Spring 2019 OLLI Catalog

PEER-LED CLASSES (Omnilore)
Common Reading:
How Civilizations Die:
(And Why Islam Is Dying Too)
by David Goldman (September 2011)
(HCD) How Civilizations Die:
(And Why Islam is Dying Too)
This course will look at the demographics facing the entire world.
What is the impact on various civilizations. You’ve heard about the
Death of the West. But the Muslim world is on the brink of an even
greater collapse.
Will we go down in the implosion? Thanks to collapsing birthrates,
much of Europe is on a path of willed self-extinction. The untold
story is that birthrates in Muslim nations are declining faster than
anywhere else—at a rate never before documented. Europe, even
in its decline, may have the resources to support an aging
population, if at a terrible economic and cultural cost. But in the
impoverished Islamic world, an aging population means a
civilization on the brink of total collapse—something Islamic
terrorists know and fear.
Muslim decline poses new threats to America, challenges we
cannot even understand, much less face effectively, without a
wholly new kind of political analysis that explains how desperate
peoples and nations behave.
In How Civilizations Die, David P. Goldman—author of the
celebrated “Spengler” column read by intelligence organizations
worldwide—reveals how, almost unnoticed, massive shifts in
global power are remaking our future.
Common Reading:
The Mirage Factory: Illusion,
Imagination, and the Invention
of Los Angeles, by Gary Krist,
(May 2018)
(ILA) The Invention of Los Angeles
Only after the Mexican War of 1846-48, when southern California
became American, did anyone really start to postulate a grand
metropolis in this desert, centered on a narrow, unreliable
waterway known optimistically as the Los Angeles River…
But eventually the implausible became actual. By the end of the
1920s, the world city of Los Angeles, California, was a reality—an
urban giant grown up in a place where no city should rightly be.
This book is the story of that extraordinary transformation.
It spans the years from 1900 to 1930 and features the lives of three
key people (William Mulholland, D.W. Griffin, and Aimee Semple
McPherson) who willed this improbable city into existence, by
pushing the limits of human engineering and imagination.
40 OSHER LIFELONG LEARNING INSTITUTE @ CSU DOMINGUEZ HILLS