Books you may want to give as Gifts

Books make fine gifts, and here are some suggestions

Sequoia receives many offers of books to be reviewed for our readers.

We too often fail to find reviewers who have the time and skill to do so.

I keep hoping to be at least a brief reviewer of many of these books, and

this Gift giving time of year makes me see the urgency of letting you know

about many of these books, some of which I have actually purchased myself,

not waiting for review copies. Here is a list of those I consider worth your

thinking about giving as gift books, even to yourself, or your congregation's library.

Top of the list for many reasons, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right, by Rabbi Michael Lerner, [Harper SF, 2005, 408pp, $25 hardback] also Editor and Founder of Tikkun Magazine 20 years ago, when I began reading it, and founder of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue, that has regularly used the Noe Valley Presbyterian Church building in San Francisco where I worshipped for many years, before moving to Oakland this year. Lerner was responsible along with his partners, Professor Cornell West and Sister Joan Chitester,OSB, [ see the Tent of Abraham book on the Middle East below] and many others, for calling together over 1,500 people last summer at UC Berkeley campus to bring together the growing Network of Spiritual Progressives [NSP].

The book is basically the call to national struggle for a New Bottom Line, no longer "profits and power over others", but Compassion, Caring, and Generosity toward others, a Politics of Meaning. His thesis is that human being both hunger for and urgently need cooperative and collaborative ways of working and living together, and will vote for politicians that support that kind of society.

He is currently urging all of us to become a faith- or spirituality-based caucus in any political party we respect and want to influence, to get them to introduce such ideas as a Global Marshall Plan as the way to spend 5 to 10% of our wealth as affluent industrialized nations, who have spent too many years benefiting from the natural resources and the labor of slaves or poorly paid immigrants from other nations to accumulate our wealth. This would rapidly change the image we have as Ugly Americans, imperialist invaders and exploiters of poorer nations. We were generous once, after World War 2, and were loved and respected for years by many who had been our enemies in that war. I spent 3 years in Italy after the war, rebuilding homes and schools and hospitals, working with AFSC and UNRRA, and learned first hand what generous sharing can bring about to end the anger and hatred wars bring about. We have two places to start such a plan, Afghanistan and Iraq, plus Lebanon and Gaza, with Israel's help and many other partners.

I strongly urge you to buy several copies, along with other friends or family members, so you can form a study group based on this book, and become a member group of NSP, one of the hundreds of such groups already started across our nation, and also plug in at www.nsp.org with Nichola and the others in the office in Berkeley, and get the new booklet on organizing such a group. You can call me at 510/535-2470 and I will offer my ideas on people you can connect with and ideas that may help, from our experiences in the last year or two on doing just this kind of organizing. If you are in the Bay area, we have city governments that are good places to start [see my Letter from an Editor for one joyous meeting I attended, that is doing NSP kind of work in Oakland already with political, press and police participation.]

More books:

Two autobiographical books by Barack Obama, who is not only a seriously respected possible candidate for President of the US -- who I am ready to vote for -- but now a Senator from Illinois: Dreams from My Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance [Random House,Three Rivers Press, NY, 1996, 453 pp, paperback; $14] and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream [Random House, 2006, 375 pp., $25]. These will give you a further push into politics, as they have given me, son of a Republican who served on our city council in New Jersey, and with an uncle who ran as a Republican candidate for Congress in Wisconsin, and lost, but got a University dorm named after him at least. I am a registered and dues paying Democrat, but my Green and Socialist friends will find lots of reasons to support this Democrat for President also. He spent several years after college as a community organizer in South Side Chicago, largely African American, back when the city had Harold Washington as mayor. Having spent similar years in that kind of role in Black urban neighborhoods with Puerto Ricans coming in to replace Russians and Irish earlier immigrants in the tenement housing of that slum area, and then moving into public housing organizing as Obama did also, I rejoice to see someone with that experience serving in the Senate, a goal I once dreamed of back in college.

These books will show you how self-critical Obama is, as well as how much healthy adolescent rebellion he enjoyed, critical both of his mother's white parents and his father's Kenyan origins. He comes to respect and appreciate and love his African blood, as well as his midwestern white blood. And I came to respect and admire his intelligence and concern for justice. Having an Indonesian step-father and living there when 7 and 8, when his father suddenly returned to his African family, and a post in the government, Obama appreciates what poor nations like Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, face in a world dominated by the US and our military and economic power. He is a likely candidate for proposing the Global Marshall Plan.

Another book that fits into Lerner's vision of an economy that cares about workers, customers, quality of products, and what we are doing to the atmosphere and water with our waste, is Dennis W. Bakke's Joy at Work: a Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job [PVG, Seattle, 2005, 314 pp Hardback, $25 ] It has a whole family of other books, CDs and DVDs that supplement its story of how a new company, formed in 1981 to build power plants around the world and also have fun while they did this. There is even a free Bible study guide to go along with the book, and a DVD that gives visual backup as well, if you go to www.dennisbakke.com which I encourage you to do before you invest in the book. I have persuaded a number of my friends to read this book, and they agree it is a wonderful vision of how offices, plants, and even nonprofit organizations can improve, and workers get a voice, and a decent share of the profits, and some decision-making power in what was envisioned as a worker-run enterprise, and actualized it.

Some day I hope we can get to see the DVDs of the documentary reports on Venezuelan worker-run plants and oil fields, where everyone gets the same salary, and all get a voice in how to run the company, and also pay attention to the needs of suppliers of raw materials, customers, people living near the plants, the environment, etc. We told you about these documentaries when they were shown at the UC Berkeley Art Museum by the new directors of that museum, who see political documentaries as an art form we need to pay attention to.

Among those who recommend this book have been the folks at Sojourners Magazine from DC, with Jim Wallis being a strong advocate, as a progressive Evangelical preacher, and a friend of Lerner. The Harvard Business School has drafted a Case Study on whether Bakke's company with 20,000 employees can succeed with no human relations dept., no environmental dept., almost no legal dept. nor strategic planning. Check all of this out on the web site.

A group of helpful books on the Middle East :

1. A Catholic, Muslim and Jewish trio have written fascinating versions of the ancient story of Abraham and Sarah and their offspring, as told and understood by their three faith groups. This is hot off the Beacon Press in Boston: The Tent of Abraham: stories of hope and peace for Jews, Christians and Muslims [218 pp, hardback, $25]. Rabbi Arthur Waskow and his two partners, Joan Chitester OSB, the retired head of Benedictine sisters, and the other, Murshid Saadi Shakur Chishti [formerly Neil Douglas-Klotz] a world-renowned Sufi scholar from Edinburgh -- where else would we look for such a person? -- have put together a fascinating, very readable triple version of the Abraham and Sarah saga, as found in the Torah, Christian Bible and the Koran. And most important of all, they have pulled out of these stories and the centuries of reflection on them by Jews, Christians and Muslims some very helpful clues on how we can learn to get along with one another, as part of the Abrahamic family of monotheists -- and all other humans for that matter.

Karen Armstrong, the British former nun who has helped us with her books on Islam and Buddha -- both still good as gifts also -- and her most recent: The Great Transformation: the beginning of our religious traditions [Knopf, NY, April 2006, 470 pp, $30 hardback], which shows that in Karl Jasper's Axial Age from 900 bce to 200 bce all the great religions of our planet took their basic and essential form, which was to insist after centuries of war and destruction and selfishness, the only Way for human beings to behave was with empathy and compassion for all other humans, and even for animals and other living things.

Confucius, Budhha, Jeremiah and Amos, Socrates and all the anonymous architects of Hinduism and Daoism, reacted to the sorry mess that humans had made of their various societies and the landscape, and said in effect, "Whoa! stop and look, then listen to our questions: Is this any way to behave? Are all these ruins and cemeteries the best memorials to civilization? Of course not, so why not try compassion, love, generosity to everyone you encounter? It might just relieve your headaches and bellyaching and dying in the streets! And it is just what our religions are all about at their best!" [Armstrong suggests that Jesus, Mohammed and others in recent millennia have simply retrieved and emphasized the best of the earlier prophets, and tried to get us organized to practice compassion, mercy, empathy, free loans and gifts, etc. and did not intend us to divide up into warring factions as we Christians did for centuries in Europe, and now people of all faiths have bombs and missiles, and too often think God wants us to use them.]

I have just saved you the $30 and lots of time reading Karen's book, but some of us should pay attention to the details she spells out in most readable and persuasive language. I hope many of you will join me in that hard but important work.

2. Now for the next Middle East peace relevant book: Rashid Khalidi's The Iron Cage: the story of the Palestinian struggle for statehood [also a 2006 Beacon Press book, 280 pp, hardback, $25]. Khalidi occupies the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, NY. He has been published in many leading papers and The Nation. He realizes that most of us know a little bit at least about the birth in 1948 and struggles of the new Jewish nation of Israel. But what has happened to the people called Phillistines in the Bible, who lived in the area called by the Romans Palestine, where both Jews and Christians claim their spiritual homelands, and Muslims as well, all from the Scriptures we read every week -- here is a vague and mysteirious blank for most Earth dwellers. Khalidi tries to fill it in, to help all of us assist intelligently and with necessary information in persuading both of the angry and besieged peoples living in and next to Israel that they can join us in being part of the one worldwide human family, and follow the ancient wisdom Karen Armstrong reminds us about -- peace comes from compassion and empathy for one another, instead of revenge and hatred without end. Iraq and the whole planet need to learn the same lessons, and perhaps even our elected employees in Washington?

Please see if some of you can join me in tackling this book and its subject -- the peaceful creation and stable existence of a homeland for the millions of Palestinians who now live either in refugee camps or in the Israeli occupied "prison" with its iron gates and Israeli army checkpoints preventing both entrance by Palestinians whose spouses and children live there if they go outside the Palestinian territories to find work, and make it impossible to leave Gaza and the West Bank to look for work legally, away from the huge unemployment and blockage of shipments of olives, olive oil and other Palestinian farmers' products. It is a bloody and cruel stalemate situation, and Lebanon has suffered terribly recently because it is in the neighborhood, and has large numbers of Palestinian refugees, also sitting unemployed and broke inside their borders. Poverty and injustice are a great breeding ground for terrorism and low level warfare, as well as crime and domestic violence. Do we care? Let's learn more and help persuade our nation to help bring unarmed peace to the Middle East.

3. A short and easy to read pamphlet-size booklet of 65 pages: On Palestinian Diplomacy by Afif Safieh, the Palestinian ambassador to the US, stationed in Washington, but also a recent visitor to the Bay area thanks to sponsorship by the American Friends Service Committee, and over the official opposition of our Congress, who insist on seeing Palestinians as "terrorists" -- which many young adults have become in recent years. But our wise and savvy President issued an Executive Order allowing such "dangerous" people as Ambassador Safieh to come and talk with those who would listen. Fortunately that included many hundreds of people in the Bay area, and listeners across our nation who tuned in to his hour on the Michael Krasny Forum program on KQED-FM. If you did not get to her Afief in person or on the air, do read his humorous and persuasive words in these 5 dozen pages, available from AFSC Middle East Peace program office, 65 Ninth St., SF 94103 or call in your order to 415-565-0201, ext. 26 - $5 each.

Finally for this list: Hope or Terror? Gandhi and the other 9/11 by Michael Nagler, also $5 for this even shorter, 43 page explanation that 8/11 was a famous date in history long before 2001. One hundred years earlier to the day in 1906, Mohandas K. Gandhi " launched a new way of waging conflict." Thirteen years earlier he had come to South Africa as a failed 24 year old attorney from India, hoping to make a new start. He certainly did! We are all the richer and less damaged and deformed because of his efforts, though less than successful in South Africa, but later world-shakingly effective in India, gently but firmly pushing the British Empire out of their long term, and profitable in many ways, occupation -- like Israel's in some ways. His target in September 1906 was the British-run railway that threw him off his train up in the mountains between Durban and Pretoria, because he had committed Rosa Parks' crime: riding in a first class seat while Colored. His story and his style are urgently important for us to learn about; so please order these booklets, also for $5 from the same office of AFSC listed above. --Bob F.