1-7 Star Rating – Page 214 – Public Intelligence Blog

Read the Other Reviews, This One Connects Some Dots, May 30, 2007

Frances Moore Lappe

There are some excellent reviews of this book, so I will summarize the key points briefly and then point to the top ten books on my Transpartisan Democracy list.

This is a delightful, thoughtful read that is totally transpartisan in spirit, and joins other books like Escaping the Matrix and Society's Breakthrough in setting the stage for a non-violent restoration of We the People as the working owners of the Republic.

The author distinguishes between thin and living democracy, points out that democracy is a process, and you must live it or lose it. The two appendices are superb, one on competing frames (one page) and one on restoring the meaning of language for democracy (3 pages). I recommend taking a look at them before reading the book itself.

I have a note in my margin, “Lappe for President.” Seriously. Lappe, not Hillary Clinton, and certainly not Condi Rice, is precisely the kind of Epoch B leader we need right now, someone who can energize Wisdom Councils at every level, and convene Global Intelligence Councils and Global Policy Councils on the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight players other than the EU and the US (see my comment for a URL).

I absolutely agree with her that poverty is caused by a lack of democracy. Dictators and Wall Street have created a class war in which the few are looting the natural resources of the many, and it is time we put a stop to that, to include disbanding the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization.

She says that voice is the heart of democracy, and that a culture of connection is now being woven (see Blessed Unrest, Tao of Democracy, and Society's Breakthrough).

She says that the split is not between left and right, but rather between those who believe in democracy and We the People, and those that do not (see George Orwell's Animal Farm–we are all being harvested for profit by a handful).

In the author's view, the crisis is our feeling of helplessness, and the solution is to widen the circle of problem solvers. Well, Joe Trippi is going to bring us the “Big Bat” to channel $500M a year into the Transpartisan Peoples' Trust, and Reuniting America will join with the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER) to connect all of the people all of the time.

There is such a wealth of gifted insight in this book that I do not want to list all the points that made it to my fly-leaf. BUT THIS BOOK. Discuss it with friends. Send this review to everyone you wish to engage in this national conversation.

There is a breathtaking graphic on page 33 in which she lists the seven main areas affecting our public life, and then lists specific individual roles of the citizen in each of these, which I depict by the number in parenthesis:

Economic Life (9 roles)
Media (3 roles, but she neglected to mention citizen journalist)
Education (6 roles)
Cultural (9 roles)
Civic life (7 roles)
Human and Health Care Services (6 roles)
Religious Life (3 roles)

True power, good power, is our multiple relationships to one another. We can get rid of money TOMORROW and shift to localized currencies and Internet barter points. Governments should not be going into debt to banks, they should nationalize them!

She destroys the four prevailing myths:
1) that we only need two parties
2) that we cannot limit private money in politics
3) that we must not tamper with the “free” market
4) that corporations are only responsible for short-term bottom line

See my varied lists, especially on Natural Capitalism and on Democracy, for more recommended readings that strongly support her concise views.

She lists eight corporate crimes:
1) Enrichment through manipulated public giveaways
2) Tax avoidance
3) Global Warming (we have to pay)
4) Hazardous Waste (we have to pay)
5) Profits retained by the managers, worker's salaries do not increase
6) Concentration killing our health industry (and agriculture and energy)
7) Low corporate wages force us to pay benefits–Wal-Mart costs us $2.5 billion a year because their employees are so badly paid they qualify for public benefits! This is NUTS!
8) Campaign to eradicate unions leaves workers without voice or protection

I am quite pleased to learn from this author that townships are passing laws abolishing corporate citizenship. This needs to be a nation-wide finding.

Pension fund managers are one key to victory over corporations.

SA8000 sets global standards for fair labor conditions. We need to enforce it with our purchases.

Expectations and fairness matter. COSTCO pays its employees more, and gives them good benefits, yet applies only 7% of its budget to labor. Wal-Mart treats them like slaves, and applies 12% because of turn-over.

Part III has chapters on attention, action, choice, and voice, and focuses on the need to create localized economies with local currencies, community banking, and 100% worker ownership. That, in my view, is precisely where we are headed.

She lists 11 sources of citizen power, credited to the Industrial Areas Foundation:
1) Relational
2) Self-Interest
3) Listening
4) Tapping passion
5) Storytelling
6) Disciplined preparation
7) Actions and intentional tension (helps reframing)
8) Negotiation
9) Accountability
10) Mentoring
11) Reflection and evaluation

She lists five ways we are robbed of choice by corporations, and ten losses we suffer from corporations. She reminds us that Thomas Jefferson was very concerned in the 1790's about commercial monopolies, and concludes, correctly, that corporations have more power and as much secrecy as the Communist Party in China and Russia.

She presents loss of voice facts on pages 222-224, addresses the need for democratic software and low-cost Internet access for all (good-bye, Microsoft, unless everyone can get mobile Windows for a dollar a month.

She concludes with chapters on learning, security, and reframing.

This book is magical in its common sense and imminent applicability.

Top Ten Transpartisan Books Other Than This One:
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Bk Currents)
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Where Have All the Leaders Gone?
A House Divided
The Nine Nations of North America
Who Will Tell The People? : The Betrayal Of American Democracy
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy

2007/05/292009/12/04

Review: The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers

4 Star, Leadership, Misinformation & Propaganda

Business Emperor is Naked, As Are the Courtiers,

May 20, 2007

Phil Rosenzweig

Other reviewers have listed the delusions, so I will not do that. This book was recommended to me by a disgruntled reader of one of my reviews, and I care what thinking people say in the Comments, so I got it and went through it.

The author is as good as it gets in terms of deep academic and practical understanding of business. This book is the equivalent of saying that not only is the Emperor of Business naked, but so are all of his courtiers.

I recommend the book in part because the author has done a lovely job of integrating and reviewing, with scathing subtlety, every major business weekly and business “guru”, showing how they are all blowing the breeze and have no clue which way is up.

I am reminded of Michael Lewis's “Liar's Poker” about Wall Street exploding the client (one reason most investment firms do well is because they off-load the bad stuff to their low-end customers–they play the upside of the IPO and then bail out leaving the little guy to take all the risk and suffer the consequences after the smart money bails out).

I did find it off-putting that the author thinks Rubin bailed out Mexico for some grand strategic reason. My reading of the situation is that Rubin bailed out Mexico to bail out all the idiots on Wall Street that invested in Mexico and were not prepared to suffer the consequences of their ill-advised investments. Here I am reminded of General Smedley Butler's book, “War is a Racket,” where he rails against Wall Street lending money to decrepit Third World nations and their corrupt leaders, and then sending in the Marines when it all goes bad. See also my review of “The Global Class War” and of “Unintended Consequences: The United States at War.”

This book is worth reading if you are all too prone, as most are, to accept conventional wisdom and blatant lies (e.g. “our books are balanced” or “there is no doubt Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” For the rest of us that are skeptical about virtually every statement by any corporation chief or any politician, this book is reinforcement on the margins.

Like Al Gore, the author does a good job of showing us what the problem is. He does not offer solutions or any new integrated concept of business analysis that properly provides for all that is external to the corporation.

I am especially struck by the fact that “green” or “environment” or “Capitalism 3.0” or “Natural Capitalism” do not appear in this book. Let us conclude then, that the author has done an excellent job of burying the past, and now needs to spend some time thinking about the future (see my list on Natural Capitalism).

I am nominating Paul Hawkins, Herman Daly, and Lester Brown for the Nobel Prize. Al Gore is not even close–his Hollywood Oscar will have to do. Paul Hawkins especially (see his latest, “Blessed Unrest” and also the online World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility) has actually mobilized and organized and suffered for the future.

Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
Unintended Consequences: The United States at War
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It

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2007/05/282009/12/04

Review: Deep Economy–The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

5 Star, Economics, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Great Book, I'm a Fan, But Other Works Exist

May 28, 2007

Bill McKibben

I've been a fan of the author since I read his book on The Age of Missing Information, and I then lost touch with his work. I was reminded of him by Paul Hawken, whose book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming I will review this afternoon.

DEEP ECONOMY is a very fine personal effort with a very straight-forward prescription for localizing food production, energy production, radio, and currency. The author is a gigantic intellect, and writes clearly.

The core point in the first part of the book is an emphasis on a need to restore humanity to the process, to reduce industrial era efficiencies in order to enable more intangible values such as community. The opening chapter is a great review of the literature the author is familiar, but I take off one star because the other books I list below are not mentioned, hence this great book is incomplete in that sense.

The author puts forward three areas where life as we know it is going downhill:

1) Our political systems continue to emphasize industrialization and consolidation that is not affordable by our current rates of depleting energy and water;

2) There is not enough energy for China, let alone Brazil, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like Turkey and South Africa, to follow in our steps.

3) All this “more” is not making us happier. Indeed the author documents, as others have, that the US was happiest in 1946, and it's been downhill from there. He pegs financially-stimulated happiness at $10,000, after which more money does not bring more happiness in relation to self, community, and eternity.

He educates in pointing out that 50% of the global economy is tied up in food systems; that 50 acres can support 10-12 families; that a gallon of gasoline releases five of its six pounds of weight as emissions.

He introduces Bob Constanza and the calculated value of the ecosystem we are destroyed at $33 trillion annually. I learned of the Earth Stakeholder Report and about Behavioral Economics from this author. To that I would add the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER) and the inspiring works of Paul Hawken with “true cost” metrics and Jon Ramer with local currencies, Interra.

The middle book focuses, as others have, on the loss of community, on hyper-individualization, and on how Wal-Mart can save someone roughly $58 a year, but cost them their entire local economy. He uses this to emphasize the urgency of restoring our sense of community so we can make decisions as a collective, for the common good.

Like Al Gore, but with less pomp, he rails against advertising as the engine for unnecessary consumption.

I was surprised by, and then in agreement with, his voiced need to restore local radio stations that actually focus on local needs and concerns and news. His critical comments on the conglomerate shows that feature Rush Limbaugh and morons talking about pornography are properly devastating.

Take home message: localization is the only way to achieve resilience–the federal government is not going to be effective in the short or long term as things now stand. We learn that the ideal community size for participatory democracy is no more than 500 voters, of whom 40% can be expected to show up for a town hall meeting.

We learn that Anthony Lovins has reported to the Department of Defense that if they spend $180B over the next ten years–$18B a year–that can cut US oil imports in half, and save $70B a year in addition. Now that is what I consider to be a key piece of public information.

He is generally negative on Tom Friedman, with which I agree, and Jeffrey Sachs, for whom I hold out more hope.

Below are the books that teach us beyond and before the scope of this book, which I am very happy to have read and added to my library.

Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
The Future of Life
The Ecology of Commerce
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy
Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author
Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

2007/05/282009/12/04

Review: The New American Story

3 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Corruption, Politics

Bill Bradley (D) for President and Bloomberg (I) for VP?,

May 28, 2007

Bill Bradley

Edit of 5 Jul 09 to observe Bradley is theater–a fraud–as are all the others. With Obama it has become clear that the Borg consists of Wall Street (including Allen & Co) owning Congress, Treasury, Justice, and the Fed. We the People have been mugged.

Edited 25 Jun 07 to focus on possibility of Bradley-Bloomberg and comment.

This is a very solid, well-written and well-documented, and with great insights that I am all too happy to absorb in my capacity as an estranged moderate Republican. On balance I find Bill Bradley to be smarter, more nuanced, more deliberate, and not so trivially, taller and fitter than Al Gore. I am so impressed by the possibilities that I am immediately going back to my existing copy of Price of Loyalty, the story of how Dick Cheney betrayed Paul O'Neill and all the rest of us moderate Republicans, to see if there is a cross-walk that can be done. If these two worthies will agree to electoral reform and a transpartisan Cabinet, we can save the Republic in 2008.

The book begins with a marvelous review of the many false stories the extremist Republicans and their White House neo-cons have been telling about everything from tax cuts and the deficit and Medicare to Iraq, terrorism, and so on He has mastered the story-telling dynamic so recommended by Stephen Denning, the World Bank's Chief Knowledge Officer until his retirement.

In Part II of the book the author explores the break-downs in global cooperation and global responsibility, and specifically points to the growth of religion as a force we cannot ignore. See Left Hand of God. He addresses the big picture issues including the concentration of wealth and the drop in savings, increase in inequality, and failure to invest in the future (education, infrastructure).

His review names three systems–economic, social, and national defense–where we are being pushed to the breaking point. In a somewhat scattered fashion, he moves across education, the deficit, tax reform, geopolitical instability, oil, water, pensions, stock market, and health care (specifically praising Paul O'Neil and holistic reform.

In part III he identifies voter turn-out and electoral reform as the two keys to victory over money and conglomerate media spin. The book then ends with what for me was complexly new and useful insight on why the Republicans cannot fix nor manage America, and why the Democrats continue to flounder.

His eight “curses” of the Democratic Party:
1) Fear of thinking big
2) Capitulation on defense (hard vs soft power)
3) Inability to counter accusations of being wasteful spendthrifts
4) Close-minded devotion to the secular
5) Wealth-bashing
6) Special Friends in teachers, trial lawyers, and auto workers
7) Ceased to stand on principle
8) Hypnotized by charisma

There is no one now running that I consider worthy of being the first transpartisan president. Bradley, if he adopted the three standards: electoral reform as the only truly urgent issue; transpartisanship and a transpartisan cabinet announced in advance; and a commitment to show a balanced budget addressing all ten threats with all ten policies by November 2008, I'd want to be part of that restoration of the Republic.

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill
Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Bk Currents)
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

2007/05/262009/12/04

Review: The Assault on Reason

3 Star, Politics

Nine Years Too Late, Lacks Passion & Credibility,

May 26, 2007

Al Gore

Edit of 5 Jul 09 to observe that Mr. Gore is now worth $100M. Greg Palast not only called the fix before the election, but the one after as well. How sweet it must be to cast We the People adrift.

This book is nine years too late. It lacks passion & credibility. By way of context, and to disclose my inherent bias, I am an estranged moderate Republican who will never forgive Al Gore for 1) picking the de facto Israeli Ambassador and a closet neo-conservative as his running mate; 2) refusing to act on the advance disclosure by Greg Palast of the Bush plan to steal the election by disenfranchising 35,000 to 50,000 people of color in Florida; and 3) refusing to sign or encourage any other Senator to sign the legitimate House of Representatives demand for a repeal of the Florida results and a new election.

In that context, this book is shallow, pedantic, and largely pointless, as futile as his last sixteen years. You would be better off with the ten books I list below, or even with the reviews alone of those ten books. This is a double-spaced easily readable statement of the obvious.

1) TV and advertising have destroyed reason
2) Passionate faith blinds and makes the loyal brain-dead
3) Generals are not allowed to tell the truth and ignored when they do
4) Concentrated wealth and concentrated power doom democracy
5) Corporate power and mass deception go hand in hand
6) Bush administration has taken secrecy and withheld information to new heights
7) Loss of civil liberaties and rise of a police state, including torture, set a new low for America
8) Education and being informed are not the same thing.
9) His top threats are the environment, water, terrorism, drugs & corruption, and pandemics. Evidently he is not familiar with the ten high-level threats identified by LtGen Scowcroft and the United Nations (poverty, environmental degradation, infectuous disease, inter-state conflict, civil war, gencoide, other atrocities, proliferation, terrorism, and transnational crime).
10) Congress failed America by becoming the hand-maiden of the President rather than the Article 1 balance of power.
11) Internet offers hope (but no recognition of the missing sense-making tools including total transparency for all budgets)

I've met Al Gore and I have dealt with his senior staff both in office and now. My bottom line is that he is a very intelligent and well-intentioned individual with a very shallow staff and absolutely no sense of how to build a transpartisan team. He may run for President in 2008, if he does, he will lose unless he discovers the following three fundamentals:

1) Transpartisan meme as represented by Reuniting America (Unity 08 is a fraud, the last gasp of the two-party spoils system, the same one that displaced the League of Women Voters from the Presidential debate process in order to exclude the more sensible Libertarian, Green, Reform and Independent candidates from the debate)
2) Electoral reform as the ONLY major issue facing America
3) Selecting and announcing a multi-party Cabinet in advance, and challenging all the others to do the same–America is too complicated to be managed by a white boy and his cronies! It's time we destroy the Republican and the Democratic Party machines, restore participatory democracy, and end the corrupt “winner take all” system in both the Legislative and Executive branches.

Al Gore continues to have potential, but on his present course he will not earn the Nobel (Paul Hawkin, Herman Daly, and Lester Brown have done more) and he will not restore democracy in America. He's too busy being a hedge fund manager and celebrity speaker with one probllem and no solutions. That's how I see it. He has not earned my vote yet, but I will change parties and vote Democratic if he first wins the Democratic primaries, then selects a Republican as a running mate, and commits to the three ideas above. It's not rocket science. It just takes passion and an appreciation for diversity and dissent, and that is one thing Al Gore has not been able to unleash.

The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Bk Currents)
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders

2007/05/202009/12/04

Review: Unintended Consequences–The United States at War

4 Star, Politics, Strategy, War & Face of Battle

Strong Buy, Simplistic but Focused,

May 20, 2007

Kenneth J. Hagan

I think enough of this book by Hagan and Bickerton, both, significantly, respected professors in the US military war college system, to recommend it very strongly. It is simplistic, but in combination with the books I list below, it is quite striking.

Key points:

1. Wars have consequences, not only in the defeated region, but within the USA where the national and regional cultures (Nine Nations) can be conflicted.

2. War *alters* policy for all future generations.

3. America's wars have been engines of economic growth, but the authors fail to observe that the rich benefit while the poor die.

4. The post-war period is a continuation of the war and cannot be ignored. Both explicitly and implicitly, they crucify Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith.

5. In every single case, the outcome of the war has been “far removed” from the stated objectives.

6. Each war brings with it repressive measures against those who dissent. I am reminded of Valley Girl Condi Rice suggesting that General Tony Zinni was a “traitor” for saying the idea of invading Iraq was idiocy. How now, cow?

7. War tends to loosen the bonds of traditional authority and undermine community.

8. Across our history, not just at our inception, Native Americans have lost big. Genocide was not only perpetuated in the wars of independence, but after the Civil War, when the US Army practices scorched earth war.

9. The most importance consequence of the war of 1812 was it total lack of achievement of ANY of its goals, together with an accentuation of sectional differences within the USA.

10. On page 47: “Enhanced chauvinism, ambitious jingoism, and patriotism [per Samuel Johnson, the last refuge of the scoundrel] were unintended consequences of the war. The slave trade continued.

11. The Indian Wars were deliberately genocidal.

12. In general, in its first hundred years, the USA was a belligerent against Canada, Mexico, and the Indian Nations.

13. The war on Mexico caused long-term host8ility and led to the civil war by aggravating differences between North and South (and one might add, Texas as the largest ego in the West). The war on Mexico was mostly fought and led by the South.

14. The Civil War was America's first ideological war.

15. The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in hostile states, not to Northern states.

16. Civil War extended the power of the Federal Government, which increasingly sold the American people out to special interests including European banks.

17. The authors provide a *fascinating* description of Abraham Lincoln's unprecedented abuse of presidential powers, including the suspension of habeas corpus, and I can now understand why “W” thinks he is following greatness by turning America into a police state.

18. Civil War introduced total annihilation (scorched earth) as an American “war of war.”

19. Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino war is, in the author's view, most similar to the Iraq war in terms of the mendacity preceding and the insurrections following.

20. WWI, WWII, and the Cold War are discussed in terms that show the US to have been the more belligerent. Stalin learned not to trust the US, and this led to the ideological stand-off and the emergency of “fantasy war.”

21. In Korea, General McArthur exceeded his authority, the Chinese warned the US via an Indian who was blown off, and the game was on.

22. The US concurrence in the restoration of the French in Indochina (now Viet-Nam), and the conflicts that Johnson had in having to support being a hawk on Viet-Nam in order to have his “Great Society,” are covered.

23. The authors are *brutal* on the Bush Family, to the point that one is inspired to think of a lunatic asylum as the natural resting place for the whole lot of them.

24. According to the authors, Iraq is a “phony war” in every sense of the word except the casualties.

25. Iran is not in the index but the authors observe that US pressure on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon opened the door for Iran.

Bottom line: going to war does not solve problems, it creates more of them. The authors conclude that war is both folly and futile. I agree.

All Americans have a choice in 2008: they can continue business as usual, with the corrupt and inept Republican and Democratic “machines” that are “running on empty” and totally beholden to Wall Street, or Americans can reassert the fact that this is a Republic and the government as a whole can be fired for cause. See the books listed below. May God have mercy on our souls. It's time we started living up to our sacred responsibility as citizen-warriors, as Minutemen.

The authors lose one star to simplicty and an avoidance of both the intelligence availabale but ignored, and lack of couinter-vailing forces (e.g. Congress and the media inevitably fall for the Executive deceptions).

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
The Nine Nations of North America
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars

2007/05/162009/12/04

Review: The Weather Wizard’s Cloud Book–A Unique Way to Predict the Weather Accurately and Easily by Reading the Clouds

4 Star, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Sailing

Superb, portable, and incomplete,

May 16, 2007

Louis D. Rubin Sr.

I bought this book in preparation for an advanced mariner's meteorology course, and could not have made this comment without having first gained that higher level of knowledge.

This is a suberb book with two major flaws:

1) It sticks to the two-dimensional depiction of weather that is common to the average person. Although there are a couple of illustrations showing altitude, the author could easily have put in a few pages on the rotation of the earth, the 500 mb level, and how weather on the surface cannot be understood without underestanding what is happening at the 18,000 level. As my instructor put it, the high-level troughs are the chicken that hatches the surface level (scrambled) egg.

2) It provides the pictures of the clouds, but missed the key chance to break down the names into the original latin meanings, to create a matrix of high (Cirro), medium (alto), and low (strato), with substantive meaning including layer (stratus), curly (cirrus), stacked in a vertical heap (cumulo-cumulus), and delivering rain (nimbus).

Add this little matrix above, and read “Mariner's Guide to the 500-Millibar Chart” by Joe Stenkiewicz and Lee Chesneau, and Google for <Lee Chesneau> to find his web site, and you'll have all you need to move to the better three-dimensional interactive viewing of weather and weather charts.

I also recommend Understanding Weatherfax