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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REVIEW: The Barbarians, The Vikings, The Goths, The Vandals, and The Huns are not just great names for rock groups, they were also terrific periods for artistic creation. Thanks to the 4-part DVD entitled 'The Dark Ages: An Age of Light,' you and your family can see the art they made while touring the world in the company of a very entertaining host.

The post DVD Review: Making the Dark Ages Fun appeared first on MuseWire.

ADSP Chapter 25: God can be found inside many things: The sun, moon, and stars; a child's simple wisdom; a lover's kiss. And at one nightclub on one sultry summer evening in Southern California, god was in the fingers of Derek Trucks.

The post Truckloads of Soul (Aspects of The Blues) appeared first on MuseWire.

ADSP Chapter 22: Blues guitar virtuoso Buddy Guy succeeds on every level from soul to sizzle to showmanship. Sitting in his trailer before taking the stage for a festival performance, Buddy Guy is philosophical about his place in the pantheon of blues guitarists.

The post Oh Buddy: This Guy is Great – Blues guitar virtuoso Buddy Guy succeeds on every level appeared first on MuseWire.

ARTICLE: There I was, working at an ad agency whose main office was located not too far from Amoeba Records and the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, not to mention a whole bunch of clubs, bars, nightspots, and everything else in that gaudy cesspool known as Tinsel Town. The ad shop was a medium-sized place with only a couple dozen employees but they had some very busy retail accounts like car dealerships and a national chain of pizza restaurants.

The post Night on the Town, or: Untouchable Sex Chain in Tupelo appeared first on MuseWire.

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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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: Peter Schuck's "Why Government Fails So Often: And How it Can do Better" (ISBN: 9780691161624) takes 30 pages of brilliant observation and crams it into 412 pages of text. His combination of garrulousness and impenetrable language makes it a very long and extensive and extended and elongated and lengthy and protracted and time-consuming and boring read.

The post Book Review: Bad Writing is One Reason ‘Why Government Fails so Often’ appeared first on MuseWire.

REVIEW (by John Scott G) : The U.S. is drowning in laws, laws, and more laws. So says Philip K. Howard in his fast-paced "The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government" (ISBN-13: 978-0-393-08282-1). He calls for some common sense changes of attitude and makes a good case for constitutional amendments as part of the cure.

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REVIEW: With an eye-catching title, Elijah Wald's "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music" (ISBN: 9780199756971) is an off-kilter look at the progression of music from ragtime to rock to rap, with lots of insights on swing, jazz, folk, and blues. Consistently interesting and fun to read, the book pays special attention to what the media and the American mindset have done to influence the music we hear today.

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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: With two million copies sold, Howard Zinn's 'A People's History of the United States' (ISBN: 9780060838652) is possibly the most successful history book in, well, history. It is also riveting, sobering, and valuable. While decent Americans admire it, RWNJs loathe it.

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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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REVIEW (by John Scott G): Stacks of facts tumble over each other in the second edition of 'What You Should Know About Politics...But Don't" (ISBN-13: 9781611454758) by Jessamyn Conrad, and it would be an incredibly valuable book if it contained an index. Still, this is a fairly handy reference guide despite some notable lapses into placating the odious conservative fringe.

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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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