Extraordinary, Inspires Need for 183 Other “Lost History” Studies, January 27, 2008
Charles C. Mann
Paul Hawken recommended this book during a Seattle lecture introducing his latest book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. It took me a while to get to, but it is certainly an extraordinary achievement, and it has enormous meaning for future studies of both lost histories of 183+ indigenous cultures and languages, and for a new appreciation of how humans can and should shape the environment, not just try to protect it.
The maps alone are a treasure, and are complemented by perfectly selected photographs and graphics, including one on page 144 that documents the deaths of 50 million indigenous Indians in Mexico alone, over the course of a 100 years from 1518 to 1623. The maps highlight the extraordinary contribution of this book and this author in documenting the scope and sophistication and massive numbers of native Americans across both continents, and with some documentation going back to 5000 BC.
The author opens by pointing out, as “Holmberg's Mistake,” the long-standing incorrect views that history began in 1492, and that the indigenous people's were few in number and lacked any semblance of influence or “agency” over what historians over hundreds of years assumed was a “state of nature” in which the indigenous humans were nothing more than a higher state of animal.
The book, which comes with 140 pages of endnotes, is world-class scholarship and world-class investigative journalism. It compellingly documents an Inka Empire spanning a continent in the 15th century and before, with 25,000 miles of roads that last to this day. Tens of millions, many languages, a great deal of trade, sophisticated culture with metalurgy and stone masonry equal to or superior to the Europeans.
I was particularly impressed by the author's description of how language analysis, looking for common words or syllables, helped to document a breadth of unique languages going far back in time.
Overall the book documents how the introduction of smallpox from humans and many other pandemic diseases from pigs that spread to wildlife and then humans, killed perhaps 100 million indigenous American Indians (north and south).
The book ends, appropriately for our time, with a section on the Five Nations of native American Indians who in the early 17th Century were practicing the Great Law of Peace. The Chinese brought Dick Cheney's airplane down over Singapore with precision electronic pulses, and have demonstrated that they can sneak up on our carriers and also immobilize or neutralize are mobility and weapons systems which are completely unprotected against advanced electronic warfare. Simultaneously, the Chinese are waging peace across the southern hemisphere, and rapidly displacing the US and Europe as the primary external actor (see my one-page memorandum on Chinese Irregular Warfare).
I mention other books below that are relevant to the larger issue of “what can we know” about the past or about reality that can help us craft a future that delivers a good life for all, including the five billion poor, a prosperous world at peace. I am persuaded that the emphasis on secret intelligence and military “might” has gone a long way toward destroyed the Earth and Humanity's hopes. The ten books below do not include any books I have written, edited, or published, but I do want to mention that they are all free online at OSS.Net, or more recently, Earth Intelligence Network, where we have posted the new edited work, “COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.”
I read a lot, almost totally non-fiction, and for the past several years, after accidentally becoming a top Amazon reviewer on the strength of 300 reviews lifted from the annotated bibliographies of my first two books, I have been dedicated, as a hobby, to reading in the service of the public. My goal in life at the age of 55, what I learned from this book is called an “encore career,” is to be intelligence officer to the five billion poor, and–I now realize from this book–to the social entrepreneurs that are changing the world on a scale and with a speed that governments cannot match.
This book blew my mind, literally. It has not altered my course, but it has dramatically accelerated my ability to make progress by illuminating a path I thought I would have to discover. This book is the first “map” of a completely new form of endeavor, profoundly individual in inspiration and global in scale, that of social entrepreneurship, not to be confused with non-profit or non-governmental, more traditional forms.
The author, apart from mapping examples (33, focused on education, health, protection, and access to electricity and technology), provides what I consider to be the single best preface/introduction I have ever read. Here are a few of the underlined bits:
+ hidden history unfolding
+ landscape of innovators
+ ratio of problem-focused information to solution-focused information is completely out of balance
+ reality distorted, people deprived of knowledge they could use
+ individual social entrepreneurs advancing systemic scalable solutions
+ new sector of social entrepreneurship now being taught, funded, and respected
+ two Nobel Peace Prizes (2004, 2006)–micro-finance now micro-everything
+ Ashoka, founded by Bill Drayton is the spine of the book
+ conceptual firewalls coming down, “whole brains” being used
+ influencing conventional businesses (going green, good) and governments (adopting unconventional education, kids teaching parents, etc)
+ “social entrepreneurs are uniquely suited to make headway on problems that have resisted considerable money and intelligence”
+ government are looking at problems from the outside, social entrepreneurs see problems–and solutions–from the inside
+ scale still a challenge, but coming
+ Students and local groups actively interested in hearing about this now
+ Students are leading the way, pushing for change in curriculums
+ optimism, hope, energy are being unleashed as never before–but not being properly mapped, reported, or appreciated outside small circles
+ new pathways being discovered every day in every place
+ changemakers far more numerous than any might have imagined
+ many levels of changemaker
+ charaqcterized by first-hand active engagement in reality
+ individuals driven to understand, and driven to remove shackles from others with shared knowledge (e.g. kids learning to fix pumps and spreading knowledge across villages with a speed and energy only quick-witten children could apply)
+ social entrepreneurship network now has sensors everywhere, millions of changemarkers, tens of thousands of organizations
+ far better mechanism to respond to needed than we have ever had before
+ decentralized and emergent force
BAD NEWS:
– not yet properly financed
– lacking holistic public intelligence for voluntary harmonization against the ten threats, with the twelve policies, with a special focus on the eight challengers. (Learn more at Earth Intelligence Network)
+ emphasis on metrics slows down the needed pace of funding for innovation
Core principles for social excellence (chapter twelve):
+ Putting Children in Charge
+ Enlisting “Barefoot” Professionals
+ Designing New Legal Frameworks for Environmental Reform
+ Helping Small Producers Capture Greater Profits
+ Linking Economic Development and Environmental Protection
+ Unleashing Resources in the Community You Are Serving
+ Linking the Citizen, Government, and Business Sectors for Comprehensive Solutions (this is where shared public intelligence and a shared Range of Gifts Table can harmonize disparate capabilities with a common interest in stabilization, reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, and relief)
The book ends with a superb resource section including the following headings for lists of one-line access points:
+ Resources for People Seeking Jobs and Volunteer Opportunities
+ Organizations that Identify and/or Support (or Invest in) Social Entrepreneurs
+ Management, Funding, and Networking Resources for Citizen Organizations
+ Academic-Based Resources
+ Resources for Funders
+ Resources for Businesspeople
The notes and index are totally professional.
I put this book down with one final note: WOW!!!
This is an Earth-changing book, an utterly brilliant, timely, ethical, wonderful piece of scholarship, journalism, vision and information sharing. I actually have tears in my eyes. This book is Ref A for saving the Earth seven generations into the future and beyond.
See also the books I have written, helped edit, or published, including our forthcoming COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, edited by Mark Tovey with 55 contributors. It will be on Amazon 1 March 2008, and is offered free online at Earth Intelligence Network.
In addition, I recommend the “52 Tough Questions” with transpartisan answers at Earth Intelligence Network, that address the ten high-level threats to humanity as identified by the UN study on “Creating a More Secure world” (free online and also sold via Amazon), the twelve policies that must be harmonized, and the eight challengers whom we must help avoid our mistakes of the past 100 years.
This book by David Bornstein could not have come into my life at a better time–the New York Times calls it a bible in the field, I consider it to be my inspiration for my encore career. Simply spectacular. AMAZING–not just the book, but every person and organization the book names and discusses. WOW!!!
Destroys the Bible as Immutable–Totally Engrossing, January 27, 2008
Gary Greenberg
I've read close to 20 books on religion in relation to politics in the past several years, and two books have consistently fallen behind in my stack: this one, and Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus). Of the two, this one, published in 2000, five years earlier than Misquoting Jesus (but not mentioned at all in the latter) is vastly better organized, more interesting, and more pointed.
I note that the publisher and Amazon do provide the entire table of contents above (101 myths, each listed in the table of contents) and I recommend that the table of contents be considered as helpful to my recommendation that anyone interested in religion and/or virtue buy and read this book.
The author himself captures the highlights in his own preface:
+ Africa and Egypt provided most of the raw material for the Biblical stories, i.e. neighboring cultures, not “God” or even the disciples, provided the original information
+ The stories were part of a long0running propagandaa war between the kingdoms of Judah and Israel
+ The author focuses on contradictions, clear and compelling evidence of Bible myths originating in earthly cultures, and stories that simply cannot be true (e.g. cities claimed destroyed that did not exist)
+ Although explained more ably by “Misquoting Jesus,” the book clearly shows how the Bible is NOT original, nor is it even accurate. It consists of stories whose origins are earthly, rewritten over and over again, and imbued with false authority.
For me, the greatest humor and wisdom came from Israel being firmly rooted in Arab (Egyptian) myths, yet being unable to be it's brother's keeper, instead genociding the Palestinians and stealing Arab water thorugh long underground pipes.
Below are other books I recommend, and two DVDs, one on Gandhi and one on Tibet. I have come to the conclusion that organized religion is inherently a sham, illegitimate and corrupt, but that the values that religion seeks to impact are good in so far as they can be adopted by communities. This is not rocket science–the Golden Rule and the Great Law of Peace actually create prosperity and well-being.
101 Myths Better, But This is Solid Back-Up, January 27, 2008
Bart D. Ehrman
See my review of 101 Myths of the Bible for both extended comments and a list of two DVDs and several books that capture my history of reading of about religion.
With so many other reviews, this one is primarily to highlight and summarize the book for those that use me as a surrogate browser of non-fiction.
What struck me most about this book and its learned “born again” Christian was that it deconstructed the Bible so ably, but strives to retain the immutability of the Bible.
The author excels at telling his personal story of discovery, and doess a better job than 101 Myths at capturing and explaining:
+ We have no originals
+ The Bible is copies of copies over centuries
+ The Bible is a human book, full of mistakes
+ The Bible has been consistently revised by generations inserting their own historical contexts and agendas
+ Radical (the aurhot's word) alterations abound.
This book is a scholarly work that respects the contributions of a number of key scholars, but strangely makes no reference I could find to 101 Myths.
Religion has been fradulent and abusive. I agree with Rabbi Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right, on the importance of reintegrating a culture of compassion back into our social and political lives, but I am now inclined to reject all organized religion as a form of organized crime, cult, and theater.
It ignores Catholic genocide, the Catholic crusades against Islam, the high culture of both Arabic Islam and Persian Iran that preceeded European culture, eteceta.
It ignores the present day Jewish genocide against the Palestinians as well as Jewish theft of water from the Arab aquifers (the Arabs are not blameless, far from it).
Most importantly, it ignores India's success (second largest Muslim population outside of Indonesia) as well as the success of Malaysia, Turkey, and Indonesia among others, and it fails to distinguish between Islam and dictatorships or peverted roylaty such as the Saudi's to whom the US Governmetn has prostituted the Republic while they spread virulent Wahhabiism all over the world.
Gold Standard for Marketing a Brand, January 22, 2008
Dan Herman
This is a five-star book. Amazon won't let us change the stars. I realized I was imposing my ethics in taking away one star. For what it seeks to do, this is a five-star book.
This is a well-written book, ably illustrated, that is easy to read and appreciate. A few flyleaf notes:
+ Real-time branding, leveraging opportunities instead of plans
+ Accelerated world, focus on customer psyche
+ Price is NOT a strategic obstacle or advantage
+ Differentiation is everything (at the 5% level)
+ Promotional campaigns of dubious value
+ Good management is not strategy
+ Market research flawed for its focus on aggregate (group) statistics instead of psychology of the individual consumer
+ Vision plus values can make a difference
+ Identify, Invent, Implement
+ Stellar use of examples through-out the book
+ Opportunity scan: content, consumers, market, competitors, us (from outer circle to inner sweet spot)
+ Very useful and thoughtful lists, easy to understand and reflect upon
+ 15 stages of consumption within which differentiation can occur
+ Loyalty bankruptcy a challenge
+ Hypnotic branding and Fear of Missing Out both can be leveraged
Although I am a long-term strategist and focused on saving the Earth for my three boys and future generations, there is no question but that this book is the gold standard in short-term branding and market exploitation for short-term profit. It was worth my while.
Disappointing, Revisionist, Misleading, Incomplete, January 21, 2008
Newt Gingrich
Edit of 13 Feb 08 to remove extraneous negatives.
Although Newt Gingrich is one of a handful of previously elected officials who has both a brain and an appreciation for history, this book is disappointing. It is primarily a base-pleasing blast on a variety of issues that are generally described with no implementation specifics, and certainly nothing in the way of an over-all balanced budget that would show what the trade-offs are.
2) Claiming that most of America is center-right and that the Democratic party now represents the fringe left places this author at the edge of delusion. Presumably he has read Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, but I question whether he has a clue about Liberty Coalition, Reuniting America, Cultural Creatives, World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, Bioneers, or any of the other groups that in the aggregate represent over 150 million American voters who despise BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties and are–as Lou Dobbs urges–declaring Independence.
4) His specious recommendations on Iraq are completely inconsistent with reality as I have observed it across many many reviews. He fails to point out that the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Shinseki, correctly told Congress that 400,000 were needed to assure orderly stabilization & reconstruction, and that it was Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney who over-ruled the Army and insisted on listening to a combination of Ahmed Chalabi (an Iranian agent of influence) and the Israeli government all too eager to have us do their dirty work. He natually avoids discussing the fact that we were snookered by Iran into doing what they could not do for themselves. Cf. A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies)
Now for the substance, such as it is:
1) Platitudes on steroids. This is a facile book that explodes a YouTube video into a 242-page double-spaced booklet (not counting the last third of the book, appendices).
2) There are no footnotes, endnotes, or bibliography. This is a massive Op-Ed that is totally disconnected from the need to take account of any larger reality.
3)He touches lightly on young people, education, the judiciary, privatizing social security, immgiration (never mind that he consistently failed as Speaker to funded urgently needed border patrol positions), and green conservatism. “National security” gets two double-spaced pages, other topics as many as four to six. Whoopee.
3) His approach to a balanced budget is disingenius as well as mis-directed. He chants the four mantras: 1) cut taxes; 2) increase spending on what I like, decrease it on everything else; 3) end pork barrel spending; and 4) smarter spending. He certainly has a point with respect to the idiocy of rewarding Lockheed Martin for consistently failing NASA, but the last time I looked, the President and Congress had an Office of Management and Budget and a Government Accountability Office, so this is pontifical. He has no serious observations on how to eliminate income taxes (introduce the Tobin tax on Federal reserve transactions); increase revenue (end the import-export pricing fraud, the crop insurance and other frauds, different corporate books for IRS versus stockholders, the list is long and he does not have it).
4) He calls for citizen leadership and more entrepreneurship without any reference to what has been going on for over a decade in the way of World Cafe, Nexus for Change, National Online Deliberation, Wisdom Councils, Wealth of Networks, etcetera.
The book asks three relevant questions and fails to answer them to my satisfaction as a broadly-read person who believes that transpartisanship, not bipartisanship, is the necessary solution:
1) Whom do we serve?
2) What do we value?
3) How do we measure achievement?
The book contains scattered impulses, some good (Hart-Rudman emphasized that the failure of US education, especially in mathematics and science, was a major threat to the future of the Republic), and some bad (several blatant overtures to evangelicals).
Enough.
By way of larger context for those who believe non-fiction can be useful:
Bush-Cheney, and Gingrich, ignore the first 8 threats as well as the last. The global war on terrorism is a fraud. What we *should* be doing is orchestrating a $250 billion a year program against the first seven threats, stop being the world's largest arms merchant, and start phasing out the 44 dictators, all but two our best pals (see Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025.
2) There are twelve policies that must be harmonized if we are to stabilize and reconstruct our own country:
01 Agriculture
02 Diplomacy
03 Economy
04 Education
05 Energy
06 Family
07 Health
08 Immigration
09 Justice
10 Security
11 Society
12 Water
3) Nothing the USA or EU in the next ten years will matter EXCEPT AND UNLESS they create an EarthGame, an Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, that compellingly demonstrates to the eight demographic challengers (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo) how they can avoid our mistakes.
Earth Intelligence Network is offering a free book online today that will be available on Amazon in late Feburary, “COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.” Here is the bottom line: the age of top-down elite “management” of complex societies, using secrecy, scarcity, and fear to concentrate wealth and abuse the majority, is over. There is a broad literature on the emergence of bottom-up consensual citizen power including localized wisdom councils, and I have over 70 lists that can guide the earnest reader, but I will content myself for now with my last alloted link: The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All.
This book will, I hope, make money for the author. It will not, however, do anything for the Republic. Below I list seven REAL changes:
1) Electoral Reform Act (One-Page Outline at Earth Intelligence Network
2) Debates Open to ALL Parties, Not Just the Two Corrupt Parties
3) End Winner Take All in Both Cabinet and Congress
4) No Legislation Without Prior Public Posting in Detail
5) End Individual Income Taxes, Substitute Tobin Tax on Federal Reserve
6) End CEO Greed, Top Salary No More Than 1000X Lowest Salary
7) End Secrecy, Make All Government Decisions Transparent
To end on a positive note, I am quite certain that Speaker Gingrich would be a most valuable participant in any transpartisan cabinet that brought together leaders from across the spectrum. Our Nation needs more than platitudes–it needs a Transpartisan People's Trust that buys back the government; and an EarthGame in which each person has full access to all relevant information and we can self-govern in the context of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers. It does not help that we have lost an entire generation to lazy rote mediocrity in our schools.
The bottom line is that this book does not reflect the demonstrated breadth and depth of the Speaker's knowledge. It's a shallow quickie.
