Blogcritics Author: Abram Bergen

Book Review: Something About the Blues - an unlikely collection of poetry by Al Young

Abram Bergen — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:13:05 EST

The poetry in Something About the Blues is beautiful, captivating, painful, powerful, sometimes soothing, and often thought-provoking. Highly recommended.
There is something about the blues that grabs hold of you and moves you, physically and emotionally, that transports you to places past, present and imagined, something that taps into the deepest elemental parts of you to soothe and sometimes heal. It's easy to lose yourself in the blues. Its history runs deep and its influence on other forms...

Book Review: Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics by William Bonner and Lila Rajiva

Abram Bergen — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:48:48 EST

A serious and hilarious guide to surviving the public spectacle in finance and politics.
Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva team up, in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, to peel the layers of glittering wool from our eyes so that we may see the world of politics and financial markets for what they are. They show us the poor players upon the stage, to paraphrase Macbeth for a moment, as they...

Book Review: Ecohouse: A Design Guide, 3rd Edition, by Sue Roaf, Manuel Fuentes, and Stephanie Thomas

Abram Bergen — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:48:09 EST

A beautifully designed, well-written, thorough guide to the ecohouse. Much recommended as both an inspiration and a technical guide.
Ecohouse: A Design Guide is a big book to read straight through. Whether you read it from front to back or dip into specific chapters depends on who you are and why you are reading it. In any case, Ecohouse is loaded with interesting and important -- shocking, disturbing, inspiring, and enlightening -- information, as well as very useful and...

Book Review: The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, by Hugh Kennedy

Abram Bergen — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:09:10 EST

A fascinating, powerful, and engaging narrative told in a remarkably straightforward and balanced way.
The spread of Islam, first through conquest, then migration, has had a tremendous impact on the world in which we live. Today, certainly by Hollywood and the Western media, that impact is usually framed in terms of terrorism. Again and again, Arabs in general and Muslims in particular are portrayed as backward, hateful, violent people fueled by an...

Book Review: Consider the Source: A Critical Guide to the 100 Most Prominent News and Information Sites on the Web by James F. Broderick & Darren W. Miller

Abram Bergen — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:53:53 EDT

Whether you are a newshound, student, journalist, or writer, this handy guide to news websites should save you a great deal of time.
Whether you are a student, writer, journalist, or newshound, you are often in need of sources. For most of us, the days of spending hours in a library accessing card catalogues, microfiche, and microfilm are over. Not only do most of us no longer need to use such time-consuming and inefficient technologies in search of information, many of us...

Book Review: Adland: a Global History of Advertising by Mark Tungate

Abram Bergen — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:56:19 EDT

An excellent resource and primer for anyone interested in getting into advertising, with insight into its history and major players.
Advertising is ubiquitous. Read the newspaper in the morning, in print or online, and you are confronted with ads. Billboards line the highway on your drive to work. If you use public transportation to get to work there are ads at the station or shelter. Get on the metro or bus and ads become convenient focal points away from the eyes of strangers....

Book Review: Teeth by Aracelis Girmay

Abram Bergen — Tue, 9 Oct 2007 03:50:21 EDT

Teeth is, whatever one's stylistic preferences, an important collection of poems. Girmay's is a bold and fresh voice in poetry.
Aracelis Girmay's poetry collection, Teeth, though rather new on the scene, is no timid voice on the poetic stage. The poetry of Teeth is often bold, brave, and dark, but also joyously triumphant. It is both a poetry of protest and of celebration. It rails against discrimination, despair, death, rape, and war, and celebrates the enduring...

Book Review: Virtual Worlds - Rewiring Your Emotional Future by Jack Myers

Abram Bergen — Mon, 1 Oct 2007 12:54:12 EDT

A near Utopian vision of human transformation and evolution through immersion in virtual worlds.
In June 2007, Mother Jones published an article by Dave Gilson entitled "Even Better Than the Real Thing." More a point-by-point listing of interesting and potentially disturbing facts related to virtual worlds than a coherent article, this piece makes one thing very clear -- regardless of how you feel or what you think about virtual...

Book Review: An Ocean of Air - Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere by Gabrielle Walker

Abram Bergen — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 03:39:05 EDT

A wonderful journey behind the science of air through a series of biographical narratives to be read and re-read.
We tend to think of ourselves as surface dwellers, roaming about on the surface of Earth, far beneath the inhospitable emptiness of space. There are blue skies above us and life-sustaining air all around. It seems so light, this atmosphere of ours, that we hardly give it any thought. Indeed, unless it threatens us with disastrous weather, we take...

Book Review - The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War by David Livingstone Smith

Abram Bergen — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 08:47:14 EDT

If David Livingstone Smith's analysis in this book is correct, then we all should read it: it is that important.
To say that much has been written on the topic of war seems like a gross understatement. At the time of this writing, a search for 'war' on Amazon.com yields 639,124 results. Tightened to display only non-fiction books on war still yields 183,839. History teachers, no doubt many with heart-felt sincerity, repeat the tired cliche,...