Cultural Books

This is a good book to give people who are sincerely curious about Kwanzaa--but would (for various reasons) feel uncomfortable learning about it bookwise from something which is geared towards only kids.

So many other explaination books I've come across were only for kids. And that's a missed opportunity for bringing people together.

After having attended a Kwanzaa celebration while enrolled in college, I wanted to explain this celebration to friends and family members. But I hadn't found anything which was inclusive of older readers--and my experience/perspective---until now.

Kwanzaa is based on the universal principals of the Creator God and these principles are the part of every person's life, regardless of their culture or ethnicity.

This is another great reference source by Riley. She writes and tells everything about the holdiay that anyone needs to know. The book is organized in such a way that you can read a section, gain information, put it down and come back for more. I love this book and the cover is beautiful.

I have used the paperback copy for the past two years during Kwanzaa. Each year I find something I missed before. It is the best book for all ages on the subjects. It tells you everything you want to know.

THE CONSUMER SOCIETY is an exceptionally timely and incisive work. Much of the current national dialogue on environmental politics is disabled by the notion that our citizens harbor two incompatible drives: more material goods and a healthy environment. Underlying that common wisdom is the neoclassical conception of human motivation that has become so widely rooted in the media. This book provides an important sociological and historical critique of the highly abstract neoclassical view.

The presentation of the material, with clear and comprehensive essays for each section, and brief summaries for each of the outside authors, make this book exceptionally accessible. It should be widely used by political and environmental scholars and in college classrooms as well.

The "Frontier Issues in Economic Thought" summaries, along with the overview essays, provide a markedly different service from the standard collection of abstracts. The series will benefit not only scholarly work but the application of our best thinking to the problems of the times.

-- Kenneth Prewitt President, Social Sciences Research Council

This book is basically a massive collection of indepth summaries (usually about 2-4 pages long) of the points made by major papers in the fields of sociology and economics (mainly somewhat "liberal" works). Frequently essays and papers include a lot of information that is simply filler or is unnecessary explaination of already established concepts. This book eliminates that but leaves all the main points and main support of those points intact. This book summarizes just short of 100 essays and divides them into 10 parts: Scope and Definition; Consumption in the Affluent Society; Family, Gender, and Socialization; the History of Consumer Society; Foundations of Economic Theories of Consumption; Critques and Alernatives in Economic Theory; Perpetuating Consumer Culture: Media, Advertising and Wants Creation; Consumption and the Environment; Globalization and Consumer Culture; and Visions of an Alternative.

Some of the summaries are of essays from writers such as: Juliet Schor, Alan Durning, John Kenneth Galbraith (Forward also written by him), Colin Campbell, Frank Ackerman, and (of course) many others.

There are name and subject indexes in the back and a table of contents in the front, so it is very easy to find a particular essay's summary or just find summaries of essays on the subjects/by the authors you are interested in. In addition, each summary begins with a formal citation of the essay being summarized. This is a great way of finding good articles on various subjects!

I highly recommend this book as a tool for finding good essays, as a reference book on various economics and sociology subjects, or as an introductory book to major sociology and economic theories.

THE CONSUMER SOCIETY is an exceptionally timely and incisive work. Much of the current national dialogue on environmental politics is disabled by the notion that our citizens harbor two incompatible drives: more material goods and a healthy environment. Underlying that common wisdom is the neoclassical conception of human motivation that has become so widely rooted in the media. This book provides an mportant sociological and historical critique of the highly abstract neoclassical view.

The presentation of the material, with clear and comprehensive essays for each section, and brief summaries for each of the outside authors, make this book exceptionally accessible. It should be widely used by political and environmental scholars and in college classrooms as well.

Maybe the first thing I noticed was that whenever I heard the word "democracy" used, and considered its context and meaning, that what was really meant was "capitalism." A typical example might be "we must defend democracy..." where what was really meant is "we must defend capitalism..." Anyone who disagrees should consider all the democratically elected leftist governments the United States has deposed (esp. South and Central America) through secret (i.e. illegal) economic and military attacks, to be replaced by violent, right-wing dictatorships, sympathetic to capitalist business interests.

I noticed that most news stories of importance to the government or big business are obviously one-sided. I noticed that one rarely hears both sides of many stories, and when one does, it is usually one short, page 14 contrarian bit, against many more front page articles supporting the big business or State Department view.

I began noticing that the language used in these stories is always biased, e.g. when there is a dispute between a company and labor, it is always reported as "labor trouble," or "a strike by labor, causing..." all kinds of problems. It is never "Management refuses to pay fair wages and eliminate hazardous working conditions, forcing labor to strike."

I began noticing other loaded language, like calling every potential enemy (of the state) a "terrorist." Of course American troops bombing private homes, killing innocent (usually foreign) civilians are not terrorists! NO! They are "peace keepers." No doubt about it, Double Speak is now official American policy, and far too many people buy it (lock, stock and Tomahawk missile).

I noticed George Bush spewing propaganda during the early days of his war in Iraq. He came "on the air" at least 4-5 times a day (that I heard; probably much more) saying, with very little variation in wording, "we are right to be in Iraq." It was the same, simplified message, repeated over and over, with virtually no alternative opinions offered. It was classic, textbook propaganda, exactly as Joseph Goebbels (Minister for Public Enlightenment & Propaganda in Nazi Germany) described it.

I also noticed that government programs frequently fail to fully benefit the people they are supposed to benefit, but usually do produce millions or billions of dollars worth of profit for some industry. Do we suppose that is an accident? Really?

I noticed that at first Bush attacked Iraq to eliminate WMDs, then later it was to free Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, then finally it is to prevent civil war. What do we know about a suspect when he keeps changing his story? That he's a liar, of course.

The list of inequities, injustices, inconsistencies and outright scams, larceny and lies, "not to mention" the occasional slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people, is endless. I name those cases which I recognized, even before reading Parenti, just to show that it's not that hard to recognize. And it's just not that hard to recognize the truth in what Parenti tells us.

Parenti's words ring absolutely true. The deck IS in fact stacked against the average American. The government (and especially the State) DOES IN FACT represent big money and big power, and most emphatically DOES NOT represent the average American citizen, though it certainly pretends to. Democracy exists only as a shell, to distract and divert the People, and convince us that everything is OK, or at least as well as possible.

I am not a "conspiracy theorist." That phrase is an example of what Parenti gently describes as "name calling," used by establishment media to discredit legitimate arguments which might threaten power. I knew that. But of course there ARE conspiracies. And there IS in fact a Big Conspiracy of capitalists against the people.

No, capitalists and people who work within and for that system do not necessarily meet with representatives of the government and state, in seedy motel rooms, wearing trenchcoats, after midnight, to plan their attacks. They don't need to. They all know their roles perfectly well, as they've been handed down to them, or which they've been indoctrinated for, and know that they must play them, if they want to STAY rich and in power. Money is in fact the root of all evil, with simple power not far behind.

Michael Parenti describes these cases and hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar ones, and explains them in the context of state, military, big business and big money power. He tells us the true story, unaltered by political and economic pressure, censorship and self-censorship, and the politics of exclusion (when is the last time YOUR leftist voice was heard in the major media?). It should be no surprise that power almost always wins, at the expense of everyone else, their claims to the contrary not withstanding. And all issues of justice and morality fall by the wayside, victims of capitalist money and state power.

I could go on, practically forever in fact, because the injustices, large and small, are practically infinite. But Parenti tells it much better than I, in fact most of us, ever could. The fact is, what Parenti tells us in Contrary Notions (and in his other books) is perfectly consistent with what can be observed every day, if we would just open our eyes. He tells the absolute, ugly truth, which every citizen should know if our society is EVER to change for the better.

Contrary Notions should be required reading for every American citizen who cares about Democracy and Justice (fat chance!). There is not a man (or woman) in America who tells the unvarnished truth about American politics, money and power more clearly and honestly than does Michael Parenti.

For me the comments on Clinton's bombing of Kosovo were very insightful. But I'm an easy sell since I am so sceptical about everything I read in the media.

I've been reading progressive books for 40 years, so I've read plenty. When reading this book by Dr. Michael Parenti it struck me that if there was only one book I could recommend everyone should read, it would have to be this one. It touches just enough, on everything that one should be aware of, to make sense of why the world is as it is and why it is time to question the capitalist economic paradigm that we live in. Dr. Parenti shows his ability to take complex class-based analysis of the world order and our personal lives within it and state the arguments for how we can create a better world in a way that should be understandable to every reader. At least those readers who are prepared to remove the blinders imposed on us all by capitalist indoctrination. This is indeed a "reader" that instills a working class consciousness in simple terms and equips one with a clear understanding of our class enemy and the need to build a real people's alternative. Buy it, read it and share it. You won't be sorry! I'm going to approach my local library and get them to purchase it as well.

This book is a wonderful addition to Parenti's body of work. I sat down and started reading and found myself reading every article. Touching on many of the areas Parenti has examined for years, it brings together his usual sharp, readable critique and an extraordinary amassing of interesting facts and accounts. With such an array of topics and ideas and representing such a wide scope of learning and reflection it's an education all its own. And it's so beautifully written (as Parenti's books always are). It's so nice to know that there are people who can write this way, with such economy of prose -- so elegant in style yet saying so much.

I bought this for my son. He feels that this this is a good book. It was very inspirational to him.

It has been about 4 years now since I read this book. To me it was an excellent autobiography and told a miraculous story. So, Carl, what have you been up to since?

"Convicted in the Womb" is a deeply captivating too true autobiography that reads like the first half of the life of an untold number of African-American men in the last half century.
The detailed descriptive analysis of the terms and concepts Niggerization, DeNiggerization, and AntiNiggerization is not only long overdue to the public, but gives voice and creedence to particularly those men who can identify with Carl Upchurch's
LIFE Experiences and Mission.
For someone like myself to live and breath my passion in teaching incarcerated teen boys in a court-mandated program called ACE - Adolescent Counseling Education, copies of "Convicted In The Womb" have now been placed into the hands of all my students. Through this story they can see themselves, each other, and how they place in the history of this country. They also have read and expressed that it's truly the first book they have ever read, and wanted to read!!!! This is a story to be shared and read together and discussed, because IT MEANS BUSINESS. This is a story that must be understood. People must be understood! It teaches how when we look at our personal circumstances, and then have the opportunity to look outside our life,"hood",and prison life, particularly through books, and then we can find our FREEDOM, our HOPE, our POSSIBILITIES, our ANSWERS, our WISDOM, OUR TRUE POWER IN UNITY. My students know that I care about them and demonstrate it by my fierce committment to AntiNiggerization. May the Youth of America read this book! May the people who work with Youth read this book! May the Prison Staff read this book! May our Spiritual Leaders and Activists read this book! May the High Schools and Colleges put this in their adopted book lists for VIOLENCE PREVENTION coursework and THE RESOURCE MANUAL for all students on how to help our youth coming up with the Community Work they can do to CHANGE our World for the better!!! And so May the Politicians read this book! May the Parents [who understandably worry about their childrens' safety and future] read this book. My students all know now that there are people all over this country changing things for the better, people just like them, and they have our support!!! My students are learning that the Womb is Sacred, we all as Equals are Sacred.

Carl vividly describes his life beginning as a young child. The challenges he faced growing up in this society are dramatically expressed in the first paragraph of the book. This is clearly a story of hope and inspiration as it shows the struggles one endures in making positive changes in one's life. Carl shows how God worked in his life and how the impact of the Holy Spirit in one person's life can impact the world. Many inmates identify with Carl's life experiences and view him as a role model. Carl's story quickly invites the reader into his life and is difficult to put down until the last page is read.

I liked the information given and how it was presented. IT gives examples of things that have actually happen and this one will really make you think.

It has always been the case that those with excess power are likely to overuse it, at the expense of those who have little power. In the corporate world, the hand of companies can get overbearing when there's a lot at stake. Unions have always experienced tough tactics. Legislatures are wooed with money, contributions, influence and political pressure. Whistle blowers often find themselves harassed, threatened, and intimidated. All of these excesses are documented with recent examples in this thoughtful book.

If you love your relationship with your HMO, the way your credit card company charges you, what your credit report has to say, and how your privacy is protected, then you have no need for this book. If, on the other hand, you are concerned about scandals like Enron, WorldCom, and have problems with corporate marketing to children at school, your HMO, credit card companies or credit reports, you need to read this book.

Mr. Court makes a persuasive case for corporations having gained too much power, and that the time has come to redress that balance in favor of individual citizens. He also provides lots of advice about what you can do to make matters better . . . both for yourself and others. The book's main flaw is that the section on how to fix matters is the briefest.

I hope that during the elections in 2004 that these issues will receive the attention they deserve.

After you finish this excellent book, find something to do to exercise your rights from the lists that begin in Part Three.

This book will shock you with how much information on you is floating around and more importantly, who has access to it. A must read in todays world.

I heard Mr. Court speak at a breakfast in San Francisco last week and purchased a copy of the book. Excellent expose of how corporations are curtailing our freedom and ending any idea of privacy. A lot of interesting things to think about.

Don McNay
President
McNay Settlement Group
Richmond, Ky. 40475

The Costs of Living isn't what you'd call light reading. Published in 1994, its subject could be broadly classified as the meaning of life. But the subtitle, "How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life," offers the constraint on the topic that prevents this book from being endless.

It's an enchanting but difficult read. Barry Schwartz, whose more recent Paradox of Choice garnered a New Yorker review and positive press for dealing with the same topics on the level of the individual, here demonstrates instead the powerlessness of the individual to stop the relentless advance of market forces into every domain of life. Moving from business to medicine to law to sports to love to education to democracy, Schawrtz shows how the things we purport to value most in life are now subject to market influence--and argues, persuasively, that they are far worse for it.

This is enchanting because Schwartz is a fantastic writer, good at using examples to make his points and capable of humor and serious concern in equal measure. The reading is made difficult by the fact that the book was written in 1994. Rather than the doomsday prophet that Schwartz surely seemed upon publication, he now appears oddly prescient about the continuing advances the market would make into all spheres of life if people did not band together to stop it. While he could not have anticipated the ways in which people's yearning for community in the face of these forces would be exploited by politicians willing to wield those communities' principles as marketable commodities--and how those politicians would use their resulting power to help the market forces advance ever faster--the ingredients of that recipe for disaster are all quite plain to the reader with benefit of knowledge of the ensuing decade.

Can we still turn things around? The task is undoubtedly even more difficult now than Schwartz suggested it would be ten years ago. But we ought to try, and Costs of Living still offers a good way to start constructing the framework by which we might begin to do so. Highly recommended.

Ever worry that your doctor has the HMO profit margins in mind more than your care? Ever get disgusted by big time college sports? Ever worry about the erosion of values and cohesion in your community? Then this book is for you.

This is a marvelous book that explores how people should think about their places in our society. Schwartz, a Professor at Swarthmore College, has a well-deserved reputation for debunking commonly held myths promulgated by economists and others who seek to explain all human behavior by supply and demand curves, and irresistible biological imperatives.

Yes, we do have a choice about how we want our communities to function, and Schwartz tells us how we can ``reintroduce the language of responsibility and morality into our public life.''

Schwartz also has a rare gift for making complex topics seem easy to understand. This is a surprisingly readable book, full of anecdotes and examples that will help you relate the ideas to your own life. Its conclusion, about a dilemma Schwartz faced in his own community, is notable for its drama as well as for the fact that Schwartz declines to offer easy answers.

Read this book, and you will think differently (and more perceptively) about the world around you. It is *that* good.

A good attempt at explaining the costs of living in capitalism. A bit dated considering the World Trade Organization, computerization and downsizing, but he makes points most people need to hear and consider. Well worth reading and thinking about. Order a copy and begin to think!

Read this book if you have ever been concerned about how some of our societies great institutions are being weakened by the market pressures of today. Ever worry that your doctor has the HMO profit margins in mind more than your care? Ever get disgusted by big time college sports? Ever worry about the erosion of values and cohesion in your community? Then this book is for you.

Counting Coup is an interesting book, and an important one I think. Joseph Medicine Crow is the "last traditional Crow chief" and this is his story. Dr. Medicine Crow discusses his family, his schooling, his days as a soldier, he also tells us a little about Crow mythology which is really interesting, and for what it's worth, I believe him. I particularly like the story called "Stealing a Beef," and his description of his warrior training which includes running barefoot in the snow.

Although the book is short and there is a whole lot more that could be said, it's worth reading. This book is great for a younger audience or adults looking to get acquainted with Crow culture.

Mr. Medicine Crow is an impressive man, about 90 years old now. The book is written in the brief and blunt sentences as he would speak English. He lived up to the old ways of the Crow when he stole fifty German horses from under their noses in World War II. A landmark in Indian literature.

This book is made up of several short story snippets from the life of Joseph Medicine Crow. The intended audience was young adult, though certainly an adult like myself can enjoy it, too. Of course, because the stories are very short and to the point, one can't help but feel that there is so much more that could have been included here. The author tells brief stories about his formative years and his time in WWII. Good, easy reading for an overnight trip, but it might leave you wanting more.

Joe Medicine Crow is a national treasure. Born on the Crow Reservation in the early years of the twentieth century, he was raised among Indians who lived during the buffalo hunting days. Grandparents Medicine Crow and Yellowtail were important Crow leaders whose homes were the place of many gatherings. Joe soaked up the stories like a sponge, and he has been an invaluable source of tribal stories. In this book, in particular, he talks about his own upbringing, as his people's traditions adapted to life in America in the new century. He writes of his life using compassion and humor, but the difficulties he faced are clear. That he has led such a strong life is testimony to the fine man that he is. I found this book tremendously enjoyable, and the glimpse it gave me into this forgotten era is priceless.

This is a subject that is worthy of multiple volumes. Nothing in our history is more controversial than the wars we have participated in. That Perret covered this subject in one volume creates a good news/bad news situation. Bad news: There is no room for any depth of discussion on his part and that leads quite often to conclusions that are, at the very least, misleading if for no other reason than they aren't explored thoroughly. Also he is moving along so fast that there is often a kind of breezy smugness in his approach which tended to make me the reader defensive.
Good news: The entire narrative is is very readable. The Perret stays strictly on his subject throughout, which is no easy task when dealing with military/political issues of any nature. Finally, he makes a very strong arguement against the Uptonian view that has held sway for so long. I've always been a bit of a centrist when it comes to Upton and Perret has me leaning toward the "anti" camp. That, in my case, is no small thing. For that reason alone, four stars!

This is the ONE book you should read if you are interested in American History. Perret links society and culture to an exposition of the American military experience, showing how both are intertwined, and how each affects the course of the other

January 2004

I've read a lot of history books and when I came across this one 15 years after it was published I thought it would be outdated, especially current history and personal projections around the time it was published, but I was wrong. The entire book brings back academic studies and refreshes the reader's memory of the history of America and the final chapters conclude with eerie philosophy, prophecies, and conclusions that makes one realize in hindsight that the author was right on target. He should write a sequel.

Complete timeline and strories from beginning to SE Asia. The author's style of interjecting his own fact-based impressions really help lighten up what could be an otherwise long winded topic. I have read several books on US military history, but none as thorough and cross-service as this. Most just covering one conflict or one branch of service. This has it all. A MUST FOR ALL MILITARY HISTORY BUFFS!

Just when you thought literary crit. was doomed to its staid exsistence, Ronell arrives on the scene. A critic (whose name escapes me) once said that while we can pick up a book, books can throw us across the room. I'm still recovering from the flight and trip this little book sent me on...

This book is revolutionary. If you've ever wondered what an artist (Avital Ronnell is a former performance artist) might be capable of coming up with if they became an academic (a professor) but were still devoted to the idea of performance, this is the answer. Think Kitaj and how his paintings is a form of interpretation of other artists' work in referencing them in the theme of his own work. In other words, Avital Ronnel's "Crack Wars" and its "analysis" of Madame Bovary is possible because it is from a field of study that is unique in that it is devoted to the study of an artform (literary arts) while itself operating in the same medium as that artform (words). The creativity exhibited in "Crack Wars", which is its most powerful proposition, shows that an interpretive "analysis" can be offered on a work of art ("Madame Bovery") without even wanting to answer the question, "What does is mean?". Much of the creative thrust seems to come from the way in which Ronnell re-metaphorizes certain elements or metaphors related to (current) drug use and applies them in the exploration of other facets of society that alters or simulates (ex. taking a "hit" or "scoring" of literature). What this does is to expand the reading of "Madame Bovery" to a whole crop of metaphors and their current exploration whose consideration in language may not have been in circulation at the time of its writing. And though this work may be on the edge of "literary studies", Ronnell is by no means a marginal figure. As head of NYU's dept of Germanic Languages, Ronnell co-lectured a graduate seminar last fall with Derrida (she is in the "Derrida" documentary with multi-colored bobby-pins relaying an interaction with Derrida's mother). Consider the language of the extensive quote below.

"Madame Bovary I daresay is about bad drugs. Equally, it is about thinking we have properly understood them. But if the novel matches its reputation for rendering its epoch- our modernity - intelligible, then we would do well to recall that epoch also means interruption, arrest, suspension and, above all, suspension of judgement. Madame Bovary travels the razor's edge of understanding/reading protocols. In this context understanding is given as something that happens when you are no longer reading. It is not the open-ended Nietzschean echo, "Have I been understood?" but rather the "I understand" that means you have suspended judgement over a chasm of the real. Out of this collapse of judgement no genuine decision can be allowed to emerge. Madame Bovary understood too much; she understood what things were supposed to be like and suffered a series of ethical injuries for this certitude. Her understanding made her legislate closure at every step of the way. She was her own police force, finally turning herself in to the authorities. She understood when the time had come to an end [...] for Madame Bovary opens herself to an altogether different history of intelligibility, in fact, to another suicide pact, cosigned by a world that longer limits its rotting to a singular locality of the unjust."

Ronell's book is a tour-de-force on many levels: for its lucid and startling close-reading of -Madame Bovary-, for the densely glittering energy (and humor) of her prose, and above all for its insight -- never before so comprehensively and convincingly argued -- into addiction as a symptomatic structure of the modern condition. (The addict, she points out, embodies a peculiar challenge for thinking about the inside/outside, mind/body relation. Emma Bovary takes us farther into questions of expenditure and circulation.) This is a must-read not only for those interested in Flaubert's novel, but in the history of subjectivity more generally. Even in its craziest moments, the book is provocative and perceptive.

Avital Ronell examines drugs addiction & mania in this amazingly well written and concisely beautiful book. A book-as-object, containing installations, special sections and poetic-philosophic passages, Crack Wars is sure to please the patient reader. Draws from Flaubert, Heidegger and Derrida...contends that this "culture inspires and supports destructive play only to punish it." A must read!

Sloterdijk adheres to the theories advanced by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, but begins where Kant left off by exposing the force behind dynamic individualism. In other words, the a priori of Kant becomes the a posteriori here--the experience alone mitigates life. Rather than dwelling endlessly on mathematical knowledge, as Kant did, Sloterdijk's epistemology more nearly resembles David Hume's. Indeed, in shaping his discussion of logical versus factual propositions, knowledge by acquaintance is always knowledge based upon what Hume called "impressions". The 'cynical' aspect of the title derives from the "enlightened false consciousness" Sloterdijk finds in modern society.

"Mistrust is the intelligence of the disadvantaged," or "In any form of erudition, intelligence risks its life" or "emigration has become a fact of mass psychology"--these are among hundreds of aphoristic statements that make Sloterdijk's wide-ranging studies and well-reasoned observations on cynicism, Diogenes and the search for truth, Nietzsche, Marx, and the contemporary human situation so striking. He's had enough of nihilism (and all its intellectual and industrial applications), and tells you why. And the book's illustrated with extraordinary aptness--everything from medieval woodcuts to Pasolini. In short, he clears a space to think--a rare event. To read a present-day Lucian who can shake hands with Kierkegaard, read this book.

Sloterdijk's categorical imperative centers on the phenomenology of reason and judgment, without the excess baggage one finds in Kant. Describing an arc, for example, Sloterdijk reveals the nuances of and reasoning surrounding a curve, bending the parallax of the necessary optical effect.

Sloterdijk's humor is not lost, either, for his critique blends the effusive as well as effective. I highly recommend this book.

An insightful account of the cynical "Zeitgeist." Sloterdijk's book is-after 15 years-still a fresh wind in the grey landscape of Philosophy. He writes with "verve," thinks wonderfully unsystematic, and says what we all (more or less) think. Highly recommendable to the flexible mind. Juergen Kleist, Plattsburgh, New York