Category: America (Founders, Current Situation)

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Review (Guest): Deep Green Resistance – Strategy to Save the Planet

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Secession & Nullification, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
Amazon Page

Derrick Jensen (Author), Aric McBay (Author), Lierre Keith (Author)

About the Authors

Activist, philosopher, teacher, and leading voice of uncompromising dissent, DERRICK JENSEN holds degrees in creative writing and mineral engineering physics. In 2008, he was named one of the Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,” and in 2006 he was named Press Action’s Person of the Year for his work on the book Endgame. He lives in California.

Writer, activist, and small-scale organic farmer ARIC MCBAY works to share information about community sufficiency and off-the-grid skills. He is the author of Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life after Gridcrash and creator of “In the Wake: A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization.”

LIERRE KEITH is a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of two novels, as well The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She's also been arrested six times. She lives in Humboldt County, CA.

5.0 out of 5 stars finally, a book to meet the scale of our predicament,June 7, 2011
By  Owen Lloyd (Eugene, OR) – See all my reviews

What is different about Deep Green Resistance is that it is the first book that offers a solution that is scaled to the size of our predicament.

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Review: The Long Twentieth Century – Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Capitalism (Good & Bad)
Amazon Page

Giovanni Arrighi

4.0 out of 5 stars Adding Links In Support of Review by Joseph Martin,August 10, 2011

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4.0 out of 5 stars Adding Links In Support of Review by Joseph Martin,August 10, 2011
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This review is from: The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New and Updated Edition) (Paperback)

I wish I could afford all the books I'd like to read. This one was recommended to me and I can certainly see how valuable it must be.

Here are just a few books that I believe strongly complement this one.

The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits
Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

A more interesting option for readers is to use the lists of book reviews at Phi Beta Iota (BOOKS), where the list on negative books includes these lists, all reviews leading back to the Amazon Page [at Phi Beta Iota, all links are active in this review].

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Review (Guest): The Long Twentieth Century – Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Capitalism (Good & Bad)
Amazon Page

Giovanni Arrighi

Product Description

Winner of the American Sociological Association PEWS Award for Distinguished Scholarship: a comprehensive analysis of the development of world capitalism over the millennium.

The Long Twentieth Century traces the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Arrighi argues that capitalism has unfolded as a succession of “long centuries,” each of which produced a new world power that secured control over an expanding world-economic space. Examining the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English and finally American capitalism, Arrighi concludes with an examination of the forces that have shaped and are now poised to undermine America’s world dominance. A masterpiece of historical sociology, The Long Twentieth Century rivals in scope and ambition contemporary classics by Perry Anderson, Charles Tilly and Michael Mann.

4.0 out of 5 stars The History of Capitalism,September 7, 2010

By  Joseph Martin “pomonomo2003” (NJ, USA) – See all my reviews

Why is this edition “new and updated”? Apparently, because of the 15 page Postscript at the end of the book (pp. 371-386). (I had read the first edition back when it first came out in the nineties but no longer seem to have a copy of it so I cannot compare the earlier edition with this one.) Here in the Postscript Arrighi attempts to sum up what he understands were the three main propositions of his book.

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Review: Family of Secrets – The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)
Amazon Page

Russ Baker

5.0 out of 5 stars Tough reading, desperately needs charts and graphs and a proper web site,August 4, 2011

I sat down to write a review and realized that the top review is a very good summary, and has a number of comments that provide specific new information and also recommend two other books, so what I have decided to do, as a direct complement to the top review by Richard Cumming, is provide links to the other books mentioned in the comments, and then add some of my own. I strongly recommend all the comments on the review be read.

The book desperately needs social networking graphics and its own web site. Although the author, who sent me the book, has a web site by the book's title, it is focused on video clips and is not an extension of the book. Public intelligence is now at a point where all that needs to be known is large known, but it cannot be aggregated and made sense of for lack of a public intelligence ability to do data mining and data visualization in a very structured continuous manner.

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Review: Pathology of Power

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)
Amazon Page

Norman Cousins

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Detailed Exposure of Power Killing Intelligence, July 30, 2011

This is a new edition of the book, and so very timely. If I had the money to give one book to every American, this would be it, followed by TYRANNICIDE The Story of the Second American Revolution and my all time God Bless America favorite, The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen.

Here is the author's opening statement:

“Connected to the tendency of power to corrupt are yet other tendencies that emerge from the pages of the historians:

* The tendency of power to drive intelligence underground;

* The tendency of power to become a theology, admitting no other gods before it;

* The tendency of power to distort and damage the traditions and institutions it was designed to protect;

* The tendency of power to create a language of its own, making other forms of communication incoherent and irrelevant;

* The tendency of power to spawn imitators, leading to volatile competition;

* The tendency of power to set the stage for its own use.

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Review: No More Secrets – Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Budget Process & Politics, Change & Innovation, Communications, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Security (Including Immigration)

Hamilton Bean

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular Integrative and Pioneering Work, July 27, 2011

This is a pioneering work that not only explains the true worth of open source intelligence, but also illuminates the institutional bias against it and the pathologies of a culture of secrecy. The use of primary data from interviews makes this an original work in every possible sense of the word. I strongly recommend the book to both professionals and to faculty seeking a provocative book for students.

The book opens with a Foreword from Senator Gary Hart, who cites Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's point that secrecy is used against the US public more often than it is used to withhold information from the alleged enemy. He also makes the observation that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the web occurred almost simultaneously (1990-1991). See Senator Hart's three most recent books, The Thunder and the Sunshine: Four Seasons in a Burnished Life; The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons, and my favorite The Minuteman: Returning to an Army of the People. The concept of an “intelligence minuteman” is at the foundation of the Open Source Intelligence movement, and highly relevant to this book by Dr. Hamilton Bean.

In his Preface Dr. Bean makes the point that his book is about institutional change and resistance, and the open source intelligence story is simply a vehicle for examining both the utility of his methods with respect to the study of communications and discourse, and the ebbs and flows of institutional change.

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Review: The Arsonist – The Most Dangerous Man in America (James Otis 1760′s Catalyst for Liberty)

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Biography & Memoirs, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Democracy, History, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
Amazon Page

Nathan A. Allen
5.0 out of 5 stars Six Star Pre-History Ignored Until Now, July 17, 2011

This is a BARN-BURNER of a book! This book is a PhD dissertation that is being published quickly to aid the cause of liberty in 2012. The academic detail would normally make it a four-star read, but the relevance, the originality, and the appendices-both within the book as it will be published, and online-carry it to six stars. Depending on one's interest, this can be a quick read to confirm that we need a second American revolution-or a slow read to savor the loneliness, the persistence, the integrity of one man called a lunatic and a traitor for one reason only: he was twenty years ahead of his time. It is on the shoulders of James Otis that the Founding Father stood, and this author, Nathan Allen, has performed brilliantly in identifying a slice of American history here-to-fore overlooked, and in deeply investigating and then publicizing what can only be appreciated as both one man's cross to bear, and one nation's long lead-time in the gestation of liberty.

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