Review: What Americans Really Want...Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears

What Americans Really Want...Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears by Frank Luntz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dr. Frank I. Luntz draws on experience as a secret shopper, focus group runner, and consultant in industries as varied as automotive, financial services, and more. While much of this 2009 book talks about the rise of Obama, the wisdom from industry and of the American consumer has much broader value and keeps this work from being very dated. Certainly entrepreneurs and marketers will find much value here. There is sociological knowledge in the assessment of thoughts and motivations of the tech-savvy young and the politically important seniors. Luntz leads this all and summarizes to a family values and back-to-religion culmination that doesn't reach me while I very much appreciate his impressive insights into workings of the American consumer and voter.

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Review: Life under the Stuarts

Life under the Stuarts by Falcon Educational Books
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is really is really an anthology of essays from different authors on various topics of Stuart life in England: Art, Science, Politics, etc. Most of this is mode-of-life stuff: clothing, dancing, Puritans attacking Christmas and Maypoles, etc. However, what I find most interesting here is the Post-Cromwell meding of monarchical and parliamentary power that suggests the seed of our own Republican ideals.

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Review: The Prodigal Rogerson: The Tragic, Hilarious, and Possibly Apocryphal Story of Circle Jerks Bassist Roger Rogerson in the Golden Age of LA Punk, 1979-1996

The Prodigal Rogerson: The Tragic, Hilarious, and Possibly Apocryphal Story of Circle Jerks Bassist Roger Rogerson in the Golden Age of LA Punk, 1979-1996 by J. Hunter Bennett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Short but engaging -- this is a biog off-and-on again Circle Jerks bassists Roger R. This was certainly enough to get me to sign up for the publisher's newsletter. This overview of the punk rock career of the duplicitous junkie "Rogerson" is stitched together from quotes from bandmates, scenesters, family members, etc. In a way, this reminds me of some aspects of Dee Dee Ramone: bassist music director/composer brought low by his substance abuse demons.

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Review: Trust Me: The True Story of Confession Killer Henry Lee Lucas

Trust Me: The True Story of Confession Killer Henry Lee Lucas by Ryan Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

True crime author Ryan Green steps up with a better narrator Steve White. Also, he ventures from Australian murderers to tackle Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole. This can't be done appropriately without considering how the frequent baseless confessions from either criminal casts doubts on who their victims were and how many there were. This is clearly stated at the end, but the dialogue-driven intro and putting the reader into the car with victim Adam Walsh in a way that is more detailed than can be documented puts much of this into the realm of historical fiction.

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Review: Leonardo Da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality

Leonardo Da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality by Sigmund Freud
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ah, Freud - I admire the chutzpah of reaching out across the centuries to psychoanalyze Da Vinci. In a way, it is easy. All is rooted in sexuality, so that premise is already laid. A lengthy introduction by a convinced psychiatrist explains that Freud could draw all on secxuality because he extended the definition of sexualtiy so broadly .. that it meant nothing? Basically it seems the argument hear for Freud undercut Freud. And then, hey, Freud - sometimes a vulture's tail is just bird feathers.

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Review: Samurai!

Samurai! by Martin Caidin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this a fascinating autobiography by WW II Japanese Zero pilot and ace Saburō Sakai. He recounts in detail many dogfights and his recountings challenge specific military history on some points that will appeal to WWII buffs. While I do appreciate his arc from dominance ver the early P-39 Airacobra through to take over of the skies by more numerous and capable Hellcats and Mustangs, it is the broader view I appreciate the most. Sakai makes a good cases that it was an Allied error to pass by Iwo Jima in order to retake The Philippines. Also, he paints a picture of Japan hampered by an elitist pilot training program passing over many solid candidates. He also describes the lack of cooperation between Japan's Navy and Army branches that I have read of elsewhere. Further, Sakai expresses his consternation on visiting home of a populace unaware of the realities of war, something fostered by the Imperial obscuring the truth. It implies that a civilian population longer exposed to aerial bombing, etc. may have conceded without being exposed to nuclear weaponry.

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Review: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are by Carl Sagan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really admire the ambition of Sagan and Ann Druyan to embark on the multi-volume examination of the roots of humanity beginning with this tome. At times, however, I feel they could of gained in cohesion and clarity what they may have lost in breadth had they constrained themselves to a single opus. This just seems to wander at times, which makes me wonder...

However, it is a wondrous topic and the pair bring humanity down from a self-ascribed special realm closer to the animals, which are raised up. (Especially chimps and bonobos.) This was an excellent read after Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? which is a slimmer and more concise consideration of many of the same topics using updated research.

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Review: Who I Am: A Memoir

Who I Am: A Memoir by Pete Townshend
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Long in coming, this is a rocker autobiography well worth waiting for. (And, waiting for me to get around to it.) In this audiobook, having Pete narrate it himself makes it more personal and adds dimension as he frequently chuckles or sighs in a way adding nuance to key passages.

So, this is not a Who memoir, but a Townshend memoir. Whole Who and even solo albums can be dispensed with by a sentence or two. There is none of the detailed session notes and track-by-track minutiae that often comes with such histories. Now, I like those too. This is about Townshend's career outside of the band; solo career, (book) publishing efforts and more, including his family life, life on the road, and battle with coke and the bottle.

Also in there is him grappling with the realities of his own remembered abuse as a child, being outed as a bisexual, and his child-porn arrest. There may be a lesson for anyone confronted with criminal charges here. While he claims to have been researching for his 2002 treatise, he also decided on admitting he used his credit card to gain access to a child-porn site. The guitarist was placed on the sex offenders register for five years while apparently no proof could be found that the credit card company took the money. (Maybe tht financial insitution was more circumspect than Townshend.)

Something that jumped out at me is while The Rolling Stones get mentioned about twenty times, Led Zeppelin is only-named dropped five times and seem to be a subject that is a present absence and there seems to be a dismissive tone to the few mentions. This made my Google:

"led zeppelin" "pete townshend"

Apparently, I am not the only one suspicious that Townshend harbors ill feelings for that group. One thing that does get mentioned much is his prescient vision for the internet as it would affect music distribution and creation. He seems so spot-on in hindsight on so much it makes me wonder if he could really have had the gift of so much accurate foresight.

This makes me feel a few aspects of the Townshend personality and story could be shaded differently with the perspectives of others close to his life.

Anyway, I had no idea of his deep adherence to Meher Baba, an Indian spiritual master who said he was God in human form, and how this affected the Tommy storyline. Also, Townshend is very forthcoming on his awkward attempts to participate in the changing sounds - punk included - while his hairline receded over his boiler suits and Doc Martens. He admits to a lot of unfortunate rage, fisticuffs, and destructive behavior if not to the lengths that eventually subsumed "John" and "Moonie".


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Review: Q.E.D.: Beauty in Mathematical Proof

Q.E.D.: Beauty in Mathematical Proof by Burkard Polster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a beautiful, compact collection of largely visual proofs from series, and 2- and 3-D geometry. I especially appreciate the inclusion of fallacies as well as infinite summations. While most of this can be grasped with even solely a high school background, enough of it is worth consideration again and revisited for applying tools of mathematical logic in the same ways that worked for Archimedes and beyond.

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Review: Gestalt Therapy Integrated: Contours of Theory & Practice

Gestalt Therapy Integrated: Contours of Theory & Practice by Erving Polster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gestalt therapy is an existential/experiential form of psychotherapy that emphasizes personal responsibility, and that focuses upon the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist–client relationship, the environmental and social contexts of a person's life, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of their overall situation. Gestalt therapy was developed by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls and Paul Goodman in the 1940s and 1950s. In the late 80s as a failing telemarketer, a manager introduced me to the dice puzzle Petals Around the Rose to try and disrupt my funk and improve my thinking. When I figured it out, I was told that thinking was "Gestalt". Well, I never became a decent telemarketer and I only now got around to trying to understand Gestalt.

OK, so this is second generation Gestalt, I take it. Authors Erving and Miriam Polster started a training center in La Jolla, California and played an influential role in advancing the concept of contact-boundary phenomena in the 1970s. They did this from very hands-on client sessions and scaled up to "happenings" like events and workshops.

You product differentiation for your particular target market. So, some of this book obviously required to differentiate from Freud which is basically done by saying Freud is about the infantile past and Gestalt is about the "now". Well, so often, the "now" seems to be about resolving childhood dysfunction from trauma or an aloof parent, etc. It is interesting that two competing approaches find themselves at the same task: working out issues originating in youth.

At a time when "Hippies and Cops" could be role-played in a coffeehouse, Gestalt sought to integrated the individual with a fracturing society.

Correspondingly, there is no point when a person becomes so well endowed with his own powers that he will never again want community attention to his psychological needs. The termination of therapy, for example, is the completion of only one form of communal aid. The traditional view of the terminated therapy is naive and mechanistic, counting on the delusion that once one is rid of his own faulty view of the world, the world will neatly fall into place. Of course, the world has never fallen into place in any age, and surely not in this one. Childrearing problems have existed since Cain and Abel; sexual dysrhythmia since Adam and Eve; environmental cataclysm since Noah; the rigors of paying the price since Jacob and Rachel; sibling rivalry since Joseph and his brothers; dysfunctional organizational behavior since the Tower of Babel. These tales record the many natural tortures which are the by-products of a human system of heterogeneous interests and contradictions. An ageless web forms in the interrelationship between the individual's needs and the group's needs and between two dissonant acts of the same person.

The consequent struggle calls for communal orientation, support and stimulation to guide or arouse behavior too difficult for solo performance. The community serves as a group ethos, providing mores, rituals, and instruction which give ease to the individual, freeing him from personally exploring everything under the sun to determine what is right for him...

What we need now are new rituals, mores, and instructions, sensitive to recurrent need but rooted also in present experience. Psychotherapists are finally beginning to take some responsibility in shaping some of the possibilities for living a good life.

The principles of gestalt therapy in particular apply to actual people meeting actual problems in an actual environment. The gestalt therapist is a human being in awareness and interaction. For him there is no pure patient-ness. There is only the person in relationship to his social scene, seeking to grow by integrating all aspects of himself.

Appendices give credit to two of my favorite researchers in the area: Carl Jung and Otto Rank as well as some actualized "new rituals" in coffeehouses and universities.

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Review: Math Makers: The Lives and Works of 50 Famous Mathematicians

Math Makers: The Lives and Works of 50 Famous Mathematicians by Alfred S. Posamentier
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Fifty short biographies of mathematicians are here arranged chronologically by birth year. These range from Thales to Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman and the first Iranian to be awarded the Fields Medal. Written to be engaging and entertaining, the material is not dry like an encyclopedia entry or focused on expected facts like a Wikipedia article. These overviews are meant to interest a reader, particularly a young adult fostering an interest in a mathematics. ..."

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]



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Review: Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I feel we may be decades away from truly realizing the economic changes caused by digitization changes the way music other media as well as software, games, etc. are distributed and marketed. Even though this book is a decade old, I feel it is still insightful how Anderson from his vantage as Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, a position he took in 2001, sees the history and landscape. Obviously billions are being made on free (Google, etc.) and billions lost (newspapers, artists and record labels). Anderson explores the disruption, paths forward, and the psychology of the consumer confronted with these new realities.

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Review: Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears

Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears by Kim Cooper
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A cast of contributors (from cartoonist Peter Bagge to the bizarre Partridge Family Temple to Greg Shaw) document the history of, and opine on, and celebrate the unknowns of bubblegum music. Pete Townsend once remarked, "some of the world's best music is bubblegum" and most of these contributors agree. Their overlapping and amorphous definitions of the genre cause the chronologically laid out volume to act as a history of pop music from the 60s to today with a focus on that music created with marketing in mind. Entertaining and enlightening, this lively tome sheds light on the names behind the manufactured sounds, the true stories of the real people leading or trapped in the movement, and institutions that fostered its growth. As educational as it is fun, this excellent collection of essays and interviews is a must for any music fan.

Audio for tmy interview with contributor Becky Ebenkamp is archived to #102 at https://archive.org/details/BrucePollockOnOutsightRadioHours.

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Review: A Renegade History of the United States

A Renegade History of the United States by Thaddeus Russell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an enlightening, engaging alternative view of history from colonial-era transvestite prostitutes to collusion between mafia dons and gay bar patrons and more paints a picutre of crminalized and stigmatized underclasses as the progenitures of the rich and free culture we revel in. This is well worth reading to balance more traditional histories.

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