Michael Parenti: Waiting for Yesterday: Pages from a Street Kid’s Life

with Michael Parenti
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Michael Parenti Blog
www.michaelparenti.org
June 17, 2013

Jane Bouey
http://www.coopradio.org/
June 10, 2013

Interview with award-winning progressive political analyst and author Michael Parenti about his new memoir, “Waiting for Yesterday: Pages from a Street Kid’s Life.” Interviewed June 10 by Jane Bouey.

Les Leopold: How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour by Nomi Prins

Sent to Dandelion Salad from Les Leopold

by Nomi Prins
Truthdig
May 23, 2013

Image by eyewashdesign: A. Golden via Flickr

How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away With Siphoning Off America’s Wealth
A book by Les Leopold

Les Leopold’s latest masterpiece, How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away With Siphoning Off America’s Wealth, is necessary, alarming and really funny. His talent for deconstructing complex financial terms and topics constitutes a public service. What he reveals in “How to Make,” in a sardonic and appropriately irreverent tone, is something more ominous.

Before Books Become Extinct by Rocket Kirchner

Image by Kara Allyson via Flickr

by Rocket Kirchner
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rocket Kirchner (blog)
Rocket Kirchner (youtube channel)
April 12, 2013

Be it fiction or nonfiction, short stories, novellas, or novels, list some your favorite books of all time and why, in no particular order. We might as well list them before books become extinct. Here are some of mine.

Time For Some Muckraking by Guadamour + FREE Ebook This Week Only

Updated: April 16, 2013; Free Ebook

by Guadamour
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
March 2, 2013

A Book Review of Steam Drills, Treadmills and Shooting Stars

Mark Twain coined the phrase “Gilded Age” in reference to the late 19th century in America. The hidden, “gilded,” corruption of the period was exposed by a special group of writers referred to as Muckrakers. The Muckrakers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries left a lasting mark on the US. Their response to the corruption and abuse in US culture set the pattern for future reform movements in America. It would seem a hundred years later the United States is again experiencing a “gilded age” of corruption at the top levels of business and government, and the country is in need of novelists like Upton Sinclair who brought events to such attention that laws were enacted which changed the course of US history.

Culpa Innata by B. Barmanbek: A Dystopian novel about a New World Order, by Roland Michel Tremblay

by Roland Michel Tremblay
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
The Marginal
February 21, 2013

Culpa Innata is a well written, imaginative and realistic dystopian novel set in the future and taking place in Eastern Europe. It paints a picture of what a New World Order might look like following a great economic meltdown, worldwide riots, globalisation and some affluent trillionaires buying the worldwide debt to introduce a new system in their own vision, a vision where mega-corporations control the world.

In Culpa Innata the world is separated into two: the mighty World Union, a free trade area encompassing all the Western World including South America, Japan and Eastern Europe, and the independent Rogue Nation States like Russia, China and India.

Revolutionary Love and its Terrible Hurts by Daniel N. White

Cover of One Morning in Sarajevo: 28 June 1914

by Daniel N. White
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
January 29, 2013

One Morning in Sarajevo: 28 June 1914
by David James Smith, 2008

David James Smith is a British journalist and One Morning is his second book.  My copy was printed in the UK and has rave cover blurbs on it from various English publications.  I don’t recall the book making any splash this side of the Atlantic.  Something wrong with that; the book is very good.

Shattering Myths Can Be Dangerous by William T. Hathaway

by William T. Hathaway
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
Dec. 19, 2012

A review of Gaither Stewart’s new novel, Lily Pad Roll

Gaither Stewart is a shatterer of myths. In The Trojan Spy, volume one of the Europe Trilogy, he shattered the myth that the USA is fighting terrorism and showed instead how our government works in a symbiotic relationship with the so-called terrorists. Now in Lily Pad Roll, volume two of the trilogy, he shatters the myth that America is invading countries and building foreign bases in order to defend the homeland and secure oil supplies.

Lethal Hypocrisies—of Haunting Lily Pads by Branford Perry

By Branford Perry
Review of Gaither Stewart’s book, Lily Pad Roll: Journey to the Outposts of the Empire
Dandelion Salad
Hipographia
Oct. 27, 2012

Lily Pad Roll: Journey to the Outposts of the Empire
by Gaither Stewart
Trepper & Katz Impact Books, 344 pp, $12.45 (Paper)
Also available in electronic format at $6.99

I just finished a second reading of Gaither Stewart’s explosive and highly disturbing new novel, Lily Pad Roll, volume two of the Europe Trilogy.

At the end of such a novel I like to sit in silence, in semi-obscurity if possible, and let the atmosphere sweep over me in order to feel the sum effect of my reading and the residue and the mood I know I will feel come over me each time I think of the work in the future.

From Decay to Resurrection by Jerry Mazza

By Jerry Mazza
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.jerrymazza.com
August 15, 2012

Image by kiszka king via Flickr

A book review of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
By Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco
Published by Nation Books

Amazon writes,

“Two years ago, Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges and award-winning cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco set out to take a look at the sacrifice zones, those areas in America that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement.

Overview: The Bubble and Beyond by Michael Hudson

by Michael Hudson
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
http://michael-hudson.com
August 10, 2012

Image by Tobias Higbie via Flickr

The Road from Industrial Capitalism to Finance Capitalism and Debt Peonage

Essays on Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and the Global Crisis

Michael Hudson’s new book The Bubble and Beyond can be purchased here.

Preface

Summary and Analytic Table of Contents

William Morris’ Vision of Socialism: Self-sustaining Local Communities by William Bowles

by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
30 June 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

There — it sickens one to have to wade through this grimy sea of opportunism. What a spectacle of shuffling, lies, vacillation and imbecility does this Game Political offer to us? I cannot conclude without an earnest appeal to those Socialists, of whatever section, who may be drawn towards the vortex of Parliamentarism, to think better of it while there is yet time.

The Righteous Road to Ruin by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
June 28, 2012

Image by greenwise art via Flickr

“The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”

A book by Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” trumpets yet another grand theory of evolution, this time in the form of evolutionary psychology, which purports to unravel the mystery of moral behavior. Such theories, whether in the form of dialectical materialism, Social Darwinism, biblical inherency or its more bizarre subsets of phrenology or eugenics, never hold up against the vast complexity of history, the inner workings of economic and political systems, and the intricacies of the human psyche. But simplicity has a strong appeal for those who seek order in the chaos of existence.

Chris Hedges: Public Libraries are the Heart of Any Functioning Civilized City

with Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 24, 2012

Image by Blake W.B. via Flickr

Jun 22, 2012 by wworldp

Chris Hedges explains why a print based culture is important. Corporate interests promote mindless celebrity trivia instead of real news, vaporize our heritage, and use the media to turn minds into mush. This shifts attention from their take over of government as well as destruction of the environment and society. Remarks were made at Free Library of Philadelphia event for his book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt”.

Dear Alex by Daniel N. White

by Daniel N. White
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 17, 2012

Image by sarabeephoto via Flickr

Alex–

I am delighted that your recent editorial takes to task the nonsense of education, particularly higher education, as a panacea for what ails us here in the US in regards to a better economic future for all of us.

I have never thought that the push for more college spending and putting more people in college was ever an honest social policy prescription. The people behind it had too much of an economic stake in the policy for me to ever take it seriously.

Subversive Thrills: A Review of Gaither Stewart’s new novel, The Trojan Spy by William T. Hathaway and Paul Carline

by William T. Hathaway and Paul Carline
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 10, 2012

Gaither Stewart‘s The Trojan Spy takes the thriller genre an important step forward, advancing it from the work of his predecessors John le Carré and Robert Ludlum. Le Carré and Ludlum rebelled against the conventions of the classic spy thrillers, which assumed that we’re the good guys who are under attack by bad guys so evil that we’re justified in bending the rules to save ourselves from them. In that world, lies, deceit, sabotage, and even murder are sometimes necessary to defend peace, justice, and the American (or Western) Way against (pick one, depending on when the book was written) Nazis, communists, or terrorists.