The Undeniably Non-Fiction Book Club (Berkeley)

For those who are interested, here is the link to the detailed results from the voting.

The book traces how a single prehistoric language became the ancestor of languages now spoken by nearly half the world, including English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, and Persian. That language, Proto-Indo-European, was never written down, and linguists have rebuilt parts of it by comparing its descendants, work that began when an eighteenth-century British judge in India noticed that Sanskrit resembled Latin and Greek. Laura Spinney, a science journalist whose previous book, Pale Rider, covered the Spanish flu, writes for a general audience and combines the linguistic record with archaeology and ancient DNA. She places the language's speakers among the Yamnaya, herders on the grasslands north of the Black Sea who began migrating outward about five thousand years ago, and she covers the newer view that the Anatolian languages, such as Hittite, split from an older parent language before the Yamnaya expansion, making them a sister branch rather than a descendant.

The book opens with a history of the field, including how the idea of an original Aryan people was used to support theories of racial superiority. After chapters on where the language began and what can be reconstructed of it, Spinney gives a chapter to each major branch: Anatolian; Tocharian, once spoken in what is now western China; Celtic, Germanic, and Italic; Indo-Iranian; Baltic and Slavic; and Albanian, Armenian, and Greek. Along the way she covers what shared vocabulary suggests about the speakers' myths, herding, metalwork, and trade, and considers whether disease, along with conflict, drove the large population turnover in prehistoric Europe. The history is interwoven with visits to the linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists doing the research, and the book closes on what this story means for present-day questions of language and migration.

This event will be hybrid. I will host the meeting in person at my house in Berkeley which is near the intersection of College Ave and Woolsey St. I will email people the address the Saturday before the meeting.

Here are the Zoom details:
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88589978749?pwd=B3aRifcxwzL3kmUTrSJeaPlbozircV.1
Or dial: ‪(US) +1-669-444-9171 Meeting ID:88589978749# Participant ID: none Passcode:690326#

For those who are interested, here is the link to the detailed results from the voting.

In 1951, Iran’s parliament voted to nationalize the country’s oil industry, which had been controlled for half a century by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the forerunner of BP. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a European-educated lawyer and nationalist, led the effort and became the face of a broader push for Iranian self-rule. Britain tried to reverse the decision through negotiation, an embargo on Iranian oil, and an international court case, and when those failed it asked the United States for help. President Truman declined, but the Eisenhower administration, with John Foster Dulles at the State Department and his brother Allen Dulles at the CIA, agreed. In August 1953, CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr., a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, organized a coup using bribed politicians, paid street crowds, and army officers loyal to the Shah. The first attempt failed and the Shah fled the country, but a second attempt a few days later removed Mossadegh and returned the Shah to power.

Stephen Kinzer, a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times, published the book in 2003, drawing on declassified records that include the CIA’s own internal history of the operation. He begins with the background: the Qajar dynasty, the early oil concession granted to British investor William Knox D’Arcy, and the rise of the Pahlavi family. He then follows the aftermath, as Mossadegh spent the rest of his life under house arrest and Mohammad Reza Shah ruled with growing repression for 25 years until the 1979 revolution brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power. Kinzer argues that the coup set a pattern for later American covert interventions, beginning in Guatemala the following year, and that its legacy fed lasting Iranian distrust of the United States and contributed to the rise of anti-Western militancy in the Middle East.

This event will be hybrid. I will host the meeting in person at my house in Berkeley which is near the intersection of College Ave and Woolsey St. I will email people the address the Saturday before the meeting.

Here are the Zoom details:
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88589978749?pwd=B3aRifcxwzL3kmUTrSJeaPlbozircV.1
Or dial: ‪(US) +1-669-444-9171 Meeting ID:88589978749# Participant ID: none Passcode:690326#