book review

“Blessed Unrest”- You’ve got to start sometime, somewhere.

August 17, 2010 by Patty Jones
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Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming – A book review

Having escaped high school by my junior year, passing the California High School Equivalency exam, continuing on to the community college system and gaining enough technical education to get a decent job, I never got much of an education in history or government.

I worked for a company that was owned by a fairly progressive thinking family, manufacturing goods used mainly by environmental agencies and educational institutions. It was gratifying work and allowed me to care for my family in a simple fashion, we didn’t want for much, but we didn’t want much either. I went about my daily life pretty isolated from the issues that affect so many, I had a job, we had health insurance and until that company closed I didn’t really understand how good we had it.

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The Book Nook: How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer

November 19, 2009 by Doug Porter
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by Doug Porter

The Boeing 737 was at seven thousand feet descending into San Diego’s Lindbergh Field from the west, due to weather conditions, when the left engine caught fire. Bells and horns sounded immediately within the cockpit, warning the pilots of multiple system failures. The plane immediately reacted to the emergency cutoff of fuel to the affected engine by banking steeply. The pilots struggled to steer the plane as it veered first one way, then the other, but their efforts were in vain.

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Book Review: “Recipe For America – Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do To Fix It”

July 27, 2009 by Doug Porter
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by Doug Porter

Once upon a time in America we were all promised a future where there would be “better living through chemistry”. Well here we are. It’s the future. And the better living future we’re experiencing is chock full of unexpected consequences.

Jill Richardson’s new book, Recipe For America, is filled with stories about those consequences. I sat down with Jill last week in San Diego to talk about the release of her book and her plans for the future.

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It’s In the Jeans – Book Review of “Fugitive Denim”

March 6, 2009 by Doug Porter
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by Doug Porter

Dungarees. Jeans. Demin. Blue Jeans. Bootcuts. Bellbottom. Stonewashed. Low Riders. No matter what you call them, they’re the most popular pants in our little corner of the universe.

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Book Review: Grey Apocalypse by James Murdoch

January 29, 2009 by Doug Porter
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BOOK REVIEW by Doug Porter

There are a plethora of conspiracy theories out there centered on aliens, UFOs and the government’s role in suppressing the “truth” about those things. Gray Apocalypse successfully weaves several of the more popular theories/legends into a sci-fi page burner with just enough credibility to inspire nightmares. Treading cagily in the zone between the pit of deep seated fears and the summit of knowledge, the author opens us up to what the world might look like if the UFO/alien conspiracies were true.

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Book Review: Terror and Consent – The Wars for the Twenty-First Century

January 5, 2009 by Doug Porter
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BOOK REVIEW: The last two decades have seen a significant transformation in just about every element of the international arena. The “long war” between parliamentary republics and their totalitarian opponents ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. New technologies have enabled fundamental changes in commerce and communications that pose significant challenges to economic and cultural norms in both developed and developing nations. Author Philip Bobbitt posits that these changes are so fundamental and widespread as to be causing a basic reformation in the nature of the State. The nation-state, he argues, is being replaced with a new form, one that he and others have dubbed the market state.

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Book Review: Behind Enemy Lines

December 30, 2008 by Doug Porter
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Author/Activist Michael Steinberg has patched together over sixty posts from over the last half dozen years, written mostly for Independent Media Centers around the country, along with a few published right here at the OB Rag. His narratives, mostly written with a feeling of being in the heat of the moment, are grouped together into five parts: the Anti-Iraq War Movement, Post Katrina New Orleans, the Battle for Public Housing in New Orleans, Entergy Corporation and Their Nuclear Ambitions, and various Bay area protests, including the “No on Prop 98” Campaign waged last year in defense of rent control in California.

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Book Review: Waiterrant

September 17, 2008 by Doug Porter

Waiterrant – authored by Steve Dublanica, eccobooks, 2008 Waiterrant.net was the first online blog that engaged me and made me into a believer in the medium. Let’s face it; most blogs are drivel, few last beyond the first couple of postings and even fewer have anything substantive to say. The “Waiter’s” postings (he was blogging […]

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