FDL's Book Salon is honored to have Maggie Mahar, health fellow at The Century Foundation, business journalist, and author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. The book has been made into a film, produced by Alex Gibney (best known for Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and featured on Bill Moyer's Journal.

Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler's new book re-examines the recent course of American politics. They tell us about how authoritarian politics - especially on the right - have helped give rise to increasing polarization between Republicans and Democrats. This is an important contribution to debate among political scientists about polarization, but deserves a much wider readership. If they are right - and the differences between authoritarians and non-authoritarians are the key factor driving polarized politics - then many of the received wisdoms of the punditocracy are flat out wrong. Right wing columnists like Michael Gerson and Clive Crook, who deplore the increasing extremism of American politics and especially of the left, are missing out on the ways in which right wing politics are increasingly based around authoritarianism and intolerance.

“Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s quest to change Harlem and America” is an important book. I think so not because his favorable portrait of the Harlem’s Children Zone provides the answers, but because it inspires so many questions: about the nature of urban poverty, the capacity and means by which public institutions can break cycles of systemic inequality, and how a community can transform. Tough doesn’t answer all of these questions—and some he leaves uninvestigated, such as the tension between learning and performing well on exams—but his moving account of Geoffrey Canada’s project to change the lives of the children of Harlem should be read by anyone who wants to think critically about how poverty, culture and education intersect.

Many people are perfectly capable of controlling their own actions – until they see or perhaps taste a bite of certain foods. Maybe your downfall is Buffalo wings. Maybe it’s a Snickers bar. Mine is Coconut Bliss ice cream. I understand that it has a lot of fat and sugar. I understand that eating an entire pint in one sitting is not healthy for me. I really want to fit in my clothes, and I know that eating an entire pint of ice cream is counterproductive towards that goal. And yet… “just one bite” is not an option for me. Just one bite turns into just one serving, and then that turns into “maybe a little bit more” until most of the pint is all gone. I DO have enough will power to put it back in the freezer before I can see the bottom of the carton. Just barely. But why is that? Why can’t I control my eating, and why can’t so many others control theirs?

Today’s book salon focuses on something that I think should get a lot more attention than it does – our psychological well-being as progressive activists. Hillary Rettig’s book, The Lifelong Activist, seeks to help us build activism sustainably into our lives. In order to do so, we’ll need to take better care of ourselves. She starts with an aspiration and a challenge, offering this vision: “Imagine how different the world would be if there were twice – or ten times! – as many progressive activists as there are now, and if those activists were happy and effective and enjoying long full-time or part time careers. Entire societies and cultures, and quite possibly every society and culture, would be transformed.”

For members of the Firedoglake community, I expect Matthew Kerbel’s Netroots:Online Progressives and the Transformation of American Politics will prove to be equal parts familiar and insightful. The familiarity comes from the rich descriptive account he provides of the netroots community itself. Unlike many of his contemporary academics, Kerbel has clearly done the legwork of getting to know progressive blogging communities like FDL, DailyKos, OpenLeft, and others. In offering a detailed account of the goals, values, and achievements of this community, Kerbel portrays the netroots as it is, rather than perpetuating the easy stereotypes so often provided by defensive political pundits and the like.

T.R. (Tom) Reid, the former Washington Post foreign correspondent whom I came to know and admire in the early 1990s when we were both stationed in Tokyo (I for the Chicago Tribune), is the ultimate medical tourist. Only, instead of looking for cheaper health care, he went looking for cheaper, more effective and universal health care systems.

Marijuana has become mainstream. Breathless stories about it in TIME, Newsweek, and all major media outlets proclaim that it is either a potential savior of the economy, the scourge of teen development, or just a plant that happens to have a bad rap.

Robert D. Auerbach began his career as a cab driver. A chance ride with Abram Lincoln Harris, a leading professor in the economics department at the University of Chicago -- and its only African-American member -- catapulted him into graduate school. (When he went in to register, he still had his changer on his belt.) There he became a student of Milton Friedman, completing a dissertation in 1969. Then it was on to the staff of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank – the beginning of a lifelong no-love-lost affair with the central bank.

Electing Barack Obama has actually been sort of the same thing. For a lot of people, just getting Obama elected president was IT. They’d been fighting (or hiding under the bed, whichever the choice) for so long that this was the be-all and end-all. And then he got elected (with the help of a lot of people and people who actually went and stood in the voting booth and made their choice) and everyone held their breaths and waited for some disaster to hit before the inaugural. And then Aretha Franklin stood up and sang and the Chief Justice screwed up the oath and they did it again. And there’s been all this noise trying to delegitimize the entire thing.