ERA Reviews

For anyone looking for a straight-foward examination of "NWO" political thought, minus the right wing conspiracy propaganda. The author explains why nation states are obsolete in the face of increased economic and social hegemony, pointing to an increasing need for a collective cooperation. The fact the book was written years before the European Union or WTO even existed is testament to Brzezinski's foward thinking genius. One of the best books on foreign relations, period.

History of science, psychology and lots of wisdom in this book seaking a new paradigm for software engineering, using the unique features of software. I loved the book.

Found this book used in a bookstore. Must admit the cover attracted me...but what a treasure it has been.

This reference to the songs, orchestras and individuals of the big band music era will prove an indispensable reference to any student of swing or jazz big band music: it covers songs favored by swing era orchestras and provides an excellent examination of both the roots of the songs and those orchestras which made them famous.

"Black Jack" Logan was perhaps the best of the "political" generals of the Union army.
His military service, from Forts Henry and Donelson, through Vicksburg and Atlanta and on to the Carolinas, demonstrated not only his own abilities and personal courage, but also was emblematic of the skilll and sacrifice of his "Egyptians" of southern Illinois generally. His political thought, too, illustrative of the times, reflected the shift in Illinois opinion from initial confusion and wavering, to near-solid support for Lincoln and his war policies.
In conjunction with this very readable biography, the reader might be also be interested in "Reminiscences of a Soldier's Wife", Mrs. Logan's memoirs, which cannot be regarded as entirely reliable but which are a valuable adjunct to Jones' biography and give a colorful insight into the times.

(The "score" rating is an ineradicable feature of the page. This reviewer does not 'score" books.)

The ideal gift for the man who appreciates both beautiful books and beautiful blondes. Indeed, men and women alike will appreciate this exceptional effort from the charming Mr. Conrad, who has somehow managed to imbue his book with a magical feeling of blondness. Strongly recommended, despite a few errors. For example, Sam Brody was a passenger, not the driver, in the car accident that killed Jayne Mansfield. Also, BC III could have done without including people like Princess Diana, Drew Barrymore and, especially, Madonna. But you can't go wrong with a book that has Veronica Lake on the front cover and Kim Novak's back on the back.

In "BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT: American Culture Between Revolution and Modernity 1820 to 1860," Lewis Perry's thoughtful and engaging cultural history, we encounter the oligarchic post-colonial culture swamped by the ideas and cultural practices of a newly expressive citizenry. Busily creating and enacting the idea of democracy in word and deed, the unfettered multitude, according to Lewis launched America into the modernist current well ahead of the rest of the West. He shows how with the frame of traditional colonial society cracking apart, a new performative space opened up, and was filled with a chaos of new subjectivities.

Perry convincingly describes this era as a time when new ideas met with new audiences, a time when evangelists like Charles Finney, Lyceum lecturers including visionaries like Emerson, abolitionists such as Garrison, circuit ridingMethodist ministers, mountebanks such as the Twain's fictionalized "King" and the "Duke," beggars and Yankee peddlers, co-created with the people a new kind of democratic theater in a new national imaginarium. Perry shows how the contentiousness between rival groups as to what constituted American culture, a contest which has continued throughout American history, began in this era. For instance in the expanding urban of New York "b-hoys" (antecendents of "b-boys?") invaded the new Astor Place theater (which catered to a newly self-conscious upper-class) and shouting the name of their hero, American Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest, pelted a high-toned English actor with rotten vegetables in a gesture of cultural defiance. The conflict ended the next day when the police shot and killed 15 of the rioters.

His main thesis is that in this creation of the new popular culture, the beginnings of "modernism" are visible. Modernism is a slippery term, of course, which he readily admits, but does go to some length to define what he means by it, noting how different disciplines employ different definitions. He notes for instance that most historians draw the line according to economic acitivity positing the beginning of modernism in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and defending this view by citing how the war sped up the process of the consolidation of capital and the centralization of the industrial economy of the United States. But an economic basis for judging the onset of modernism, he argues, is not sufficient. He suggests that in the performative culture of this era, in the radical individualism of this post-revolutionary era, the new subjectivity of modernism was also evident. Free to clothe themselves in new ideas, to invent new livelihoods (evangelist, abolitionist, missionary, democratic politician, etc.) or to move between occupations as necessary (lawyer, doctor, farmer) Americans, during this time when boundaries between professions and careers were not as well policed as they later became, were subject to the same anxieties and radical discontinuities we experience now.

Some of the texts he uses to support his thesis includeWhitman's individualistic and democratic poetry such as "Song of Myself", Melville's adventure novels, the elegaic romances of Hawthorne (who through such works as "The Scarlet Letter," attempted to drive a stake through the still-beating heart of the Purtinanical past). Perry also gives us new readings of works of European visitors such as Toqueville, who often negatively reported on the expressive individualism and economic self-interest unleashed by "democracy in America" to European aristocrats and bourgeious as a way to warn them of what the inevitable democratic wave might look like when it washed up on their shores.

Based on Perry's research and readings, it appears DeToqueville's writings do need a fresh look. Perry shows how DeToqueville was biased by his aristocratic past, and his initial sources in New England, most of whom looked down their noses at the new democratic culture. Too, DeToqueville, although often praised for his objectivity, was sentimental and attached to the life of the ancien regime. Perry, for instance, tells us how DeToqueville, moved by a an account he had read as a young man of a French aristocrat who lived in exile on an island in a lake in Massachusetts, took a special trip there to revel in the fine wistful sentiment of it all. Perry tells us DeToqueville also took a special trip into the "frontier" (near Detroit at that time) to see real "noble savages." On the way he enountered town Indians, miserable, poor, sick and drunk. He was appalled by their "degeneracy," blind to the role of the American settlers in creating such suffering, but thrilled when he met Native Americans on the frontier who had yet to be conquered and fit his idealized picture of the noble savage he'd encountered in books.

Another key work for Perry is Hawthorne's "The Seven Vagabonds," and some striking passeages from Hawthorne's letters reporting on a trip during which encountered peddlers, performers (one with a wagon featuring a model of the wonders of the ancient world), who are later fictionalized in the story. He also does a nice reading of a passage in James Greenleaf Whittier "Yankee Gypsies" in which Whittier tells of a man who knocks on his door and wordlessly hands him a "soiled piece of parchment, whereon I read what purports to be a melancholy account of shipwreck and disaster, to the particular detriment, loss, and damnification of one Pietro Frugoni, who is, in consequence, [is] sorely in want of the alms of all charitable Christian persons..." Whittier tells us that this was the beggar's fourth or fifth incarnation, that he had been begging in different guises for years, and that, actually, they had grown up together as boys.

Other examples of the rise of the mass and mass culture he cites are Matthew Brady's photography studio and P.T, Barnum's Musuem, (which were incidentally located across the street from each other in New York). He shows how through all these new "circuits," the great chaotic experiment of freedom began, and how the Jacksonian republic of the multitude set off into with blithe unknowing into the uncharted waters of modernism.

Over a period of almost 60 years E. Hoffman Price, a writer during the pulp magazine era, befriended great writers from Lovecraft and Derleth to Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Williamson. He kept diaries and letters of his cross-country trips and encounters and in Book Of The Dead provides a set of fascinating biographical essays on his experiences and relationships with the authors, offering many insights and personal encounters.

Boss Cox's Cincinnati: Urban Politics In The Progressive Era is a scholarly and meticulously researched examination of late nineteenth century big city politics as exemplified by the political structures of Cincinnati, Ohio under George B. Cox's political machine. Zane Miller (Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Cincinnati) carefully explores both the nature and the significance of "bossism" and how it and municipal reform were both essential components of the political system in a the time of labor and ethnic unrest, election violence, rising crime rates, political innovation, and civic achievement. Boss Cox's Cincinnati is a highly recommended addition to political science reference collections and reading lists.

BRAVE NEW BRAIN follows up the classic THE BROKEN BRAIN, both written by Dr. Nancy Andreasen. She is a recent winner of the National Medal of Science, and a great thinker in the fields of medicine and philosophy of medicine. The book is written for the general public so they will become part of the great revolution of knowledge in the neurosciences. She details not only traditional psychiatric illnesses, but expands this view into the neurological illnesses. This is important as now psychiatry and neurology begin to merge, each developing a new respect for the field of the other. She details how psychiatry cannot solve all of our modern day society's woes, but must turn these over to individuals to seek answers. A recommended book for any public or private library.