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October Meeting

Several years ago we read this author's last book "The United States of Europe" that was very well-received by the group. This time T.R. Reid tackles healthcare.

In The Healing of America, New York Times bestselling author T. R. Reid shows how all the other industrialized democracies have achieved something the United States can't seem to do: provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost. Impossible if you listen to the naysayers. So, let's understand how you can achieve to supposedly conflicting goals: lower costs and more access.

Please join us for what should be a great discussion!

Title: The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
Author: T.R. Reid

So everyone is talking jobs - job creation in particularly. So where are these jobs to come from in this coming decade? According to a lot of sources, green is where it's all at. Please join us, we'll be reading:

Title: The Green Collar Economy
Author: Van Jones

Review: Van Jones illustrates how we can invent and invest our way out of the pollution-based grey economy and into the healthy new green economy. Built by a broad coalition deeply rooted in the lives and struggles of ordinary people, this path has the practical benefit of both cutting energy prices and generating enough work to pull the U.S. economy out of its present death spiral.

Rachel Carson's 1963 landmark book Silent Spring was the pivotal ecological examination of the last century. Now, rising above the impenetrable debate over the environment andthe economy, Van Jones's The Green Collar Economy delivers a timely and essential call to action for this new century.

Please join us, we'll be reading:

Title: A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Author: Tom Standage

Historian Standage explores the significant role that six beverages have played in the world's history. Few realize the prominence of beer in ancient Egypt, but it was crucial to both cultural and religious life throughout the Fertile Crescent, appearing even in the Gilgamesh epic. Wine's history has been recounted in many places, and its use to avoid often--polluted water supplies made it ubiquitous wherever grapes could be easily cultivated. Spirits, first manufactured by Arabs and later rejected by them with the rise of Islam, played a fundamental role in the ascendance of the British navy. As a stimulant, coffee found no hostility within Islam's tenets, and its use spread as the faith moved out of Arabia into Asia and Europe. Tea enjoyed similar status, and it bound China and India to the West. Cola drinks, a modern American phenomenon, relied on American mass-marketing skills to achieve dominance.

I hope you can join us for what should be an interesting perspective on history through our drinking glasses.

Please join us, we'll be reading:

Title: Critical: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Author: Paul Krugman

Obama and Tim Geithner have released their stimulus package to help stop the economic bleeding. This short, easy read is very effective and a good pick for a short month.

How you get out of a financial crisis is the issue of the day. So, let's learn some history and strategies of how others have come out of our current dilemma.

The book is a reissue of a 1999 book with the same title, minus the "and the Crisis of 2008" language. It is fine to read that copy if you cannot find the newest version at the library. The content changes are minor in the reissue, especially if you follow Krugman's column in the NY Times.

If you want some "extra credit" reading and enjoy the topic. Feel free to read Charles Kindleberger's "Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises".

DECEMBER MEETING CANCELLED, due to a family matter, I am going to have to cancel tomorrow night's meeting on 12/8. Please join us in January on the 12th we'll be reading:

Title: Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency
Author: Robert Kuttner

Talk about making the right prediction. This book from a Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor on public policy, was written earlier this year and released in August. It evaluates what might be Obama's challenges if he were elected. Well, he's been elected so this sounds like a great book from a leading public policy academic.

From Amazon.com Review: "It's a concisely reasoned and elegantly written essay on how a truly courageous president could lead us forward. A slender volume, it very usefully sweeps us past the often-overwrought speculation about whether this will or won't be a "transformative" election--akin to Lincoln's, Roosevelt's, JFK's, and even Ronald Reagan's--and on to the real questions of what such an election might accomplish, how, and why.

Obama's Challenge assumes Obama will be elected, but its author is hardly a captive partisan. As a highly regarded journalist and deft policy analyst, Robert Kuttner has been covering presidential elections--as well the politics of governance in the four years between them--for more than three decades. Experience has convinced him that the size and complexity of the problems America and the world are facing today requires an extraordinarily gifted leader--and he is willing here to affirm that Barack Obama might well be that person."