Suggestions for
Future Books

Following are suggestions for Book titles and topics for future months.

Everyone is invited to submit suggestions.  All we need it the title of the book and the name of the author.

Send your suggestions to Al Veilleux

Proverbs of Ashes

By Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker

Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us.  An extraordinary personal and theological examination of what's wrong with the crucifixion

Brock and Parker, writing alternating chapters, witness to the legacies of violence in their own lives, and in the lives of those they have known and loved. Beginning with the powerful story of an abused woman who felt her sacrifice was demanded by God—an all too common story, as she discovers—Parker tells of her journey to confront her own impulses toward self-sacrifice. Brock reveals the terrible, isolating costs of racism suffered silently and depicts the quiet but devastating aftermath of war. But Brock and Parker also seek out communities that resist violence and foster love—communities that begin to give them the strength to question the destructive ideas they have internalized.

Living a Life That Matters: Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success
by Harold S. Kushner

Amazon.com's Best of 2001
A person's longing for significance--which can lead to excessive ambition, moral compromise, and preoccupation with status--often stands in conflict with a longing to be good. In Living a Life That Matters, Harold S. Kushner (the Massachusetts rabbi whose bestselling books include When Bad Things Happen to Good People) suggests that the most successful lives are the ones that most effectively manage and resolve that conflict. For example, Kushner retells the biblical story of Jacob, in a chapter whose lesson is named by its title, "How to Win By Losing." Hamlet, Dirty Harry, and Exodus are a few of the dozens of examples he cites while elaborating on the essential lesson of this book: that success and significance converge in every act of love, generosity, and self-sacrifice that we make for our families, friends, and communities. --Michael Joseph Gross

The Universe in a Nutshell
by Stephen Hawking

Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Stephen Hawking, science's first real rock star, may be the least-read bestselling author in history--it's no secret that many people who own A Brief History of Time have never finished it. Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell aims to remedy the situation, with a plethora of friendly illustrations to help readers grok some of the most brain-bending ideas ever conceived.

Does it succeed? Yes and no. While Hawking offers genuinely accessible context for such complexities as string theory and the nature of time, it's when he must translate equations to sentences that the limits of language get in the way. But Hawking has simplified the origin of the universe, the nature of space and time, and what holds it all together to an unprecedented degree, inviting nonscientists to share his obvious awe and love of the unseen forces that shape it all.

Yes, it's difficult reading, but it's worth it. Hawking is one of the great geniuses of our time, a man whose life has been devoted to thinking in the abstract about the universe. With his help, and pictures--lots of pictures--we can seek to understand a bit more of the cosmos. --Therese Littleton

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
by Joseph J. Ellis

In retrospect, it seems as if the American Revolution was inevitable. But was it? In Founding Brothers, Joseph J. Ellis reveals that many of those truths we hold to be self-evident were actually fiercely contested in the early days of the republic.

Ellis focuses on six crucial moments in the life of the new nation, including a secret dinner at which the seat of the nation's capital was determined--in exchange for support of Hamilton's financial plan; Washington's precedent-setting Farewell Address; and the Hamilton and Burr duel. Most interesting, perhaps, is the debate (still dividing scholars today) over the meaning of the Revolution. In a fascinating chapter on the renewed friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson at the end of their lives, Ellis points out the fundamental differences between the Republicans, who saw the Revolution as a liberating act and hold the Declaration of Independence most sacred, and the Federalists, who saw the revolution as a step in the building of American nationhood and hold the Constitution most dear. Throughout the text, Ellis explains the personal, face-to-face nature of early American politics--and notes that the members of the revolutionary generation were conscious of the fact that they were establishing precedents on which future generations would rely.

A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
by Gerald M. Edelman, Giulio Tononi

Emily Dickinson wrote "The Brain--is wider than the Sky," and who can argue with that? Quoted by Nobel-winning scientist Gerald M. Edelman and his Neurosciences Institute colleague Giulio Tononi in A Universe of Consciousness, Miss Emily neatly explains the problem of conscious awareness, then ducks out of the way as the two scientists get to work solving it. Testable theories of consciousness are mighty lonely, as even the soberest mind can be driven to tears of madness pondering its own activity. Centuries of work by philosophers and psychologists like James and Freud have made little progress by starting with awareness and working backward to the brain; these days we have a secure enough base to try looking in the other direction and building a theory of the mind out of neurons.

Though Edelman and Tononi do make a good effort to help out the lay reader, ultimately A Universe of Consciousness is aimed at the interdisciplinary gang of scientists and academics trying to understand our shared but invisible experience. The first sections of the book cover the basic philosophical, psychological, and biological elements essential to their theory. Swiftly the authors proceed to define terms and concepts (even the long-abused term complexity gets a reappraisal) and elaborate on these to create a robust, testable theory of the neural basis of consciousness. Following this hard work, they consider some ramifications of the theory and take a close look at language and thinking. This much-needed jump-start is sure to provoke a flurry of experimental and theoretical responses; A Universe of Consciousness might just help us answer some of the greatest questions of science, philosophy, and even poetry. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The Brethren
Joseph J. Ellis portrays the select fraternity that founded our nation.

The paternity of America has never been in doubt. But once Washington is allowed to descend a step or two from his acknowledged heights, it is possible to view him as the foremost member of a remarkable fraternity that collectively determined the nation's early course. These men included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and Aaron Burr. Burr was the least of them, and in a pantheon of such exalted character Abigail Adams (the one undoubted ''sister'' of the group) may fairly take his place.

In ''Founding Brothers,'' Joseph J. Ellis, a leading scholar of the period, gives us succinct and telling portraits of each of them by taking a close look at six critical episodes in the interrelated story of their lives. In each case, his object (after the manner of Lytton Strachey's ''Eminent Victorians'') is to include only what is significant, and to untwist the raveled strands of rumor woven about their lives. In assessing their stature, Ellis prefers ''brothers'' to ''fathers'' as the less adoring term; but unlike Strachey, a true iconoclast, he never veers toward caricature.

As Ellis sees it, the founding brethren not only ''created the American republic'' but ''held it together throughout the volatile and vulnerable early years by sustaining their presence until national habits and customs took root.'' To be sure, their mettle was put to a mighty test. In the last of the ''General Orders'' Washington issued to his troops, he acknowledged the uncertain future Americans faced. On the one hand, they had won their independence, which offered them ''enlarged prospects of happiness'' almost beyond ''the power of description,'' together with an opportunity to work out for themselves a new social and political order for the benefit of man. But he could not be sure the people were up to the task. ''Unless the principles of the federal government were properly supported,'' he warned, ''and the powers of the Union increased, the honor, dignity and justice of the nation would be lost forever.'' Everything depended on the form the Union took.

At the end of the war, there was a tremendously conflicted, if inexorable, move toward a strong central government uniting the 13 states. The Articles of Confederation (adopted in 1781) were inadequate to the challenge, and at length a national Constitutional Convention was called to meet in Philadelphia in May 1787 to address the crisis. From its secret and sometimes improbable deliberations our Constitution emerged.

But what, in fact, did that document create? Was it a centralized, or centralizing, authority? Or a federation of sovereign states? The founding brothers took sides, of course, and all the arguments developed then have been endlessly recapitulated since. Hamilton stood stoutly for a strong central authority; Jefferson, for republican principles and states' rights. Adams was more capable than either of a bipartisan vision; in the brilliant and devoted Abigail, he discovered his alter ego and true political mate. But only Washington proved able to ''levitate'' above the fray. Burr (his mirror opposite) cultivated the semblance of an independent stance, but was an unscrupulous opportunist with a traitor's heart. The venerable Franklin had a profoundly radical bent, which his somewhat avuncular demeanor tended to disguise.

Madison was hard to pin down. In certain respects, he was a remarkably colorless figure, though in his legislative prowess he turned this to account: ''He seemed to lack a personal agenda because he seemed to lack a personality,'' Ellis writes, which enabled him to urge a partisan case with the impartial-seeming logic of an arbitrating judge. Much of his work was done behind the scenes, so that the developing lines of some of his greatest achievements ''remain forever hidden, visible only in the way that one detects the movement of iron filings within a magnetic field.''

The magnetic center of that field was political honor, or personal honor in the field of politics. For throughout the 1790's, most of the institutional checks and balances we now count on were not yet in place. The nation's survival, therefore, largely depended upon the will and ability of these antagonists to settle issues in debate. Passions ran high, and there was plenty of slander, but in the end their battles were mostly a ''bloodless affair in which,'' Ellis reminds us, ''the energies released by national independence did not devour its own children. The Burr-Hamilton duel represented the singular exception to this rule.'' That duel is one of the episodes the author examines, as he ably sorts through the conflicting versions of it and explains the polemical cloud that engulfed its aftermath. He also looks closely at a private dinner given by Jefferson that helped Hamilton and Madison come to terms over the assumption of state debt by the federal government in exchange for the transfer of the nation's capital to a site on the Potomac River; at the brief, failed attempt by Congress in 1790 to deal with the issue of slavery; at the intent and circumstances of Washington's Farewell Address, composed in part to refute charges that he was senile, a creeping monarchist or the tool of some Federalist elite; and at the shifting alliances that joined Washington to Hamilton, Hamilton to Madison, Madison to Jefferson, Jefferson to Adams and (the one unbreakable link in the chain) Adams to Abigail. Finally, Ellis poignantly recounts the friendship, break and lasting reconciliation between Jefferson and Adams, which brought them both a measure of peace in their final years.

After Jefferson succeeded him as president, Adams retired to Quincy, Mass., where he seethed about Jefferson's growing reputation and began to fear his own place in history might be eclipsed. He tried to exorcise his demons in memoirs that tended to collapse into diatribes, and more or less turned himself into a nervous wreck. At length, the two resumed their dialogue, and between 1812 and 1826 exchanged 158 letters, in which, to paraphrase Adams, they tried to explain themselves to each other before they died. To each other, but also to us: for they knew they were writing for the ages.

This is a splendid book -- humane, learned, written with flair and radiant with a calm intelligence and wit. Even those familiar with ''the Revolutionary generation'' will, I would warrant, find much in its pages to captivate and enlarge their understanding of our nation's fledgling years.

Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!
by Michael Moore

Amazon.com
Stupid White Men, Michael Moore's screed against "Thief-in-Chief" George Bush's power elite, hit No. 1 at Amazon.com within days of publication. Why? It's as fulminating and crammed with infuriating facts as any right-wing bestseller, as irreverent as The Onion, and as noisily entertaining as a wrestling smackdown. Moore offers a more interesting critique of the 2000 election than Ralph Nader's Crashing the Party (he argued with Nader, his old boss, who sacked him), and he's serious when he advocates ousting Bush. But Moore's rage is outrageous, couched in shameless gags and madcap comedy: "Old white men wielding martinis and wearing dickies have occupied our nation's capital.... Launch the SCUD missiles! Bring us the head of Antonin Scalia!... We are no longer [able] to hold free and fair elections. We need U.N. observers, U.N. troops." Moore's ideas range from on-the-money (Arafat should beat Sharon with Gandhi's nonviolent shame tactics) to over-the-top: blacks should put inflatable white dolls in their cars so racist cops will think they're chauffeurs; the ever-more-Republicanesque Democratic Party should be sued for fraud; "no contributions toward advancing our civilization ever came out of the South [except Faulkner, Hellman, and R.J. Reynolds]," because it's too hot to think straight there; Korean dictator Kim Jong-il "has got to broaden himself beyond porn and John Wayne" by watching better movies, like Dude, Where's My Car? (which contains "all you need to know about America"). Whatever your politics, Stupid White Men should make you blow your stack. --Tim Appelo

The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone
by Joseph S., Jr. Nye

From Publishers Weekly
"Unilateralism, arrogance, and parochialism" the U.S. must abandon these traits in a post-Sept. 11 world, says Nye, former assistant secretary of defense and now dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He explains eloquently the principles he believes should govern American foreign policy in the decades ahead. His starting point is the preponderance of American power in today's world. Nye distinguishes between hard power (military and economic strength) and soft power (openness, prosperity and similar values that persuade and attract rather than coerce others). Nye argues that a dominant state needs both kinds of power, and that the current information revolution and the related phenomenon of globalization call for the exercise of soft more than hard power. It is, Nye believes, dangerous for the U.S. systematically to opt out of treaties and conventions endorsed by the great majority of nations. The U.S. should participate in world debate on transnational issues such as global warming and nuclear defense, not simply declare American interests paramount to the exclusion of all other views. Nye quotes a summarizing insight from a French critic: "nothing in the world can be done without the United States, [A]nd... there is very little the United States can achieve alone." As the author points out, in the aftermath of September 11, the policy issues this book addresses are magnified rather than diminished in importance. This reasoned and timely essay on the uses of power makes a valuable contribution to American public discourse. (Mar.)Forecast: Blurbs by Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger highlight that this should be required reading for foreign policy wonks. Oxford is backing this with a $50,000 marketing budget and is counting on major media attention. Still, whether this finds a wider audience may depend on whether Americans' interest in the world at large survives six months after September 11.