YNPN San Francisco Book Club Blog

Dear YNPN,

We’re pleased to announce that our December Book Club Event will be Reader’s Choice! We collected the titles of books you recommended over the last year. Now it’s time for you to decide which book you would like to read for our December event.

Please vote for 1 of the below titles by leaving us a comment before October 1, 2009.

1. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr.Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracey Kidder
The story traces the life of Paul Farmer, an anthropologist and specialist in infectious diseases, whose goal is to redress the “steep gradient of inequality” in medical service to the desperately poor.

2. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success.

3. Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner
Weiner follows two scientists living in the Galapagos as they watch Darwin’s finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.

4. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof
Half the Sky lays out an agenda for the world’s women and three major abuses: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence including honor killings and mass rape; maternal mortality, which needlessly claims one woman a minute.

5. Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents by Minal Hajratwala
Hajratwala, a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News, tells of the Indian diaspora experience through a part-personal, part-reported story of her extended family’s journey through 5 continents.

Thanks in advance for your vote! Winning book title will be announced October 1., 2009

If you have any questions about YNPN Book Club – or are interested in being a part of the YNPN Book Club Committee leave

The YNPN Book Club is proud to announce our October YNPN Book Club event, reading the New York Times Bestseller:

A Problem from Hell – America and the Age of Genocide
By Samantha Power

Whether you’ve had a chance to read the book, or want to learn more about the US’s role in genocides, or you’re just looking for a way to participate in a fun networking event, please join us!

Where: Foundation Center (312 Sutter Street, Suite 606, San Francisco)
When: 6 to 8pm, Wednesday October 7, 2009

We’ll have refreshments during our discussion!

If you have any questions or would like to receive the Evite, please email at bookclubsf@ynpn.org

About the Book:
Samanth Power, a former journalist for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist and now the executive director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, offers an uncompromising and disturbing examination of 20th-century acts of genocide and U.S responses to them. In clean, unadorned prose, Power revisits the Turkish genocide directed at Armenians in 1915-1916, the Holocaust, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, Iraqi attacks on Kurdish populations, Rwanda, and Bosnian “ethnic cleansing,” and in doing so, argues that U.S. intervention has been shamefully inadequate.

Her analysis of U.S. politics what she casts as the State Department’s unwritten rule that nonaction is better than action with a PR backlash; the Pentagon’s unwillingness to see a moral imperative; an isolationist right; a suspicious left and a population unconcerned with distant nations aims to show how ingrained inertia is, even as she argues that the U.S. must reevaluate the principles it applies to foreign policy choices. But Power also sees signs that the fight against genocide has made progress. This is a well-researched and powerful study that is both a history and a call to action.

* Get your Discounted Book at BookSmith (1644 Haight Street)! *

YNPN Book Club is partnering with BookSmith to make our book club more exciting at the same time supporting our independent bookstores in San Francisco. Just tell them you are a member of the YNPN book club and you’ll get a 15% discount on the book we’re reading in the book club.

* Become part of the YNPN Book Club Committee!
We’re looking for volunteers to join our book club committee. Want experience in event planning and/or developing leadership skills? Interested in meeting authors? You don’t need to be a big bookworm to join us. However, if you love reading books, that’s a big plus! If you’re interested in learning more about this volunteer opportunity, please email YNPN at bookclubsf@ynpn.org with the Subject heading ‘Book Club Committee Volunteer’