By Ed Schultz Hyperion, $25.95, 198 pages Killer Politics is the story of Ed Schultz and his efforts to prove that a liberal format could compete in a talk-radio market dominated by conservatives. It’s also a commentary on the major issues of our day, which Schultz approaches from the perspective of their negative effect on [...]
By Clyde Prestowitz Free Press, $26.00, 337 pages The recent economic downturn has sure been a boon to the publishing industry, as scores of books have been released analyzing how Big Banks, Wall Street, greed, and incompetence have caused the financial crisis. A few books have gone deeper than pointing fingers and looked at the [...]
By Paul Greenberg The Penguin Press, $25.95, 284 pages Here’s a piece of nonfiction that is sure to reel you in! Paul Greenberg’s Four Fish details the plight of our wild seafood system. By focusing on four species—salmon, tuna, bass, and cod—Greenberg paints the grim story of our collective aquatic diets. It seems that all [...]
By George G. Szpiro Princeton University Press, $26.95, 226 pages This book by George Szpiro is a book for math geeks, as well as those of us who have ever questioned justice and how the numbers of democracy really works. Written for general readership, this highly entertaining book (I’m not a math geek) starts off [...]
By Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy Harvard University Press, $27.95, 256 pages The author presents a brilliant analysis, surveying the anthropology, politics, and development studies done from 1909-2009. It was interesting to note that the social costs of drug wars were high and gains very few. Based upon on looking at the rich bibliography and glossary of drug [...]
By Garret Keizer Public Affairs, $27.95, 385 pages This is a highly entertaining and sometimes maddening survey account of noise around the world and its impact on humans. Garrett Keizer occasionally cites relevant points, such as that one’s reaction to noise is often tied to personal factors. If I’m married to a professional pilot, the [...]
By Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons Crown, $27.00, 306 pages Co-authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons are psychologists whose scientific study of attention, Gorillas in Our Midst, became so popular that has been viewed countless times in classrooms and over the Internet. Charbis and Simons explain six everyday illusions that deceive us and can prove dangerous. [...]
By Deanna Zandt Berrett-Koehler, $16.95, 172 pages More than a how-to book, Deanna Zandt in Share This!: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking explains the ins and outs of becoming increasingly engaged through Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. The main text of the book discusses the powerful tools that are [...]
By William Jelani Cobb Walker & Company, $23.00, 191 pages Historian William Cobb of Spelman College traces the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States in 2008. The latter was the most remarkable development of the 2008 election is shown in a very limited manner. “On November 5, 2008, the [...]
By Anthony Bianco Public Affairs, $26.95, 355 pages The Big Lie: Spying, Scandal, and Ethical Collapse at Hewlett-Packard uses testimony and records of written communications to paint an unflattering picture of petty interpersonal conflict among top leaders at Hewlett-Packard. It starts with a history of people and events leading to the Spygate scandal that revealed [...]
By Michael Peel Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press, $24.95, 256 pages In Nigeria, oil has boomed and small villages have challenged giant oil companies. The oil rich Nigeria delta region is the focus of the study in this book. Among the author’s various travels in his quest to understand Nigeria’s oil [...]
By Annie Leonard Free Press, $26.00, 317 pages Based on the wildly popular Internet video of the same name, The Story of Stuff takes the reader on a journey through the life of our stuff. We all have a lot of stuff. Too much stuff, in fact. And as we consume more stuff and demand [...]
By Ian Gill Douglas & McIntyre, $28.95, 328 pages The treatment of the native peoples of the Americas is, both historically and currently, a scourge on the face of the nations that make up the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. In All That We Say is Ours, Ian Gill writes of British Columbia’s Haida Nation, [...]
By Jeffrey A. Miron The Basic Book Group, $24.95, 198 pages The word Libertarian and the political philosophy it represents received a great deal of attention during the U.S. presidential primaries in 2008, because of Ron Paul, who while registered as a Republican calls himself a Libertarian. Libertarianism is a word that is thrown around [...]
By Fernando Baez Atlas Books, $15.00, 354 pages Oblivion and the Fragility of Books. That’s the title of chapter eight in Fernando Baez’s A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, and it perfectly encapsulates the message of his work. For being so desperately, keenly important to our development, our history, and our culture, books [...]
By Justin Vaisse; Translated by Arthur Goldhammer Harvard University Press, $35.00, 366 pages Throughout Neoconservatism: Biography of a Movement, the author Justin Vaisse never offers a concise definition of “neoconservative,” instead floating between several, remaining ever frustratingly vague. One gets the sense that Vaisse feels much as Justice Potter Stewart felt about pornography, he can’t [...]
