Book Recommendations

Sing with me: Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high. Just take a look. It's in a book. The Reading Rainbow . . . .

Books mentioned during our meeting this week include:

Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic by Martha Beck
"Wickedly funny and wrenchingly sad memoirs of a young mother awaiting the birth of a Down's syndrome baby while simultaneously pursuing a doctorate at Harvard."

The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggeman
"In this challenging and enlightening treatment, Brueggemann traces the lines from the radical vision of Moses to the solidification of royal power in Solomon to the prophetic critique of that power with a new vision of freedom in the prophets. Here he traces the broad sweep from Exodus to Kings to Jeremiah to Jesus. He highlights that the prophetic vision not only embraces the pain of the people but creates an energy and amazement based on the new thing that God is doing."

Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives by George Lakoff, Don Hazen, and Howard Dean
"Lakoff (cognitive science and linguistics, U. of California, Berkeley) examines the ways U.S. conservatives use language to create "frames," phrases fully loaded with significance from the American collective cognitive unconscious. He shows how he believes this misappropriation of language creates the context for discussion amongst candidates, parties, and in the media, rather than the real issues. He asserts that progressives and others committed to full public discourse must learn when it is used, and how to use it themselves to level the playing field."

God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It by Jim Wallis
"Our biblical faith and religious traditions simply do not allow us as a nation to continue to ignore the poor and marginalized, deny racial justice, tolerate the ravages of war, or turn away from the human rights of those made in the image of God. These are the values of love and justice, reconciliation, and community that Jesus taught and that are at the core of what many of us believe, Christian or not."
***Jim Wallis is the editor of Cloud of Witnesses from our reading list and editor-in-chief of Soujourner's Magazine.***

Also of interest by Jim Wallis
The Soul of Politics: Beyond "Religious Right" and "Secular Left"
Broken We Kneel: Reflections on Faith and Citizenship (with Diana Butler Bass)

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs
"Marrying vivid eyewitness storytelling to his laserlike analysis, Jeffrey Sachs sets the stage by drawing a vivid conceptual map of the world economy and the different categories into which countries fall. Then, in a tour de force of elegance and compression, he explains why, over the past two hundred years, wealth has diverged across the planet in the manner that it has and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the cruel vortex of poverty."

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. He is internationally renowned for his work as economic adviser to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Africa.