Reviews of books in our bibliography

[Anne Millhollen]

Many of the books suggested by Beyond War members have now been reviewed either by other members or by the students in the Portland State University capstone class on Beyond War taught by Debbie Kaufman. We have around 150 books on the list, and I would like to know your thoughts on how to handle the books that received bad reviews. The reviewers were asked to address whether the books exemplified Beyond War principles and practices and whether they had any elements that violated any of them. Some of the reviewers identified elements that violated the principle that "we are one on this planet." An example of that would be a book that emphasized that only one religion provides salvation. Other books were found to preoccupy themselves with an enemy.

I can imagine several alternative ways to handle this. (1) We can eliminate books from the list, perhaps requiring two bad reviews before we remove them. Alternatively, because we will be including reviews on this site, (2) we can keep the books on the list and just include the review or (3) annotate the list to show that the book received a bad review and include the review. We don't yet know how we will link the books on the list with the reviews, but we will.

Are there other ways to handle this? Which alternative would you choose?

Anne

[Bill Scheurer]

Anne,

Thanks for starting this great converstion and handling this question so skillfully!

I see two separate but related questions that you have framed here: 1) How do we decide which books and videos should not remain in our recommended list? 2) What do we do with those books?

1) Deciding On Books/Videos

We can rely on the coordinators of this team (currently you!) to make these judgments. In fact, we need you to do this. It is very important that we do not include resources that are inconsistent with the values we are trying to share. So, we need the stewards of this team to respond right away whenever we find them.

Of course, you are doing this in a very transparent manner. You are exploring clearly stated standards and inviting collaboration from all concerned. I'm sure you will continue this approach and that things will change from time to time as we grow our community, learn more from our experience, and other circumstances continue to change. I have complete confidence in you.

You could post a separate discussion (in the general forums) for each book you are deciding to drop and include the reviews and your comments about why we are dropping them. That way, people can always see the reasoning and offer different points of view. We can keep the conversation open, while no longer presently recommending that resource.

It's okay for books to come and go as well. You may pull a book from the list and on further deliberation, conversation, and input from others decide to add it back again. That's okay too. Things change.

2) Handling Dropped Items

We should remove dropped books and videos from the recommended list and add them to a separate dropped resources list. Like the recomended list, we can include links to our reviews, conversations and other resources for all to see.

This will help preserve and make available a complete record of our evaluation of these items so we don't lose sight of the fact that we have already considered them. It also will help people who may want to revisit them and restart the conversation about their possible value for our purposes.

[Sally Suzanne Marie]

Anne, I don't think we should keep books that violate our principles and practices unless they have some other VALUE. I imagine that some books might be labeled as examples of what we don't believe if there is a lesson to be learned there.
I think with our local group we often gently remind each other when we fallible humans are posing enemies ourselves without thinking about it that way.
I like Bill's response to your post. The list can be dynamic. And keeping the dropped items and tracking those is a great idea.