What members are reading

Although we aren't meeting this month, it doesn't mean we've stopped reading. Here's a list of books people mentioned at the last JUST Books meeting and some others that have been on my reading list this month:

The History of the American Empire, by Howard Zinn. This is a graphic novel illustrated by Mike Konopacki, based on Zinn's People's History of the United States. This should be required reading in every junior high/middle school. I learned some stuff from it.

Medussa and the Snail, by Louis Thomas
a book of 29 essays on biology. According to one reader,
"This is quite simply one of the best written books on biology that you'll ever read. If you are in the camp which believes that scientists use one side of their brain, and that writers use the other, be prepared for a big surprise."

The Right is Wrong, How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe, by Arianna Huffington. With her trademark passion, intelligence, and devastating wit, Huffington Post editor in chief Arianna Huffington tackles the issues that are crucial to this year’s presidential election and, even more so, to the fate of the country.

Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being
and Why No One Saw it Coming
by Paul Hawken
A leading environmentalist and social activist's examination of the worldwide movement for social and environmental change

Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice.
From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another.

A Game as Old as Empire, various authors. This is a follow-up to John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Here, other economic hit men, journalists, and investigators join Perkins to reveal many more deeply disturbing stories of greed and international corruption. In gripping detail, they describe the schemes and subterfuges that multinational corporations, governments, powerful individuals, financial institutions, and quasi-governmental agencies use to line their pockets behind the facade of “foreign aid” and “international development.”

By the Ore Docks, A Working People's History of Duluth, by Richard Hudelson and Carl Ross. A history of the people who built Duluth and their fight for fair labor.

They Took My Father, Finnish Americans in Stalin's Russia, by Mayme Sevander. One immigrant's story of the pilgrimage of Utopian Finnish Americans to Bolshevik Russia and how Stalin destroyed their dreams.

Papermill, by Joseph Kalar. A book of poems and short essays written by a laborer in an International Fall papermill during the violent period of labor organizing in the early 20th Century.

Secession: How Vermont and all the other states can save themselves from the empire, by Thomas H. Naylor. This is the selection that we will be discussing on September 30. For more information, see the previous post, and/or go to http://www.vermontrepublic.org/