David Wearing at New Left Project reviews Belén Fernández's recent book, The Imperial Messenger – Thomas Friedman At Work, noting how Friedman's banal pro-imperialist bloviation reflects -- and helps to further -- an all-too entrenched broader mentality:

Friedman puts the Iraqi public’s failure to appreciate the benefits of foreign occupation down to “the wall in the Arab mind”. As Fernández notes, “the Orientalist tendency to anchor Oriental subjects in antiquity, where they remain in perpetual need of civilisation by the West and its militaries, is viewable time and again in Friedman’s discourse”. Arabs and Muslims are “backward”. Iraqis “hate each other more than they love their own kids”. Shortly after the invasion of 2003, he opines that “it would be idiotic to even ask Iraqis here how they felt about politics. They are in a pre-political, primordial state of nature”.

For the American missionaries, the noble mission of raising the savages out of the swamp is not without its dangers. “While we would like an Iraqi national movement – building Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis – to coalesce, we don’t want it coalescing in opposition to us”. Evidently then there is a limit to which even this staunch advocate of enlightened Western values will support democracy, the limit being whether the liberated people then bow before the might of western power.

All of this would be of limited relevance were Friedman an isolated figure, rather than the ugly face of ideas and assumptions which have a much wider currency. His complaint that American occupying forces in Iraq “are baby-sitting a civil war” is a direct echo of Barack Obama’s promise during the 2007 presidential election campaign that “we're not going to babysit a civil war”, as though the bloodbath engulfing the country was attributable to the infantilism of its people and not to the effects of it being violently invaded by a foreign power. Elsewhere, Friedman’s likening of the US occupation of Afghanistan to the adoption of a “special needs baby” bears more than a passing resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld’s description of Washington’s role in teaching Iraqis how to run their own country:

“Getting Iraq straightened out was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: 'They're learning, and you're running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it. You can't know when you're running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know that, but we're off to a good start.”

The flip side of this casual racism is of course the chauvinistic view of the nature of Western civilisation; the paternal figure to the Iraqi and Afghan infants. For Friedman, “without a strong America holding the world together, and doing the right thing more often than not, the world really would be a Hobbesian jungle”, a faith in the benevolence of Western power which is shared right across the spectrum of mainstream intellectual opinion.

Related: If you have not yet done so, please read--nay, experience--Matt Taibbi's legendary takedown of The World is Flat. If snark were whiskey we'd all be shit-faced before breakfast.

is now available at Amazon..., and probably other places. Over at his website there is a post of the introduction to the book by Ken Smith.

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2012/04/introduction-to-book-of-joes-essays.html

“I’m so damn average that what I write resonates with people”, Joe Bageant once told an interviewer in explaining how he had gained a global following for his essays published on the web. In 2004, at the age of 58, Joe sensed that the Internet could give him editorial freedom. Without gatekeepers, he began writing about what he was really thinking, and then submitted his essays to left-of-center websites.

Dave graciously posted his reading list yesterday and asked that I do the same. 44 books a year ain't so bad. Want a detailed exegesis on some of the books, read here. And if not, well, here is my list. Thanks Dave for the great suggestions. Who else is going to post their list?

Mirror of Herodotus - Hartog
Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein
Dan Brown's latest book.
Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow - Kahneman
Under The Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
Manana Carlos - Castaneda
Runciman volume three of Crusades.
Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter
The Travels of John Mandeville
The Alexander Romance
Ibn Fadlan's Russia
The Great War For Civilization - Robert Fisk
Rising from the Plains - John McPhee
Out of the East - Paul Freedman
Helix - Eric Brown

More after the jump

I'm not that smart. I'm curious and I've accumulated a measure of knowledge over the years by reading. Often times it has been voracious reading, up to 52 books a year on some occasions, not to mention every issue of the New York Review of Books cover to cover. There is nothing unattainable or unique about the knowledge I've acquired over the years. Most people of average or better intelligence could do the same. And don't tell me you don't have time to read at least ten books a year. Everyone has time for that.

Regardless, quotes like these, especially when they come from the publisher of Public Affairs books, which are frequently very sophisticated books, flummox me:

There is so much to read in the New York Review of Books, and so much of it shapes our most sophisticated public discourse that keeping up with it can be intimidating.

The only thing sophisticated about the New York Review of Books is that it requires someone to read at a 12th grade level and only occasionally higher. But intimidating? I don't know why I take issue with this characterization, but it feels like one of those comments that our 'thought leaders' throw out that simply leads to more infantilization.

On second thought TNRB does require one to 'think.' And if there is one mortal sin in contemporary American culture it is certainly thinking.

. . . that I owned a Kindle I would have told you I was done with the dead tree book. But the dew dried off that chandelier pretty quickly. I like to break the binding of a book, twist it, make highlights in it, to feel and touch the book and turn the page, not scroll. Apparently, I am not the only one:

Facing economic gloom and competition from cheap e-readers, brick-and-mortar booksellers entered this holiday season with the humblest of expectations. But the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders, the chain that went out of business this year.

Make no mistake: the e-readers are here to stay, but the dead tree book will be around for a while longer as well.

The best non-fiction book I read in 2011 was probably Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusion." The book simply demolishes the net-utopian fantasy that the interwebz will set us free. A close second would be Empire of the Summer Moon, which is about the Comanches and Quanah Parker.

The best fiction book I read in 2011 was, without a doubt, Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From The Goon Squad." While it was published in mid-2010 I did not get to it until early this year. The main premise behind this book is how time and aging really is a goon squad, beating certain people down and lifting others up.

All three of these books make for very good reading. What are your favorite books of 2011?

Smack o'the forehead moment: Oh man, oh man. I completely missed Charles C. Mann's completely excellent "1493." Look, this is a book you want to read. I thought it would be impossible to beat 1491, but this book is better. And really is in a dead tie with Morozov's book.

The financial news from Europe is worse every day. Now (11/23/11) the most stable country in Euro-Land..., Germany, has no buyers for its bonds. Maybe the Federal Reserve will save the world (again) and Bail Out Germany and the rest of the world’s banks and bond holders..., like they clandestinely did in 2008. The Fed doesn’t have to buy American T-bonds with QE-2 anymore..., everyone is buying them up now. Lots of money left to buy Euro-Bonds. QE-3..., if they don’t get caught.

I know one guy who hopes they don’t get away with it..., or hopes it fails..., if they do. He hopes the whole shebang comes falling down like the famous bridge in the children’s rhyme. He hopes..., or knows..., that the whole industrial economy of this fragile planet needs to come to a screeching halt in short order. The sooner the better for this Spaceship Earth that we call “ours”. It’s our only hope. He says that if we keep burning the fossil fuels that sustain our industrial economy at the present rate..., let alone at the rate at which it would take to “grow” the current economy enough too “rescue” us from fiscal and monetary collapse..., it would fuel world climate change and global warming to the extent of total extinction of most living species...., including our own.

Some nut-case doomer..., this guy..., you ask? No..., this guy..., is Guy R. McPherson. With a PH.D in Range Science, Texas Tech University..., along with all the other academic credentials the come prior to a Doctorate degree. A tenured professor at the University of Arizona..., until he “walked away” from it..., and all the trappings that go with it.

I finished the book on Quanah Parker today. I don't have much to say about "Empire of the Summer Moon," other than that you should read it. If you want to better understand some of the pathologies afflicting Texas you can do no better than reading it and also Larry McMurtry's short non-fiction book, "In a Narrow Grave."

This is from page 13 of Eckhart Tolle's book, The Power of Now:

The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness beyond that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they were talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is they are denying. This misuse gives rise to the absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead."

A few weeks ago an Agonist reader suggested I read Larry McMurtry's In a Narrow Grave, which I did and which I enjoyed completely. If you want to understand the pathology of Texas (and the Western states in general) you can do no better than to start there and continue with Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. In the course of reading In a Narrow Grave McMurtry discusses Texas writers in the context of the times--he wrote the book in the mid sixties. One of the writers he praises is John Graves and his book "Goodbye to a River." Graves' book is about the upper Brazos River between Possum Kingdom Lake and Lake Whitney. Don't let that put you off. This is a masterful book. Graves is a master stylist and "Goodbye to a River" is one of the five best books I've ever read. It's full of candid, harsh but poetic observations on life before and after the Great Depression in a part of Texas I knew little about. But it's not about the Depression, per se, or the Comanches who used to raid down the plains into the area from Oklahoma and Arkansas, nor is it just about a river. It's one of those books about everything. If you like the stories Don Henry Ford writes here at The Agonist you will like this book too. Of this I have no doubt. I have to wonder if Don has read "Goodbye to a River" and if he hasn't, well, he should.

The reason I mention this is I'm wondering if any of you have favorite books that are regional in flavor, like Graves' book. If you do, I'd love your recommendations.

John Walsh | Jun 11 | The Independent

Fifty years ago, in the early hours of Sunday 2 July, 1961, Ernest Hemingway, America's most celebrated writer and a titan of 20th-century letters, awoke in his house in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, rose from his bed, taking care not to wake his wife Mary, unlocked the door of the storage room where he kept his firearms, and selected a double-barrelled shotgun with which he liked to shoot pigeons. He took it to the front of the house and, in the foyer, put the twin barrels against his forehead, reached down, pushed his thumb against the trigger and blew his brains out.

His death was timed at 7am. Witnesses who saw the body remarked that he had chosen from his wardrobe a favourite dressing gown that he called his "emperor's robe". They might have been reminded of the words of Shakespeare's Cleopatra, just before she applied the asp to her flesh: "Give me my robe. Put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me". His widow Mary told the media that it was an unfortunate accident, that Ernest had been cleaning one of his guns when it accidentally went off. The story was splashed on the front page of all American newspapers.

It took Mary Welsh Hemingway several months to admit that her husband's death was suicide; and it's taken nearly 50 years to piece together the reasons why this giant personality, this rumbustious man of action, this bullfighter, deep-sea fisherman, great white hunter, war hero, gunslinger and four-times-married, all-round tough guy, whom every red-blooded American male hero-worshipped, should do himself in. How could he? Why would he? Successive biographers – AE Hochtner, Carlos Baker, KS Lynn, AJ Monnier, Anthony Burgess – have chewed over the available facts, his restless travelling, his many amours, the peaks and troughs of his writing career. But eventually it took a psychiatrist from Houston, Texas, to hold up all the evidence to the light and announce his disturbing conclusions.

Last week I was lucky enough to be in New York and attend the first book event for Herding Donkeys: The Fight To Rebuild The Democratic Party And Reshape American Politics.

The event had a lot of buzz, because author and fantastic Nation writer Ari Berman, was conducting a Q & A of sorts with Howard Dean, the main protagonist in his story of how Democrats came to rebuild The Party of Jefferson and obtain electoral dominance in 2006 and 2008.

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, by Stephen Adly Guirguis, is a beautiful play with heart and soul. It is smart and funny and has something to say. I don’t think that I could do the play justice in a review, so I’ll just let the playwright speak for himself. Here is a section from the opening monologue spoken by Judas’ mother, Henrietta Iscariot:

No parent should have to bury a child. . . No mother should have to bury a son. Mothers are not meant to bury sons. It is not in the natural order of things.

I buried my son. In a potter’s field. In a field of Blood. In empty, acrid silence. There was no funeral. There were no mourners. His friends all absent. His father dead. His sisters refusing to attend. I discovered his body alone, I dug his grave alone, I placed him in a hole, and covered him with dirt and rock alone. I was not able to finish burying him before sundown, and I’m not sure if that affected his fate…

You can go here for a great excerpt from Will Bunch's excellent new book on the kooky right--including a scoop on the bizarre story of how an ex-diet scammer now uses fear to get rich through Glenn Beck's website.

Below is a video about the book starring the author. I'm sharing because I couldn't be a bigger fan of Will's work--and from my experience, if you can get both Beck and Limbaugh to attack you (as you'll see in this video), you must be doing something right (or left). Buy it!:

Guardian UK - Nicholas D. Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn argue in their new book

that the world is in the grip of a massive moral outrage no less egregious in scale or in the intensity of despair than the African slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries or the genocides of the 20th. They believe this outrage is a key factor behind many of the most pressing economic and political issues today, from famine in Africa to Islamist terrorism and climate change. Yet they say the phenomenon is largely hidden, invisible to most of us and passing relatively unreported. At worst it is actively tolerated; at best it is ignored. The fodder of this latterday trade in human suffering is not African people, but women. Which is why they call it "gendercide". If the supreme moral challenge of the 19th century was slavery, and of the 20th century the fight against totalitarianism, then, they write, "in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world".

Alison Flood interviews Fr Gerald O'Collins S.J. on his latest tome that takes Philip Pullman to task:

O'Collins criticises Pullman for "picking, choosing and changing" what he wants from the gospels, altering the story "over and over again in the interests of his own 'truth' or ideology", making historical errors and conducting poor historical research.

Schiotz said Saturday the court ruled Ms. Åsne Seierstad had used inaccurate information in her accounts of Rais and didn't act in good faith.

So, she wrote best selling bullshit on an Afghan family. Now the other members of the Afghan family can sue her too.

How much cock does Glenn Beck suck?

Fox News host Glenn Beck's apocalyptic political thriller has shrugged off a pile of bad reviews to debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list this week.

The story of a young, handsome PR executive's quest to save America from a 100-year-old plot to destroy it, The Overton Window was described as "didactic, discursive [and] sporadically incoherent" in the Los Angeles Times, and as "not just a bad book ... an instructively bad book because it offers a complete colour-by-numbers picture of the contemporary Wingnut psyche" in the Daily Beast.

This book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Vintage)is awesome and a great read for the anti-Enlightenment age in which we live.

In November of 2000, Americans sat on the edge of their seats waiting to find out who would be the next president. Protests were held, counter protests were organized to meet the challenge and everyone had an opinion. The 2000 election remains capable of igniting passionate debate. Some look it as the time that the Supreme Court stole an election for George W. Bush. Some mark it up to Al Gore having the campaign skills and spinal fortitude of a slime mold. There are those who rue Florida's hanging chads and aging Jewish voters for Buchanan. And not a few still point to those tense days as proof that Ralph Nader is a festering sore on the ass of the Republic.

Any or all of them could be right. But when you read Alexander Zaitchik's new book Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance you'll turn the last page with the understanding that election 2000 brought something far more sinister than Bush/Cheney down upon America. Worse, you'll know that it ain't over yet.

I took my entire share of royalty interest for Ruminations from the Garden in books. They arrived yesterday, 2,400 copies. Reading that number doesn't do justice to the fact of the matter. Carrying 80 boxes of thirty books each into the house and stacking them up does.

We shouldn't lack for door stops, furniture levelers or fuel for the wood stove should a new ice age develop. Hopefully someone will want to read the thing. While not perfect, it's a much more professional version of the book.

If you're inclined to buy one, contact Speir Publishing.

And if you have a book that needs publishing, contact Paul Speir. He worked hard on this. He's honest, intelligent and decent. Plus he has a good wife, a newborn daughter and needs work. Proceeds from sales are his.

Paul tells me he has a limited number of copies of the book free to those willing to write a review and publish it. The review need not be positive. Honesty and perhaps the cost of postage is all that's required.

Now, this is one gossip book I might actually read, in the hopes it has some good dirt, as I really detest the subject.

This book is amazing: The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel. I bought the damn thing last night and already read it all. Wow! It's like Homer meets Borges, all post-modern, but poignant and telling, almost sweet and rueful at the same time. It's the sum of a thousand tiny complications all rolled into one.

If you have even a passing interest in the ancients, I cannot recommend this book highly enough: a really brilliant retelling of an ancient but timeless tale. And brilliant is a word I seldom, if ever use, in a book review.

You can read my full review of the book, here.

The New York Times reported the arrest of a top Taliban commander in a joint operation with Pakistan's Army. The story was published on February 15. Pakistan's Interior Minister, denied that Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was captured in a joint operation and characterized the New York Times report as "propaganda." See portions of the Times and Dawn articles below with links to the entire article. This may be much ado about nothing, since the capture was made, or a revealing insight into the manipulation of opinion in the "War on Terror." (Image)

The Warrior Diet: Switch on Your Biological Powerhouse For High Energy, Explosive Strength, and a Leaner, Harder Body
by Ori Hofmekler
(Paperback - Dec 4, 2007)

http://www.amazon.com/Warrior-Diet-Biological-Powerhouse-Explosive/dp/1583942009/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262303666&sr=8-1

I got this book earlier this week and have gone through the preface and a couple of chapters already. But, it has got me thinking. Why? well ... this is not your ordinary diet book - eat this and this and you'll lose weight. Instead, the author proposes a lifestyle change into what he calls the "Warrior Cycle" and provides historical precedence examples and stories (unfortunately, without real references that your English 101 teacher would insist on).