451° F: Hot Books:
The New Pearl Harbor

Alta Price

451° F: Hot Books
has a new blog!  For complete information on which books will be
discussed, how to host a book discussion group, where to sign up to
host a group, and much, much more, go to http://www.451f.org.

Blending
my experiences as a Dean House Party Coordinator and as the organizer
of a mother-daughter book club, I want to start a national book
discussion organization featuring political books. The first discussion
would be of the book The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, which we would probably discuss in July. Here is the first draft of my idea:

The organization would be called 451° F: Hot Books (pronounced Fahrenheit 451), unless someone comes up with a better name!

Books
would be political, with books through November 2004 chosen with the
goal of contributing to the defeat of George W. Bush and his neo-conservative buddies. After that, we could be broader.

Book Discussion Groups (BDG) would register online, at the 451° F page at blogforiowa.com. A BDG could be as small or large as anyone wanted. It would be nice to get at least 451 groups. (!)

States
with multiple BDG would have a State Coordinator. State Coordinators
would keep in contact with 451° F and each other by email and
conference calls.

We would have press releases, invitations, a logo, buttons with the logo and name of the current book, cool downloadable bookmarks like the ones for this book club, etc. – just like any DFA event.

On
the same day, at the same time across the country, BDG would meet to
discuss the book – with a conference call with the author or some other
interesting person for part of the time, probably 20 minutes or so.
Let's call this person the Discussion Leader (DL). For The New Pearl
Harbor, it could be the author, Michael Moore, one of the Jersey Girls,
etc. (Now of course, I don't know that I can actually get any one of
these people to agree to do this, but I'm going to try. It would be a
great way for the author to promote his or her book.) The DL would
talk, and then answer a few questions (probably submitted in advance).

A
state would volunteer to “host” the book discussion the next month. In
advance of the day of the discussion, next month's host state (probably
the state coordinator with input from local people) would choose 3
different books, finding a DL and a date the DL would be available for
each book. This information would be posted online. Each BDG would give
feedback about their discussion and would be allowed to vote, as a
group, for whichever book they wanted. Whichever book got the most
votes would be the one discussed the next month.

That's it in a nutshell. Suggestions? Comments? Volunteers to help organize this? Please either comment or contact me at:

altaprice@451F.org

Alta Price

Purchase 451°F: Hot Books merchandise here.