BookClub Discussion Series

BookClub is a politics reading-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 politics junkies could exchange their views about recent and not-so-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. Please 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. On 22 May 2005, our members discussed 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.

The dates of subsequent discussions and the books discussed on those dates include:
22 Aug.'10, Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest (W.W. Norton, 2000);
25 Jul.'10, The New Cold War (Rev.Ed.) by Edward Lucas (Palgrave Macmillan, '09);
20 Jun.'10, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia by David Remnick (Vintage, 1997);
16 May '10, The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin, '05);
18 Apr.'10, Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Knopf, 1994);
21 Mar.'10, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Union by David Remnick (Vintage, 1993);
21 Feb.'10, The Revenge of the Past by Ronald Grigor Suny (Stanford Univ. Pr., 1993); 
24 Jan.'10, The Gulag Archipelago (Abr.  Ed.) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Harper & Row, 1985);
06 Dec.'09, The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (Harper & Row, 1951);
15 Nov.'09, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes (Vintage, 1995);
18 Oct.'09, The Russian Revolution (3rd Ed.) by Sheila Fitzpatrick (Oxford Univ. Pr., '08);
04 Oct.'09, Russian under the Old Regime (Rev. Ed.) by Richard Pipes (Penguin, 1974);
16 Aug.'09, The Anatomy of Revolution (Rev. Ed.) by Crane Brinton (Prentice-Hall, 1965);
02 Aug.'09, Parts II & III of Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt (Random House, '08);
21 Jun.'09, Part I of Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt (Random House, '08);
17 May '09, Dreams and Shadows by Robin Wright (Penguin, '08);
19 Apr.'09, The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr (W.W. Norton, '06);
15 Mar.'09, Modern Iran (Updated Ed.) by Nikki Keddie (Yale Univ. Pr., '06);
15 Feb.'09, Persian Mirrors (Updated Ed.) by Elaine Sciolino (Free Press, '05);
18 Jan.'09, The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis (Modern Library, '03);
14 Dec.'08, The Future of Political Islam by Graham E. Fuller (Palgrave Macmillan, '03);
16 Nov.'08, The Failure of Political Islam by Olivier Roy (Harvard Univ. Pr., 1994);
26 Oct.'08, Islam Today by Akbar S. Ahmed (I.B.Tauris, '06);
28 Sep.'08, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt;
20 Jul.'08, The Cultural Foundations of Nations by Anthony D. Smith (Blackwell, '08);
15 Jun.'08, The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton (Vintage, '04);
18 May '08, Fascism: Past, Present, Future by Walter Laqueur (Oxford Univ. Pr., 1996);
20 Apr.'08, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey by M. Hakan Yavuz (Oxford Univ. Pr., '03);
16 Mar.'08, The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism by William Pfaff;
17 Feb.'08, Imagined Communities (Rev. Ed.) by Benedict Anderson (Verso, '06);
13 Jan.'08, Securing Japan by Richard J. Samuels (Cornell Univ. Pr., '07);
16 Dec.'07, The Turks Today by Andrew Mango (Overlook Pr., '04);
18 Nov.'07, Turkey Unveiled by Nicole and Hugh Pope (Overlook Pr., 1998);
21 Oct.'07, Ataturk by Andrew Mango (Overlook Pr., 1999);
16 Sep.'07, The Ottoman Centuries by Patrick, Lord Kinross (Quill, 1979);
19 Aug.'07, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid (Penguin, '03);
15 Jul.'07, Tournament of Shadows (Rev. Ed.) by K. Meyer and S. Brysac (Basic Books, '06);
17 Jun.'07, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife by John Nagl (Univ. of Chicago Pr., '05);
20 May '07, The Sling & the Stone: On War in the 21st Century by T. Hammes (Zenith Pr., '06);
15 Apr.'07, Insurgency & Terrorism (2nd Ed.) by Bard O'Neill (Potomac Books, '05);
18 Mar.'07, Understanding Terror Networks by Marc Sageman (Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., '04);
25 Feb.'07, Origins of Terrorism (edited) by Walter Reich (Woodrow Wilson Center Pr., 1998);
21 Jan.'07, Occidentalism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (Penguin, '04);
17 Dec.'06, Inside Terrorism (Rev. Ed.) by Bruce Hoffman (Columbia Univ. Pr., '06);
19 Nov.'06, The Next Attack by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon (Henry Holt, '05);
15 Oct.'06, The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, '05);
17 Sep.'06, India: A Wounded Civilization by V.S. Naipaul;
20 Aug.'06, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond by Shashi Tharoor (Arcade, '06);
30 Jul.'06, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Knopf, '04);
25 Jun.'06, China's New Order by Wang Hui (Harvard Univ. Pr., '03);
21 May '06, Machiavelli's Children by Richard J. Samuels (Cornell Univ. Pr., '03);
23 Apr.'06, Rising to the Challenge by Avery Goldstein (Stanford Univ. Pr., '05);
19 Mar.'06, The Great Wall & the Empty Fortress by A. Nathan and R. Ross (W.W. Norton, 1997);
26 Feb.'06, Understanding China (Rev. Ed.) by John Bryan Starr (Hill & Wang, '01);
29 Jan.'06, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, & the Course of History by P. Bobbitt (Knopf, '02);
11 Dec.'05, Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern by John Gray (Faber & Faber, '03);
13 Nov.'05, Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Norton, '02);
23 Oct.'05, The Iranian Labyrinth by Dilip Hiro (Nation Books, '05);
18 Sep.'05, Blood and Oil by Michael T. Klare (Henry Holt, '04);
28 Aug.'05, Islam in the World (Second Edition) by Malise Ruthven (Oxford Univ. Pr., '00);
24 Jul.'05, The West & the Rest: Globalization & the Terrorist Threat by R. Scruton (ISI, '02);
26 Jun.'05, The Dream Palace of the Arabs by Fouad Ajami (Pantheon, 1998).

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