From Great Wars, Come Great Consequences by Greg Maybury

by Greg Maybury
Guest Writer, Dandelion Salad
Pox Amerikana, Sept. 19, 2017
September 21, 2017

…[In] such trying games of conquest, results might never be expected to take shape quickly…Imperial stratagems are protracted affairs. The captains of world aggression measure their achievements…on a timescale whose unit is the generation. It’s within such a frame that the incubation of Nazism should be gauged: it was a long and elaborate plan to eliminate the possibility of German hegemony over the continent. And the stewards of the empire took their time.’ — Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Created the Third Reich, Guido Preparata (© 2006)

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Pull Down That Statue of the U.S. Constitution by David Swanson

Image by Brad Dougherty via Flickr

with David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy
September 17, 2017

Nobody, not racist warmakers, not imaginary non-racist warmakers, not founding fathers, not radical protesters should be made into a deity, larger than life, in marble or bronze, on horseback or otherwise. Nobody is that flawless, and nobody’s story so withstands the test of time. We need human-sized statues and memorials of whole movements.

Obama: A Hollow Man Filled With Ruling Class Ideas by Paul Street + Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama and the Limitations of Liberal Criticism

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, June 6, 2017
June 8, 2017

A “Hollow” Man Who Was “Unwilling to Fight the Good Fight”

What on Earth motivated the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and law professor David J. Garrow to write an incredibly detailed 1078-page (1460 pages with endnotes and index included) biography of Barack Obama from conception through election to the White House? Not any great personal affinity for Obama on Garrow’s part, that’s for sure. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama is no hagiography. On the last page of this remarkable tome, Garrow describes Obama at the end of his distinctly non-transformative and “failed presidency” as a man who had long ago had become a “vessel [that] was hollow at its core.”

How I Lost by Hillary Clinton, reviewed by Guadamour

Image by thierry ehrmann via Flickr

by Guadamour
Writer, Dandelion Salad
June 4, 2017

“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” — Mark Twain towards the end of 19^th century

How U.S. Race Laws Inspired Nazis by David Swanson

Image by jay joslin via Flickr

by David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy, April 21, 2017
April 23, 2017

James Q. Whitman’s new book is called Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. It is understated and overdocumented, difficult to argue with. No doubt some will try.

The Final Theory of Everything, An In-depth Interview with the Author by Roland Michel Tremblay

by Roland Michel Tremblay
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Marginal
October 8, 2016

In 2002 Mark McCutcheon published the first edition of his book The Final Theory at Universal Publishers. It was an instant success on the Amazon website, however it also created some controversy. It presented to the world a new Theory of Everything that worked out of the box, to replace Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Inside the Nefarious and Unethical Worlds of High Finance, Intelligence and MIC by Guadamour

Note: at the publisher’s request this review has been revised

by Guadamour
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published, June 13, 2016
Revised version, October 5, 2016

Science fiction deals with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology. Many people are aficionados of science fiction, but what puts many off are when it goes into space/time travel and creates extraterrestrials and other phenomenon difficult for many to wrap their minds around. Science fiction has been called “The Literature of Ideas.” The genre can offer a glimpse into the future, and can be most realistic using the platform of the present and recent past to look into what is ahead. A truly classic example of that is Philip K. Dick’s novel, The Man In The High Tower, where Dick describes what it is like to live in Occupied America after losing WWII to Germany and Japan.

An Epiphany On Wall Street, reviewed by Guadamour

Note: at the publisher’s request this review has been revised

by Guadamour
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published November 24, 2013
Revised version, October 3, 2016

The success or failure of any work of fiction depends to a great extent on the writer’s ability to produce a Suspension of Disbelief in the reader. This is especially true of futurist novels, fantasy, or for lack of a better term, science fiction. The concept was first introduced by the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 in his Biographia Literari. When a work overcomes the barrier of the Suspension of Disbelief, it draws the reader in and takes them into the world created by the author. Such is the case with the book An Epiphany On Wall Street (Author Networks Edition, 2012) by anonym.

Rivera Sun’s Billionaire Buddha, reviewed by Guadamour

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Guadamour
Writer, Dandelion Salad
June 18, 2016

Billionaire Buddha is Rivera Sun‘s third novel. In it David Grant, a self-made billionaire, goes from the pinnacle of a most unfulfilling and emotionally deprived material success to homelessness, destitution and the spiritual contentment of knowing himself (which is the embodiment of Buddhahood). Sun describes the changes Grant goes through in a clear writing style which holds the reader and compels them to turn the pages to see what happens next in this book which should be read by all Americans with their general love of money.

Amulet, reviewed by Gaither Stewart

Image by Marcos G. via Flickr

by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
June 17, 2016

(Rome) I am reading for the first time the work of Chilean born writer, Roberto Bolaño. His novel, Amulet, set in a phantasmagoric Mexico City that, perhaps, also because it is Latin America’s biggest city, represents the entire crushed and tortured and imprisoned and murdered Latin America while also his characters are emblematic of the suffering and decimation of much of the best of the Latin American youth. Perhaps the author chose to highlight Mexico City, not only because of the massacre of Mexican students there in 1968, but also because he moved there as a teenager and lived there many years before moving to Spain and Barcelona where he died at 50.

Review of Suited For War by Guadamour

Note: Here is the revised version: Inside the Nefarious and Unethical Worlds of High Finance, Intelligence and MIC by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Writer, Dandelion Salad
June 13, 2016

Science fiction deals with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology. Many people are aficionados of science fiction, but what puts many off are when it goes into space/time travel and creates extraterrestrials and other phenomenon difficult for many to wrap their minds around. Science fiction has been called “The Literature of Ideas.” The genre can offer a glimpse into the future, and can be most realistic using the platform of the present and recent past to look into what is ahead. A truly classic example of that is Philip K. Dick’s novel, The Man In The High Tower, where Dick describes what it is like to live in Occupied America after losing WWII to Germany and Japan.

Bush-Obama Powers Will Pass to Next President by David Swanson

Image by www.dronethusiast.com and AK Rockefeller via Flickr

by David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy, May 11, 2016
May 13, 2016

Remember when coups and assassinations were secretive, when presidents were obliged to go to Congress and tell lies and ask permission for wars, when torture, spying, and lawless imprisonment were illicit, when re-writing laws with signing statements and shutting down legal cases by yelling “state secrets!” was abusive, and when the idea of a president going through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays to pick whom to have murdered would have been deemed an outrage?

“We Need Dissent From the Dubious Thesis That Military Power Alone Can Change the Map of the World” by Gaither Stewart

Image by Stephen Melkisethian via Flickr

by Gaither Stewart
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rome, Italy
March 16, 2016

Edward Said wrote a new preface for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his classic book, Orientalism, originally published in the USA by Random House in 1978. In the following pages I have quoted some of the author’s major thoughts and added my own ideas about Said’s preface written in 2003 for the last Vintage Books edition of his magnificent work.

Gaither Stewart’s Time of Exile reviewed by Kendall Mercer

Dandelion Salad

by Kendall Mercer
crossposted from greanvillepost.com
August 11, 2015

Prefatory Note
In Defense of the Political Novel

TIME OF EXILE, the third volume of Gaither Stewart’s Europe Trilogy, is a political novel. I see no reasons to conceal it or to feel shame. On the contrary.

Are the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Miguel Angel Asturias not political? And worthy of the Nobel Prize.

“The System Must Be Overthrown, and That Requires Revolution” by William T. Hathaway

Image by brent granby via Flickr

by William T. Hathaway
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Germany
August 6, 2015

Review of
Recollection of Things Learned
By Gaither Stewart

Gaither Stewart is a man of passions. In The Europe Trilogy he shared with us his passion for international espionage and intrigue. In Voices from Pisalocca he shared his passion for village life in his adoptive country, Italy. In The Fifth Sun he shared his passion for Native-American mythology. Now in Recollection of Things Learned he shares his passion for socialism, both the complexity of its theory and the clash of its praxis.