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This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: No Logo, the Shock Doctrine, Fences and Windows. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a 2007 book by Canadian author Naomi Klein. The book argues that the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman have risen to prominence in some countries because they were pushed through while the citizens were reacting to disasters or upheavals. It is implied that some man-made crises, such as the Falklands war, may have been created with the intention of being able to push through these unpopular reforms in their wake. The book has an introduction, a main body and a conclusion, divided into seven parts with a total of 21 chapters. The introduction sketches the history of the last thirty years where economic shock doctrine has been applied throughout the world, from South America in the 1970s to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Klein introduces two of her main themes. Part 1 begins with a chapter on psychiatric shock therapy and the covert experiments conducted by the psychiatrist Ewen Cameron in collusion with the Central Intelligence Agency: how it was partially successful in distorting and regressing patients' original personality, but ineffectual in developing a better personality to replace it. Parallels with economic shock therapy are made, including a digression on how government agencies harnessed some of the lessons learned to create more effective torture techniques. Torture, according to Klein, has often been an essential tool for authorities who have implemented aggressive free market reforms this assertion is stressed throughout the book. She suggests that for historical reasons the human rights movement has often portrayed torture without explaining...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=1312750

I recently went to Las Vegas for the first, and probably only, time in my life. I hadn't read this book in years, and previously, it hadn't even been my favorite Hunter S. Thompson work. Thompson is dearly missed by many people, and on a personal level, I miss him deeply. He spoke to a true astonishment at the complete, unrelenting fuckedupedness of America and her politics, and he did it with a bite that was deserved and unmatched. He probably could have been a very rich super-novelist of popular, uninspired filth. He probably could have been a brilliant novelist of any kind. But he chose to do what he did, and he did it better than any of his generation. Like Mark Twain, he chronicled American stupidity in the tongue of his generation, and he captured it perfectly, from the insanity of the drug experience to the depravity of American politics. For years, no work of his stood out to me as much as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 or the Gonzo letters. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to me, wasn't his best work. Then I went to Vegas. Suddenly, all the subtle differences between this and his other work made sense, and I realized that he had captured the true tackiness of the truest tacky city on the entire planet (though Dubai with their fucking Island fantasies are likely to take over soon). Fear &amp; Loathing in Las Vegas IS Las Vegas. It's a nightmare, a joke, a blunder of comical, cosmically-fucked proportions. It's not Sin City. It's where Sin goes to die when it's embarrassed for itself. It's where families go on vacations with ten-year-olds, children who get handed fliers for prostitutes. It's the living, pulsing, filthing embodiment of the Holy Dollar. It's sensory overload on a scale drugs can't equal, a place where you almost have to take a brimful of Valium and a pint of ether to feel normal and not feel utterly ashamed at the state of the human condition. It would make you want to blow your brains out if it weren't so goddamned fun, even if you're gay, you hate gambling and hookers make your brain itch. Yet you never, ever feel like it is evil or subversive or curious in any way. It's just about a buck, and every other blink reminds you of it. This is a place where Hunter S. Thompson could easily mingle with a law enforcement convention and not get noticed. This is a place where a lawyer could leave you with a hotel bill. This is a place where no questions get asked because no answers would make sense, and the only thing profound about any of it is that you know, on a gut level, that all the oil used to produce all the plastic used to build that city no doubt funded an island shaped like Australia that was built off the coast of the UAE over the weekend. This novel will never cease to be important, and one day, as a cultural artifact of a forgotten culture from a forgotten nation, it will be one of the most important anthropological pieces in existence. I wish he'd survived the Bush administration. We need this man.NC

Austrian playwright and novelist (1931-1989)

In this best-selling new book, his first in seventeen years, Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, takes us on a poignant and passionate journey as mysterious and compelling as his first life-changing work. Instead of a motorcycle, a sailboat carries his philosopher-narrator Phaedrus down the Hudson River as winter closes in. Along the way he picks up a most unlikely traveling companion: a woman named Lila who in her desperate sexuality, hostility, and oncoming madness threatens to disrupt his life.In Lila Robert M. Pirsig has crafted a unique work of adventure and ideas that examines the essential issues of the nineties as his previous classic did the seventies.

* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* The Restaurant at the End of the Universe* Life, the Universe and Everything* So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish* Mostly HarmlessSuppose a good friend calmly told you over a round of drinks that the world was about to end? And suppose your friend went on to confess that he wasn't from around here at all, but rather from a small planet near Betelgeuse? And what if the world really did come to an end, but instead of being blown away, you found yourself hitching a ride on a spaceship with your buddy as a travelling companion?It happens to Arthur Dent.An ordinary guy from a small town in England, Arthur is one lucky sonofagun: his alien friend, Ford Prefect, is in fact a roving researcher for the universally bestselling Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ... and expert at seeing the cosmos on 30 Altairian dollars a day. Ford lives by the Guide's seminal bit of advice: Don't Panic. Which comes in handy when their first ride--on the very same vessel that demolished Earth to make way for a hyperspacial freeway--ends disastrously (they are booted out of an airlock). with 30 seconds of air in their lungs and the odd of being picked up by another ship 2^276,709 to 1 against, the pair are scooped up by the only ship in the universe powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive.But this (and the idea that Bogart movies and McDonald's hamburgers now exist only in his mind) is just the beginning of the weird things Arthur will have to get used to. For, on his travels, he'll encounter Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed ex-President of the Galaxy; Trillian, a sexy spacecadet he once tried to pick up at a cocktail party, now Zaphod's girlfriend; Marvin, a chronically depressed robot; and Slartibartfast, the award-winning engineer who built the Earth and travels in a spaceship disguised as a bistro.Arthur's crazed wanderings will take him from the restaurant at the end of the Universe (where the main dish of the day introduces itself and the floor show is doomsday), to the planet Krikkit (locked in Slo-Time to punish its inhabitants for trying to end the Universe), to Earth (huh? wait! wasn't it destroyed?!) to the very offices of The Hitchhiker's Guide itself as he and his friends quest for the answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything ... and search for a really good cup of tea.Ready or not, Arthur Dent is in for one hell of a ride!

The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their sanity while fulfilling their service requirements so that they may return home.

George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novel—a scathing satire on a downtrodden society’s blind march towards totalitarianism.“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned—a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.  When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.

When Jack Kerouac’s On the Road first appeared in 1957, readers instantly felt the beat of a new literary rhythm. A fictionalised account of his own journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s beatnik odyssey captured the soul of a generation and changed the landscape of American fiction for ever.Influenced by Jack London and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac always wanted to be a writer, but his true voice only emerged when he wrote about his own experiences in On the Road. Leaving a broken marriage behind him, Sal Paradise (Kerouac) joins Dean Moriarty (Cassady), a tearaway and former reform school boy, on a series of journeys that takes them from New York to San Francisco, then south to Mexico. Hitching rides and boarding buses, they enter a world of hobos and drifters, fruit-pickers and migrant families, small towns and wide horizons. Adrift from conventional society, they experience America in the raw: a place where living is hard, but ‘life is holy and every moment is precious’.With its smoky, jazz-filled atmosphere and its restless, yearning spirit of adventure, On the Road left its mark on the culture of the late 20th century, influencing countless books, films and songs. Kerouac’s prose is remarkable both for its colloquial swing and for the pure lyricism inspired by the American landscape – ‘the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy’. This Folio Society edition is illustrated with evocative photographs of Kerouac and the landscapes of 1950s America. Now acknowledged as a modern classic, On the Road remains a thrilling and poignant story of the road less travelled.

The astonishing novel Brave New World, originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley's vision of the future--of a world utterly transformed. Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece.The non-fiction work Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World, including the threats to humanity, such as over-population, propaganda, and chemical persuasion.

Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy – the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.

Robert M. Pirsig's Zen &amp; the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father &amp; his young son.

Spinal Tap, one of England's loudest bands, is chronicled by film director Marty DiBergi on what proves to be a fateful tour.

The rivalry between Enzo and Jacques, two childhood friends and now world-renowned free divers, becomes a beautiful and perilous journey into oneself and the unknown.

1988 English-language film directed by Luc Besson

A mousy romance novelist sets off for Colombia to ransom her kidnapped sister, and soon finds herself in the middle of a dangerous adventure hunting for treasure with a mercenary rogue.

1984 adventure comedy movie directed by Robert Zemeckis

An idealistic prep school teacher attempts to redeem an incorrigible student.

When their relationship turns sour, a couple undergoes a medical procedure to have each other erased from their memories.

The drug-induced utopias of four Coney Island people are shattered when their addictions run deep.

A team of explorers travel through a wormhole in space in an attempt to ensure humanity's survival.

2014 British-American science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan

PROT is a patient at a mental hospital who claims to be from a faraway planet named K-PAX. His psychiatrist tries to help him, only to begin to doubt his own explanations.

A malfunction in a sleeping pod on a spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet wakes one passenger 90 years early.

In the early 1960s, CIA agent Napoleon Solo and KGB operative Illya Kuryakin participate in a joint mission against a mysterious criminal organization, which is working to proliferate nuclear weapons.

A young programmer is selected to participate in a ground-breaking experiment in synthetic intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a highly advanced humanoid A.I.

2014 British science fiction thriller film directed by Alex Garland

In a near future, a lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with an operating system designed to meet his every need.

Human race is at edge of the end. Robot race is at edge of the beginning.

A corporate risk-management consultant must decide whether or not to terminate an artificially created humanoid being.

A crew of astronauts on a multi-generational mission descend into paranoia and madness, not knowing what is real or not.

The United State's Department of Homeland Security is led to believe an American teen hacker playing a terrorist-attack simulator game online is a real terrorist out to destroy the U.S.

A family man struggling to hold it all together discovers a hidden parlor that offers a solution...sexbots.

James Bond investigates the mid-air theft of a space shuttle, and discovers a plot to commit global genocide.

A man trapped in an automated prison must outsmart a computer in order to escape.

2017 science fiction film by Travis Milloy

Gary Burton (born January 23, 1943) is an American jazz vibraphonist, composer, and educator. Burton developed a pianistic style of four-mallet technique as an alternative to the prevailing two-mallet technique. This approach caused him to be heralded as an innovator, and his sound and technique are widely imitated. He is also known for pioneering fusion jazz and popularizing the duet format in jazz, as well as being a major figure in music education from his 30 years at the Berklee College of Music.Burton was born in Anderson, Indiana in 1943. Beginning music at six years old, he mostly taught himself to play marimba and vibraphone. He began studying piano at age sixteen while finishing high school at Princeton Community High School in Princeton, Indiana (1956–60). He has cited jazz pianist Bill Evans as the inspiration for his approach to the vibraphone.

American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger

Steven Toast, an eccentric middle aged actor with a chequered past, spends more time dealing with his problems off stage than performing on it

Cheaters is a 2022 British sitcom and comedy first broadcast on BBC One in February 2022. The first series, originally created for BBC Three by Oliver Lyttleton, consists of all fully 10-minute episodes, broadcast as triple-features. The plot revolves around an adulterous couple and their paramours.The cast includes Susan Wokoma, Joshua McGuire, Jack Fox and Callie Cooke. Guests include Jim Norton.Cheaters premiered on BBC One HD on 15 February 2022.In Australia, the series premiered on 10 HD based in Sydney and Melbourne.Jack Seale of The Guardian gave the series 4 out of 5 stars.

The adventures of Noel and his friends Smooth, Andy Warhol, and Dolly.

Which of the staff are safe at the surreal Kirke University when cuts are imminent? Writer of 'Joy Of Zero', Imogen Moffat looks safe, as does womanizer Matt Beer - vital for seducing the restructuring guru Georgina.

Gavin and Stacey have been continuing their romance on-line and by telephone for the last six months. Now they want to be together but will their friends and family let them?

The Right Honorable James Hacker has landed the plum job of Cabinet Minister to the Department of Administration. At last he is in a position of power and can carry out some long-needed reforms, or so he thinks.

A part-improvised comedy about a couple bringing up their three young children.

The wild misadventures of Edina "Eddy" Monsoon and her best friend Patsy Stone, who live in a nearly constant haze of drugged, drunken selfishness.

The adventures of the last human alive and his friends, stranded three million years into deep space on the mining ship Red Dwarf.

BBC science-fiction comedy drama television programme

An acutely observed, forensically honest, warts-and-all look at a working-class couple in their mid-20s.

A group of up-and-coming hustlers who stumble upon a truck-load of stolen gold bullion are suddenly thrust into the high-stakes world of organized crime.

Diane Morgan is an English actress, comedian, television presenter, and writer. She is best known for playing Philomena Cunk on Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe and in other mockumentaries, as Liz in the BBC Two sitcom Motherland, and Kath in the Netflix dark comedy series After Life. She also wrote and starred in the BBC Two comedy series Mandy.

Before there was The Office, there was People Like Us. A mockumentary in the style of the "docusoap" British reality television shows popular at the time about regular people and their regular lives, People Like Us follows actors pla

After Tony's wife dies unexpectedly, his nice-guy persona is altered into an impulsive, devil-may-care attitude; taking his old world by storm.

British dark comedy web television series

An interweaving narrative chronicling the antics of such diverse characters as: a transgender taxi driver, a family obsessed with hygiene and toads, a fiery reverend, a carnival owner who kidnaps women into marriage, and a xenophobic

A couple of British TV producers move to Hollywood to export their most popular series, and find it is not what they expected.

Political satire about television news company Globe Link and its team of workers such as anchors Henry and Sally, reporter Damien, editor Dave, execs George and Helen, assistant Joy and manager Gus Hedges.

The story of an office that faces closure when the company decides to downsize its branches. A documentary film crew follow staff and the manager David Brent as they continue their daily lives.

The show centers on Warwick Davis in his day-to-day life, complete with the frustrations he faces.

Dave Gorman points out things he finds strange about modern life.

2013–2017 British comedy television series on Dave and presented by Dave Gorman

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