Summertime Reading
by Ralph Nader
Ah, summertime reading. Set aside the e-mails, close down the computer and pick up some good books. Here are some worthy suggestions ala non-fiction:
1. Harper's editor, Lewis H. Lapham, has written Gag Rule - On the Supppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy. What a sharp, concise pen, he has. "Dissent is Democracy. Democracy is in Trouble."
2. God's Politics, the bestseller by theologian Jim Wallis, believes in applying the prophetic religious traditions to social justice. He asks: "since when did believing in God and having moral values make you pro-war, pro-rich and pro-Republican?" Bono, Bill Moyers and Archbishop Tutu praise the book on the back cover.
3. Steve Brouwer, grandfather, has written this super-readable, soft cover titled, Robbing Us Blind: The Return of the Bush Gagna and the Mugging of America. Its large print layout, factual content and comparisons between haves and have-nots, punctuated by Matt Wuerker's searing cartoons, make this a tract that motivated from pure outrage.
4. National Security Advisor to four Senators, Winslow T. Wheeler turns on the Congress with his book The Wastrels of Defense. It is about the military budget and pork - pushed by the munitions industry marinating willing members of Congress with campaign money and wasteful projects that cost tens of billions out of your pockets.
5. My boyhood sports hero, Lou Gehrig, is the subject of Luckiest Man - a fine biography of the Iron Man for the New York Yankees. Lou Gehrig's disease, still without a cure, receives its best biographical treatment in this volume.
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