The Wisdom of Crowds
By James Surowiecki

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant–better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.

A softcover secondhand copy (good as new) of The Wisdom of Crowds is available for sale at Bound Bookshop for only Php600.00. Call (7992004) or email us (boundbookshop@gmail.com) now to reserve this book. Other books on business and finance, as well as other subjects, are also available for sale at bargain prices.

A Fish in the Water: A Memoir
By Mario Vargas Llosa

In 1990, Mario Vargas Llosa decided to run for the presidency of his native Peru, campaigning on a platform of economic reform and stringent counterterrorism against the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. His campaign against (and ultimate defeat by) Alberto Fujimori was the stuff of international headlines, transforming an eminent writer into a politician of world stature.

A Fish in the Water is Vargas Llosa’s disarming and deeply absorbing response to that profoundly heady - and troubling - experience. This is a twofold book: a memoir of the formation of one of Latin America’s most celebrated artists, from his birth in Arequipa in 1936 to his departure for Europe to make his career as a writer, and, in alternating chapters, the story of Vargas Llosa’s organization of the reform movement which culminated in his bid for the presidency. In this richly personal work, Vargas Llosa evokes the experiences which gave rise to his fiction, including his stay at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, which was the basis of his first book, The Time of the Hero, and his desperate attempts to marry while still a minor, as recounted in hilarious detail in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In parallel, he describes the social, literary, and political influences that led him to enter the political arena as a crusader for modern democracy and a free-market economy. Offering an unexpectedly intimate look at how fact becomes fiction and at the formation of a courageous and original politician and thinker. A Fish in the Water reveals Mario Vargas Llosa as a world figure whose real story is just beginning.

A softcover secondhand copy of A Fish in the Water is available for sale at Bound Bookshop for only Php500.00. A softcover copy of one of his works, The Storyteller, is also available for only Php125.00. Call (7992004) or email us (boundbookshop@gmail.com) now to reserve these books. Other biographies and memoirs, as well as literary fiction (classical and contemporary) are also available for sale at bargain prices.

The APA Collection at the Library of Congress is exhibiting the books of
Asian American women poets in collaboration with the First Annual Festival
of Women’s Poetry on the Internet. (http://wompherence.proboards82.com).

A collection of the published works of select poets in the list of “100
Filipino women poets” featured on the website and curated by Luisa Igloria,
multi-awarded poet, are part of the Library’s special exhibit.

Angela Manalang Gloria’s *Poems *released in 1940 is considered the first
published poetry collection by a Filipina. The original, the revised edition
and the updated edition (*The Complete Poems,* edited by Edna Zapanta
Manlapaz) are part of the exhibit. Two seldom seen monographs, Two
Voices, *Selected Poems of Abelardo Subido and Trinidad Tarrosa Subido,* published in 1945 and
Trinidad Tarrosa Subido’s *Private Edition: sonnets and other poems *(2002)
are likewise included.

The Wompherence Exhibit in the Library is displayed in the Asian Reading
Room, LJ150 at the Jefferson Building, 101 Independence Avenue, N.E. and is
open to the public Monday through Saturday during the month of November. For
more information, contact Reme Grefalda at regr@loc.gov or (202) 707-6096.

The Filipino poets featured at the Library exhibit are: Mila Aguilar, Cora
Almerino, Linda Alburo, Lilia F. Antonio, Jessie Badillo-Snyder, Merlinda C.
Bobis, Carlene S. Bonnivier, Cynthia Buiza, Sofiya Cabalquinto, Catalina
Cariaga, Marjorie Evasco, Penelope Flores, Sarah Gambito, Jean V. Gier, Reme
Grefalda, Jessica Hagedorn, Aileen Ibardaloza, Luisa Igloria (Ma. Luisa B.
Aguilar Carino ), Marra PL Lanot, Babeth Lolarga, Susan T. Layug, Fatima
Lim-Wilson, Ruth Elynia S. Mabanglo, Angela Manalang-Gloria, Maningning
Miclat, Barb Natividad, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Cristina Querrer, Lilia
Quindoza-Santiago, Barbara J. Pulmano Reyes, Patria Rivera, Nadine Sarreal,
Trinidad Tarrosa Subido, Eileen Tabios, Ester Tapia, Edith L. Tiempo, and
Rowena T. Torrevillas.

Readers can find the works of the 100 Filipina poets in
http://www.wompherence.proboards82.com/index.cgi?board=fip

Wompherence is spearheaded by Moira Richards, Shayla Mollohan, and Louisa
Howerowe of the Women’s Poetry Collective (Wompo) started by poet Annie
Finch, who directs the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Low
Residency Program. One recent and brilliant example of another Wompo
collaborative effort is the anthology published by Red Hen Press in January
this year, LETTERS TO THE WORLD.

Dr. Floro Quibuyen, author of A NATION ABORTED, will speak about how
Rizal has been misrepresented by the prevailing orthodoxy on
Philippine nationalism in a lecture titled, “What Nation was Aborted?
Recovering History from Historians,” on Tuesday, November 11, from 4
pm, at the Museo ng Maynila (what used to be the Army and Navy Club),
Roxas Blvd., Manila.

The lecture coincides with the release of the second edition of his A
NATION ABORTED: Rizal, American Hegemony, and Philippine Nationalism,
which contains two new chapters. The book (rated “one of the most
provocative books” for the ’90s by the Japanese publishing house
Iwanami), urges students and teachers and thoughtful readers to
rethink long-held ideas about our history, and to reread Rizal and his
ideas against what has been taken as “official nationalism.”

The program will be opened by Ms. Gemma Cruz-Araneta, vice chair of
the co-organizer Manila Historical and Heritage Commission. To lead
the discussion after the lecture, Ms. Sylvia Mayuga and Mr. Alex
Dacanay will give commentaries about the book.

Attesting to the author’s broad interests, his short film, “Hibik sa
Dapit-hapon,” an imagining of Josephine witnessing Rizal’s execution,
will also be shown. “Hibik” was adjudged one of the top ten films of
the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines Film Festival in 1981.

Through all these years of his varied career, independent scholar Dr.
Quibuyen has been a prolific professor, innovative educator, and
pioneering filmmaker. He has taught over 30 different courses in the
social sciences in several universities here and abroad. He has made
film projects both in the Philippines and Hawaii. And although
officially retired from the UP Asian Center, Dr. Quibuyen continues to
teach as Professorial Lecturer at the University of Santo Tomas.

The recent historic victory of Barack Obama in the US presidential race has heightened interest in the African-American experience. At Bound Bookshop, we have several titles on black history, racism and related issues. Among these are Africana: Arts and Letters by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., available for only Php560.00, and A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Dubois and African American Portraits of Progress, available for only Php395.00.

“The original Africana was inspired by a dream of the late W.E.B. Du Bois and shaped by an eminent advisory board led by Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. It packed 3,500 entries into 2,000 pages and garnered great critical acclaim. Now, in Africana: Arts and Letters, series editors Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., present a selection of the most notable African-American events, writers, musicians and artists that helped to shape culture and history.”

“A Small Nation of People is a collection of 150 rare photographs of African-Americans since slavery and beyond, with essays by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Levering Lewis and African-American photo historian Deborah Willis, a MacArthur fellow.”

Call (7992004) or email us (boundbookshop@gmail.com) now to reserve these books. Other titles on politics, current affairs and history, as well as hundreds of other titles on different subjects, are also available for sale at bargain prices.

An American Iliad in the guise of contemporary political reportage, What It Takes: The Way to the White House penetrates the mystery at the heart of all presidential campaigns: How do presumably ordinary people acquire that mixture of ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness that makes a true candidate?

As he recounts the frenzied course of the 1988 presidential race — and scours the psyches of contenders from George Bush and Robert Dole to Michael Dukakis and Gary Hart — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer comes up with the answers, in a book that is vast, exhaustively researched, exhilarating, and sometimes appalling in its revelations.

A hardcover secondhand copy of What It Takes is available for sale at Bound Bookshop for only Php100.00. Call (7992004) or email us (boundbookshop@gmail.com) now to reserve this book. Other books on politics, current affairs and history, as well as hundreds of other titles on different subjects, are also available for sale at bargain prices.