Book Reviews: Thoughts, Summaries, and extensive Quotation

This index goes by the order in which I read them, roughly.

Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain

I did a lousy and incomplete review, and the book is worth reading if you want some recent American history.  Which you had better, if you are an American.  So skip my review and get the book (it is currently part of the Maurice Institute Library collection).

The True Society: A Philosophy of Labour by Frank Tannenbaum.

Hometown by Tracy Kidder.

Interviewing Principles and Practices

Paradoxes of Mr. Pond by G. K. Chesterton.

Is Science Necessary? by Max Perutz (1989).

Here Is Your War, by Ernie Pyle, covers the U.S.’s African campaign in Tunisia.  Extensive quotation from this 1943 book by the famous war correspondent, little review.

The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School by Neil Postman (1995).

Bagombo Snuff Box: Short Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut.

Time of Peace: September 26, 1930—December 7, 1941, also subtitled “A Story of the Decade that Ended with Pearl Harbor,” by Ben Ames Williams (1942).

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, by Gregory Maguire (1999) is set in Holland’s golden age and recasts the Cinderella story.

The Debt: Randall Robinson makes a case for reparations for slavery.

A Man of the South, by Peter A. Kraft (2000) is a novella about the Civil War and Reconstruction (more de-Reconstrution) South.

Aguecheek, or “My Unknown Chum,” a novel by an anonymous reactionary of the nineteenth century.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

Generating Inequality, by Lester C. Thurow (1975) presents economic theories that better explain distributions of income and wealth: people compete for jobs (training slots) and investors and entrepreneurs face unknowable results; both processes work out like a lottery.

Billy Budd and other stories by Herman Melville.

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.

Butterfly Economics by Paul Ormerod.

A General Theory of Competition by Shelby Hunt (Resource-Advantage theory).

Capitalism and Justice by John Isbister.

The Entrepreneurial Process by Paul D. Reynolds and Sammis B. White (statistics on how firms are born, what they do for economic growth).

Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo as translated by Norman Denny: this review of the masterpiece features quotation of Hugo’s asides and discussion of plot and character, particularly in relation to the play.

Designing Web Graphics.3 by Lynda Weinman had some useful web design tips and facts.

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