The Scapegoat Generation by Mike Males, Common Courage Press, 1996
The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman by Steve Heller, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1987
The Politician by Stephen and Ethel Longstreet, Popular Library, 1959
Paris in the Twentieth Century by Jules Verne,Random House, 1996
The Nine Nations of North America,Avon Books, 1981
When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten,Kumarian Press and Barrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995
Harvest the Fire by Poul Anderson,Tor Books, 1995
The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest by Po Bronson,Random House, 1997
April Morning by Howard Fast,Bantam Books, 1961
The Balkan Express by Slavenka Drakulic,Harper Perennial, 1993
Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott,Tor Books, 1994
Not Fade Away by Jim Dodge,Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987
The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents, Mike Males, Common Courage Press, 1996
The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman, Steve Heller, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1987
The Politician, Stephen and Ethel Longstreet, Popular Library, 1959
Paris in the Twentieth Century, Jules Verne, Random House, 1996
The Nine Nations of North America, Joel Garreau, Avon Books, 1981
When Corporations Rule the World, David C. Korten, Kumarian Press and Barrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995
Harvest the Fire, Poul Anderson, Tor Books, 1995
The First $20 Million is Always The Hardest, Po Bronson, Random House, 1997
April Morning, Howard Fast, Bantam Books, 1961
The Balkan Express, Slavenka Drakulic, HarperPerennial, 1993
Trouble and Her Friends, Melissa Scott, Tor Books, 1994
Anyone who has read the mainstream media could be forgiven for thinking that America's teenagers are on an orgy of self-destruction. From teen pregnancy to teens on welfare to teen drug abuse, the crises seem to be never-ending. Mike Males, who has written extensively on youth issues for many years, comes out with a different perspective on these issues.
On the subject of teens and drugs, teen pot-smoking accounts for four of every 100,000 emergency room visits; during the War on Drugs, drug-related murders have skyrocketed and the number of adult drug deaths have risen sharply, while the number of teen drug deaths have stayed low. The biggest problem for teens and drugs is drug-abusing adults, something ignored by the media.
In the area of teen pregnancy, no one seems to mention that a significant number of pregnancies are the result of sex with men over 20, or are the result of rape, incest, or other sexual abuse, not the result of teen fathers.
A certain number of young people die each year; the authorities apply the label 'suicide' to a certain number of those deaths. Recently, the official definition of suicide was broadened (the book doesn't go into the specifics of the new suicide definition). The same general number of young people die each year, but with the broadened suicide definition, more deaths were classified as such. Therefore, America is in the middle of a sudden epidemic of teen suicide.
This book is full of footnoted tables and statistics, so everything is backed up by tangible facts. On the other hand, it can also be rather dry reading. That doesn't stop The Scapegoat Generation from being a highly recommended book for both adolescents and adults.
Set in present-day Oklahoma, Lucky Kellerman, a widower, has had a life-long love affair with cars. He has kept every car he ever owned, except the first one, a 1932 V-8 roadster. One day, he locks himself inside an abandoned one-room schoolhouse on his property with the intention of building one from the ground up. The interesting thing is that with him in the schoolhouse are 100,000 honey bees.
Along with the car building, Lucky does a lot of reminiscing. He used to be one of the best car mechanics around, until he was forced out of business by an injury and the bank. When he was a teenager, he secretly built a car from the ground up. His father's reaction was to take an axe to it. Lucky's relationship with his son, an ex-game show host now making travel commercials in Hawaii, could perhaps be described as two people rarely being on the same wavelength.
It may be wrong to call this a dark and depressing novel, but it isn't very light and optimistic, either. It's certainly interesting and original, and Heller does a good job at making Kellerman into some sort of Everyman. Can I recommend it? I really don't know. Try it and see for yourself.
This novel is about Paul Hawley Barraclough, who comes from a family of old Chesapeake Bay money. He grows up the right way, going to Phillips Exeter and Yale, eventually getting married and joining the family law firm.
A lifelong friend, Jake Barton, is the narrator. A middle-class lawyer who spends most of his time involved in national politics, he asks Paul to run for State Senate at the urging of the political bosses. He accepts, runs, and wins on the other ticket.
From the start, Paul shows a disturbing, to the bosses, sense of independence, culminating in the next national party convention where Paul engineers a win for a reform candidate over the boss-approved candidate.
The reform candidate, a man named Beverly Baxter, wins the election, and gives Paul a roving ambassadorship to get his proposals accepted by the people. The job isn't made any easier when Baxter suffers a stroke while in office, and Paul becomes the "public" President, a job that nearly kills him.
After a forced hiatus and bout with depression, Paul returns, spending two terms in the US Senate, with the only logical next step being a run at the Presidency.
To a '90s reader, raised on sex, violence and car chases, this book might seem tame and boring. Keep in mind that this is a story of life in another era, that of Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. Remember, also, that this is more the story of a man who keeps his principles, even in politics, than it is a "politics" novel, and the reader may find that this is a pretty good story.
This novel, written in the 1860s and undiscovered until recently, takes place in 1960s Paris. It tells the story of Michel, a dreamer and budding poet in a world where mechanization has taken over. After finishing school, at which he wasn't exactly a standout, Michel is told by his father that he will be working in the main office of a national bank. He is shifted from job to job within the bank, failing everywhere, until he meets a kindred soul who also cares about Music and Literature. Along the way, Michel is horrified to learn that the great 19th Century French writers, like Victor Hugo, have been forgotten in modern Paris; music has turned into cacophonous noise; poetry has been reduced to titles like Ode To Oxygen. Having been summarily thrown out of the bank, Michel is given a last chance at a state-run firm where theatre pieces, from operas to light comedies, are written under an assembly-line system.
As you might have guessed, this isn't the typical Verne adventure story, having been written early in his career. To those interested in future speculation and society-building, this novel is pretty good. To those interested in another Journey To The Center Of The Earth, look elsewhere.
The author, a Washington Post reporter. asserts that traditional boundaries in North America like state and national boundaries have become increasingly meaningless as the continent has already broken up into nine separate countries. With names like The Foundry, The Empty Quarter, Ecotopia and MexAmerica, each has its own culture, its own economy, and own way of getting what it wants from its neighbors.
Agreeing, or disagreeing, with any of this is up to the individual reader. This is still a logical, plausible, and fascinating look at a very possible future for America.
"Economic growth" is one of those indisputable concepts with which everyone is supposed to agree. Seeming to be ranked with God, motherhood and apple pie, economic growth is supposed to provide more, and better paying, jobs for everyone and greater prosperity from one end of society to the other.
But, David Korten, armed with an MBA and PhD from Stanford Business School, and thirty years of overseas experience actually seeing the effects of economic growth, says Not So Fast.
He says that mankind, Americans included, have been using earth's finite resources as if they were infinite. He talks about transnational corporations that may be headquartered in a certain country, but owe their allegiance to whoever has the lowest tax rate. Also mentioned are corporate CEOs who lay off thousands of employees, then are treated as heroes by their boards of directors and Wall Street for their bold leadership.
Korten also has a wonderful metaphor or analogy for life in contemporary America. The first Star Trek series had an episode called "The Cloud Minders". It took place on a planet where the elite lived in a city on a cloud called Stratos where they had the best of everything. The dirty, dangerous ore mining that made Stratos possible took place on the planet surface. The surface dwellers had no opportunity to experience life on Stratos, and the residents of Stratos had no desire to experience life on the surface.
This is a thoroughly researched, easy to read book that easily reaches the level of required reading for everyone. Highly recommended.
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This is part of a far future series about a poet, Jesse Nicol, living on an Earth whose cultural and literary glory days are in the past. He travels to the moon and falls in love with a Lunarian (a human subspecies) named Falaire. She wishes to escape the rule of the Cybercosm, an intelligent, self-aware, more-than-an-artificial-intelligence system which rules Earth with a benevolent, but iron, hand. She gets Jesse, also a pilot, involved in a plot to hijack the last interplanetary shipment of anti-matter and send it toward a Lunarian asteroid colony. The anti-matter would give the Lunarians enough energy to be permanently independent of the Cybercosm.
This is an excellent story. I have avidly read science fiction for over 20 years, and Anderson is my favorite SF author, so I don't claim to be totally objective or unbiased. Still, the characters are real people, the future society building is well done, and, overall, this novel is writing raised almost to an art form. Well worth reading.
At a Silicon Valley company called Omega Logic, Andy Caspar, a young software tester, wants to become one of the techno-elite. He figures the way to get there is to get involved in a hot project at Omega to build a 686 computer. Instead, through a bit of upper-management maneuvering, he is made project manager on what seems like a bottom-of-the-list project, to build a computer with a $300 price tag.
From the 3D characters to the interesting, easy to read story to the fact that Bronson does a good job at keeping the technical parts from getting too overwhelming so that no special computer knowledge is needed, this is a first-class story for everyone, not just those in the computer field.
This is the story of one day in the life of 15-year-old Adam Cooper, having the usual difficult son/father relationship with his father, Moses, a stubborn man who loves to argue about anything. Taking place in April, 1775 in Lexington, Massachusetts, one day word reaches the residents that the British are coming through on their way to a colonists' ammunition dump in Concord. The men of the town gather their weapons and meet the British on the town green hoping to convince them to leave Lexington alone. The British aren't in a talking mood.
When the smoke clears, several men, including Moses, lie dead, and Adam is running for his life with only a hunting musket. He meets up with some survivors from the town, and nearby towns, and over the next 24 hours they all get a crash course in war.
Fast does an excellent job with this book. He really has the reader crouched behind a stone wall, sweaty hands on a musket, never having killed another person before, but knowing that the British are just down the road, and soon it will be them or you. Strongly recommended.
This is a group of essays about the Yugoslav civil war of the early '90s. While much of the world was hearing about the destruction of Vukovar, the siege of Sarajevo, or ethnic cleansing, Drakulic, a Croatian journalist living in Zagreb, was writing about things like neighbors suddenly turning on each other because they belong to different ethnic groups.
One essay is about her father, a veteran of Tito's partisan army during World War II, who was emotionally changed by the war and never told her about it. Another essay is the story of how it feels to be a refugee, occupying an apartment in Ljubljana of a friend who has fled to France. There is more than one essay about death close up; seeing a report about a shell destroying a house and wondering what the people inside were doing at that moment; seeing a photo of a man with half his head blown away.
If there is such a thing as a list of must-read "reference" books on the effects of modern war away from the front lines, this book should be included on that list. It is filled with passionate and eloquent writing on the tiny ways that war seeps into a person's soul until they are consumed by it.
Trouble and Cerise are two of the best cyberspace hackers in the business. When the government cracks down on such activities, Trouble takes off permanently, neglecting to tell Cerise. A few years later, after both have gone legit, someone suddenly appears on the nets, boasting about their (now very illegal) criminal hacking, and using Trouble's name. The authorities get really interested, and turn up the heat on Trouble. She and Cerise get back together, a bit reluctantly, and go searching for the impostor, in the real world, and in cyberspace.
This is a first-rate novel. The cyberspace prts will keep any cyberpunk happy. There is an interesting story in the real world, too, along with excellent characters, especially Trouble and Cerise. You won't go wrong on this one.