If Jennifer, Alex, and a couple other people don't respond, they are out of here.

PS- DE, I actually just got an email from Nathan the other day, as he is in the middle of biking across... Canada..

_The New American Militarism,_ by Andrew Bacevich
_Shock Doctrine,_ by Naomi Wolf
_War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,_ by Norman Solomon

Lies and the lying liars that tell them.

Basically, Al Franken, through comedy, debunked Fox and the right-wing noise machine, before anyone else. Plus, its funny.

Or, Krugman, either the collection of columns documenting the first few years of Bush (the Great Unraveling), or the recent book (Conscience of a Liberal).

More Academic
Freud - Civilization and its Discontents
Lippman - Public Opinion
Heilbroner - The Worldly Philosophers
Fanon - the Wretched of the Earth
Gore - the Assault on Reason
Zinni - the Battle for Peace
Sledge - With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

Less Academic
The Heart of Darkness
100 Years of Solitude
Narcissus and Goldimund
Some Call it Sleep
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
Fight Club

Current
The Imperial Presidency - Arthur Schlesinger (one of the best histories of the presidential position)
The Personal President - Theodore J. Lowi (how the idea of the president has become corrupted in American society)
The World is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman (Makes perfect sense of modern trends in globalization)
Imperial Life in the Emerald City - Rajiv Chandrasekaran (why/how the Bush Admin. bungled Iraq)

Novels/History
An Army at Dawn & The Day of Battle - Rick Atkinson (The campaigns in N. Africa and Italy during WWII)
Undaunted Courage - Stephen Ambrose (Lewis, Clark, Jefferson, and the West.)
The Radicalism of the American Revolution - Gordon S. Wood (Foundations and Social/Political/Economic ramifications)
Team of Rivals - Dorris Kearns Goodwin (Lincoln's remarkable political genius during the Civil War)

Biographies

Benjamin Franklin - Edmund S. Morgan (far and away the best [and slimmest] version of the great Philadelphian's life)
Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times - H.W. Brands (one of the better and more recent Bios)

Pleasure:

All Fiction
Shogun - James Clavell (a sweeping tale of a European in 17th century Japan)
Aztec - Gary Jennings (engrossing story of the Aztec Empire.)
The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe (a remarkable and entertaining look at New York city life)

I was just in the Penn Book store and was amazed at the amount of interesting new academic books that are being published-something the chain book stores seem to lack.

oh, and i agree with the Shock Doctrine but it is by Naomi Klein, not Wolf.

"A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World"

I could easily recommend a thousand books in film, modernism, and literary theory, so I will spare us all.

Better, by Atul Gawande, about the American health system
The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, easily the most gripping nonfiction book in years
Adverbs by Daniel Handler is my favorite recent novel.
The Corrections by Franzen is also terrific.
One lit-crit book that's actually pretty good is Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice about Stein and Toklas.
I would highly recommend Columbarium by Susan Stewart as a recent book of poetry.
And The Complete Visual History of Star Wars is totally awesome.

Race Matters, Cornel West - it's not the "best" book on race but it's personal and short and is a starting point for dialogue
Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol - obviously a little dated but still remains one of the best documentations of the broad inequity and injustice of education
America is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan - one of my favorite classics about immigration and American history from the great Filipino writer(though not sure if it's out of print)

I also found Samantha Powers book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide an amazing book.

Fiction:
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon

On my bookshelf but highly recommended by folks:
Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and A New Social Movement, Jean Anyon - links broader social issues with education policy

While this is evolving into a fun scan of everyone’s bookshelf, I think people are losing the scope to the original poster. As things have evolved in this thread, we’re reaching the point where we all should just migrate over to Facebook and gaze at each other’s “My Bookshelf” app.

Two things to remember here: D2’s students or mentees or what have you’s are asking for contemporary takes on American matters. This rules out Freud, The Worldly Philosophers, Faulkner, etc. Yes, they’re all relevant to “getting America” (maybe not Freud unless you’re defending a dissertation to a very out of touch committee), but in my experience European students of this age tend to be much more schooled in the basics of cultural and, more impressively, economic theory than their American counterparts, and while someone like Faulkner may help one understand a certain trajectory in American fiction, I don’t think he’s at all necessary for general “gist” level of study.

Second, budget. $200 makes this a sort of fun game in resource management, and I think it’s fun to take the budgetary challenge rather than just ignoring that parameter and leaving D2 and crew to figure it out.
That said, here’s my two cents or two hundred dollars.

(Actually, $200 will get you the first four seasons of The Wire on DVD used. I’d say that may be a worthier investment than a lot of paper, and probably easier to take home, but then you get into regional encoding and the like. I jest.)

Fiction:
David Markson, most recently The Last Novel, but really any Markson will do. Very much in line with traditions in European fiction, particularly chilly post WWII French and German experimental work, what a lay reader can probably get away with calling anti-fiction.
Shelly Jackson, Melancholy of Anatomy, really a “one trick” formal exercise, but a much more visceral read than Markson. I’d say if Markson is picked up, the buyer has to read Jackson as a counterpoint. I’d say Jackson can be read alone too.
Junot Diaz, The Brief and Wonderful Life of Oscar Wow. Wonderful read. I’m pretty sure the “geek cred” requisite to really get the novel can be surmounted these days since all the obscure otaku stuff is still better documented online than the stuff of the “normal” world. (hmm, not out in paperback till Sept.)
Chabon’s been mentioned, but his Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a more recent title. Good too. Probably a good read to get the pulse on “mainstream” American fiction. I’m also guessing there are plenty of used copies of Egger’s What is the What laying around.

/Fiction:
I strongly disagree with the recommendations for Klein’s Shock Doctrine. Rather, have them read some policy papers from the AEI or the like (a lot of that shit is free) and compare them with counterpart publications from the Brookings Institute, or Human Rights Watch, etc. I think it’s better to educate these students as to the origins of American foreign and domestic policy, and those trying to critique it within the policy realm than it is to entertain them with “outrage porn” consisting of a thin psych theory (worse-so, blurring clinical with social psych theory) characterizing policy makers as the Legion of Doom.

For that reason, Gore’s book The Assault on Reason works both ways to some degree, and should be read to get the tone of political discourse between the populace as well as between politicians and the populace.

Also second A Problem from Hell.

I can’t think of a single book I’d recommend on the place of religion/God in American society (to get at the student’s atheism question). Recent studies of religion seem too reverential, so to speak, and the recent rise in atheist tracks isn’t really productive either. I’d be interested in a solid work that appreciates the contributions of religion to American society historically and in the contemporary moment while simultaneously acknowledging the societal problems engendered by Americans’ particular brands of religious and “spiritual” observance.

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture (available in many online formats for free): while it’s too optimistic in its treatment of the fault lines in American intellectual/creative property, the legal linchpins of globalized mass culture as it has existed are laid out here pretty well.

Colby Buzzell’s My War: Killing Time in Iraq. I think this provides a character study of American soldiers that’s more accurate than the go-to accounts and hagiography’s used by the “sides” in the domestic war debate.

Bill Bishop The Great Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. I think there’s a lot of bull in this, probably as sociologically accurate as David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise. That said, I don’t think it should be read as any insight into how Americans actually are, but as a message Americans are receiving regarding their identity (and likely internalizing). On a similar note, though a stronger case, Robert Putman’s Bowling Alone is still worth a read.

I’ll also support Arsenal1530’s recommendations for current events books:

The Imperial Presidency - Arthur Schlesinger (one of the best histories of the presidential position)
The Personal President - Theodore J. Lowi (how the idea of the president has become corrupted in American society)
The World is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman (Makes perfect sense of modern trends in globalization)
Imperial Life in the Emerald City - Rajiv Chandrasekaran (why/how the Bush Admin. bungled Iraq)

Two Presidency books there, I think in the interest of presenting the full picture of the U.S. gov at work, some time ought to be granted the judicial and legislative branches as well. There was a trio of Supreme Court books out recently. Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine, Jeffrey Rosen’s The Supreme Court: bunch of post colon verbiage about personalities defining America, and Jan Crawford Greenberg’s Supreme Conflict. Toobin and Rosen’s books strike me as a bit softball armchair psychiatrist, though Greenberg’s book doesn’t get a whole hearted endorsement either. Maybe any of them can be read as an illustration of problems in American analytical long form journalism. Other recommendations? Anything recent regarding Congress published recently worth reading?

Musical:
Sort of cheating here, but Sondheim’s Assassins went through a revival a few years back (there was also the Arden’s recent production, and I know of at least one theater company in Boston putting it on now), putting a new cast recording and the book out on the market. The “take a shot” theme speaks volumes to both American gun culture and American “opportunity” (the revival added “Something Just Broke” which also speaks to some of the quasi-religious underpinnings of blunt “gut” patriotism a lot of Americans still adhere too).

Since I’m not sure how these stipends are going to be disbursed, I went with “Amazon discount” cover prices (though a lot of this stuff can be found on used markets for a lot cheaper), and I’m up around the $200 ballpark.

I think I'm being "reverse condescending" here. I'd actually expect D2's group to be aghast at the general level of economic and global political ignorance in the U.S., particularly given the background of this group of students. I think Freakanomics may also get at this problem with American's weird economic literacy from a different angle.

More than the generator, I'd also love to see McSweeney's or someone audit Friedman's carbon debt for flying all over his flat world to "research" this "problem."

PS, the "ha" was embedded with a repeat of the McSweeney's link. Was there supposed to be a different punchline?

Quite a list to cull through. Thanks for all the fantastic recommendations.

Maybe just one other request:

A number of the students have mentioned that they are surprised that they haven't yet met someone they consider a stereotypical American. You know, a Fox-watching, my country right or wrong, gun-toting, mono-lingual, SUV-driving, type.

I give them readings from multiple perspectives on all the issues we examine, and I do my best to portray the perspectives of our Republican countrymates during the more broad-ranging class discussions (it's kind of fun, actually), but I was wondering if anyone had some favorite works written from someone on the other side of the fence - or at least books like What's The Matter With Kansas that perhaps analyze contemporary conservative American perspectives from a somewhat non-polemical take.

(Actually, I would consider anything by Thomas Friedman to fit into the category of being written by someone on the other side of the fence, but that's another matter).

A request was for "What is going on in the American intellectual world right now,"

This stuff is as close to intellectualism as I get at this point in my life. I threw in one novel, just one science fiction book, but it is "hard scifi"... I guess almost anything by Ursula K. LeGuin but tops are "The Lathe of Heaven" and "The Left Hand of Darkness." blow your mind...

Eco-economics:
E. F. Schumacher ‘Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered’;
Paul Hawken, Hunter Lovins, Amory Lovins 'The Ecology of Commerce';
David C. Korten 'The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community,' 'When Corporations Rule The World' 'The Post Corporate World: Life After Capitalism';
Amy Goodman 'The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them,' ';
Gus Speth (James Gustave Speth, Dean Yale Forestry) 'The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability';
William McDonough & Michael Braungart 'Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things';
Robert Costanza, John H Cumberland, Herman Daly, and Robert Goodland 'An Introduction to Ecological Economics';
Bill McKibben 'Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future';

History:
Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle 'A People's History of American Empire';

Ways of seeing, re-seeing by changing the question:
Betty Edwards 'New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Workbook: Guided Practice in the Five Basic Skills of Drawing';
Janine Benyus 'Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature';
George Lakoff 'The Political Mind';
M. Mitchell Waldrop 'Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos';
anything by Stephen Jay Gould
anything by E.O. Wilson
anything by John McPhee

Adaptation:
Lester R. Brown 'Plan B 3.0';
Kim Stanley Robinson 'Red Mars' (Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars of which Red is much better)