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Books I Read in 2025

In 2025 most of the books I read were courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library. I read parts of books and checked out books that I was simply curious about. The San Francisco Public Library is an amazing resource. You can even check out vinyl records!

Below is a list of books that I finished. I do this exercise to simply reflect on the previous year.

Books I Read 2025


Crow Planet Essential Wisdom From the Urban Wilderness
Haupt, Lyanda Lynn
New York : Little, Brown and Co., 2009.


The Explosion of Deferred Dreams Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975
Callahan, Mathew
Oakland, CA : PM Press, [2017]
see review

This is a really interesting book for those interested in San Francisco history.

Eiger Dreams Ventures Among Men and Mountains
Krakauer, Jon
New York, NY : Lyons & Burford, c1990.


The Fifth Risk
Lewis, Michael
New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Michael Lewis has spent the last few years investigating what the federal government does. The Fifth Risk illuminates how behind the scenes, dedicated, often eccentric federal employees do jobs that are very important for our safety and also simply to advance pure science.

James A Novel
Everett, Percival
New York : Doubleday, [2024]
see review

The review of James linked above is the most viewed post on this website.

Rasputin The Untold Story
Fuhrmann, Joseph T.
Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, c2013.

Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya
TQS Publications 1972

barbariandayscover200
Barbarian Days A Surfing Life
Finnegan, William
New York : Penguin Press, 2015.
see review

Indeed, underestimation is practiced with the greatest aplomb on the North Shore of Oahu. There, a wave must be the size of a small cathedral before locals will call it eight feet.

 

Buzzy Trent, an old-time big wave rider, allegedly said, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but increments of fear.” If he said that, he got it right.
– “Barbarian Days A Surfing Life”

Knoxville: This Obscure Prismatic City
(American Chronicles) Neely, Jack
The History Press; Illustrated edition (November 13, 2009)

Technofeudalism What Killed Capitalism
Varoufakis, Yanis
Brooklyn, NY : Melville House, [2023], ©2023

Indeed we are all serfs in the new economic order, with every social media post adding to the coffers of the the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. Give not your children away to these schmucks!

Notes From Underground
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Grand Rapids, Mich. : William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2009.

1984
Orwell, George
San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, [1984], ©1949

It is always good to revisit the dystopian works of the twentieth century. 1984 rings true still.

The Song of the Hawk The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins
Chilton, John
Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c1990.
see review

Walden and Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau
New York : Union Square & Co., 2023.

If simplicity is a virtue, I think that Thoreau has vanished from the American psychique. We are a country where more is better and the accumulation of stuff is really the only virtue.

Tropic of Cancer
Miller, Henry
Mexican Publisher

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
Miller, Henry
New Directions

“The language of society is conformity; the language of the individual is freedom. Life will continue to be hell as long as the people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality. Switching from one ideology to another is a useless game. Each and every one of us is unique, and must be recognized as such. The least we can say about ourselves is that we are American, or French, or whatever the case may be. We are first of all human beings, different one from another, obliged to live together, to stew in the same pot.”
– Henry Miller from “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird”

Teaching to Transgress Education as the Practice of Freedom
hooks, bell New York : Routledge, 1994.

Abundance
Klein, Ezra
First Avid Reader Press

Good grief! I have no idea why this book was taken seriously. The rose-colored glasses this book takes on the current situation is so devoid of the realities on the ground. It is for those who have this delusional idea that somehow technology will fix all our problems (Bill Gates is in this camp). Climate change is but a bug that we can fix. Miraculously affordable housing will emerge just as long as we get government regulations eradicated. It is as if the authors have no understanding of history.

The World’s Fastest Man the Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America’s First Black Sports Hero
Kranish, Michael
New York : Scribner, 2019.

Highly recommended book about Marshall “Major” Taylor and a view into the Gilded Age, extraordinary racism, courage and a short period of time when bicycles were the modern thing. The odd fact that the story of Major Taylor is obscure is unfortunate.

The Pirate’s Wife The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd
Geanacopoulos, Daphne Palmer
Toronto : Hanover Square Press, [2022]

King of Kings The Iranian Revolution : A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Anderson, Scott
First Doubleday hardcover edition
see review

Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
Lewis, Michael
New York : Riverhead Books, [2025]

The Phantom Tollbooth
Juster, Norton
HarperCollins 1964

Not really a kids book, Norton Juster was a genius.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Turner, Fred
Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2006.

From 2006, From Counterculture to Cyberculture is a bit of love-letter to Stewart Brand and an interesting view of how counter-culture morphed into the techno-libertarian world we live in today. It was written before “social media” and illuminates how the New Communalists of the early 1970s morphed into a notion of a digital utopia where people became one and could communicate for the good of all humankind. Enter, Newt Gingrich and an ethos of libertarian deregulation and we have the current world we live in today. It briefly goes into the Telecommunications Act of 1996 but does not even mention the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – DMCA of 1998.

While Tanner’s thesis is correct, the book ignores a lot of the events and forces that were going on at the time and instead redundantly drives home the point that the people who drove VW Westphalia’s in the seventies are now surely driving Tesla’s and living in gated communities, counting their millions.

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King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution – A Review and Reflections

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation is the full title of a book by Scott Anderson published in 2025.  The gist of the book is that the United States, distracted by the Soviet Union and the cold war, overly compartmentalized in its state department and spy networks, did not take the religious fundamentalism that was growing in Iran seriously.  Few people in the state department or even at the embassy spoke Farsi. Not many were in the smaller towns and countryside. Important warnings were ignored. Crucial reports where just filed away. While the book looks at the history of Iran and things like the 1953 coup, it mostly focuses on the leadup to the 1979 revolution. Three key sources are referenced throughout the book: Farah Pahlavi, Michael Metrinko and National Security Council officer Gary Sick.  Through this lens you see clearly the catastrophic miscalculations of the U.S. that lead to the fall of shah and the Iran hostage crisis. There are some juicy moments like when President Carter visited Iran in the 1970s and brought Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan along for entertainment. Their improvisations and informality were perplexing to the stiff Shah and gave Gary Sick insights into the monarch he was dealing with. Additionally, Michael Metrinko who was one of the hostages provides some interesting and humorous  observations along the way.

“By my count I worked with nineteen different American generals over there,” Metrinko observed in the autumn of 2021, shortly after the American forces had abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban, “but at this point I’d be very hard-pressed to tell you which one was the dumbest.”

When it gets to 1978 the book moves slowly and recounts the tense daily events leading up to the storming of the U.S Embassy and the Iran hostage crisis. The details and complexity of the situation are well-researched and conveyed. Eventually, you learn that the shah, battling cancer, leaves Tehran with his family – the shah in the cockpit of a Boeing 707, piloting the jetliner out of Iran. The book is quite the page turner and begs the question that if the state department was so incompetent then, it must be even more a disaster today. 5 stars.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 5, 2025
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 512 pages

NOTE: The author of this review lived in Tehran from 1970 to 1972, attended fourth and fifth grade at Iranzamin international school, and while he does not speak much Farsi, he does remember a few swear words that he learned by listening to frustrated Tehran cab drivers. The photo above is indeed from the author’s stamp collection from that era.

RELATED POST: Later, while in high school back in the United States, he questioned a United States senator about the situation in Iran. The senator seemed a bit stumped by the question. In a way, it foretold the disaster about to unfold.

 I had always wondered how it was possible for the two disparate worlds to get along and how the meeting of the West with the Persian world would work out in the end. Stylish woman getting off the plane from shopping sprees in Paris, wearing the latest fashions  in the same streets with Muslim women in traditional chadors.  How is this possible?

Dear Senator, I have a question

 

 

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The Song of Hawk – The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins – A Review

The Song of Hawk – The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins is a biography by John Chilton of Coleman Hawkins, one of the most influential tenor saxophonists and musicians of the twentieth century. John Chilton was an English trumpet player and working jazz musician, who has methodically chronicled every recording session that Coleman Hawkins ever played; this was a lot of sessions. Interspersed with the details of these sessions, are life events, gigs, travels and various quotes from musicians and others that give light to Hawkins and the environment he was living in.

Coleman Hawkins was born in 1904 so most of the recordings were 78s. The book chronicles each of these recordings as a timeline of Hawkins’ life. How Chilton got his hands on these records in unknown and unfortunately the book does not have a discography.  The book does gets a bit lugubrious at times with the author’s impressions of the various soloists and recording qualities, but it is for true fans who do not mind the details.  For this reader, it was about finding needles in the haystack. Hawkins indeed played and recorded with John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Thad Jones. These are surely interesting listens that I was unaware of and want to pursue. For many years he took Thelonious Monk under his wing.  Many people asked him why he used Monk, who’s playing was unorthodox, when he could have hired a “real” piano player. Hawkins knew genius when he heard it. It is interesting to muse how differently Monk’s career would have been without Hawkins.

While many biographies delve into the personal, The Song of Hawk – The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins, mostly stays away from Hawkins’ personal and family life. The one aspect where this is not true is the insane quantity of liquor consumed. Coleman liked his scotch and brandy.

We just happened to be living in the same hotel in Nottingham, only living about three doors apart. So Fats would bring by my breakfast every morning – a glass of Scotch, full glass, a water glass of whiskey. You see that is the way we drank. It would take me an hour to drink a glass of scotch; he’d drink it in two minutes, straight down, just like he was drinking water. He was a big drinker and a big eater. Yeah, Fats was something else.
Hawkins reflecting on a stint with Fats Waller at a European hotel

We got along nicely. He was such a wonderful person. I couldn’t believe that anyone could drink so much alcohol and that it would have so little effect on him.
Arthur Briggs

But what was amazing about Hawkins was even though he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank all that booze, people generally found him to be a great guy. While he was in many ways a very private person and did not say much, he did often help out younger players and talent.

First, he taught me to put expression into singing ballads, and he did it saying, ‘Carp, if you’re putting a song across, you’ve got to regard it as if you are making love. You greet the song, then you slowly get closer to it, caressing it, kissing it, and finally making love to it, and when you bring your performance to a climax you don’t just end it there and then, you have to be just as tender as you were when you began, so that the audience feels the flow of your expression and they end up peaceful and satisfied.’
Thelma Carpenter

From 1934 to 1939, Hawkins lived in Europe where he played long residencies in various clubs and hotels. Sometimes he was backed up by other Americans but more often by local European players. At one point he took to the slopes.

Hawkins’s success in Switzerland were just as great as those he had enjoyed in other parts of Europe. During the winter of 1935-36 he worked in St Moritz (where he learned how to ski)… his main base was Zurich.

St. Moritz - Wikipedia
St. Moritz – Wikipedia

If there is ever a movie made of his life, the film should start with Coleman Hawkins skiing in the Alps, Hawk bundled up, smoking a cigarette, looking out at the sublime mountains, ready to head down the mountain. Needless to say. Mr. Hawkins, while being a fine saxophone player, could also be known as an early predecessor to the modern ski bum. I have a feeling he probably mostly enjoyed the apre ski.

He was amused and sometimes vexed, when local jazz critics praised only black musicians, automatically excluding white performers from any listing of  favorites. Having always kept an open mind when listening to jazz musicians, he had difficulty in making Europeans understand that there were some white jazz musicians he genuinely enjoyed. “After all. I played with Benny Goodman and all of them and I didn’t know any clarinet player that played more than Benny.”

In 1939 he returned to the United States. In that same year he recorded the ballad Body and Soul which was a big hit and set the stage for the modernism on 52nd Street – tritone substitutions, irregular measured phrases, harmony derived from the vocabulary of Ravel and other impressionists, complex polyrhythms and ridiculously fast tempos which soon challenged the pop tune and riff-based music of the big band era.

It is always important to note that Coleman Hawkins idea of a good time at home was kicking back and listening to classical music. He had a vast collection of operas and symphonies on vinyl and a state-of-the-art high-fi. People commented that when they visited him in his apartment they would find him in a comfortable chair with an opera playing on the hi-fi and tears streaming down his face.

Competitive to the end, you get a real sense of this with a recollection from Cannonball Adderley.

A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous; I told him Hawkins was suppose to make him nervous for forty years.
Julian “Cannonball” Adderley

hawk-record-smWhile The Song of Hawk – The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins is a welcome addition to the genre of jazz history, one can get a very good idea of the life of Coleman Hawkins by simply reading the liner notes by Dan Morgenstern of The Hawk Flies which won a Grammy award for liner notes. Morgenstern knew Hawkins well and later in his life helped him get gigs. There was a heartfelt personal relationship there which is non-existent  in The Song of Hawk – The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins. The Song of Hawk digs very deep in a very methodical way into the life of Hawkins in a very detached way. I doubt anyone will take the time to write it again. It is a welcome addition to understanding this music called jazz.

The Hawk Flies reissue with Dan Morgenstern liner notes
The Hawk Flies reissue with Dan Morgenstern liner notes

CODA

When I was fifteen years old, living in Madison, Wisconsin, one summer I went out riding my bike looking for a job. I road down State Street and outside a French restaurant, The Ovens of Brittany, I saw two cooks on break outside. They were hanging out on a stoop, and as people do in the restaurant business, having a smoke break. I asked them if there was any work. After a few moments they asked me if I wanted to clean up and paint the staircase behind them. Somehow a bucket of molasses had been kicked down the stairs. It had splattered everywhere – on the carpeting, against the door, on the walls. We must have agreed on a wage and I then commenced with a bucket of hot water, rags, mop and a sponge. When I had finished later that day, I went to pick up my pay. They were happy with my work and asked what my plans were for the evening. I said that I was free, to which they asked if I wanted to wash dishes. The dishwasher had called in sick. I told them that it sounded great but that I would need to call my mother.  And so ensued my decades-long career in the restaurant industry.

The Ovens of Brittany dishroom was in the basement of an old corner building that was probably from the last century. Every ten of fifteen minutes a tub of dishes would make its way down via a manual dumbwaiter. The people who worked at the restaurant were mostly college students, so at a young age I was conversing about adult topics with people five or ten years my senior. From a Jewish guy from New York I learned about the term anti-Semitism. You grew up fast in those days.

With the tips that I made as a dishwasher I would mosey on down to the record stores on State Street and buy vinyl, mostly jazz cut-outs. One of those records was The Hawk Flies a remastered Milestone reissue of various dates. On that record are amazing sidemen – J.J. Johnson, Hank Jones, Nat Adderley, Idrees Sulieman, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk. The sound of Coleman Hawkins and that sophisticated modern music coming out of New York City was the perfect sound track for the feeling I had after a six hour dish shift. I was hooked.

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Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan – A Review

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

barbariandayscover200William Finnegan’s – Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is a memoir. It is mostly a true story of a life where the common thread is surfing. Finnegan grew up in Southern California and Hawaii and at one point when he was just a grom the waves were not far from his family’s humble house near Diamond Head, Hawaii. He took to surfing at a very early age and though he does not admit it, became a big wave surfer, riding huge waves on the North Shore of Oahu, Ocean Beach in San Francisco, discovering a wave in Fiji and later in life, Portugal.  When he was a young teenager he began to experience the power of the ocean.

 

I was shaken to the core by the sound of the waves detonating a few yards behind me. I was convinced that if I had been caught inside I would have died.
William Finnegan at fourteen surfing the Rice Bowl in Hawaii

For some inexplicable reason, he kept coming back to these harrowing experiences.  He seems to have remembered the minute details of various rides from previous decades were he thought the end was near. Captivating read indeed, and much of it surely somewhere near the truth.

The book is a romp through various times in his life. It is a very fun read not just because of the surfing tales but it gives a window into a time in history when people had the ability to be very mobile, flying to faraway lands, but at the same time communications back home did not exist. A telegram now and then. Regular letter writing but making a call on a phone was far too expensive and not common. People out in the world traveling used random message boards, taping hand writing messages in often feeble attempts to contact others.

In the end, I teamed up with other Westerners, bribed some Bulgarian border guards, made my way through the Balkans and over the Alps and, with the help of an American Express office message board in Munich, found [his girlfriend] Caryn in a campground south of the city. She seemed fine.
William Finnegan at nineteen bumming around Europe

For this reader, the chapters where he travels around the world for a few years chasing waves with his friend Bryan is truly amazing. With nautical charts they head off to the South Pacific and discover a phenomenal wave in Fiji, unknown to the world but for a few. Now the spot is an expensive surfing resort destination. A year in Australia surfing and working odd jobs, searching for waves. Buying a beater car and driving it clear across the country, always a bit concerned if it would overheat or the next day would even start. Such road trips are times when living in the moment seems to take precedence. They seem to be not so much in nature but a part of nature.

Then there is the peculiar way that wave size is measured. While this may not be of interest to people who do not surf, it gets pretty funny.

Indeed, underestimation is practiced with the greatest aplomb on the North Shore of Oahu. There, a wave must be the size of a small cathedral before locals will call it eight feet.

 

Buzzy Trent, an old-time big wave rider, allegedly said, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but increments of fear.” If he said that, he got it right.

Barbarian Days – A Surfing Life is a very fun read, especially if you enjoy travelogues, you are a surfer or just love the outdoors. There may be times when the author delves into the finer points of a two wave hold-down, or the advantages of a certain fin set up or length of board.  This talk must be a bit perplexing and perhaps a bit tedious to the non-surfer. One thing that Finnegan claims is that it is just about impossible to get really good at surfing  if you pick it up later in life. I am living proof of this theory and would agree.

Getting old as a surfer, I’d heard it said, was just a long, slow, humiliating process of becoming a kook again.

CODA:EVERY SURFER HAS A STORY
I started surfing at the age of thirty-five, an age far too advanced to every actually get really good at the sport. I mostly do it for the exercise, be with friends and to commune with nature. It is amazing the wildlife you see out in the water. I regularly surf with dolphins and certain times of the year there are whales within twenty feet.

Paul Lyons surfing Ocean Beach - March 2008
Paul Lyons surfing Ocean Beach in his late forties – March 2008. This session was complete luck. I remember paddling out with a board that my friend had found while on the job cleaning out student housing. I found a channel right away and caught three really nice waves. This was a rare session. I have always been a bit of a kook. – Photo by Doug Oakley

I remember the thrill of the first time I took off on a head-high wave and made it. I also remember the first time I took off on big wave on a long period swell. The waves were overhead at Ocean Beach back in the days when you would sometimes be the only person in the water. It did actually get lonely out there.  I went right, stayed high on the shoulder and remember just flying down the wave faster than I had ever surfed. I had never ridden a wave with such power. I also remember a day when my surf buddies and I when out at Ocean Beach and the waves were big but seemed at the time nothing scary. I had only been surfing a few years. We made it out past the shore-break and white water only to discover that the swell, in the course of the next hour, had increased quickly. A huge set came and we tossed our boards and dove underneath. I broke my leash, lost my board which eventually washed into shore. We both paddled in a bit terrified by the whole ordeal. I pledged to never to do that again. It scared the bejesus out of me. Later I saw the buoys from when we were out. It  had jumped up to 11 feet at 19 seconds. Big waves. That’s my one captivating story and it is all true.

William Finnegan lives in Manhattan and the end of the book loses the wild adventure of earlier years. Parents die. He becomes a father. Life becomes more urban. In his seventies he must still be a really good surfer as he surfs off of Long Island in the winter and will chase waves in the summer and even during  hurricanes.

For those who love the adventure of youth and want to escape into that magical time of traveling before the internet, I highly recommend William Finnegan’s – Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is a Pulitzer Prize winning memoir.

5 Stars

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“James” the Novel – A Review

James is a novel by author Percival Everett and is based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. It tells the story in the first person not from the character Huck but through the enslaved person Jim. Huck Finn is a classic work of American literature that everyone has heard of but as I am finding few people have actually read. Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” A few years ago I wanted to revisit this Twain classic. Thinking I could pick up a copy at a local Goodwill I found myself out of luck. I did find one eventually and when I read the introduction I soon realized I had picked up a sanitized, censored version. I had purchased the 2011 edition of the book, published by NewSouth Books. This version replaced the term “nigger” with “slave” (not even enslaved person) throughout the book. I am sure that Twain would have not approved as he got bent out of shape when his editors simply changed his punctuation.

But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.
– Letter to Harriet Whitmore, 7 February 1907

Huck Finn Illustration
Huck Finn Illustration

In any event, Huck Finn has been banned from the beginning.  I did eventually purchase the original Huck Finn, complete with illustrations. This was the version Mark Twain approved. It is always best to read the original.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a complicated tale that brings up many timeless themes. It makes perfect sense for Everett to use Huck Finn as a springboard for a reimagining of this classic. James  tells the story of Huck Finn through the eyes and ears of Jim; in this way he is pulling one on Twain by making a “stretcher” out of his “stretcher.” Additionally Everett goes a step further than Twain and allows the character Jim to not just be freed but to become empowered.  James like Huck Finn challenges assumptions about race, sex, gender and identity and in the end through a combination of education, courage, reason and the performative, James finds agency by embracing the ideals of The Enlightenment. James is a book about the “American dream.”

In order to get the most out of James it is best to have first read a few books that are referenced otherwise these references will make no sense.  Start with the short novella Candide: or, The Optimist (1759)  by Voltaire (it is around 100 pages). Like Huck Finn this book was banned and Voltaire did spend time in prison for his writings. Candide is a bit like a comic book in that it moves very fast – there is sex, rapes and violence, gold and jewels. Like Huck Finn it is really for adults. Characters and places from Candide make their way into James.  Of course the next step is to read Huck Finn – the original version with all the bad words. Take your time.

A major theme throughout James is the performative and the anxiety that surrounds identity. In modern times this has been often called code-switching. Jim has to be careful that he does not slip out of the language of being a slave and give away that he can read and write. Of course he pulls it off mostly until at a crucial point in the book (which I will not spoil). An important thing about this code-switching is that it is handed down through generations with the elders teaching their youth how to speak and act like a slave as a means of survival. In modern language, this is perhaps a psychological aspect of what is called systemic racism. You also have a few characters who’s sex or gender are misidentified – Doris and Sammy. This is not thoroughly explained but surely has to do with black people being controlled and abused by their owners. Interestingly, the people concerned are so abused they simply accept their lot in life. Of course the King and the Duke are all about code-switching and impersonating royalty. I think it was a missed opportunity that James does not play around more with these two characters as Twain did, revealing the arrogance, corruption and incompetence of royalty. How soon we forget.

In James, the historical characters Voltaire and Locke enter the novel though Jim’s dreams. The first time is soon after he is bitten by a snake and delirious. In this way, history becomes surreal and less believable than the fiction – we only see historical figures in dreams. Jim’s dream-induced conversations with Voltaire are brief but we get a references to Westphalia and the notion of “tending your garden” and near the end Cunégonde, the love interest of Candide. Besides references to these themes the philosophical themes that Voltaire brings up in his work are not ventured into. There is no Professor Pangloss and his dogmatic “best of all possible worlds” mantra. By the time James reunites with his wife Sadie and daughter, the Voltaire references are long gone. Unlike  Cunégonde, Sadie has not lost her charm and is not irritating to be around. And unlike Candide who’s identity is a constant, Jim becomes James and this identity is reinforced with the notion that you claim your identity through courage and the performative. James discards that layer of his self that is disenfranchising. If you no longer speak with the diction of a slave, then you are no longer a slave.

Race in America has a complicated history and Everett helps to illuminate this complexity not dumb it down or simplify it.  In the end, James does begin to live his dream of freedom and is empowered by his literacy and the ideals of The Enlightenment that all men are created equal. As the plot twists and turns, by the end James is not anything like Huck Finn. We find ourselves back in Hannibal then another city with Jim looking for his wife and family on a “breeder farm.” Good grief! Things move quickly and become a bit like a Cohen Brothers thriller movie with lots of violence and fireworks. It is probably a good idea to read the book now. It is a thrilling page-turner and James will be in theaters soon.

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The Explosion of Deferred Dreams – A Review

There are many ways to learn about history and events. One is by researching published accounts of the time – books, newspapers and magazines. Another is to get first hand accounts through interviews. A third way is to actually have lived through the time and events and report what happened through first-hand observation. The The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975 by San Francisco native Mat Callahan, published by PM Press uses all three. Often times books about popular music become fan literature and lightweight puff-pieces, highlighting the usual tabloid events. In contrast The Explosion of Deferred Dreams looks deeply into politics, the music business, journalism and human interactions of the time and shows how for a very brief period a special sort of music freedom and political idealism existed in San Francisco only to eventually be coopted and controlled by the press and music industry.

While Callahan is not an academic, the book at times takes on the flavor of a graduate-level thesis with an abundance of footnotes and references. It is a very well-researched, insightful look at a dynamic time in the Bay Area. No stone is left unturned and the interactions between the Black Panthers, The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Sly and the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, The Diggers, Bill Graham and many others shows how different the actual history was when compared to how the history eventual was marketed by the music industry and press.  Callahan likes to set the record straight. He points out how journalists and the music industry coopted and invented terms such as “The Summer of Love,” “hippie” and the “The San Francisco Sound.” that were actually foreign to the people and movements of the time. (There is no mention of the term “groovy” but I have a feeling that was some marketing department as well.) In actuality, the time period was really about protesting the Vietnam War, the movement, consciousness and liberation,  ideas and goals that were revolutionary and a bit too much for the people in power. In short time the music industry relegated the music and time period to a genre or style while the music at that time was about doing away with categories and genres.

“..there was no “Summer of Love.” This was a media creation that passed into popular usage the same way Tampax became the generic name for sanitary napkins. Journalists and publicity agents (is there really a difference?) repeated this phrase so often that it became a common referent; it was a short easy way to identify a time and place without doing the hard work of chronicling what actually transpired , thereby preventing its lessons from  being learned.”

With all history there is nothing like the ability to be a fly on the wall. The book begins with a personal story of being on the Hoover Middle School playground in 1965 and the life-changing event of simply learning about the Beatles. There are many interesting parts of the book that relay these  personal experiences during his youth including the interactions between certain San Francisco High schools and what was going on in the Haight-Ashbury and Mission Districts. Definitely insider knowledge where you sometimes get the feeling that you a talking to some local at a corner bar. With all the careful research this barstool wisdom does come off all the more believable.

While the music industry is so often a slick packaged product wanting things in neat buckets we all know that in reality, events and people are complicated. I never knew that Bill Graham got his start with the Mime Troupe, a very anti-corporate, leftist theater group still in action today. There are other interesting facts along the way.  Reaching back a few decades you learn that Jerry Wexler was the guy in 1949 who came up with the idea of replacing the category “Race Music” with “Rhythm and Blues.” Who knew?   It is this sort of romp through an academic angle and the first-hand accounts that makes the book so compelling.

Anyone interested in San Francisco, music and politics and the history of this time period will enjoy The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975. Some university should give Mr. Callahan an honorary doctorate. He did his homework.

SKU: 9781629632315
Author: Mat Callahan
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629632315
Published: 1/2017
Page count: 352

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What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection – A Review

I heard about What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection by Dorsey Nunn while listening to an interview of Dorsey on Sheer Intelligence. It is an inspiring read and for anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area a window into maybe a world on the other side of the tracks – in this case, the other side of the freeway.

Dorsey is a remarkable person who really is an inspiration, He proves that it is never too late to have hope and change your ways and create a better world. The book is a memoir that outlines the realities of growing up as a Black person in East Palo Alto, California on the other side of Interstate 101 from the world of Menlo Park and Silicon Valley. In his honest, direct and often profane voice, he paints the picture of what it was like to grow up in community that has been disenfranchised and marginalized. The red-lining. The drugs. The violence. The community. The poverty. The police. His complicated family and their struggles as well. The book then is a journey of a lengthy prison sentence, much in San Quentin and how through learning to read and finding various mentors he educated himself and then went on to advocate for incarcerate people’s rights, eventually making for the passage of some very significant legislation .

The book recalls all of Dorsey’s ups and downs. His drug problems and addictions. The people who ultimately believed in him. The various non-profits organizations that Dorsey started to help “people in cages.” The tone and pace of the book is consistent and the linear nature of the book makes it so you can’t wait to read the next chapter. Its a page-turner and will make you understand the Prison Industrial Complex a little bit better the next time you drive by one of the many prisons along Interstate 5.

While I was reading What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection I picked up by chance at the local Goodwill the album Good Old Boys by Randy Newman . It is an amazing album with poignant song writing.  The title track Rednecks is basically the soundtrack to Dorsey Nunn’s book. While Dorsey’s book never uses the “N” word, Rednecks has a chorus that ends with Keeping the Niggers Down.

Yes he’s free to be put in a cage in Harlem in New York City.
And he’s free to be put in a cage on the South Side of Chicago and the West-Side.
And he’s free to be put in a cage in Hough in Cleveland.
And he’s free to be put in a cage in East St. Louis.
And he’s free to be put in a cage in Fillmore in San Francisco.
And he’s free to be put in a cage Roxbury in Boston.
They’re gathering ’em up from miles all around. Keepin’ the Niggers down.
Rednecks by Randy Newman

While it is evidently one of Randy’s favorite songs, he rarely perform it live. It surely makes a lot of people uncomfortable and definitely not Disney-approved but it could be a song in the movie version of What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection. Buy the book. Let me know if you agree.

What Kind of Bird Can’t Fly: A Memoir of Resilience and Resurrection is available from Heyday Press, your local bookstore and online.

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“Romney A Reckoning” by McKay Coppins – A Review and Quotes

UPDATE: September 23, 2025
Mitt Romney warned of political violence during the first Trump administration when legislators refused to convict Trump. Republicans in the Senate and House all became terrified of ever crossing Trump’s path, worried that a heavily armed MAGA character would go after their entire families. Fast-forward a few years and the same Senators and Representatives are astonished that one of their “social media influencer” is assassinated. Besides political violence what we have today is a lack of political courage. Welcome to the Age of Delusion.

When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the other urgently encouraged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, one said, think of your personal safety, said another, think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right. There were too many Trump supporters with guns in his state, he explained to Romney. His wife wouldn’t feel safe going out in public.
– From Romney A Reckoning

THE REVIEW
I checked out Romney A Reckoning from the San Francisco Public Library having heard McKay Coppins, the author, in an interview on public radio. Both Romney and Coppins are Mormon.  Romney gave Coppins access to his personal journals, texts and emails and they had weekly interviews while he was a U.S. Senator so that Coppins could write the book. The agreement was that Coppins would be the author and Romney would not have any influence over the final product.

While most politicians these days are extremely careful with their exposure to journalists, media and the spin, this relationship does speak to Romney’s candor and the notion that he has nothing to hide.  While Romney became a very wealthy man starting and running Bain Capital, the book focuses primarily on his personal and recent political life.  Often quite goofy and more humorous than expected, Romney predictably comes off as someone of character and courage. We get brief excerpts of his private journals, the assessment of the people around him, the turmoil of January 6th., his meetings with Trump. Romney A Reckoning is an interesting, entertaining, alarming, fun and fast read and an important view into our tumultuous political times.

At an event in New Hampshire a man confronted him with an accusatory question. “Are you going to compromise? the voter asked. “I don’t want to vote for anyone who’s going to compromise.” Romney, unable to restrain himself, replied, “Are you married, sir?”
Romney A Reckoning

I have never voted for Mitt Romney but gained much respect for him when he was the only Republican to both impeach and convict Donald Trump. Like his father George Romney, Mitt Romney did believe in civil rights and he is documented as marching with Black Lives Matters protesters after the murder of George Floyd. He is a rational person, believes in science and the notion that the planet is warming and climate change is real. But in many ways he is a throwback to an earlier type of Republican – a buttoned-down, well-mannered conservative capitalist who really does have an insane amount of money.

The quote below will always be a political liability no matter how you spin it. The visual of Mitt Romney at a rest stop hosing dog shit off of the family station wagon is simply too funny.

One prolonged subplot of the campaign had to do with a decades-old anecdote about Romney strapping the family dog, Seamus, to the roof of their station wagon during a road trip. One of Romney’s sons had shared the story with a newspaper reporter as a funny demonstration of this dad’s organizational skills: when Seamus experienced a bout of diarrhea, Romney moved quickly to find a rest stop, hose down the dog and car, and get back on the road without losing much time.
Romney A Reckoning

According to the book, Mitt Romney is a man who enjoys managing and solving problems whether they mean packing the family station wagon roof rack or working in the private or public sectors.  Unlike, Reagan and current Republicans, he does not think that government is the problem, he thinks government just needs to be better managed. Indeed, it was Massachusetts health care plan while Romney was governor that was in many was the blueprint for the Obama-era Affordable Care Act. Perhaps one of his shortcomings as a politician is that he does not actually care for the theater that so often goes along with politics and is motivated by his technocratic, problem-solving impulses. Mitt Romney surely finds reality television shows ridiculous.

I really do believe if you’re not being booed, if people aren’t angry at you, you really haven’t done anything in public life.
Mitt Romney

A theme that is persistent in the book is how his Mormon faith often became a political liability.  Mormonism for many Americans is and has always been a bit strange. This modern offshoot of Christianity and its Zionism finding a home in  isolated Utah seems to often make other Christians uncomfortable. There is a chapter in the book about how Romney realized the existence of extremists in parts of Utah while on the campaign trail. What is odd is that the new Republican Tea Party Evangelicals are more comfortable with a vile, dishonest, racist, misogynist non-religious  con-man than a morally upstanding character like Mitt Romney.

Near the end of the book, you get this very chilling realization that the violence unleashed by Trump has really made it into the highest halls of government.

When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the other urgently encouraged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, one said, think of your personal safety, said another, think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right. There were too many Trump supporters with guns in his state, he explained to Romney. His wife wouldn’t feel safe going out in public.

Senators voting a certain way because they fear assassinations? Sounds like fascism not the home of the free and the brave. Romney A Reckoning . A fun read. You will find this book at a garage sale in a few years. Buy it. Read it. Hopefully the world will be a bit saner by then.

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Discovering Blindness “Ensaio sobre a cegueira” by José Saramago

Blindness (Portuguese: Ensaio sobre a cegueira, meaning Essay on Blindness) is a 1995 novel by the Portuguese author José Saramago. It is one of Saramago’s most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. In 1998, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Blindness was one of his works noted by the committee when announcing the award.[1]
Wikipedia

A few weeks ago I was in Mexico City when I had run out of reading material. When in a country where English is not the first language, it is often very difficult to find books in English. We went to a bookstore and though the possibilities were a bit limiting, I picked up Blindness by José Saramago. It sucked me in and I finished the novel by the time we left Mexico.

But I almost put the book down after the first few chapters. The English translation was so horrible I wondered if I could make it through. When I figured out that the translator had died midway through the work I realized that what I was reading was not really a finished piece but a draft. The translator was Giovanni Pontiero who passed away. Margaret Jill Costa finished the work. I soon realized that they had seemingly worked backwards and as the novel progressed, the writing got better. The story is so good and captivating, the writing can lean on the narrative.

You can read about the plot in Wikipedia so I will not rehash the story. There are so many angles from which to interpreting and understand this novel and that is what makes it so intriguing – the symbolism of blindness, the fragility of society, the psychology of power, the psychology of interpersonal relationships, violence, the act of forgiveness, the power and responsibilities of those that can see, vengeance. All of these themes and others are somewhere inside this captivating novel.

Of course when you read a book like this you cannot help but imagine it as a movie. After finishing Blindness, I discovered and watched the movie. I had reservations about how would you even make a movie from the novel but was surprised at how good the movie is. It brings together all the important themes and in many ways does not stray too far from the novel. Of course, the movie did not do well at the box office as dystopian nightmares are not what people desire in the theaters these days.

I am not usually one for books that are thrillers and on the macabre side, but Blindness is highly recommended reading. Probably best to start with the book.

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In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist – Great Summer Reading

The book In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist by Pete Jordon is featured in a very entertaining 99% Invisible episode De Fiets is Niets/.

In the City of Bikes is a fast read about both the twists and turns of both Amsterdam and Jordon’s  journal with the bicycle. It is well-researched and the quotes about and from the various characters integral to the story make it a light read. Perfect for the beach or nearby lake.

In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist
By Pete Jordan
Publisher: ‎ Harper Perennial; 0 edition (April 16, 2013)
Language: ‎English
Paperback: ‎448 pages
ISBN-10: ‎0061995207
ISBN-13: ‎978-0061995200

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Reflections on Thomas Szasz and The Manufacture of Madness

Thomas Szasz’s The Manufacture of Madness –  A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement was published in 1970. The gist of the book is that the Inquisition that persecuted witches, heretics, Jews and homosexuals and a variety of “others” is similar to modern psychiatry and the Mental Health Movement that diagnoses people for their insanity and locks them up, against their will in institutions for safekeeping and treatments.

That was 1970. I am sure there is still the practice of putting people with schizophrenia and other diagnoses against their will into institutions and it may be good to remember that The Manufacture of Madness was written in the time of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Additionally it was a time when homosexuality and masturbation were often considered diseases that needed to be cured. I will refrain from the gory details of the treatments.

Of course, comparing the Mental Health Movement to the Inquisition made Dr. Szasz a very controversial academic and he surely had many enemies.  In effect he was declaring that mental illness is a myth and the profession of psychiatry a hoax and the people who practice it immoral and dense – not a good way to make friends. Szasz’s thesis surely has merit and it is odd that people then and today dismiss his theories simply because it makes them uncomfortable and they do not like them. In every era we think we become more noble and advanced but time and time again it turns out that more often than not the same dynamics are in play; it is only the words, players and titles that change.

What one thinks of Rush’s tactics depends, of course , on what one thinks of the ideology of psychiatric imperialism and its attendant quasi-medical sanctions.

The chapter The New Manufacturers – Benjamin Rush, The Father of American Psychiatry is an eye-opening account of how Benjamin Rush thought that criminals had mental diseases that needed to be “cured” and that Black people suffered a “disease” from the color of their skin

More surprising than Rush’s self-proclaimed love for the Negro is his theory of Negritude. Rush does not believe that God created the Negro black; nor that a Negro is black in nature…  About 1792, white spots began to appear on the body of a Negro slave named Henry Moss. In three years he was almost entirely white. Moss had the symptoms of an hereditary disease we now know as vitiligo. The condition, characterized by loss of skin pigmentation, occurs in both white and colored people… The gist of Rush’s theory was that the Negro suffered from congenital leprosy which “… appeared so mild a form that excess pigmentation was its only symptom.”

By inventing his theory of Negritude, Rush solved the issue of racial  segregation. Whites and Blacks could not have sexual contact and God-forbid marry as it would propagate this dreaded disease of being Black.  By conflating race with a disease, he was promoting a concept that humans could be cured of their race – or in more modern terms, they would then be cured by becoming  transracial. Race (as gender is today) was considered a preexisting medical condition. In the 18th and 19ths centuries, it is clear that unless you were a white male, you had some sort of disease that needed a medical remedy.  Women suffered from hysteria and pregnancy was a disease. Black people had the disease of Negritude. It is a sobering fact that this is the basis of psychiatry in America  as conjured up by Benjamin Rush, the preeminent doctor and a man who signed the Declaration of Independence.

All students of psychology and psychiatry would do well to read the work of Thomas Szasz as he was a very influential person, intelligently questioning the status quo and his work goes deep into the history of psychiatry. That he is fading into the background of history is predictable. People in the field of medicine that question the profit sector of the industry will always get pushed aside. That the last forty years has seen huge profits in the mental health pharmaceutical industry speaks to this conundrum.

What is interesting is how much has changed in the Mental Health Movement in the last fifty years. Homosexuality and masturbation are no longer considered diseases. Since President Ronald Reagan helped to defund mental health services in the 1980s we see plenty of people that are mentally imbalanced on the streets. If mental illness is a myth, tell that to the homeless person screaming at the moon at 3 AM in the middle of the night.  Their condition may go beyond just the cardboard box they sleep in. Indeed. they may have a “problem with living” and a warm, clean safe bed, a toilet and shower is surely part of the remedy, but years of abuse, living on the edge and poverty has its toll. People are complicated. Simple solutions are often overly simplistic.

But then again, as Szasz pointed out, the Mental Health Movement is always manufacturing new diseases. Here are just some of the the latest disorders that people are diagnosed with.

The DSM-5 (2013)
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals around the world. The manual is the guide by which mental health professionals base their diagnosis. Below is a list in alphabetical order of the 15 new disorders added to the DSM-5.

  1. Binge Eating Disorder
  2. Caffeine Withdrawal
  3. Cannabis Withdrawal
  4. Central Sleep Apnoea
  5. Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder
  6. Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder- DMDD
  7. Excoriation (Skin-picking) Disorder
  8. Hoarding Disorder
  9. Hypersexual Disorder
  10. Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder – PMDD
  11. Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behaviour Disorder
  12. Restless Legs Syndrome
  13. Sleep-related Hypoventilation
  14. Social (Pragmatic) Communication Withdrawal

From https://www.aifc.com.au/14-new-disorders-in-the-dsm-5/

The list above is just the tip of the iceberg. Dr. Thomas Szasz was definitely on to something no one wants discuss. I highly doubt he is required reading in university programs. Need I say more?

You can hear an amazing Studs Terkel sixty minute interview of Dr. Szasz from 1970.

The Manufacture of Madness
by Thomas S Szasz
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000GJVK5E
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Paladin; 1st Edition, 5th Printing (January 1, 1970)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 383 pages

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Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings – A Review

Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings is a book by Bill Morgan soon to be released by BEATDOM BOOKS. While the book is rather short, about a 100 pages, it is one of those “pandemic projects” that creative people were taking on in 2020 and 2021.  We are all the wiser for the fascinating story of two men, from very different circles, both “yearning to discover a spiritual basis for life” and their correspondences while Ferlinghetti attempted to publish a journal for City Lights Books called  Journal for the Protection Of All Beings.

Thomas Merton had a best selling book The Seven Story Mountain which sold over a million copies.  After writing that book Merton went on to pursue spirituality in the Catholic tradition, eventually becoming a Trappist Monk in a monastery in Kentucky. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on the other hand, was a founding partner in City Lights Books in San Francisco and wrote such classics as A Coney Island of the Mind. One would think that these two men would be very different, however they became pen-pals and had a lot of mutual respect for one another.  They both became bound by their pacifism and spiritualism and a searching for a deeper meaning to life.

Poets come out of your closets,
Open your windows, open you doors,
You have been holed up too long
in your closed worlds.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The concept behind Journal for the Protection Of All Beings was to have contemporary writers submit essays and poems to shed light on the current situation in the world. Of course, the existential threat at the time was the atomic bomb and the constant threat of nuclear war.  Thomas Merton had recently written a poem  Original Child Bomb, written in a sort of detached objective style which  called for pacifism. In the Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings, there is much back and forth about including Original Child Bomb in the Journal for the Protection Of All Beings. Merton had to get all his published writings approved by the Catholic church which was often tentative about Merton being associated with the Beats. In the end, it was published in the journal along side a wide range of submissions. Such was the travails of publishing something from authors in different circles in 1961.

If you are visiting San Francisco, and want to get a sense of who the Beats were and a feeling for how San Francisco was in the 1950s and 60s Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings is a great start. So often the Beats are seen only from the anarchistic, bleary-eyed, drug crazed, sometimes homosexual counter-culture lens, but they were of course much deeper. Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings gives you a view into this world of people who were deep readers, writers and thinkers.

Merton underwent a similar type of visionary experience on a street corner in Louisville Kentucky. On March 18, 1958, as he was walking through the downtown shopping district, he stopped at the corner of Walnut and Fourth Streets, where he was “overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another though we were total strangers.” “If only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. They were all walking around shining like the sun,” he later explained. He saw that everyone was sacred, just as Ginsberg had declared that everyone was “holy.”
Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings

Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg all looked upon industrialized civilization and hoped for its demise. They saw all humans as “sacred” or “holy.” Some went on a spiritual path through Catholicism others through Zen Buddhism. One opened a bookstore and lived to be over one hundred.

What is interesting to this reader is the idealism of those times. San Francisco was much more bohemian than it is today. There must have been a sense that publishing poems and short essays could actually do something to bring about world peace. Having Original Child Bomb in the journal would somehow aid in nuclear disarmament. Reading a poem could not only change one person but the entire planet. Poems and literature actually mattered. What rose-colored glasses!

What a different world that was and how the city of San Francisco has changed. You got a little sense of that idealism in the early days of the internet but that period is long gone. San Francisco is primarily about digital technology and now more often about libertarian get rich schemes, venture capital, startups and a sort of selfish individualism.  Automated driverless car technology and mining people’s personal data for profit. Individuals are no longer “sacred” or “holy” but a mass of data points. Surely, there is still a creative vibrancy, but the rents are high and the parking tickets and bridge tolls steep. Everyone needs a day job to make rent. There are surely no poets today in San Francisco that have the delusion that their poems are going to change the world. Sorry for the buzz-kill folks.

While reading Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, And The Protection Of All Beings I could not help but imagine a screenplay of this book. It could be  a low budget film with historic photos and videos of San Francisco. The notion that these two men, in very different places had such a deep literary and philosophical relationship, simply draws you in. You can almost hear the fog horns, seagulls and a typewriter tapping away from a little apartment in North Beach. I am still undecided if I would have the tragic, accidental death of Thomas Merton, electrocuted in a bathtub in Thailand at the beginning or the end. Perhaps both.

DISCLAIMER:  This book reviewer received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher.