Category Archives: Reviews

“When my nose was so clotted with blood [from cocaine] that I could not breathe—something that happened routinely—I went to the hospital.” So writes Lisa Scott, half of the sister duo who have authored the new book Hindsight: The Story Of How Two Sisters Hurt, Hindered, And Healed Each Other But this is more than an addiction story. It includes the raw emotions of the non-addicted sister, Sharon Bonanno, who is also buffeted by the forces that cause and result from addiction. Continue reading →

In his new book, One Unbounded Ocean of Consciousness, Dr. Tony Nader has attempted something very difficult and achieved it very well. He overcomes the conceptual gap separating matter from mind, science from spirituality, the human from the divine and takes us beneath these superficial dualities into a fundamental synthesis establishing the wholeness of life. He conveys the unity underlying all diversity, and he deftly and convincingly resolves the apparent contradiction between free will and determinism. Nader writes in a clear, step-by-step manner that makes this knowledge understandable and shows how it can benefit us as individuals. Continue reading →

Before I digress slightly, let me state from the outset that the book by Greg Poulgrain that I am about to review is extraordinary by any measure. The story he tells is one you will read nowhere else, especially in the way he links the assassination of President Kennedy to former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the engineering by the latter of one of the 20th century’s most terrible mass murders. It will make your hair stand on end and should be read by anyone who cares about historical truth. Continue reading →

Dr. Klaus Volkamer’s new book, “Weighing Soul Substance,” builds bridges across the gulf that has separated science from spirituality, materialism from mysticism. It confirms the reality of auras, clairvoyance, remote viewing, psychokinesis, telepathy, and precognition, and presents empirical evidence that these phenomena have a material aspect. By using newly developed measuring technologies Volkamer detected changes in the mass of objects and people resulting only from mental activity. He proved that our thoughts produce physical changes in us and the world around us. “[H]uman thought and directed attention leave a detectable impression in our surroundings.” Continue reading →

At last a book that not only makes quantum physics understandable for general readers but shows how it has practical value for us. Author Dr. Robert M. Oates Jr. presents this abstract, theoretical topic in a step-by-step manner that makes it comprehensible. He explains the discoveries that are revolutionizing the way we see the world, and he captures the drama and conflicts involved in overthrowing the old scientific worldview and building the new. In conclusion he presents the benefits this knowledge can have for our individual lives. Continue reading →

Every four years, ruling elites aligned on either side of the two-party duopoly choose their most important political official, the president, to defend and protect their interests. Ordinary Americans are taught that the electoral process is a shining example of democracy at work. No other elected politician in the United States is more mythologized than the American president. George Washington couldn’t tell a lie. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Historians, educators, and the mass corporate media have for centuries portrayed presidents as heroes of the people and the most powerful representatives of the “land of the free” and “home of the brave.” Continue reading →

Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong have explored the albatross of myths, legends, lies and damn lies around America’s neck in their book American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. They look into America’s closet of historical secrets and expose them. They knock down the stuff that is just made up. The authors explain why the US habitually denies its own bad behavior, and projects it onto others. Continue reading →

The past is not dead; it is people who are sleeping. The current night and daymares that we are having arise out of murders lodged deep in our past that have continued into the present. No amount of feigned amnesia will erase the bloody truth of American history, the cheap grace we bestow upon ourselves. We have, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel address, been feeding on “a vast tapestry of lies” that surrounds us, lies uttered by nihilistic leaders and their media mouthpieces for a very long time. We have, or should have, bad consciences for not acknowledging being active or silent accomplices in the suppression of truth and the vicious murdering of millions at home and abroad. Continue reading →

Consumers of left-wing media are well aware that America is an oligarchy, not a democracy. Everyone with a functioning cerebrum, in fact, should be aware of it by now: even mainstream political scientists recognize it, as shown by a famous 2014 study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page. Nevertheless, it is important to continue to publicize the oligarchical character of the United States, in order to delegitimize the institutions that have destroyed democracy (insofar as it ever existed) and inspire people to take action to restore it. Ron Formisano’s book American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (2017) is a valuable contribution to this collective project. Continue reading →

When a book as fascinating, truthful, beautifully written, and politically significant as American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, written by a very well-known author by the name of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and published by a prominent publisher (HarperCollins), is boycotted by mainstream book reviewers, you know it is an important book and has touched a nerve that the corporate mainstream media wish to anesthetize by eschewal. Continue reading →

What if you didn’t grow up amid America’s gun culture, but are still a member of the race which suffers the most from U.S gun violence? As Gary Younge, a black reporter who grew up in England demonstrates in a moving new book titled, “Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives,” it might cause you to ask hard questions other reporters duck. Continue reading →

The American empire is usually not spoken of as such within today’s current mainstream media discussions, but is generally recognized as such during infrequent candid moments, and within discussions in much of the alternate media. The discussion is not new, and the factors within the discussion, while changing somewhat with the times, tend to have remained the same. Stephen Kinzer’s illustrative new history, The True Flag, takes the reader back to the turn of the Twentieth Century when the first acts of overseas empire were argued and acted on. Continue reading →

In penning this review, the primacy of Israel in North America’s hegemonic cultural circles limits my expectation of a sympathetic Western readership. The recent furor in Israeli government circles over the public broadcasting of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem is only a warning signal. Thugs and war criminals take on the mantel of literary critics to attack Palestine’s national poet and ascribe to him their own internalized fascist values. Judging from experience the malicious smear is bound to gain traction in Zionist-aligned literary circles at home and abroad. Our lead Palestinian politician in Israel, Ayman Odeh, explains well the Israeli officials’ fear: “If we were to know and acknowledge each other’s culture we may finally want to live together,” [al-Ittihad, July 21, 2016.] Continue reading →

There is a vast literature on the CIA-directed assassination of President John Kennedy. Most Americans have long rejected the Warren Commission’s findings and have accepted that there was a conspiracy. There is much less research on the assassination of JFK’s brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, and, if asked, far fewer people would say it was a conspiracy and a cover-up. They may not even know the alleged assassin’s name. Continue reading →

Kevin Barrett has become a legend in the US as a fearless journalist who cuts to the quick, his political and analytic skills leading to provocative, truthful explanations of our mostly inexplicable reality. He has written several books dealing with 9/11, and is currently an editor at Veterans Today, and a pundit at Press TV, Russia Today, al-Etejah and other international channels. His website is TruthJihad.com. He builds on a well-established American journalistic tradition of brave exposers of government misdoings. Bill Blum and Seymour Hirsh are best known, but there are hundreds more. Continue reading →

Following the events in Paris at Hebdo Charlie and the accompanying media frenzy concerning freedom of expression and freedom of the press, James Risen’s recent book, Pay Any Price, becomes, ironically, even more important than its original intention of uncovering the abuses of governmental power that tend to be hidden from view of the mainstream media. Continue reading →

This indeed is a brief history of the CIA, a topic that could command volumes of information encompassing much if not all of post World War II history. Continue reading →

This is a powerfully written unsettling work that relates the story of Israel from the perspective of how ideas are changed and manipulated for the benefit of the state. Unfortunately the majority of citizens of most countries are susceptible to the ideation/ideology of the mainstream of political thought as it is supported by the mainstream press. In the case of Israel, image and ideation, its narrative and ideology, are of paramount importance for the survival of the state beyond its military strength and relatively successful integration into the globalized corporate governed world. Continue reading →

With the peace talks being dead, what happens in Israel/Palestine? Settlements will continue to be built, dispossession will continue against Palestinians, slowly the “apartheid” context of Israel will become more and more obvious. Continue reading →

Since 1976, the bicentennial of the unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) that led to the founding of the United States of America from thirteen originally British colonies, Black History Month has been an officially recognised period—in February—when the descendants of the Founding Fathers acknowledge that the descendants of their slaves also have a history. Also in February, Presidents’ Day—initially George Washington’s birthday but now a combined birthday celebration for Washington and Abraham Lincoln: the Father of the Country and the Great Liberator. Continue reading →

Peter Knapp and Alan J. Spector have written a superb introduction to Marxist thought, a much needed one, since reading Marx can be a daunting task. The grand old man’s prose is often ponderous, abstract, and complex, so many readers can’t discern his full meaning. He wrote a great deal, but he didn’t bring it together and organize it, so it’s diffuse. Continue reading →

“Life Without Money” is a compilation of essays on theories and practices of non-monetary economics, which some people, including Anitra Nelson, call non-market socialism. It is a book intended primarily for academics who might want to consider teaching from this book, and those whom Nelson calls “thinking activists,” i.e., people who are primarily activists, but who are also interested in economic theory. Each chapter has many end notes and several gray boxes that mark out special points a teacher might wish to bring out during a lecture. Continue reading →

This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation’s founding, including the never-ending battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to “take back America.” Continue reading →