There is a fundamental moral problem about the way we use money. It isn't immoral, but it is amoral — it values unimportant things (McDonalds's franchises, foreign exchange, hedge funds) highly, and important things (families, communities, nurses) little. Because of this, it tends to drive out what's good in society, and what's vital for our lives.

— David Boyle, The Little Money Book

Welcome to BookProject

This page gives a brief overview of the website and our purpose in creating it.

BookProject is a volunteer-run nonprofit. All BookProject services are free. We do not sell books (or anything else). We do not accept advertising.

The website

BookProject is an open, non-commercial platform for:

Book reviews

You are welcome to read and post book and film reviews on the website. We welcome reviews of most any published book, and most any film released on DVD.

Reading lists

Groups and individuals are welcome to use the website to publish lists of books and films they recommend. Optionally, each reading list can have a "review team" of one or more people who rate and review the books and films on the list.

Groups

Any group of people with an interest in peace, social wealth, or the environment is welcome to create a private group on the website. Within a group, people can read each other's reviews of books they have read (visible only to the group, if desired). Group administrators can manage a central book list for the group and post messages to the group.

Person-to-person book and DVD circulation

Anyone is welcome to use the website's tools to circulate books and DVDs. Circulation works as follows. A person who wants to circulate a book (or DVD) visits our website to get a "book code" for their book. They put the book code into the book, and then either hand the book on to a friend or leave it in a book-exchange location. When the next person finishes the book, they hand it on to a friend of theirs or leave it in a book-exchange location, and so on. Each person who reads the book can make an entry in the book's travelog on the website, and can then use the website to follow the book's travels as other people read it and hand it on.

The books

All books on the BookProject website have been added by members. (It just takes a few clicks to add a book; learn how.) While we welcome most any published book, two broad classes of books are at the heart of BookProject:

• Books that grapple with current local and global challenges.
• Books that speak to what is meaningful in life.

These classifications are meant to be far-reaching. The challenge of creating peace, for example, encompasses topics ranging from geo-politics to neighborhood community building to inter-personal peace. Books that "speak to meaning" are simply those that remind us of what is worthwhile in the realm of human endeavor. They are not bounded by genre.

Our purpose

BookProject grew from three main ideas:

• Most people share the same values on fundamental issues of peace, social wealth, and the environment.
• People become powerful as a group when they exchange ideas and create a shared vision.
• Books and films are two of the most effective ways to communicate ideas.

Our statement of purpose:

Our view is that raising the level of knowledge and discourse on peace, social wealth, and sustainability within local communities is the single most important action that can be taken to create change in the world. Discussing and circulating issue-oriented books and films is one way for people to share knowledge, and to open productive, non-cynical channels of communication within their community.

While BookProject embraces a wide range of topics, we take a particular interest in the following three.

Social wealth

We use the term "social wealth" in intentional contrast to financial wealth. As a starting point, we will describe social wealth as the ability of a society to nurture its members, generation after generation, by providing not just food, water, shelter, and health care, but also community, education, identity, purpose, and dignity.

Many people have given powerful expression to the concept of social wealth. Among them is Robert F. Kennedy:

But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task: It is to confront the poverty of satisfaction — purpose and dignity — that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product — if we judge the United States of America by that — that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

— Robert F. Kennedy, March 18, 1968

We intend BookProject to serve as a platform for varied expressions of what constitutes true wealth in a society.

The media

The mass media play a fundamental role in shaping our society, and yet their influence is nearly as invisible to us as water is to fish.

Over the past several decades, television has replaced the printed word as the principal source of information in our society. At the same time, a tremendous consolidation of media ownership has taken place, so that most of our news, entertainment, and information — our very perception of the world beyond our local community — is now created by a handful of for-profit media conglomerates. During this half century, citizen participation in our democracy has declined sharply, and commercialism and consumerism have assumed dominant roles in our culture.

Al Gore addressed media consolidation and its effects in his recent book:

It's hard to understate how much media ownership has changed in the space of a generation... Now that the [media] conglomerates can dominate the expressions of opinion that flood the minds of the citizenry and selectively choose the ideas that are amplified so loudly as to drown out others that, whatever their validity, do not have wealthy patrons, the result is a de facto coup d'etat overthrowing the rule of reason. Greed and wealth now allocate power in our society, and that power is used in turn to further increase and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few. If this sounds overly strident, please read on, as I get down to cases.

— Al Gore, The Assault on Reason

A for-profit mass media system inevitably evolves in ways that maximize profit, regardless of whether the resulting media environment provides a platform for truly creative expression, or otherwise serves the public good.

There is no question that mass media is intrinsically woven into our society. One important question, though, is whether the mass media system should serve private or public interests.

We intend BookProject to serve both as a way to raise awareness of this lens through which we all view the world, and as a way to encourage discourse that rises above the din of the mainstream media.

Inner peace

The concept of inner peace is as broad as human experience, and we wouldn't presume to apply a single definition to it here. Nonetheless, our view is that inner peace is crucial to creating peace, social wealth, and sustainability in the world — because it serves to reduce consumption, and because it serves to reduce conflict.

Mankind is now consuming the earth's resources 30% faster than the planet can regenerate them. Further, a minority of the world's population — the industrialized nations — are responsible for the majority of that consumption.

In the industrialized nations (where population growth has largely stabilized), one driver behind rising consumption is the ubiquitous marketing that is the engine of a for-profit mass media system. The very purpose of marketing, and of advertising in particular, is to spur consumption: "Buy more and you will be happier."

In a sense, this is fair play within the framework of free market capitalism. However, because of the skill and scale of the enterprise — Robert W. McChesney writes that modern marketing "is clearly the greatest concerted attempt at psychological manipulation in all of human history" — there are enormous hidden costs that neither the marketers nor the media corporations bear.

What often goes unnoticed about the "buy more and you will be happier" mantra are its two profound corollaries. First, that you are not happy enough now. And second, that happiness comes from outside you and exists in the future — from consumer goods you may acquire in the future, places you may travel to in the future, and so on — not from within you, and not in the present moment.

We intend BookProject to serve as a platform for the exchange of ideas on the practice of being fulfilled, joyful, peaceful — call it what you will — in the present moment and without an excess of consumption.

Inner peace also serves to reduce conflict.

It sometimes happens that we set out after peace in anger, with a desire for vengeance against people who have perpetrated injustice or violence.

An interesting question is whether a social or political movement can contribute to creating peace if it is composed of individuals who are motivated by anger. Or whether a person who has persistent conflict at home can contribute to creating peace outside the home. Or whether a person who cannot find peace within themselves can contribute to creating peace in their home, or in society.

We may think of peace as the absence of war, that if the great powers would reduce their weapons arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we will see our own minds — our own prejudices, fears, and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of the bombs are still here — in our hearts and minds — and, sooner or later, we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women.

— Thick Nhat Hanh, Love in Action : Writings on Nonviolent Social Change

We intend BookProject to serve as a platform for the exchange of ideas on the practice of creating peace that begins with one person and spreads to touch their home, community, nation, and world.