Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review: JFK and the Unspeakable (2008)

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Why he died and why it matters
by James Douglass
Review by Brian R. Wright

jfk_unspeakable“The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb a system and think in a system. We lack the independence to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate coverup.” — page 370

The Turning …

In a crime, proof of guilt requires evidence of motive, means, and opportunity. But the greatest of these, especially for crimes of state, is motive. The distinguishing characteristic of JFK and the Unspeakable, aside from its rigorously passionate scholarship, is its complete unraveling of the “why” of the assassination of JFK.

“John F. Kennedy was turning. The key to understanding Kennedy’s presidency, his assassination, and our survival as a species through the Cuban Missile Crisis is that Kennedy was turning toward peace. The signs of his turning are the seeds of his assassination.” — page 321

James Douglass, a peace advocate with international stature,[1] homes in on the context of Kennedy’s presidency with respect to the war machine—the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon, and the CIA.[2] We learn that Kennedy, to some extent, ascended politically by out-“Cold-Warring” his opponents, often by advocating a more belligerent military posture vis a vis several foreign policy annoyances… and promoting higher military spending. For example, in a 1958 speech, as Senator, Kennedy accuses President Eisenhower of enabling a missile gap between the US and the Soviets.[3] Continue reading →

Book Review: Forks over Knives (2011)

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The plant-based way to health
Edited by Gene Stone

Reposted on the occasion of the editor’s 50-year high school reunion near Kansas City, one-time center of the euphemistically termed ‘meat processing’ industry, especially cattle, and hence a barbecue bonanza. Thus for the few days of my visit I’ve taken a break from my mostly vegetarian diet to eat fine BBQ like the natives—and have suffered the digestive tract consequences. This book/DVD is what led me to embrace the vegetarian way, for health reasons, but also for humanitarian ones. — bw

A seismic revolution in health will not come from a pill, procedure, or operation. It will occur only when the public is endowed with nutritional literacy, the kind of knowledge portrayed in Forks over Knives and highlighted by this book. — From the foreword.

You are what you eat. That’s the important lesson of this game-changing book, which is the recipe-containing companion to a documentary film that doubles as a quiet heroic story of struggle and victory. Victory of the truth over decades, even centuries, of lies and misconceptions about the food we consume. In a nutshell the argument of Forks over Knives—the title is intended to suggest the conquest of the ‘knives’ of surgery by the ‘forks’ of eating the right foods—is that changing from an animal-based diet to a whole-foods, plant-based diet will not only make you dramatically healthier, it will prevent and even cure disease… the big ones: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer—most of the time, and within a matter of weeks. Continue reading →

Book Review: The Content of Our Character (1990)

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A new vision of race in America (1990)
by Shelby Steele
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

Harper Perennial, 175 pages

Reposted for timeliness… from my original review in September 2012. — bw

“Moral power precludes racial power by denouncing race as a means to power. Now suddenly the [black power] movement itself was using race as a means to power and thereby affirming that very union of race and power it was born to redress. In the end, black power can claim no higher moral standing than white power.”
— Page 19

Shelby Steele’s unique book, The Content of our Character, arose from various essays he had written for such prestigious publications as Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, Commentary, the Washington Post, and American Scholar.  Character is essentially an anthology of these groundbreaking articles, and argues a central thesis more or less condensed in the above quotation from page 19.  It is remarkable that Steele’s stimulating and controversial book was published nearly two decades ago… and that few black intellectuals of stature— including Steele himself—have built on his startlingly ameliorative infrastructure of ideas.

What happened?  Why did the intelligentsia—black, white, or magenta—drop the ball so glaringly?  It’s as if Michael Jordan, through superhuman athleticism, scored 30 points in the first quarter of a title game against the Lakers, then for the remaining three quarters the whole team went to sleep.  I have my own ideas, though of course I cannot speak for the motives and life situation of Dr. Steele, a professor of English at San Jose State University in California. Continue reading →

Book Review: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

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An inquiry into values
by Robert Pirsig

Zen1974, Bantam Books (1984 edition), 380 pages w/afterword

This book was a staple of my college days, not among the Left—the Left in those days seemed to be as incapable of thinking for themselves as what we see in much of the Right today—but among more the more technical, individualistic reader types.

Pirsig, a technical writer for IBM with a genius-level IQ, recounts his journey on a motorcycle (he doesn’t mention the brand; Wikipedia says it’s a 1964 Honda Superhawk CB77) with his boy, Chris.  They head out across the high plains thru Montana, then down the Oregon-California coast. Continue reading →

Book Review: Erasing the Liberty (2016)

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My battle to keep alive the memory of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty
By Phillip F. Tourney
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

Erasing the Liberty is the third book I’ve read since firing myself up to support these men of the Liberty and their families seeking truth and justice all these years. The other two books are Attack on the Liberty (2009) by James Scott and Assault on the Liberty (1979) from surviving injured crew member James Ennes, Jr. I’m beginning to see that each of the books has unique strengths.

I met the author, injured survivor Phillip Tourney and his coauthor-editor, Dave Gahary, at the USS Liberty 50th Anniversary Reunion, June 8-10, 2017, Norfolk, Virginia. The authors have arranged the information in compact, highly readable units, and the latest revision is readily navigable to thumb thru and find related events to those you are reading.

What Erasing the Liberty provides that the other two books do not, or not to the same degree, is a deck-level, sailor’s view from start to finish of the attacks. Tourney, as petty officer, took a leadership role in damage control and personally wound up at the center of several of the major incidents during the action. He was directly aware of: Continue reading →

Book Review: The Secret behind Secret Societies (2003)

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by Jon Rappoport
2003, Truth Seeker Books, 392 pages
Review by Brian R. Wright (originally posted March 2007)

BW: Reposting review 8/30/2017, on the eve of taking in Mr. Rappoport’s ‘Matrix’ series (three volumes available via his nomorefakenews site: The Matrix Revealed, Exiting the Matrix, and Life outside the Matrix.) Halfway thru the first volume, and I assure you it’s worth every penny, talk about positive life transformation! This book was my entry roughly 10 years ago to “Rappaportianism;” my own breakthru has  been finding its own way since then, evidenced in my works via Global Spring, and now coming to a full boil thanks to the Matrix compendia. The Secret behind Secret Societies makes a solid foundation for anyone seeking a way out via expanded wholly independent and individual creative consciousness. Looks like it’s run out of print; I’m personally taking an action item to chat with Jon and find out how we can make his seminal work widely available once again, at a reasonable price.

This is a ‘different’ book even for me, or perhaps especially for me, as I’m at least a common-sense advocate of Aristotelian-Rand-ian rationality.  The author’s main proposition is: Two artistic visions have fought with each other about the course of humanity:

  1. One is the formula of the secret society which uses symbols and ritual to control and dominate others and claims exclusive knowledge.
  2. The other is the “Tradition of the Imagination,” which holds each of us possesses immense creative power to achieve our own fascinating artistic vision of life in voluntary community with others.

In this Tradition of Imagination lies our future if we are to have a future, and we shall overcome the secret-society conspiracy of power by outcreating it. Continue reading →

Book Review: Sacred Nonaggression Principle (2010)

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Second Edition: “Mantra for a Nourishing Planet”
by Brian R. Wright
Reviewed by the author

Copyright 2010, Free Man Publishing Co.,
175 pages

Reposting the review from 2010, with a forenote. Namely, the general mission of the book remains as it was originally: to create a groundswell of understanding of and passion for the only principle that is worthy of human beings with independent consciousnesses, wanting to live naturally, with others as we choose, in peace and abundance. An idea whose time has definitely come and we must not let go. [All links to the inexpensive Kindle edition for easy download. Except, if you do wish to purchase the paperback, use this link here… as Amazon seems somehow to have got confused in its cataloging and linking.]

Yes, the second edition—or as I prefer to call it, the “second-first” or “kindergarten” edition (SNaP II)—of the book, the Sacred Nonaggression Principle, is finished. In this incarnation of the Sacred Nonaggression Principle (SNaP) I start with things we all learned from kindergarten: don’t hit, don’t steal, don’t lie. These “Kindergarten Rules” are the nonaggression principle (NaP) libertarians have been talking about, like, forever. But the important thing from a book-reception perspective is, “EVERYBODY UNDERSTANDS IT.

The progression of ideas in the book is as follows:

    • Foreword and Prologue—The audience of the book breaks down into two natural groupings, those who are freedom-receptive and those already committed to the libertarian cause. A society without coercion is possible, and will be achieved as we solve the Big Universal Problem (BUP)—of political-economic tyranny.
    • Chapter 1: Kindergarten Rules—Leading off with notions that hail from the simplest tenets humans learn from childhood. Robert Fulghum’s book Everything I Know I Learned in Kindergarten spells out: 1) Don’t hit. 2) Don’t steal. 3) Be honest. These “Kindergarten Rules” are the nonaggression principle. It makes sense to hold them in the highest regard in all of society.

Continue reading →