The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars Review

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(More customer reviews)I stumbled upon this book by chance in a library, opened it, skimmed through the first paragraph, and immediately set myself to the task of reading it in entirety. The writing is clear and concise - Panossian's intelligent prose illuminates the past, without pages and pages of elaboration that one might expect to find in a book that covers roughly 2500 years of history.
It is heavily researched, containing quotes from at least one hundred total sources. Moreover, towards the end of the book, which covers the period from the 1965 commemoration of the Armenian Genocide in Soviet Armenia to the 1988 Nagorno-Kharabagh movement, there are good number of quotes from personal interviews that the author conducted, including several Catholicoses, politicians, and various Armenian ideologues.
The notes to the main text make up roughly one-third of the book and contain some interesting facts. For example, the title "King of Armenia," from the Cilician Kingdom that fell in 1375, eventually passed to the House of Savoy in Italy. That title was proclaimed by the Savoys until 1946, when Italians voted to abolish the monarchy and replace it with a rupublic.
This is an excellent book on Armenian history, with an emphasis on nationalism and what exactly makes a nation a nation.

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Catholics and the New Age: How Good People Are Being Drawn Into Jungian Psychology, the Enneagram, and the Age of Aquarius Review

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(More customer reviews)Pacwa, a Jesuit priest, gives a balanced and systematic treatment of the New Age movement. There are no emotional tirades and scathing attacks. This book is rigorous and scholarly (includes endnotes, a glossary and bibliography) yet very readable. He gives the history and logical arguments against these practices. This book is not just a good read. It's also good to give away to those who need it and good as a reference as well.
Pacwa exposes the roots of New Age infiltration into the Catholic Church. It's a controversial topic but he makes it pretty clear that using something like the Enneagram (a typology purporting that there are 9 types of characters) just doesn't square with being Catholic. Seen in the light of Tradition and Scripture, which Fr. Pacwa makes reference to, this and all New Age practices are dubious at best and diabolical at worst.

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Fr. Pacwa probes the reasons why Catholics are dabbling in the New Age Movement. He shares his experiences and disillusionment with Jungian psychology, the enneagram and astrology. He aslo covers crystals and channelling.

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Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism Review

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(More customer reviews)From the melodramatic title to the end, this book was a tough read. Sean's remarks are simplistic to the point of imbecility. (His logic is something akin to: all lemons are yellow; my car is yellow; my car must be a lemon.) He even repeats himself, and his references are shoddy.
This is the man who voiced opposition to President Clinton sending troops to Bosnia to eliminate the genocide and ethnic cleansing, which it did. Sean asserted that it was his patriotic duty to speak out as an American, and his exercise of free speech. He asked, how this president could justify his actions to American families when their relatives started coming home in body bags. When Bush invaded Iraq, patriotic duty and free speech went out the window when he asserted that criticism of the Bush administration was undermining our national resolve.
His real low point came when a renegade NYC Police Officer named Volpe sodomized Abner Luema (spelling?) with a broom handle in a police precinct. With nothing more than an intuition, Sean announced on the air that maybe that penetration came from the victim's lifestyle. Sean and Volpe's father shared microphones as they crooned a popular melody with made-up lyrics that implied the same. The crooning stopped suddenly when Volpe was fired from the force, and admitted to the sodomy.
Sean again showed his patriotism and wisdom in 1998 when President Clinton announced that a terrorist named Usama bin Laden and his al Qaeda group were the biggest threat to the US. Hannity joined the chorus of republican legislators who ignored the warning, accusing Clinton of "wagging the dog" in order to take focus from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Naturally, the bottom line is that all liberals are evil, and all conservatives are good. All liberals are blind, and conservatives are visionary.
There's just one question I have that Sean seemed to miss, and didn't address:
He claims:
Bill Clinton was responsible for 9/11.
President Bush was only in office eight months.
It wasn't enough time to prepare us against terrorist attack.
Okay.
The first bombing of the World Trade Center occurred six weeks after Bill Clinton came to office.
Does that mean that it was Clinton's predecessor, George Bush's father (41) who was responsible for the first bombing?
Finally, all his callers compliment him as a patriotic American, but what has this man done except talk? Like most chickenhawks, he's a great talker, but you have to walk the walk. I'm waiting for Sean to take his first step.

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unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation Review

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(More customer reviews)At least I think it's a great book, but now I'm not so sure. The authors, Brooks Jackson, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson have done such an outstanding job of showing me why I bought the electric scissors I didn't need and how I was focusing so much on watching the healthy people on the television doing Tai Chi in the park, I completely overlooked the possible side effects of the drug the commercial was pedaling. Now that I've listened and found out that it may lead to complete loss of body hair, tailbone growth, swelling of the lips and tongue, excessive weight gain, webbed feet, tooth loss, emesis and leprosy, I've stopped taking the drug.
Starting out with the first snake oil salesman making outrageous claims, to political advertisements by republicans and democrats, by Bush and Kerry, we learn that virtually none of them can be trusted because they appeal to our biases, our perception, our experiences, and cynicism with words that are open to interpretation such as clinically tested, larger, better, more people trust or use..., on average, and other caveats that deserve closer scrutiny. (I've also added to the list: "Read with an open mind," and "Only for those who can be objective").
If that isn't bad enough, the authors show us how our personal experiences and eyewitness accounts can be manipulated by others and by our own biases. For example, when subjects were shown two lines of differing lengths, they often reported that the shorter one was longer, once they learned that everyone else (supposedly) had selected the shorter line. An even better one is the neighboring review: One, who has made his conservative feelings clear, felt that there was more "left favoring" bias to this book. A commenter said that he felt there was more "right-favoring" bias. This is a classic recommendation for the book.
The most fascinating thing I took from this short paperback is that people will cling to their beliefs more tenaciously in the face of overwhelming evidence that reveals their position is incorrect or invalid, that people will short-circuit their own brains and readily accept as fact that which conforms to their own beliefs, and that we must learn to question bias, sources, evidence, and our cynicism before parting with our money or accepting information as knowledge or fact.
So, I can guarantee that you will be 100% satisfied as were the people in my survey who read this book compared with another. Two out of three found this not only a better read, but reported that it killed the germs that cause bad breath, took inches off their waistline, and removed wrinkles. So, what are you waiting for? Get started today. Start reading. After all, you have everything to lose!
Guaranteed! Or, my name isn't Axel Schnookenhoffer!


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Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning Review

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(More customer reviews)And boy, does Jonah Goldberg have himself some enemies.
It was inevitable that the review section for Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" would degenerate into the Mother of all Flame Wars. The advance dislike for this book simmered for months, and now the floodgates for negative reviews are open. I'd advise all potential readers of this book to bear in mind how few of the negative reviews appear to reflect a reading of the book.
For those willing to give Goldberg the chance, he offers the following thesis: that the label fascist has its roots in the governing philosophies of Italy's National Fascist Party and Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) Party. He argues that there has been a false duality created between the Soviet Socialists of the USSR and the socialists united under the fascists in Italy and Germany. He argues that the totalitarian impulse, the philosophy of state control of decisions taking priority over individual freedoms, is the core uniting principle behind these movements, and he argues that the ongoing home of such statism is in what has come to be known as the "liberal" politics of the modern progressive movement. As you can imagine, that doesn't sit very well with the targets of his argument (hence the rain of 1-star reviews).
I'd encourage open minded readers of all backgrounds to read Goldberg's book and address his arguments. I find his conversational and somewhat informal style to be witty and readable. That said, longtime Goldberg fans should know that this is not a book-length "G-File" (the hip and irreverent column he wrote for National Review Online). This is a serious scholarly work, and it deserves to be read and judged as such. Goldberg is attempting to right a historical injustice. This book is not attempting, as many seem to think, to say that all liberals are closet Nazis, but rather that, contrary to popular misconception, it is not conservatism, but liberalism, that traces its roots to the fascists. In some ways it is a book-length extension of the question conservatives sometimes pose to liberals: "If you leave out the parts about killing all the Jews and invading Poland, what specifically about the Nazi political platform do you disagree with?" (That platform is handily provided in the appendix.) After Goldberg's book, this question is much harder to simply shrug off.
Still, one doesn't need nearly 600 citations just to allow conservatives to say "I'm rubber, you're glue" the next time they are called a fascist. Goldberg argues that our focus on the atrocities committed by fascists in Germany obscures the fact that the fascist drive is, to a degree, universal in modern politics. The heritage and institutions of America lead it to manifest itself in a different form here. Whether it is the smothering embrace of the "It Takes a Village" mommy state or, to a lesser degree, the big-government, "compassionate conservatism" of Bush, fascism in the U.S. is well-intention, "smiley face" fascism, but it still looks first to the state, last to the individual.
In the end, that's what I liked best about this book. Yes, it's great to have a 5-pound rebuttal to the next person who tries to use "fascist" as an epithet to end criticism of a liberal program. However, what comes through in the end is not so much Goldberg's hatred of fascism, but his love of liberty. Fascism in all its forms is the enemy of liberty, and recognizing it for what it is will always be a prerequisite for stopping it. Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" clears away decades of obfuscation to allow that recognition in both the past and present day politics. Those who continue to fight for individual freedom will enjoy and appreciate this book.

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