Synopsis: The Swarming Stage by Gaylord Dold The blown mission was on Quinn. The body count was on Quinn too—one Syrian cloneslogger Quinn had killed, a stateless slogger smoked inside the Mulholland mudshield perimeter, and twelve commercial germline clones incinerated by cleanup crews. More important…
I am pleased to announce that “The Swarming Stage” is once again available in E-book format from all the regular sources! I am very proud of this dystopian science fiction vision of the near future. The vision is mine and mine alone. I think all…
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press, New York, 2016) Highly regarded Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s new book, “Strangers in Their Own Land” is an effort to “get inside” the emotional world of…
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2017 $7.99) The first few Greek democracies were scattered throughout the Peloponnesus. From the beginning, around the third century B.C., these townships and small cities were considered fragile, being…
Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2017) On Nine-Eleven George W. Bush “awoke” to a reality he defined in the coming months as Good against Evil, with the “evil doers” a set (never precisely…
Trump and Me by Mark Singer, Foreward by David Remnick (Crown, Tim Duggan Books, New York 2016) In the foreward to this splendid retrospective (a “profile” published in The New Yorker Magazine in 1996) describes the particular problem posed by Donald Trump. He was “beyond…
Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction,VT., 2014 (pb.). George Lakoff is a widely respected neuroscientist and political analyst whose books like “Moral Politics” and “Whose Freedoms?” have recently begun to…
Donald Trump and his minions and lackeys on the alt-right have had a busy week inventing stuff that serves their interests in provoking fear, reactionary xenophobia and racism. “Crime is out of control,” a common theme for Trump is a total fabrication. Crime is…
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age by Daniel J. Levitin, Dutton Penguin Random House, New York, 2016 ($28) Daniel Levitin is dean of Social Sciences at Minerva Schools at KGI in San Francisco and is also on the faculty at…
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016. $28.95 At a recent small college basketball game I was in the stands with perhaps twenty or thirty other fans, most, unlike me, parents of…