January 23  The ABC's of the Economic Crisis
February 27 Why Not Socialism?
March 27 Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
April    The Big Squeeze
May 22 Thomas F. Jackson From Civil Rights to Humans  Rights
 

Books for august through September coming soon. 

Come to one or all of the reading group meetings.  We usually have copies of some of the books at a reduced price. Drop an email to us at wichitadsa@gmail.com

The books can also be ordered on-line from Powell's Books or Amazon.

January 23

 Fred Magdoff and Michael Yates,  The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know

The economic crisis has created a host of problems for working people: collapsing wages, lost jobs, ruined pensions, and the anxiety that comes with not knowing what tomorrow will bring. Compounding all this is a lack of reliable information that speaks to the realities of workers. Commentators and pundits seem more confused than anyone, and economists—the so-called "experts"—still cling to bankrupt ideologies that failed to predict the crisis and offer nothing to explain it.

In this short, clear, and concise book, Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates explain the nature of the economic crisis. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the authors demonstrate that this crisis is not some aberration from a normally benign capitalism but rather the normal and even expected outcome of a thoroughly irrational and destructive system.

Only an aroused public, demanding the right to health care, decent employment, a secure old age, and a clean and healthy environment, can lead the United States and the world out of the worst crisis since the Great Depression and toward a system of production and distribution conducive to human happiness. This book is aimed primarily at working people, students, and activists, who want not just to understand the world but to change it.

February 27

.G. A.  Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

Is socialism desirable? Is it even possible? In this concise book, one of the world's leading political philosophers presents with clarity and wit a compelling moral case for socialism and argues that the obstacles in its way are exaggerated.

There are times, G. A. Cohen notes, when we all behave like socialists. On a camping trip, for example, campers wouldn't dream of charging each other to use a soccer ball or for fish that they happened to catch. Campers do not give merely to get, but relate to each other in a spirit of equality and community. Would such socialist norms be desirable across society as a whole? Why not? Whole societies may differ from camping trips, but it is still attractive when people treat each other with the equal regard that such trips exhibit.

But, however desirable it may be, many claim that socialism is impossible. Cohen writes that the biggest obstacle to socialism isn't, as often argued, intractable human selfishness--it's rather the lack of obvious means to harness the human generosity that is there. Lacking those means, we rely on the market. But there are many ways of confining the sway of the market: there are desirable changes that can move us toward a socialist society in which, to quote Albert Einstein, humanity has "overcome and advanced beyond the predatory stage of human development."

March 27

Nicholas Kristoff and Sherryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

New York Times columnist Kristof and his wife, WuDunn, a former Times reporter, make a brilliantly argued case for investing in the health and autonomy of women worldwide. More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century, they write, detailing the rampant gendercide in the developing world, particularly in India and Pakistan. Far from merely making moral appeals, the authors posit that it is impossible for countries to climb out of poverty if only a fant not just to understand the world but to change it.