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Review: Designing Regenerative Cultures

6 Star Top 10%, Atlases & State of the World, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Cosmos & Destiny, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Economics, Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Priorities, Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Daniel Christian Wahl

6 Star Handbook for Saving Civilization & Earth

This book makes the jump from 5 stars (generally I don’t bother to review a book if it is not a four or five star read) to 6 stars — my top ten percent — because of the combination of Questions Asked, glorious color graphics, and the total holistic nature of the book — this is easily a PhD thesis in holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering. Indeed, this book could be used as a first-year reference across any humanities and science domain, they would be the better for it.

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Review: The Art of Shaping the Metropolis

6 Star Top 10%, Atlases & State of the World, Best Practices in Management, Budget Process & Politics, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Country/Regional, Future, Leadership, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Pedro B. Ortiz

6-Star Guide to Saving Every City in Every Country — a World-Changing Book

This is an extraordinary book, easily five stars but I am elevating it to 6 stars (my top ten percent across over 2000 reviews, all but a handful non-fiction) because the author is not just a genius, but he explains his deep multi-level knowledge brilliantly. I have never seen a collection of complicated nuanced topics presented in such a compelling, easy to understand, well-illustrated manner. The case studies abound. The publisher is to be complemented for the purity of the presentation — a stunning book with perfectly laid out pages, glossy color on every page, and a superb index, which is where most publishers fail their authors.

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Review: Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

6 Star Top 10%, Atlases & State of the World, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Future, Information Operations, Information Society, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
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Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars 6-Star Utterly Brilliant Survey and Strategy, April 19, 2016

The author of this book has done something no one else has done – I say this as the reviewer of over 2,000 non-fiction books at Amazon across 98 categories. For the first time, in one book, we have a very clear map of what is happening where in the way of economic and social development; a startlingly diplomatic but no less crushing indictment of nation-state and militaries; and a truly inspiring game plan for what we should all be demanding from countries, cities, commonwealths, communities, and companies, in the way of future investments guided by a strategy for creating a prosperous world at peace.

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Review: Transforming the Dream – Ecologism and the Shaping of an Alternative American Vision

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Education (Universities), Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Charles Bednar

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Synthesis, Starting Point for Anyone Who Wishes to Think Holistically, July 4, 2015

The author taught me most of what I retain in the way of political science fundamentals during our time together at Muhlenberg College, where he was former Chair of the Department of Political Science and an Associate Dean. We had not kept in touch since I left Muhlenberg in 1974, but in 2014 I reached out to him and bought this book immediately upon learning of its existence.

Published in 2003 by the State University of New York Press, this book was evidently not marketed at all, and little noted. That is a sad commentary on our times, because I find that the author has distilled multiple literatures into one coherent presentation, augmented by an original model that tells a vital story beyond Ecological Economics into Ecological Political Economy (in essence, politics), into Ecological Ethics and Ecological Pedagogy, two topics rarely covered by others.

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Review: Before the First Shots are Fired – How America Can Win or Lose Off the Battlefield

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Change & Innovation, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Military & Pentagon Power, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction
cover zinni shots
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Tony Zinni and Tony Koltz

Foreign Politics Beyond the Beltway

By Andrew Lubin on September 6, 2014

Today’s foreign policy world seems like the bad old days of American indecision under Jimmy Carter; the Israel-Hamas war, Putin annexed the Crimea, President Obama’s red-lines in Syria are repeatedly ignored, and the Americans killed in Iraq seem to have been sacrificed for a country whose people wanted democracy far less than the “Neocon’s wanted it for them…clearly General Tony Zinni’s USMC (ret) latest book, Before the First Shot is Fired; How America can win or lose off the battlefield, is being published at a most opportune time.

Writing with an honesty rare in Washington, D.C, “Before the First Shot” is Zinni’s assessment of why America’s foreign and military policy-making is ineffective, if not harmful, to America’s national interests. In conjunction with co-author Tony Koltz, he discusses why the complex question “Are we warriors, peacekeepers, or liberators?” of Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond needs to be honestly discussed and answered when military actions are being considered.

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Review: Partnership for the Americas – Western Hemisphere Strategy and U.S. Southern Command

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Force Structure (Military), Humanitarian Assistance, Military & Pentagon Power, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)
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Amazon Page

James Stavridis

5.0 out of 5 stars Our Best Thinking to Date — We Can Go Much Further, December 24, 2014

This is the pre-cursor book to The Accidental Admiral: A Sailor Takes Command at NATO which I have reviewed most favorably and strongly recommend. This book — while free online as are all NDU Press books, is a very high quality production with some complex graphics and color photographs. It is fairly priced and absolutely recommended in print if you favor books you can hold in your hands.

There have been other books by military commanders but to the best of my knowledge only General Tony Zinni, USMC (then commanding the US Central Command with two wars and 12 task forces) and General Wesley Clark, USA (then commanding NATO during the Kosovo mess) have risen to what this book strives to be, a gold standard for whole of government multinational engagement.

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