20 pages and 56 cartoons 6 by 8 inches perfect bound 76 cartoons in the big parade 26 pages saddle stitch It’s A LondOntLife #4 has been ready to go since last year. Without the local London Comic Con, without Words, without Tingfest, there really hasn’t been an outlet. We
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Kersplebedeb: The Radical Promise of Human History: A Review of “The Dawn of Everything” [Boston Review]
[This review originally appeared in the Boston Review, November 3, 2021.] The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity David Graeber and David Wengrow [Available now at LeftWingBooks.net] The standard history of humanity goes something like this. Roughly 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens first evolved somewhere on
Continue readingKersplebedeb: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
The Dawn of Everything is now available at LeftWingBooks.net NATIONAL BESTSELLER,NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution–from the development of agriculture
Continue readingKersplebedeb: Interviews with On Necrocapitalism contributors
As the pandemic transitioned from science fiction to reality in early 2020, a number of writers and thinkers in the imperialist metropoles declared the impossibility of writing in the face of a future that is foreclosed. The M.I. Asma writing group came together to stake out a different terrain, thinking
Continue readingKersplebedeb: New Books Now Available on LeftWingBooks.net!
The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough Uncomputable: Play and Politics In the Long Digital Age Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space Salvage #10: The Disorder of the Future
Continue readingKersplebedeb: New Books Now Available on LeftWingBooks.net from AK Press, PM Press, Verso, Arsenal Pulp Press, and Common Notions!
Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism Poets of the Chinese Revolution The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work Butter Honey Pig Bread F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years Deja Vu and the End of History
Continue readingKersplebedeb: Books Recently Added to LeftWingBooks.net
Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The Power Elite: What Every Thinking Person Needs To Know
C. Wright Mills’, The Power Elite, is unquestionably one of the most important books ever written in sociology, social theory, social philosophy, social psychology or political-economy – and it of course intersects deeply with all of these areas – ranking along with other must-read books such as Erich Fromm’s, Escape
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Michael Mann’s New Climate War
It’s not all that new. There are tons of books on this topic now, so it would be hard to find a completely new angel. But the public still needs to learn the basics, and Mann does a good enough job of explaining it all in a very conversational writing
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Mass Digital Addiction vs Reading
Remember, as Thoreau said, “Read the best books first, otherwise you might never read them at all.” And in this age of pandemic digital addiction, media overload and mass information glut, when most people’s lives are far too “busy” – meaning, they have lost all sense of priorities and spend
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The Top 12 Books For Understanding The World
Or, Why A Critical Reading of History Is Now Critically & Urgently Needed The details are important, but an understanding of the major patterns of history are even more important. I don’t think that is possible without giving due credence to the quiet revolution which occurred in anthropology in the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Gertz’s Nihilism
A year after coming out with Nihilism and Technology, Dr. Nolen Gertz wrote just plain Nihilism, an “examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters.” It’s a really short book, but it took a while to wade through it all. Here it all is even more briefly
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The Failure of Propaganda, The Crisis of Legitimacy, and The Resort to Fascism
The propaganda is hitting Goebbels level, it is getting that obvious and stark. The elite are losing the propaganda war – hence, the increasingly shrill and panicked, desperate measures. Keep up the dissidence; speak truth to the people. But do know this, which is critical to understand. We need to
Continue readingpolitics – Christy's Houseful of Chaos: Little House on the Prairie Books and the Problem of Messy History.
It is a perennial questions in homeschool circles, whether one should read the Little House on the Prairie books with one’s kids or whether the racism in it makes those books ones that should be put aside. The books have the heroine’s mother saying “The only good Indian is a
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Who Are The CIA?
Who are the CIA? This will tell you everything you need to know. Here’s where things really started to go wrong: 1947, the National Security Act, which created the National Security Council and the CIA, giving the CIA sweeping, ultra-secretive, unconstitutional powers, and near limitless budget through the legalized, covert
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Books To Read, or Re-Read
(Notes to myself, and anyone else who may be interested) Desert Solitaire The Monkey Wrench Gang Hayduke Lives! A Wizard Of Earthsea The Essential John Muir Essays – Thoreau Walden The Cancer Stage of Capitalism The American Empire and the Fourth World Oneness vs The 1% Faulter V for
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On a Radical Vision of Future Earth
I grabbed this book, by meteorologist Eric Holthaus, as soon as it went on sale, excited to check out the new vision of how we can all better live together. There’s lots of information for the uninitiated, and then it becomes sort of a fictional narrative. There are no characters
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Education & Reading
I wrote these thoughts for the tiny home movement, which, although it is mainly arising out of economic injustice and sheer necessity, I think is still, nevertheless, a very positive, and potentially liberating popular movement and cultural trend. But in any case, the thoughts on reading and education apply broadly,
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The Gospel Of Thomas: A Key Text In World Religions & A Gateway To Mystery
The greatest scholar of world mythology, and one of the greatest scholars of world religion, Joseph Campbell, introduced me to the Gospel Of Thomas, and made clear its monumental importance. (Translations vary radically in quality of representing or mistepresenting the text, as is common. Stick with, or at least
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Essential Reading: A Very Short List
Here is a short letter (email) I just sent to a few friends. It has a very short list of a few of the books I would consider essential reading. (I’m still working through some of them, while reading others as well.) * With these few books, an excellent understanding
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