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Walter Pater, Matthew Beaumont

4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Literary Minutia–Not At All What I Expected,November 20, 2011

I bought this book on the basis of a rave mention of it in one of the other books I reviewed, it might have been a year ago. It’s been sitting in my airplane pile for a while.

At a professional level of erudite literary dissection and amplification, this is clearly both a supreme professional accomplishment and a labor of love. From the note to the bibliography to the chronology, this is one of the best constructed and presented “packages” I have ever held in my hands.

It leaves me cold. I simply do not see, feel, or comprehend the bru-ha-ha over this being a clarion call to flagrant abandon, an ode to homosexuality, a challenge to the ruling class, etcetera.

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Sarah van Geider et al.

4.0 out of 5 stars Annoying, But Recommended,November 18, 2011

As someone who has been following the Occupy movement since 17 September, and whose informal video (done by someone else) went viral from the front page of Reddit, I have a deep–very deep–interest in seeing Occupy achieve tangible results. I have intimately engaged with both the plethora of “demands” and the internal divisions among everyone from the anarchists to the free-riders.

This book is annoying because it is just a bit too slick and opportunistic for my taste. Use Inside the Book to see what you are getting. It is priced very reasonably (and cheaper if bought directly from YES Magazine) and it certainly deserves to be in any library intent on capturing as much about the Occupy movement as possible, but this is not a world-changing book nor does it actually help Occupy get anywhere specific.

In fairness, though, consider visiting the YES book sale site for paragraphs on each of the ten ways YES believes Occupy has changed everything; I will only list the ten blurbs without debating their merits.

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel

4.0 out of 5 stars At full reading, disappointing, October 30, 2011

After a full reading:

Disappointing. Some authors, George Will comes to mind, do well with their recycled Op-Ed columns. I’ve reduced this to four stars because it just does not add up for me. At least the price was right. The “current news” nature of the author’s opinion pieces simply does not bode well for their reshuffling in book form. Here are the Parts, but disconcertingly the pieces within the parts are not in chronological order, for example, a piece written in 2002 is at the end of one part.

Part I: Obama and Progressive America. Very disappointing. Weak gasps of disbelief as the white half of Obama, bought and paid for by Goldman Sachs, wallowed in business as usual.

Part II: A New Economic Narrative. There are gems here, but on balance the author skirts around the two words that matter: CORRUPTION (rules in Washington) and INTEGRITY (not to be found in Washington).

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Colin Woodard

Phi Beta Iota:  Elevated to four stars on recommendation of Chuck Spinney.  Synopsis of book in article for:  A Geography Lesson for the Tea Party

Many people think of the United States as a nation with two regional or sub-national entities — the North and the South. The two sub-nations have identifiable differences in outlook. The South, a traditionally rural and agricultural region, has always been perceived to have a relatively conservative and individualistic outlook, oriented toward small government and states rights. The North, dominated by urbanized commercial centers, has always been relatively more aligned with big government agendas, a natural characteristic of densely populated areas where most people’s livelihoods are derived from industry and commerce.

The geographical, political, and cultural divides between the North and South have been fairly well defined by the “Mason-Dixon Line” — approximately the line of the Ohio and Potomac Rivers . Indeed states like Kentucky and Maryland are called “Border States” as if they were on an international frontier. And of course a military frontier DID materialize between the North and South when the Southern sub-nation attempted to assert its sovereignty during the Civil War.

This great divide between the Northern and Southern sub-nations continues to this day. I’ve read commentaries from foreigners who explain the politics of the United States as consisting of a struggle for dominance between the Northern and Southern sub-nations. We Americans refer to this as the “Red State / Blue State” divide. So the idea of the USA consisting of two sub-nations is well established.

The question this book addresses is whether it makes sense to subdivide the United States into MORE THAN TWO subnational entities. Others have asked this question before. Joel Garreau wrote about it in 1981 in his book THE NINE NATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA. I read NINE NATIONS then and concluded that it was partially valid in an economic sense, i.e. relatively more Westerners earn their livelihoods from mining, relatively more people on the Great Plains earn their living from growing wheat and corn and livestock, and relatively more Northerners earn their living from Industry. So from that perspective there are arguably nine economic nations in North America. But Garreau did not convince me that there are more than two political sub-nations inside the USA.

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Sheldon S. Wolin

Editorial Review:

Of the many books I’ve read or skimmed in the past seven years that attempted to get inside the social and political debacles of the present, none has had the chilling clarity and historical discernment of Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated. Building on his fifty years as a political theorist and proponent of radical democracy, Wolin here extends his concern with the extinguishing of the political and its replacement by fraudulent simulations of democratic process. — Jonathan Crary, Artforum

4.0 out of 5 stars Managed Democracy, Superpower, and alas, even, “Inverted Totalitarianism”, June 17, 2008

ByJohn P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) – See all my reviews  (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is a seminal work which “tells it like it is” concerning the current power arrangements in the American political system, as well as the political leadership’s aspirations towards global empire. Prof. Wolin sets the tone of his work on page 1, with the juxtaposition of the imagery of Adolph Hitler landing in a small plane at the 1934 rally at Nuremberg, as shown in Leni Reifenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” and George Bush landing on the aircraft carrier “Abraham Lincoln” in 2003. Certainly one of the dominant themes of the book is comparing the operating power structure in the United States with various totalitarian regimes of the past: Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Prof Wolin emphasizes the differences between these totalitarian powers, and the softer concentration of power in the United States, which he dubs “inverted totalitarianism.”

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Lester Brown

4.0 out of 5 stars The One Book to Buy of Brown’s–By No Means the Whole Picture, September 10, 2011

I’ve read and reviewed a number of books by Lester Brown and his advocacy agency, and have especially appreciated the State of the World series, and his Plan B Series that keeps getting pushed back, and now has a Plan B 4.0, but between that latter book and this one, I chose this one.

It gets four stars for reasons I outline in passing below. The author has his pet rocks, they are all here, but NOT in this book can one find corruption, disease, mercury, rare earths, a strategic analytic model that is holistic, actual true costs across the spectrum of options, or a strategic analytic model.

However, and this is strong praise, if you are going to get only one book by Lester Brown, this is the book to get. There are others I recommend, including High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them, and A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, the latter also free online.

Here are highlights, generally things I did not know and thought worth putting into my notes.

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Dr. Emily Spencer (Author)

This book provides an excellent description of the personal, organization and mission of what are called Special Operations Forces (SOF) and their relationship to conventional forces. More importantly it introduces the concept of `cultural intelligence’ as the precise type of intelligence information that SOF unit need to successfully execute their missions.

Cultural Intelligence which Spencer refers to as “CQ” (to avoid confusion with Counter Intelligence (CI)) is a combination of ethnography, sociology, and psychology. As Spencer makes clear successful counter-insurgency operations (COIN) and counter-terrorism (CT) programs depend on understanding the cultural environment in which they are conducted. That is it is necessary to understand the underlying social structures, beliefs, and motivations of the populations constitute what she refers to as the Contemporary Operating Environment within which SOF missions are conducted. This important insight is one of those concepts which appear obvious, but only have somebody has developed it.

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Hans Born (Editor), Ian Leigh (Editor), Aidan Wills (Editor)

Four for Content, Zero for Price,August 16, 2011

There are some good contributions in this book, and it is certainly recommended for institutional purchase, but the price is utterly outrageous and completely unacceptable for the individual professional, scholar, or practitioner interest in learning from these authors. The book should be offered immediately at no more than $35.00.

The book is focused on governments. Worse, it is focused on governments exchanging secret or sensitive information with one another.  While there is one extraordinary chapter on intelligence in international operations, the book as a whole is government centric a decade (or two) after the rest of us began routing around government. The new meme is M4IS2: Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making, and the eight tribes that do M4IS2 (when properly led, which is almost never) are academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit.

The general concept of the book, that a frame of reference for accountability is needed, is a good one, but overlooks the obvious fact that 80-90% of information sharing must be multinational, multiagency, and not secret–unclassified open sources and methods are the vast majority of what needs to be shared.  In that context, I would suggest that all governments fail the most basic accountability test: they persist in spending taxpayer money on secret intelligence that provides, “at best” 4-10% of what the full range of government needs for decision-support are.  It’s time we start holding secret intelligence accountable for being largely worthless in the overall scheme of human affairs, and in relation to the ten high-level threats identified and prioritized by the United Nations High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change.

See Also: [Amazon insert a link remains broken for books]

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Giovanni Arrighi

4.0 out of 5 stars Adding Links In Support of Review by Joseph Martin,August 10, 2011

This is how your review will appear:

I wish I could afford all the books I’d like to read. This one was recommended to me and I can certainly see how valuable it must be.

Here are just a few books that I believe strongly complement this one.

The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits
Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

A more interesting option for readers is to use the lists of book reviews at Phi Beta Iota (BOOKS), where the list on negative books includes these lists, all reviews leading back to the Amazon Page [at Phi Beta Iota, all links are active in this review].

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Giovanni Arrighi

Product Description

Winner of the American Sociological Association PEWS Award for Distinguished Scholarship: a comprehensive analysis of the development of world capitalism over the millennium.

The Long Twentieth Century traces the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Arrighi argues that capitalism has unfolded as a succession of “long centuries,” each of which produced a new world power that secured control over an expanding world-economic space. Examining the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English and finally American capitalism, Arrighi concludes with an examination of the forces that have shaped and are now poised to undermine America’s world dominance. A masterpiece of historical sociology, The Long Twentieth Century rivals in scope and ambition contemporary classics by Perry Anderson, Charles Tilly and Michael Mann.

4.0 out of 5 stars The History of Capitalism,September 7, 2010

By  Joseph Martin “pomonomo2003″ (NJ, USA) – See all my reviews

Why is this edition “new and updated”? Apparently, because of the 15 page Postscript at the end of the book (pp. 371-386). (I had read the first edition back when it first came out in the nineties but no longer seem to have a copy of it so I cannot compare the earlier edition with this one.) Here in the Postscript Arrighi attempts to sum up what he understands were the three main propositions of his book.

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