Books

"..and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!". The Awful Truth, which was a television show hosted by Mike Moore, is one of my favourite shows of all time. Therefore I was a sucker to buy this book, along with the gazillion other people who did. It had its moments, sometimes it was even funny, it even told me a couple of things I didn't know, but it left me wanting something more, a more comprehensive look at power, glimmers of an alternative social vision. If you are looking for an amusing book that points the finger at...

After Stupid White Men, I didn't expect too much from this book, and perhaps as a result of that, I enjoyed it infinitely moore. From 'Corporate Aid' where they solicit donations for our poor corporations who can't get the government off their backs, to 'Love Night for the Klu Klux Klan' where they send a Mariachi Band and all-black cheerleading group to send some love to ignorant racists, to trying to buy a nuclear missle off the disintegrated Soviet Union, this book never lets up. This book will make you laugh out loud without the need to check out one's...

"The True Martin Luther King Jr.". Martin Luther King Jr. was perhaps the greatest citizen of the US in the twentieth century and the US has a national holiday reflecting this status on his birthday. I knew little about him apart from his inspiring "I had a dream" speeches and a few samples on PE records, and it was wanting to learn more about this great man that prompted me to buy this book. The main focus of the book is rescuing MLK's legacy from those who have shamelessly used his name to support their own, often right-wing political agendas...

Gandhi made his appearance in my life when I was around 15 and saw the 1982 David Attenborough movie starring Ben Kingsley in the titular role. There are a handful of movies that I like because they contain deep philosophical truths, Groundhog's Day on finding the authentic self, Don Juan De Marco on our frame of reference, the Matrix on perception of reality, Fight Club on consumerism, but Gandhi and non-violence was perhaps the single movie that most altered my worldview. While I thought the world was unfair, I didn't yet have a coherent understanding of why or what to...

Modern psychology evaluates an individuals sanity by their relationship to our society, are they successful socially, materially? With suicide and depression rates rising fastest in the very societies with the greatest access to modern psychological medicine, is reconciling an individual to our society really the path of sanity? The question Fromm is asking is whether our society, on the whole, is sane and whether asking an individual to judge themselves by their relationship to it is, in fact, leading them away from sanity. The first part of the book generally revolves around this theme, and whilst I agree wholeheartedly with...

Ahh this book is so great to read. If you consider yourself a student of history, you can't ignore the world's greatest power, the United States. If you can't ignore the United States, then you can't really know its history without understanding how it treated American Indians, African slaves, women, unions and those who dissented from its leader's picture of manifest destiny. History should not be the story of elite groups, it should not ignore the struggle of people to claim our humanity from powerful interests, it should not recount events divorced from the context of the wider society in...

"From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate Pr". After reading Sharon Beder's awesome "Global Spin", I was an easy target for her next book. This book asks some questions about our society, that are forbidden in most of our media, both the corporate media due to self-interest and our public media due to not wanting to be perceived as ideological. Why is our culture such a destructive machine, why is it that when we see the negative effects our lifestyles are having on the world, we motor on regardless, why are we working longer hours, not becoming any happier, and accepting an...

"The Truth About Corporate Cons, Globalization and High-Finance Fraudsters". Greg Palast proves two things with this mind-blowing book (John Pilger said "This information is a hand grenade"). Firstly that investigative reporting isn't dead, secondly that it is the sort of reporting that really matters. Starting from a detailed account of how a daddy's boy with a low IQ stole the election for the leader of the free world, moving on to globalization, corporatization and privatization, he shows the seedy seamy side of political and corporate life that our media are paid to gloss over rather than look into. Through leaked...

Noam Chomsky is the author I have read the most books from in the last few years. Brilliant, articulate, compassionate, well researched, insightful, he has inspired a generation of activists and enraged a generation of those who have grown fat from the status quo. In a world where everyone was involved in a vibrant discussion of ideas, he would be a household name. This book transcribes Chomsky's discussions on many of the important topics in our world over the last decades. His favourite topic is the use of US power to dominate world politics for the purposes of maintaining US...