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BOOKCLUB Discussion SeriesBOOKCLUB is a non-fiction reading and discussion group that meets monthly at Good Day Books, usually on the third Sunday of each month. BOOKCLUB was conceived as a forum in which geo- politics junkies can exchange their views about recent books that have been more widely quoted than read or understood. Each prospective participant in a BOOKCLUB discussion must buy from Good Day Books a new copy of the book to be discussed and must read the book before the discussion. The number of participants in any BOOKCLUB discussion is limited to 12. Contact Good Day Books to learn whether there will be a vacancy in an upcoming discussion.
The first two meetings of our BOOKCLUB Discussion Series were devoted to a brief examination of Samuel Huntington's (in)famous "clash of civilizations" hypothesis: "culture and cultural identities ... are [the primary factors] shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world." To this end, participants in our inaugural meeting on 24 April 2005 discussed Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus by Robert D. Kaplan (Random House, 2000), an account of a journey by master journalist Kaplan along geopolitical "fault lines" in the Near East between some of the world's major civilizations. The parts of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington (Simon & Schuster, 1996) relevant to the hypothesized clash in the Near East between Islamic and Western civilizations were discussed on 22 May 2005. The dates of subsequent discussions and the books (to be) discussed on those dates include: 26 Jun.'05, The Dream Palace of the Arabs by Fouad Ajami (Pantheon, 1998); 24 Jul.'05, The West & the Rest: Globalization & the Terrorist Threat by R. Scruton (ISI, '02); 28 Aug.'05, Islam in the World (Second Edition) by Malise Ruthven (Oxford Univ. Pr., '00); 18 Sep.'05, Blood and Oil by Michael T. Klare (Henry Holt, '04); 23 Oct.'05, The Iranian Labyrinth by Dilip Hiro (Nation Books, '05); 13 Nov.'05, Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Norton, '02); 11 Dec.'05, Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern by John Gray (Faber & Faber, '03); 29 Jan.'06, Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, & the Course of History by P. Bobbitt (Knopf, '02); 26 Feb.'06, Understanding China (Rev. Ed.) by John Bryan Starr (Hill & Wang, '01); 19 Mar.'06, The Great Wall & the Empty Fortress by A. Nathan and R. Ross (Norton, 1997); 23 Apr.'06, Rising to the Challenge by Avery Goldstein (Stanford Univ. Pr., '05); 21 May '06, Machiavelli's Children by Richard J. Samuels (Cornell Univ. Pr., '03); 25 Jun.'06, China's New Order by Wang Hui (Harvard Univ. Pr., '03); 30 Jul.'06, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Knopf, '04); 20 Aug.'06, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond by Shashi Tharoor (Arcade, '06); 17 Sep.'06, India: A Wounded Civilization by V.S. Naipaul; 15 Oct.'06, The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, '05); 19 Nov.'06, The Next Attack by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon (Henry Holt, '05); 17 Dec.'06, Inside Terrorism (Rev. Ed.) by Bruce Hoffman (Columbia Univ. Pr., '06); 21 Jan.'07, Occidentalism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (Penguin, '04); 25 Feb.'07, Origins of Terrorism (edited) by Walter Reich (Woodrow Wilson Center Pr., 1998); 18 Mar.'07, Understanding Terror Networks by Marc Sageman (Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., '04); 15 Apr.'07, Insurgency & Terrorism (2nd Ed.) by Bard O'Neill (Potomac Books, '05); 20 May '07, The Sling & the Stone: On War in the 21st Century by T. Hammes (Zenith Pr., '06); 17 Jun.'07, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife by John Nagl (Univ. of Chicago Pr., '05); 15 Jul.'07, Tournament of Shadows (Rev. Ed.) by K. Meyer and S. Brysac (Basic Books, '06); 19 Aug.'07, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid (Penguin, '03); 16 Sep.'07, The Ottoman Centuries by Patrick, Lord Kinross (Quill, 1979); 21 Oct.'07, Ataturk by Andrew Mango (Overlook Pr., 1999); 18 Nov.'07, Turkey Unveiled by Nicole Pope and Hugh Pope (Overlook Pr., 1998); 16 Dec.'07, The Turks Today by Andrew Mango (Overlook Pr., '04); 13 Jan.'08, Securing Japan by Richard J. Samuels (Cornell Univ. Pr., '07); 17 Feb.'08, Imagined Communities (Rev. Ed.) by Benedict Anderson (Verso, '06); 16 Mar.'08, The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism by William Pfaff; 20 Apr.'08, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey by M. Hakan Yavuz (Oxford Univ. Pr., '03); 18 May '08, Fascism: Past, Present, Future by Walter Laqueur (Oxford Univ. Pr., 1996); 15 Jun.'08, The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton (Vintage, '04); 20 Jul.'08, The Cultural Foundations of Nations by Anthony D. Smith (Blackwell, '08); and 28 Sep.'08, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
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