Thursday, October 2, 2008

Read Up On It


When I don't know something about a subject, my first action is to turn to a book. So I've been filling my brain with as much green, sustainability, community building, political action information as I can. I've written a review of a wonderful book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. "A Crime Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking our Democracy". Here's a taste...

With President Bush deep into what I, as the mother of teenagers, call ‘senioritus’, you might ask why you should read “Crimes Against Nature” now, a book about what Bush and his oil buddies did. Even I asked myself that question, other than that the book was free (at the library) and small (my patience for tomes not what it once was).

But it’s clear to me that I need a foundation to my growing political action. I need to understand about endangered species, the effects of strip mining in West Virginia, and the nuclear power plant meltdown just miles from my parents’ home in the West San Fernando Valley and the cancer it caused so many neighbors, including my parents and sister. How did the Republican administrations hack away at our freedoms through the rape and pillage of our resources?

Kennedy’s New York Times best seller meticulously lays down the case for how corporate cronyism got put into place so that government, ‘the problem’ to Reagan era Republicans, could be drowned in the bathtub. Read it and learn exactly how corporate types from the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries were appointed as regulators to protect their own from ‘We the People.’ Rollbacks out of view from the public, manipulating and suppressing scientific data, intimidating enforcement officials and masking it in Orwellian doublespeak – it’s all here in well written detail. Kennedy has a highly readable style and while you may not be able to retain each reference, the overall effect is compelling.

For the rest of the review, visit Be A Bookworm a site that's will leave you drooling and moaning about 'so many books, too little time.'

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