Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review: All I Really Need to Know… (1988)

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… I Learned in Kindergarten
Robert Fulghum

1988, Ivy Books, 196 pages

FulghumThe inspiration for reading this book comes from a reference at the Free State Project 2007 Winter Porcupine Festival.  John Stossel of ABC 20/20 “skewerer of conventional knowledge” fame addressed us at the banquet with a message that simplicity favors liberty.  He paraphrased Fulghum’s charming little book as follows:

1) Don’t hit people
2) Don’t steal people’s stuff
3) Keep your promises

A set of premises totally in keeping with the Sacred Nonaggression Principle (SNaP) and, equally important, a prescription for living well. The author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum, at least has lived widely: having been a ranch hand, a folksinger, IBM salesman, professional artist, parish minister, bartender (I almost wrote ‘parish bartender’ :-)), teacher of drawing and painting, and father.  At least for the time when the book was published in 1988 he lived with his wife on a houseboat in Seattle.

So the author is what one might call a free spirit.  When asked, “What do you do?” he usually replies that he is a philosopher, and then explains what he likes to do is think a lot about ordinary things then express what he thinks by writing or speaking or painting, whichever seems appropriate.  In All I Really Need to Know we have a series of short essays about “ordinary things”… like kindergarten, eensy-weensy spiders, South Pacific islanders who yell at trees, raccoons making whoopy in the crawlspace, buying deerskin gloves in San Saba, Texas, coloring with Crayola crayons, and other rituals of “deep-rooty places.” Continue reading →

Book Review: Glass Lands (2016)

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By John S. Ryan
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright
Moon is a Harsh Mistress meets Time Enough for Love and then some

Review first posted March 24, 2017.

First of all, I’m not the ideal candidate for reviewing such an amazing accomplishment as Glass Lands. Indeed, as I sit here having just climbed off the exhilarating 475-page Book 1 roller coaster ride from first-time novelist John Ryan, my mind is drawn into the Grand Editing era of the great Max Perkins at Scribners publishers of New York in the 1920s and 1930s.[1]  Perkins was top banana not only because of cleaning up his celebrated authors’ prose, but because Perkins knew the whole field of serious fiction at the time. What Ryan’s book needs more than anything is a reviewer/editor of Perkins’ stature, working full time as such for a leading general fiction publisher or for an iconic science fiction magazine like Analog. Such an individual would have the depth of field to render a proper reading and comprehensive, positive account.

Alas, like Popeye, I only yam what I yam…which yam not a literary man of stature, so I confess to feeling a bit inadequate to the task of reviewing so auspicious a work as Glass Lands. Fortunately it takes no literary master critic to see what a groundbreaker we’re dealing with here. First, let me give you a sense of the story: Continue reading →

Book Review: Consent of the Governed (2015)

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Scratches the itch for liberty like no other book since Cracking the Code
By Jason W. Hoyt
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

Abundant thanks to my recently realized compatriot, one David Schied (standing on the front lines boldly against Michigan general corruption), for referring me to this remarkable groundbreaking rallying cry for the people’s reassumption of their inherent grand jury authority. David, in a recent conversation, extolled Consent of the Governed as perhaps the most important book he’s read in the past decade… commanding his undivided attention until completion.

I purchased the Amazon Kindle edition for a very reasonable price of $5.99, digested it in roughly a week, and I agree: It IS the most important book that activists for liberty will read this year or for the remainder of the 20-teens. Why? Because as the subtitles tell us, it is the people’s guide to holding government accountable, informing us—with meticulously researched references—that ‘we the people’ are, indeed, in charge and fully constitutionally franchised to take back our direct power over all the institutions of government. By OUR grand juries. NOW.

“We don’t have to wait for elections.” We don’t have to wait period.

It’s simply a matter of working out the details. How to best coordinate the state’s—federal, state, and local levels—wholesale relinquishment of corruptly assumed authority with its facilitation, accommodation, and  enforcement of the people’s grand jury investigations, indictments and presentments[1] (and petit or trial jury functions, too, by the way). In other words, make all public officials, in fact, what they were meant to be in theory: direct, 24/7/365-accountable servants, gophers, waterboys of and for the people.

“That’s mighty tall talk for a one-eyed fat man,” you say. [ref. John Wayne film, True Grit.] Continue reading →

Book and Movie Review: Unacknowledged (2017)

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Breakthru documentary of courage and intelligence toward other beings ____ 9/10
Review by Brian R. Wright

The Unacknowledged video and book make one amazing revelation after another about the ‘We are not alone’ phenomenon, then go on to project what the Men of the Power Sickness (MOPS) [my term, from my book, The Barrier Cloud (2011)] are doing to thwart and subvert our species with suppression of knowledge, continu-ation of the MOPS planetary-dominance system, and, more immediately, toward the end of domination and control: false-flag ET attacks.

First the video, which is really quite a fluent, easy-to-follow presentation of the central thesis that ETs—or, as I like to refer to them, OIBs (other intelligent beings)—are here and have been here (meaning on and around Earth) for centuries, if not millennia. Moreover, they have increased their attention of homo sapiens’ activity on the planet with the advent of nuclear weapons during World War II and in the years immediately thereafter. From the description:

“Dr. Steven Greer presents brand new, top-secret evidence supporting Extra-terrestrial contact including witness testimony, classified documents and UFO footage while also exploring the consequences of ruthlessly enforcing such secrecy.

“The viewer will learn that a silent coup d’état occurred dating back to the 1950s and that Congress, the President and other world leaders have been sidelined by criminal elements within the Military-Industrial-Financial complex.”

In other words, on top of a US government structure that is, itself, at a level of terminal corruption, lies a wholly secret group of Unacknowledged Special Access Programs (USAPs) that are fully illegal and unanswerable to any constitutionally franchised authority… with funding in the hundreds of $billions of dollars per year. [No doubt the MOPS who control and coordinate these far-beyond secret programs are some agency of the global perpetual ‘war and debt’ cabal. Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.] Continue reading →

Book Review: The Power of Now (1999)

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A guide to spiritual enlightenment… by Eckhart Tolle
Review by Brian Wright
Major insights with transformative potential
1999, New World Library, 191 pages

It’s an enchanting thought, isn’t it?  In the middle of a society whose centers of political power are emanating stale rot to the accompaniment of bugles, we’re beginning to see a vibrant coalescence of awareness (COA) among ordinary people.  Extraordinary ordinary people that is. Spiritual enlightenment has become sort of a preoccupation of mine, not to say I’ve made stellar progress on my own but I like to see it and comment on it in others.  For example, I reviewed The Celestine Prophecy, a personally liberating book that gathered numerous devotees through the 1990s and beyond.  A fair amount of my other work on my site has had a theme of self-improvement or self-discovery or both, e.g.

book reviews of:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Think and Grow Rich
Building a Bridge to the 18th Century
The Secret behind Secret Societies
The Secret

movie reviews of:
The Matrix
Ulee’s Gold
V for Vendetta (revenge-oriented but still spiritually gratifying)
The Da Vinci Code

and articles or columns of:
The Sacred Nonaggression Principle
The 15-Minute Spirit Charge
Brew Pub Nation (beer is proof God wants us to be happy)
Reflections on a Noble Soul (loss of my brother) Continue reading →

Book Review: But Not for Me (2017)

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A 1930s Kansas City ‘star’ detective novel by Jack Kline
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

A sign of the times… or a rallying cry to break us free from the times? That is the question. What first-time-novel author Jack Kline has accomplished with But Not for Me is on par with any of the greats of the private eye genre—Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald, Tony Hillerman, Mickey Spillane, Stephen J. Cannell (TV: The Rockford Files),  and, of course, Elmore Leonard. Well, okay, these are my favorites, anyway… in an admittedly rather large universe of outstanding detective-story writers that I know very little about. Thus the question, for me, is will Kline’s uniquely splendid, soulful voice break thru the conforming conventional literary fare we’ve become used to these days and start yet another fertile and fun whodunit universe for ordinary yet uncommon blokes like yours truly?

I vote yes. With all the proper praise to Mr. Kline’s mentors and writers’ groups—or from wherever or whoever he was led to initiate the novel vocation—Kline and his first book are a wholly unexpected diamond of pure originality. He’s that good. that different, with that towering a potential. There is a very special quality in play with the But Not for Me creation that transcends its technical superlatives.

What is it that makes a novel good? Most readers and writers will answer with some combination of (appealing or well-executed) plot, character, dialog, evocation of setting, the writing itself (its sharpness, emotional depth, original phrasings, fitness to subject matter), and something I’ll just refer to as ‘sociological richness.’ BNFM has all these in spades. Plus, as a bonus, it’s completely politically incorrect, a throwback, really, to the old school, “man’s world” of hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-and-soft relations toward the fairer sex. Continue reading →

Book Review: America’s Survival Guide (2007)

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How to … reclaim America’s First Principles and history
by Judge Michael Warren

America_Survival“Only lay down true principles, and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendancy of the people….

“A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sin and suffering.”

— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval (1816).

One of the best introductions to America’s First Principles, America’s Survival Guide is a primer for those principles, along with several practical steps that we as Americans must take to reclaim liberty in our country. The author, Michael Warren, an actual sitting circuit court judge in Michigan, spells out the mission statement of the book at the outset: Continue reading →