BOOK REVIEW: Peeling back the thick tapestries of privacy shielding the odious Koch brothers, Daniel Schulman's "Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty" (ISBN: 9781455518739) is consistently compelling and a good read. There's a lot here: the Koch's anti-American politics, their disgusting waste of personal wealth, their in-fighting and lawsuits, their dysfunctional family life, and their attitude of total warfare against people in the middle class.

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REVIEW: Richard Nixon embodied nearly everything that is evil about Conservatives, and then he added alcoholism and paranoia to the mix. In Tim Weiner's 'One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon' (ISBN: 9781627790833), the revelations from Nixon's recently-released secret tapes go beyond the deceitfulness we already knew about Tricky Dick.

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REVIEW: Glenn Greenwald's excellent "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State" (ISBN: 9781627790734) is not only about Edward Snowden and the NSA; it's also about power. Who gets to watch you? Who gets to know your life's decisions? Who gets to monitor your activities? And who is watching the watchers?

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ARTICLE: Taking a ride on a cosmic wave of positive energy is a joy that special performers offer. Here are some notable examples of artists who provide transcendence within the forms of popular music. Some musicians seem to provide their own light. Larisa Stow is someone whose on-stage persona contains a million watt beacon. While her vocals are quite lovely, the force of her talent can make you think hers is the prettiest voice in the world.

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ADSP Chapter 21: Some guitarists play at lightning speed but it's the tone, the style, and the aura of magic that define the true heroes of the electric guitar. Joe Satriani. You've heard his work or you've heard his name, and he's either the greatest thing since sex or he's simply a technical master who goes through his shtick very well but has no true worth. (I look forward to your letters.)

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ADSP Chapter 23: When hired guns go solo, the results can be "meh" or "yowza," but studio great Carl Verheyen ("ver-HIGH-un") consistently wows the crowds. Los Angeles is full of guitar aces for hire and one of the best has a name you can't pronounce. You have heard quite a lot of the work of Carl Verheyen even though you may not be aware of it.

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BOOK REVIEW: Spies! Treachery! Deception! Camels! With an eye for detail and a love of intrigue, Scott Anderson plunks you down in the desert for 'Lawrence in Arabia' (ISBN-13: 978-0385532921). The author unleashes a rip-snortin' tale that ultimately reveals a lot of the backstory on the muddle that is today's Middle East.

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ADSP Chapter 20: Life can be a bit of a crapshoot. For example, one never knows when a night on the town will bring you face-to-face with magnificent music. SONIA DADA -- They played for 115 minutes and the crowd was panting for more. That just goes to show you what can happen when a great group sings terrific tunes. This delightful situation went beyond mere sonic pleasure and became almost cosmic because Sonia Dada has tapped into the primal force of life.

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REVIEW: Naomi Klein writes passionately and persuasively in her new book, 'This Changes Everything' (ISBN: 9781451697384). It will anger you, scare you, throw you for a loop, and ultimately uplift you.

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REVIEW: It may sound like baby-talk but Dada was a controversial art movement that flared up during World War I and insisted on taking unconventionality to new heights. "Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century" (ISBN: 9780465089963) by Jed Rasula presents a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of Dadaists as they attempted to forever alter art and literature.

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REVIEW: Before fleeing in horror from a book about numbers and mathematics, take a moment to consider the humor of Charles Wheelan's “Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data” (ISBN: 978-0-393-34777-7). Odds are you'll enjoy it. Well, at least sixty or seventy percent of it.

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REVIEW: Barton Swaim has done what every writer secretly longs to do: publish the unvarnished reality about his jerk employer. Too short to be called a tell-all, 'The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics' (ISBN: 9781476769929) is an interesting portrait of a stupid and disgusting Republican politician (as if there's any other kind).

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REVIEW: How often do you look forward to reading about science and history? Bill Bryson makes learning enjoyable in 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' (ISBN: 978-0-307-88515-9) now available in an illustrated edition. Why can't textbooks be this delightful and fascinating?

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