Book Review: The Third Terrorist

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Brian Wright

Mideast connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing?
by Jayna Davis

“Why do questions swirl around the official account of the massacre in Oklahoma City? A CNN/USA Today poll—taken shortly before publication of this book in 2004—revealed that 68 percent of Americans believed other bombing conspirators were still out there, somewhere. I found them,” writes author of The Third Terrorist, Jayna Davis, “hiding in plain sight.”

Investigative reporter Davis’s alarming book describes a personal journey from the rubble of the Murrah Federal Building on the fateful 19th day of April, 1995, to the large and varied evidence of Continue reading →

Book Review: Rancho Costa Nada (2003)

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Brian Wright

The dirt-cheap desert homestead
by Phil Garlington
Review by Brian Wright

This book and its author are another acquaintance I’ve made attributable to becoming the editor and publisher of one ‘Bo Keeley,’ or at least Bo’s book on alternative remedies, then two more coming soon… having to do with world-class hoboing and higher-skilled racquetball, respectively. Bo and Phil are definitely ‘six-sigma’ sorts of fellows, meaning the area on the Bell Curve their personalities occupy is not much bigger than the hopscotch course on a gnat playground. [Of course, I’m considerably off center from the normal distribution, too, which is what at least puts me in the orbit of understanding such exceptional perspectives.] Continue reading →

Book Review: Executive Hobo (2011)

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Brian Wright

Riding the American Dream
by Bo Keeley
Review by Brian Wright

As the editor and publisher for Executive Hobo, I’m in an ideal place to comment on one of the more unique books of our time. Similarly, its author is one of the more unique individuals of our time (from his Wikipedia entry you can see him as a colorful combination of Jack London and Jack Kerouac). Continue reading →

Book Review: Rivethead (1992)

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Brian Wright

Tales from the assembly line
by Ben Hamper
Review by Brian Wright

For my mother it [Family Night at the old Fisher Body Plant in Flint] was at least one night of the year when she could verify the old man’s whereabouts. One night a year when she could be reasonably assured that my father wasn’t lurchin’ over a pool table at the Patio Lounge or picklin’ his gizzard at any one of a thousand beer joints out on Dort Highway. My father loved his drink. He wasn’t nearly as fond of labor. — from the first page Continue reading →

Book Review: Bankers and Other People’s Money (1913)

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Brian Wright

From inside the belly of the beast
by Louis Brandeis
Review by Brian Wright

So this is what it looks like on the inside of the Money Trust system. Louis Brandeis was a remarkable public-spirited individual who became a top public-affairs attorney. Graduating from Harvard, he developed a highly successful law practice in Boston. Yet Brandeis was a different breed of lawyer, one who later in his legal career devoted half of his time to legal representation —without fee—of the general public and smaller-business interests against powerful government or corporate interests. This preference of his was almost as uncommon for rich attorneys in those days as it is today. Continue reading →

Book Review: The Weather Makers (2005)

Posted on June 17, 2012 by Brian Wright

How man is changing the climate and what it means for life on earth
by Tim Flannery
Review by Brian Wright

The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climatic system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.
— Wallace Broecker, Cooling the Tropics

A lot of Old Guard liberty sorts, believing in the Infinite Sink and wide open spaces forever (or being susceptible to overwrought, self-serving oil-cartel propaganda), don’t even like the word environmentalism. Let’s call it conservationism then….

Continue reading →

Book Review: The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008)

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Brian Wright

The undisguised truth about liberty in America
by Ron Paul
Review by Brian Wright

2008, Grand Central Publishing, 167 pages

“The Revolution is an important and timely work, yet its fiery title belies the quiet, more scholarly approach it advocates. This is most likely a temperament issue: where Jesse Ventura would pound on the podium and call us to the streets to depose modern royalty through mass protest like the 1960s antiwar movement, Dr. Paul would have us read several good books and vote.”

From my trip to Ron Paul’s Rally for the
Republic—which I briefly describe in notes to the VIP list in last week’s column—there in Continue reading →