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.

Fawzia Koofi’s The Favored Daughter reviewed by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
March 7, 2012

Fawzia Koofi starts her autobiographical book, The Favored Daughter (Palgrave MacMillan 2012), by offering true insight into growing up as a girl in a large Afghanistan family, the 19^th child of 23, and the last child of the second wife of a man who ended up marrying seven women in the Islamic tradition, many of the marriages for political and tactical reasons to form a dominate family kinship and political network. Remarkably enough, Koofi, left outside to die because she was a girl, survived, and because she survived, became the “Favored Daughter.”

A Convergence of Greed And Political Influence by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
January 15, 2012

Image by jennaddenda via Flickr

Pulitzer Prise winner James B. Stewart’s book, Den of Thieves, came out in 1992 and detailed the corruption in the financial and political underpinnings of the country. After reading it, one hoped they would never have to read another book on that topic, because the problems which caused it would be fixed. The book told the story of insider trading scandals involving Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and other financiers and their Investment bankers, using junk (high-yielding, high-risk unrated corporate ) bonds to takeover companies.

The Nameless by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
January 15, 2012

The Nameless

I have to get out of here
the heat shimmers
and I know no one
Phoenix sucks

I dress in the shortest skirt I have
put on fishnet stocking
over-paint my face
look like a good presentable whore

Tom Barry’s Border Wars, reviewed by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Dec. 9, 2011

In his important book, Border Wars (MIT Press, 2011) Tom Barry writes:

I found that the border security push has injected new life into the war on drugs by reconfiguring those failed policies as vital components of national security.  Immigration  control, too, has been swallowed by the security paradigm.  Instead of reforming the economic incentives that make illegal immigration inevitable, the United States has been stuffing non-threatening people into for-profit prisons.  Counter-terrorism, the ostensible purpose of these undertakings, is an excuse for sheriffs to absorb federal subsidies.  And the lack of a coherent border policy provides a vacuum in which reactionary populism and nationalism have flourished at the local, state and federal levels.

The Forthcoming “Gray Tsunami” by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
August 30, 2011

In spite of Mark Twain’s assertion, “There are liars, Damn Liars and then there are Statisticians,” sometimes numbers can tell and paint a very bleak and vivid picture. Current life expectancy for the average 65-year-old is twenty years; In 2008, 35 million Americans  were  over age 65; By  2030 85 million Americans will be over age 65, and The Fastest growing segment of the population is those over 85.  In his monumental, extremely important and timely book,  Alone and Invisible No More (Chelsea Green Publishing 2011), Allan S. Teel, MD, a Maine Family Practice physician with a sub-specialization in geriatrics, uses facts like the above to underly the importance of the message he conveys:  The Baby Boom generation currently reaching retirement age is a “Gray Tsunami” threatening to bankrupt and swamp an already overburdened medical system unless changes are made.

The Corruption In The Cancer Industry by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
August 18, 2011

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

National Cancer Institute  (NCI) and American Cancer Society (ACS)—Criminal Indifference to Cancer Prevention and Conflicts of Interest  (Xlibris Corporation 2011) by  Samuel S. Epstein. MD contains startling, disturbing and important information for anyone trying to understand and make some sense of the current dysfunctional medical situation in the United States. 

Get Up and Stand Up To A Review by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 19, 2011

In Get Up, Stand Up—Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, And Battling The Corporate Elite, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011) Bruce E. Levine, a PhD clinical psychologist, doesn’t come anywhere near to living up to the over-blown, and pompous title of his well written and readable book. To Levine’s credit he gives an accurate assessment of Barack Obama before he was elected and his record which doesn’t allow for the alleged ‘Progressives’ to bemoan the fact they were lied to by now President in Corporate America, Obama.

Wild Law and Earth Jurisprudence

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 13, 2011

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Wild Law, exists as a frequency, an umbilical cord to the creative life force existing in all living things on Earth and in the universe, and quite possibly in every atom from the theoretical “Big Bang” to the end of eternity, a force connecting everything and everyone, and providing them with a soul In the second edition of his seminal ground-breaking book, Wild Law (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011), Cormac Cullinan explores how one can tap into this cosmic juice and adapt laws of humankind into alignment with the natural laws of the “Great Earth Jurisprudence,” the physical laws governing all life on the planet and in the universe.

Raising Hell, A Review by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 2, 2011

The simple plain-looking unadorned book, Raising Hell by Jamie Court (Chelsea Green Publishing Company 2010), comes as a must read for anyone interested in a guideline and toolkit for winning “Grassroots” campaigns, getting citizen ballot initiatives turned into law and for making one’s vote count and voice heard over that of the corporate lobbyist, though this reviewer has reservations about certain points raised in the book.

Two Views on Israel by Guadamour

Updated: Aug. 23, 2011 added a video

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
May 21, 2011

photo by Rusty Stewart
Attribution Noncommercial
No Derivative Works
Some rights reserved

Book reviews of Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer (Hachette Book Group, 2009) and Spy Trade by Grant F. Smith (Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2011).

In the very readable book, Start-Up Nation. Authors Dam Senor and Saul Singer paint a glowing picture of modern day Israel, how this small nation of under eight million people, and many if not most of them, first and second generation immigrants, has become one of the leading patent holders in the, with innumerable business start-ups, and many of them hugely successful. Israel itself exists as a Start-Up nation, only having come into existence in 1948.

“Inverted Totalitarianism” by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
May 5, 2011

Image by sakuraknight2000 via Flickr

Review of Democracy Inc.

A friend of mine recently remarked she currently views a lot of parallels with the totalitarianism she sees developing and manifesting itself in the United States with what she saw when as a young woman the Nazi took over her native Germany. This confirms this reviewers opinion that America has become a “Free Country.” One is “Free” to do what he or she is told!

Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia, a Book Review by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
April 11, 2011

Book Review of Griftopia

In 2008 Wall Street feces hit the proverbial fan and sucked out trillions of US taxpayer dollars in rescuing banks criminally responsible for creating the crisis called by some the Great Recession. Griftopia by Matt Taibbi (Spiegel & Grau 2010) connects all the dots and links the key players and their roles in this criminal conspiracy which caused the domestic and international economies to implode.

Taibbi of The Rolling Stone starts slow describing the Bubble Meister, Alan Greenspan’s, connection to the ultra extreme capitalist advocate, the mediocre novelist Ayn Rand. The book delves into the crooked deals by high government officials with close Wall Street connections which determined the winners and loser in the bailout fiasco.

World On The Edge – How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
March 5, 2011

Book Review: World On the Edge

The influential and integrative thinker, Lester R. Brown’s recently published new book comes with an intriguing title, World On The Edge–How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (Norton Books 2011). Brown has published various books and received numerous awards and heads The Earth policy Institute.

Green Phonemes by Guadamour

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Guadamour
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Dec. 23, 2010

Echoes inhabit the garden
plant syllables speak among themselves

The husk cherries enunciate
an incomprehensible Chinese dialect

The tomatoes grow fat and sweet
red and lazy
yawn at lesser plants