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This page updated 15 October 2014
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Ronald Wright, What is America? Text, 2008. (A highly sceptical book. Proposing that- The nature of modern American can be found in its formative history. Amongst American contradictions, we find that a nation with core values of freedom and quality was built on violent dispossession and the slave trade. Re America, Wright notes, "There is no other country in the Western World where half the people are creationists. There's no other Western democracy that executes so many people. There's no other Western democracy that has no universal health care system".)
This webpage on LOST WORLDS The Website began on 22 October 2008 due to frustration and outrage with the so-called, late-2008 world economic crisis, which seems to have its basis in corrupt dealings in the US property market. For more on those matters, see this webpage's sister webpage at: http://www.danbyrnes.com.au/merchants/merchants15.htm
This webpage begins on the given date as the Webmaster decides that the current economic outrages now seen across the world mean the quicker decline of the so-called American Empire - and not due to Imperial overstretch via the recent ill-advised wars in Afghanistan and Iraq). (See the above note on a book by Ronald Wright.)
This is an editorial decision based on our readings of history. We are not joking. This decision means that on this website, every other listing of book titles relating to USA since 1945 now has to be transferred to this webpage - which is very annoying due to the refiling work involved.
And why is this? It's because since this website on Lost Worlds began in 1997, it has slowly, due to events since then, become a website on latter-day lost causes. Many of those events on the world stage, we did notice, were influenced by the USA. By October 2008, one great lost cause seems to be the USA itself, and its dream of "democracy"? Why is this?
It seems to this Webmaster that since the late 1990s, financier-dreamers in the USA have tried two major scams on the rest of the world - the dot.com boom which ended in 2000-2001 (a corruption of the software-writing and computer industries), and now their property-market-based derivatives scams leading to world disaster in 2008.
Behind these two scams has been the screaming rhetoric of unrestrained free-market nonsense promoted by the US Republican Party. True, the timing of these two financially-spectacular scams has been punctuated by the disaster-spectacle of 9/11, but by late 2008, who cares? 9/11 was merely a spectacular accident promoted by Muslim extremists, all too surprising.
Underlying, as years went by, the USA, in terms of behaviour with money, has simply run out of moral steam. All this is entirely unacceptable behaviour on the world's moral stage. All this is the end of the dreams of The Founding Fathers of the USA. The USA is now simply a lost cause, to be soon run into the dust of history by its own moral defaults, its mytho-fictions which reveal its problems with moral truth and reality, its tornado belts, its visits from hurricanes, its inept governments ever since Kennedy. By its current obesity epidemics (due to the diet-corruption of an entire population!). By its non-investigative, lazy-minded, lying, celebrity-promoting media networks. Now, there is no turning back for the USA. Quite simply, no one in or out of the USA can trust the USA anymore, about anything. Is it worse than Rome? Only you the reader, can answer that question. Will the USA, like Rome, fall? Yes. Has it fallen already? Probably. Would we have written anything like this even 15 years ago? No. Will Barak Obama have as from archaic Greek mythology, The Labours of Hercules in cleaning out the Aegean Stables. Yes indeed! If he's up to it, which we doubt. But no US president, we hope, could ever be worse than G. W. Bush. - Ed
More to come
Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. Black Inc., 2008, 206pp.
Richard Belfield, Terminate with Extreme Prejudice. 2005. (Explores the covert world of assassination)
Phillip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. Allen Lane, 2008, 688pp.
Dan Brody, The Halliburton Agenda. John Wiley and Sons, 2006, 290pp. (Earlier in 2004. On the rise of a company formed in the 1930s, becoming a major part of the US military-industrial complex. Named originally for Erie Halliburton, a Tennessee oil man, plus Herman Brown and Dan Root, who formed the company that became Kellog, Brown and Root, a firm which today encourages the privatisation of war)
Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue. University of Queensland Press, 2006. (On the mess in Afghanistan by 2006)
Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar, Perilous Power. Hamish Hamilton, 2006. (More criticism of US foreign policy)
Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and Its Fortune. Allen Lane, 2008, 736pp.
More to come soon
Barbara Ehrenreich, Going to Extremes: Notes from a Divided Nation. Granta, September 2008. (On inequalities in the land of the free, with horror stories from the workplaces of the USA. See by the same author, Nickel and Dimed)
Barbara Ehrenreich, Belt and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. Metropolitan Books, 2005, 237pp.
Mark Etherington, Revolt on the Tigris: The al-Sadr Uprising and the Governing of Iraq. Hurst and Co., 2005, 252pp.
John C. Fortier and Norman J. Ornstein, Second-Term Blues: How George W. Bush Has Governed. Brookings Institution Press, 2007, 146pp.
Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. Oxford University Press, 2001, 528pp.
Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution. and how it can renew our global future. Penguin, 2008.
Francis Fukuyama, State Building. Profile Trade, 2004, 194pp. ("No end to history in sight after all", says reviewer, Australian Gerard Henderson. From the peculiar author of "The End of History and The Last Man", of 1992)
Stephen Graubard, The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Allen Lane, 2005, 672pp.
Neil Henry, American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media. University of California Press, 2007, 326pp.
Molly Ivins, Who Let The Dogs In? A Personal History of America's Most Incredible Political Animals. Allison and Busby, 2005, 356pp.
More to come
Robert Kagan, The Return of History and The End of Dreams. Atlantic Books, 2008, 135pp. (By a US neo-con and foreign policy thinker; reviewer finds this book's many omissions to be strange. But Kagan is admired by John McCain)
Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the US and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy. Atlantic Books, 2008, 586pp.
Roger Morris, Haig: A General Progress. Robinson Books, 1982, 454pp. (On US general and secretary-of-state in the Nixon period, Al Haig)
More to come
More to come
Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: markets, power and the hidden battle for the world's food system. Portobello, 2007, 438pp.
Charles L. Pritchard, Failed Diplomacy: the tragic story of how North Korea got the bomb. Brookings Institute Press, 2007, 228pp.
More to come
Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Viking, 2008, 484pp.
Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America To War. Nation Books, 2008, 400pp. (On Iraqi manipulator, Ahmed Chalabi)
Philippe Sands, Torture Team. Allen Lane. 2008, 315pp. (On US use of torture during incumbency of President GW Bush)
Philippe Sands, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules. Allen Lane, 2005, 324pp. (By a professor of International Law)
Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Serpent's Tail, 2007, 452pp.
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. Allen Lane, 2008, 311pp.
Keith Suter, All About Terrorism. Bantam, 2008, 341pp.
How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young? -Paul Sweeney - (From Wordsmith)
David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. Free Press, 2007, 478pp.
George Tenet (with Bill Harlow), At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. HarperCollins, 2007, 549pp.
Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words. Ballantine, 1999. (Views on the “ceremonial combat” endemic in US universities and US polemics in general)
George Tenet (with Bill Harlow), At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. HarperCollins, 2007, 549pp.
Damian Thompson, CounterKnowledge. Atlantic Books, 2008, 256pp. (So what about the Internet and all the religious fanaticism, pseudo-medical claptrap, porn, the views of ridiculous academics, and all those conspiracy theories it delivers us?)
James Traub, The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power. Bloomsbury, 2007, 464pp.
More to come
Craig Unger, The Fall of the House of Bush. Scribner, 2008, 436pp. (On the ills of the presidency of George W. Bush)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Allen lane, 2007, 702pp.
Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800. Simon and Schuster, 2008, 659pp.
Bob Woodward, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat. Simon and Schuster, 2005, 232pp.
More to come
More to come
Now return to the Index Page
Below are selections of chronology items:
1939: Sioux chief Henry Standing Bear, in 1939 tells artist Korczak Ziolkowski that Indians wanted Americans" to know the red man had great heroes too". So Ziolkowski from 1949, now dead, spent the rest of his life carving a 27-metre high likeness of Chief Crazy Horse in the Black Hills of Dakota. The world's largest sculptural portrait and taller than the Great Pyramid. The intent is to depict Crazy Horse astride his horse, gesturing to the plains of South Dakota. Work continues on blasting the statue out of rock, guided by the artist's widow, Ruth, now (in 2004) aged 78.
"The historian serves no one well by constructing a specious continuity between the present world and that which preceded it. On the contrary, we require a history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption and chaos is our lot."
Hayden V. White, US historian, The Burden of History, p. 134. (1966)
"Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace." - Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969) - (From Wordsmith)
June 2003 and earlier: Afghanistan and its leader Karzai are “being daily betrayed by the West”. Article by Peter Oborne: June 21-22, 2003: Weekend Australian Magazine.
Reported 28 June 2004: Michael Moore says in defense of his movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, "The US media just became cheerleaders for this [Iraq] war. And that was a disservice to the American people."
September 2004: Proposed elections to be held in Afghanistan, as by 26 June 2004, when NATO leaders are expected to approve a new deployment of troop reinforcements in Afghanistan to support the Kabul government in the lead-up period.
George Soros, The Bubble of American Supremacy. Allen and Unwin, 207pp. (Soros loathes what he sees as the promotion of the Bush government, a fusion of market fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism. Sees the "war" as in "war on terrorism" as a false metaphor for the fighting of non-state actors. He feels the way to combat terrorism is by a combination of police work, intelligence and constructive programs aimed at alleviating poverty and distress.)
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these domain stats begun 18 December 2005
