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Ginny Whitelaw

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Stars, Spectacularly SImple, Foundation Book for Epoch B Collective Self-Governance,May 21, 2012

I’ve been a driven over-achiever most of my life, and only started emerging from the “because I said so” culture so characteristic of the Marine Corps and the Central Intelligence Agency, when I realized in 1988 that everything we were doing was NOT WORKING, and I started looking beyond government, beyond command & control, beyond “rule by secrecy,” for answers. Tom Atlee and his book, The Tao of Democracy: Using co-intelligence to create a world that works for all were for me a rite of passage. Since embracing Tom’s wisdom in 2004 I have read a great deal more. If Tom’s book was my introduction to the world of collaboration and collective intelligence, then this book is my graduate-level portal in which I start the transformative process of moving away from impacting on”it” to being part of “it,” a more neutral invested role that stops trying to project “the” answer on recalcitrant bureaucracies, and instead supports emerging networks such as Occupy and the Tea Party and the Freedom Node to Tower to Mesh movement.

I rate this book at six stars and beyond (my top 10% out of 1800+ non-fiction reviews) for multiple reasons.  I will read it again and then donate it.

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Lewis Sorley

A Man Promoted Above his Ability September 12, 2011

By Hrafnkell Haraldsson VINE™ VOICE

I grew up during the Vietnam War. I was seven years old when General William Westmoreland was sent to Vietnam by LBJ to take charge of things there. I was eleven when he lost his job and by then, had lost us the war. Vietnam was in the news the entire time, on TV, in the paper, in Time Magazine – as was Westmoreland’s iconic chin. Being the son of military parents I’d early gotten the history bug and I was fascinated by what was taking place over in Southeast Asia, even if I didn’t understand it well. As I grew older, and things over there grew worse, I began to wonder how we could possibly lose such a war (as I thought it was) against such a small country.

Lewis Sorely’s “Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam” will tell you how. Sorely has the credentials for this book. He is himself a graduate of West Point. He served in Vietnam. He even served in the office of the Army Chief of Staff, General William C. Westmoreland, and taught at West Point. This isn’t just a book by some journalist trying to get at the bottom of things. Sorely has been “at the bottom of things” and he has done the leg work over a period of years, talking to 175 people in his search for the events he here recounts.

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Mark Dery

Bad Thoughts, Great Book March 27, 2012

By Supervert<

I find it impossible to discuss Mark Dery’s I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts in anything other than the first person. The book speaks so eloquently of its time that, uncannily, I can’t help but feel it speaks of me. So many of my own interests and obsessions rise from its pages — death, deviance, intellect. I recognize my iTunes library in Dery’s tours de force on David Bowie and Lady Gaga. I recognize my bookshelf in Dery’s essay on Amok Books, whose productions were once textbooks in the éducation sentimentale of the counterculture. I recognize my own rhetorical strategies in the move Dery makes in “Toe Fou,” updating George Bataille’s meditation on the big toe by riffing on a picture of Madonna’s bare feet. Weirdest of all, I recognize what I thought was my own obscure fondness for “invisible literature” in Dery’s essay on the New York Academy of Medicine Library — a place I too have plundered in quiet hours of mad and horrible research. Was I sitting across the table from you, Mark? I feel as though you, like Baudelaire, have addressed your book to “mon semblable, mon frère.”

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Howard Rheingold

5.0 out of 5 stars Author is THE Path-Finder for Assisted Thinking,May 13, 2012

I first discovered Howard Rheingold through his book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology. This led to my inviting him and with him, John Perry Barlow, to a conference in 1992, where over 600 intelligence professionals got to realize how far behind they were in relation to the art of the possible. We have stayed in touch over the years, and among his many other books, I also recommend as a prequel to this one, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

Howard writes–and I read him–at multiple levels. Below I offer a couple of additional recommended readings for each level, with the assertion that you need this book in order to help your child learn what is not so obvious about the world–we can start with Google being math hacks on digital garbage.

Strategic. At the strategic level Howard sees the convergence of many minds connected and empowered by the Internet and related applications to create infinite wealth. He himself cites Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom to which I would add Alvin Toffler’s superb wrap up Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives.

Operational. At the operational level Howard is easily on of the top practitioners of “who you know is what you know” and I know of no one who better melds the tools from the tactical level and the vision from the strategic level to achieve the personal and communal efficacy embodied in a “smart community.” This book is a blend of how to make the most of who you know, what applications you use, and how you apply your own mind to include being super alert to the fact that 80% of the Internet is garbage. At this level I would point to two books, the first by David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room and the second by Tom Atlee, Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics.

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Brian Latell

3.0 out of 5 stars CIA Perspective, But Priceless — and Priced Fairly, May 3, 2012

EDIT of 13 May 2012 Chapters 6-7

I am reluctantly dropping this book to three stars. There is just too much nonsense in here. The author’s portrayal of Cuban and Castro deep engagement in El Salvador is totally inconsistent with my understanding from my service in El Salvador in 1979-1980. The author also fails to mention the extreme right death squads, the land monopoly of the 14 families, the abject poverty, and so on. This book is beginning to wear me down, sounding more and more like it was written by a rabid Cuban exile intent on spewing forth a CIA-blessed view of Castro and the DGI that is neither complete nor accurate.

On page 119 there is again a contradiction between the author’s second hand glorification of how the Cuban assassination squads can do no wrong, and miraculous escape from two assassination attempts against the author’s prime source.

Chapter Seven is a mess. The author has either not ready anything of substance about the JFK assassination and the now conclusively known facts that Oswald was a patsy, tested negative for gunspower residue, and was standing in the door (photo now available) when JFK went by and was assassinated), or the author’s book is part of an on-going CIA covert operation to muddy the CIA role in the JFK assassination. On balance I think the author is simply too quick to accept “blessed” interpretations of events, and has forgotten how to be an independent analyst able to capture his own sources outside the CIA. There is nothing in here about how Oswald was a Marine doing SIGINT on Okinawa, and the fact that he was sent to make a scene in Mexico.

What *is* valuable is the account of Castro’s direction to re-enact the Kennedy assassination with his own snipers on island, ultimately concluding–as those of us who read broadly now know–that Oswald could not have killed Kennedy.

This chapter also overlooks or fails to mention decades of DGI work with students and labor.

I still have a third of the book to go, perhaps it will get better. Right now, what this book does is make me want to go find some proper books in English or Spanish on the DGI. This book is NOT a proper book on the DGI.

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Carne Ross

4.0 out of 5 stars 5 for Superficial Overview, 3 for Pretense, May 13, 2012

It is unfortunate that Amazon’s superb “Look Inside the Book” has been limited by the publisher to only the introduction, as I would like the potential buyer to have a much greater feel for the book that the reviews or the few front pages can offer, before making a decision.

Here is the bottom line: nothing in this book is a new insight, and I am astonished by the claimed editorial reviews, as they seem oblivious of the decades of work by others in the areas of co-evolution, panarchy, collective intelligence, hybrid governance, open source everything, small is beautiful, human scale, Epoch B, resilience, intelligence at the edges of the network, etcetera. In other words, this book is more of a “quickie” book, not at all the “deeply researched” effort that is claimed, and it is at best a survey that barely scratches the surface of my two master lists, of lists of book reviews I have done here at Amazon, a means of reading all my reviews sorted into many categories (including the future of democracy, of capitalism, etcetera). The positive list is the one to focus on for everything that this author attempts to convey, and points to many of the sources that the book does not cite. Both lists were the foundation for my 2010 book listed below after my name. The negative list documents the obvious, but with a structure that has been lacking in critiques to date, most are incoherent for lack of an analytic model. To get to the link, just search for full name of the list as shown below.

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David Isenberg

He Got the Big Things Right

Thomas Powers

New York Times, April 26, 2012

Eisenhower: The White House Years
by Jim Newton
Doubleday, 451 pp., $29.95

Eisenhower in War and Peace
by Jean Edward Smith
Random House, 950 pp., $40.00

Bettmann/Corbis

When the youngest man to be elected president of the United States was inaugurated in 1961, the contrast with his predecessor could hardly have been greater, and John F. Kennedy made the most of it. “Let the word go forth,” he said grandly at his inaugural, “…that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” The Harvard graduate from Massachusetts had no great achievements to his name but he had a thick head of hair the color of chestnuts, brainy friends who played vigorous touch football, an activist international agenda, and a stylish wife with a soft voice who was already planning to bring high-end decorators and artists of international repute to the White House. Kennedy intended to move boldly where his predecessor had been watchful and slow.

Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, September 1959

The man Kennedy replaced was seventy and none too robust. He had suffered a heart attack and a mild stroke in office, along with other ailments, and was notorious for losing himself in a tangle of words when addressing sticky questions. Dwight David Eisenhower won deathless fame as commander of the 1944 invasion of France that helped to end World War II in Europe, but once out of uniform genial blandness seemed to settle over the man, called Ike since youth. His bald pate and broad smile gave him an amiable, grandfatherly air. His tastes matched those of a generation winding down. He got up early and went to bed early. In the White House he and his wife Mamie frequently had dinner together alone in front of the TV. Ike’s favorite movie was Angels in the Outfield, a sentimental baseball film of 1951. Close seconds were the western films High Noon of 1952, in which the town marshal faces down four men come to kill him, and The Big Country, in which a retired sea captain brings peace to feuding ranch families.

Ike watched High Noon three times and The Big Country four times. In the audience at one showing of the latter was the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, come to the US to argue for sweet reason in dealing with Khrushchev over Berlin. Macmillan hated The Big Country. “It lasted three hours!” he protested in his diary. “It was inconceivably banal.” Gregory Peck turned the other cheek for most of the film but a moment came when he had to fight. That, roughly, was what the president had been telling Macmillan all day. Macmillan was reluctant to push the Russians over Berlin; Eisenhower felt a line had to be drawn clearly before the talking could begin.

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Anthony Olcott

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Insider-Outsider Unique Offering, March 24, 2012

This is my final review. If you are interested in what the US Intelligence Community does NOT know about open source intelligence and the global network of sources in 183 languages, this is without question the only book available in English, and a six star rating is earned by virtue of its uniqueness. This is NOT a book that will teach you anything about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).

The author, an academic rather than a CIA body, has done a phenomenal job of integrating multiple literatures in studying the history and culture of the CIA’s open source endeavors as well as its overall culture, and in his conclusion, offers up sound ideas that need to be implemented if we ever get a national leadership that is interested in intelligence with integrity.

I certainly recommend that this book be read along with Hamilton Bean’s No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence (Praeger Security International).

Dr. Olcott has done a tremendous service to all who care about the future of the craft of intelligence (decision-support), and I have been so impressed with this book that I reworked my chapter for Routledge at the last minute to ensure this book’s inclusion in the bibliography and credit to the author on two points within the chapter. A “must read” for anyone interested in bureaucracy, public administration, intelligence, information pathologies, obstacles to innovation, and so on.

I made ten pages of notes. Below I offer a distilled summary.

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