a universe in
which we are utterly alone, to the idea that the universe might be
fundamentally inexplicable, What Is Your Dangerous Idea? takes an
unflinching look at the daring, breathtaking, sometimes terrifying
thoughts that could forever alter our world and the way we live in it.
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No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality by Judith Rich Harris
Why do identical twins who grow up together differ in personality?
Harris attempts to solve that mystery. Her initial thesis in The
Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do is replaced
here with a stronger, more detailed one based on evolutionary
psychology. Reading this book is akin to working your way through a
mystery novel—complete with periodic references to Sherlock Holmes.
And Harris has a knack for interspersing scientific and research-
laden text with personal anecdotes. Initially, she refutes five red
herring theories of personality differences, including differences in
environment and gene-environment interactions. Eventually, Harris
presents her own theory, starting from modular notions of the brain
(as Steven Pinker puts it, "the mind is not a single organ but a
system of organs"). Harris offers a three-systems theory of
personality: there's the relationship system, the socialization
system and the status system. And while she admits her theory of
personality isn't simple, it is thought provoking. Harris ties up the
loose ends of the new theory, showing how the development of the
three systems creates personality. Harris's writing is highly
entertaining, which will help readers stick with her through the
elaboration of a fairly complex theory.
The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot
by Naomi Wolf
Review
"You will be shocked and disturbed by this book. Most Americans reject
outright any comparison of post 9/11 America with the fascism and
totalitarianism of Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile. Sadly, the
parallels and similarities, what Wolf calls the 'echoes' between those
societies and America today, are all too compelling."
—Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights
"Naomi Wolf sounds the alarm for all American patriots. We must come
together as a nation and recommit ourselves to the fundamental
American idea that no president, whether Democrat or Republican, will
ever be given unchecked power."
—Wes Boyd, co-founder, MoveOn.org
"The framers of our Constitution fully understood that it can happen
here. Patriots like Madison, Paine, and Franklin would certainly
applaud Naomi Wolf and recognize her as a sister in their struggle."
—Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again
"Naomi Wolf 's End of America is a vivid, urgent, mandatory wake-up
call that addresses momentous issues of tyranny, democracy, and
survival."
—Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of the three-volume Eleanor Roosevelt
Book Description
In a stunning indictment of the Bush administration and Congress,
best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American
democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains
how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early
years of the 20th century's worst dictatorships such as Germany,
Russia, China, and Chile.
The book cuts across political parties and ideologies and speaks
directly to those among us who are concerned about the ever-tightening
noose being placed around our liberties.
In this timely call to arms, Naomi Wolf compels us to face the way our
free America is under assault. She warns us–with the
straight-to-fellow-citizens urgency of one of Thomas Paine's
revolutionary pamphlets–that we have little time to lose if our
children are to live in real freedom.
"Recent history has profound lessons for us in the U.S. today about
how fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders seize and
maintain power, especially in what were once democracies. The secret
is that these leaders all tend to take very similar, parallel steps.
The Founders of this nation were so deeply familiar with tyranny and
the habits and practices of tyrants that they set up our checks and
balances precisely out of fear of what is unfolding today. We are
seeing these same kinds of tactics now closing down freedoms in
America, turning our nation into something that in the near future
could be quite other than the open society in which we grew up and
learned to love liberty," states Wolf.
Wolf is taking her message directly to the American people in the most
accessible form and as part of a large national campaign to reach out
to ordinary Americans about the dangers we face today. This includes a
lecture and speaking tour, and being part of the nascent American
Freedom Campaign, a grassroots efforts to ensure that presidential
candidates pledge to uphold the constitution and protect our liberties
from further erosion.
The End of America will shock, enrage, and motivate–spurring us to
act, as the Founders would have counted on us to do in a time such as
this, as rebels and patriots–to save our liberty and defend our
nation.
________________________________________________
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein
From Publishers Weekly
The neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, free trade, slashed
social spending—that the Chicago School and the economist Milton
Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses,
argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are
disastrous—depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting
public wealth, by the author's accounting—their means must be
cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as
coercive pretexts for free-market reforms the public would normally
reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such
disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South
American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia's state economy to
oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the
privatization of New Orleans's public schools after Katrina; and the
seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the
Asian tsunami. Klein's economic and political analyses are not always
meticulous. Likening free-market shock therapies to electroshock
torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with
their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the
Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism.
Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how
free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other
people's economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of
economic orthodoxy. (Sept.)
________________________________________________
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Hardcover)
by Susan Faludi
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. SignatureReviewed by Richard RodriguezSusan 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.Richard Rodriguez is the author of Brown: The Last
Discovery of America (Penguin).
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier
Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Susan Faludi, as always, is simply stunning. With heroic acuity, she
digs through the mythological debris of the Bush era to recover the
dark fairytale—shades of white savagery on the early Frontier—that
founds the vengeance fantasy we call the 'war on terrorism.'"—Mike
Davis, author of Ecology of Fear
"No system has more completely failed us since 9/11 than the print and
television media. The American public is too misinformed even to
think of elementary oversight of its government. In painstaking and
documented detail, Susan Faludi demonstrates that this was not just a
matter of neglect but a failure of intent—the Sean Hannitys, Diane
Sawyers, and network anchors misled us in service of an ideological
agenda. Her chapter on Jessica Lynch is a tour de force of how the
military-journalistic complex works. You cannot find a more
eye-opening book to read."—Chalmers Johnson, author of the Blowback
Trilogy
"An important contribution to our understanding of the cultural and
political reaction to 9/11, which shows how deeply ingrained beliefs
about masculinity, femininity and sanctified violence have shaped our
national identity, and our ways of responding to crisis."—Richard
Slotkin, author of Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
Twentieth-Century America
"When the viciously misogynist al Qaeda attacked America, the
mainstream media responded, strangely enough, with a call for a
revival of manly men, frail females, and traditional domesticity. In
The Terror Dream, our premiere cultural reporter exposes the backlash
and offers a fascinating explanation of why 9/11 led to such a
perverse retreat from our own values. This is a book that had to be
written, and only Susan Faludi could do it so brilliantly and
engrossingly."—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
"In this bold and courageous book, Susan Faludi peels away the veneer
of post-9/11 bravado to expose our collective national psyche,
bringing us face to face with our nation's innermost fears and
fantasies. The Terror Dream unmasks the Lone Rangers running our
nation and their loyal media Tontos who hark back to a mythic frontier
where men were men and women were victims. Faludi shows how the
revival of these myths since 9/11 has made us weaker and less secure,
and the world a more dangerous place."—Elaine Tyler May, author of
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
"If you are wondering what's come over America since 9/11, this is the
book you've been waiting for. The Terror Dream does for 9/11 and its
effects what Backlash did for women in the '90s. Once again, Susan
Faludi combines her unparalleled gifts for research, reporting and, of
course, great writing, with an arresting and wholly original
thesis."—Katha Pollitt, author of Virginity or Death!: And Other
Social and Political Issues of Our Time
"Blistering and brilliant, The Terror Dream is cultural criticism at
its best."—Peter Biskind
"Susan Faludi is an eloquent researcher and a remarkable journalist
whose response to social crisis is invariably shrewd and original. Now
she gives us a work of eye-opening documentation of how American
culture, instead of being changed by 9/11, has absorbed it into its
own mythic sense of self. The Terror Dream is a bold, brave book that
joins the literature of dissent during one of the most dangerous,
flag-waving moments in American history."—Vivian Gornick