An essential book for anyone interested in an alternative view of American history.  Zinn presents significant events and periods in American history through the eyes of the minority, the weak, and the oppressed.  He dismises our assumptions, biases, and conventional wisdom as he seeks to present a more complete telling of history.  Thoroughly researched and clearly written this book is easily accessable to the reader.

Zinn focuses a lot of attention on American Indians, African Americans, other minority groups, and the poor; groups he see as underrepresented in traditional histories. 

Reading this book can truly change the way you view history and inform the way you see contemporary politics.   

Banker to the Poor charts the development of the Grameen Bank established by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh starting in 1976 and continuing through the present.  The bank developed the concept of Micro lending; loaning extremely small amounts of money to very poor people with little or no credit.  The project was a tremendous success in Bangladesh and has since spread throughout the developing world.

Yunnus tells his story in a very personal way, talking about many of the individuals to which the bank extended credit.  His style is very simple, direct, clear, and comfortable.  

While discussing his fights with the local and federal bureaucracies and World Bank, Yunus remains refreshingly apolitical.  He is forceful in his beliefs and rails against those organizations and practices which he believes have failed the poor, but does not enter the fray as a partisan.  

Yunus and the Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Peace.  

This book leaves the reader with a true sense of hope for the world's poor.

In Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond seeks to answer the question, why do some societies advance to a point where they can conquer and displace, while other societies are conquered and displaced?  The answer he finds is that the conquering societies are those that developed guns, germs, and steel.  From that point Diamond searches for the reasons some societies developed guns, germs, and steel and others did not.  The conclusions he draws are fascinating. 

That author looks at many factors influencing the development of technology and diseases including plant and animal domestication, social structures, continental geography, climates, etc.  He is searching for the factors that held some societies back while allowing others to steam forward. 

The book is thorough in its treatment of each continent and its indigenous society, there is no hint of a Euro-centric vision of the world.  The author’s experience with New Guinea makes that the focal point of many of his examples.  I wish Diamond had included some kind of notes and references.  He draws many conclusions which must be taken at face value given his lack of citations.

Guns, Germs and Steel is a fascinating look at the forces which have shaped our world and certainly worth reading.

In the eyes of Thomas Friedman the world is no longer round, it has become flat. This flattening is the result of the World Wide Web, high speed internet access, the fall of the Berlin Wall, outsourcing, uploading, and several other factors. A flat world means that everyone has access to the same information, opportunities, and potential. A kid in Warsaw can research information from the great western libraries and an accountant in India can do your taxes; the playing field has been leveled to an extraordinary degree.

Friedman looks at how this affects individuals seeking jobs, corporations, developing countries, and US foreign policy. All these parties must behave differently to survive in a flat world. He writes in depth about the problems each of these groups face and what they can do to thrive in this new economic and geopolitical situation.

The book is incredibly well researched and the author is well traveled. He spent time at many different corporate headquarters and visited India and China to see for himself the effect this globalization is having there. The text is filled to the brim with individual stories, quotes and interviews which lend a narrative style and a legitimacy to what Friedman has to say.

The author believes very strongly that free trade is a good thing and that it will help the most people around the world faster than any other system. He is quick to marvel at gigantic corporations, which may or may not be be forces of good, and may or may not act in responsible ways. He looks at the Middle East with a very critical eye asking why they have fallen so far behind and why their people are so hateful as to turn to suicide terrorism. Friedman has his point of view and certainly has his biases. As with any "history" book, this one must be read with an open and balanced mind.

Like many great novels Their Eyes Were Watching God was effectively lost from the time of its publication in 1937 until the 1970s.  Its revival reflected the growing interest in Feminist and Black literature, and the scholarship surrounding it. 

The novel is about Janie: finding her way, finding her voice, and finding an understanding of herself.   Hurston devotes the entire book to her main character, a young black women in the American South.  Janie starts her story as the daughter of a sharecropper and finds her way through different relationships, classes, and gender roles as she ages and searches for meaning in her life.

I was expecting the book to deal with race relations in the South, but they are strangely absent.  The conflicts instead are between the sexes, with Janie struggling with her role as a woman and wife.  Hurston gives her a voice so clear that I feel like I understand her better than most literary characters despite the barriers of time, place, race, and gender that separate us.  I really understand what Janie was going through.    

This book is a remarkable portal into a time and place which is long gone but certainly still important to our understanding of modern American culture.