OfficialWire: Sales Of James Patterson e-books Top 3 Million

OfficialWire: Sales Of James Patterson e-books Top 3 Million: "James Patterson is an e-book mega-seller.

The Hachette Book Group announced Wednesday that e-sales for the prolific author of such blockbuster series as 'Maximum Ride' have topped 3 million, with 2 million coming just in the last 11 months. Patterson releases several books a year, many of them top sellers.

The e-book market has surged in 2011, thanks to the popularity of such devices as Amazon.com's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook."

Taking time off

Following two bad bouts of flu I'm taking a couple of weeks off. If urgent, please call my cellphone.

Henry Giroux: Youth in a Suspect Society

Thursday 10 September 2009

A review by: Tolu Olorunda | The Black Commentator

(Photo: Palgrave Macmillan)

"In a radical free-market culture, when hope is precarious and bound to commodities and a corrupt financial system, young people are no longer at risk: they are the risk."

- Giroux, Henry. "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. x.

"If youth once constituted a social investment in the future and symbolized the promise of a better world, they are now entering another stage in the construction of a global social order in which children are increasingly demonized and criminalized ..."
- Ibid. p. 29.

"As the politics of the social state gives way to the biopolitics of disposability, the prison becomes a preeminently valued institution whose disciplinary practices become a model for dealing with the increasing number of young people who are considered to be the waste products of a market-mediated society."
- Ibid. p. 82.

It need not be said, though I find it necessary to restate, that Henry Giroux is one of the most important public servants the last 100 years have produced. In his expansive three decade plus academic career, Henry has written over 35 books, contributed to countless scholarly journals, and received numerous educational honors.

But perhaps what most makes this former high school basketball star distinct is his tireless advocacy on behalf of the frail, the vulnerable, the disposable.

Henry has focused much of his writing over the fragile existence disenfranchised populations are largely relegated to. Giroux's "critical sympathy" to the often forgotten, as Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson once mentioned, is what pushes him time after time to engage issues many of his peers would rather stay far away from - for fear of sanction, resentment, or job loss.

In that spirit of deep moral determination and fervent conviction, comes his latest work: Youth in a Suspect Society, which, above all else, is an attempt to interrogate the increasingly hostile future our society is preparing, with no sense of shame or irony, for its next tenants - young people.

Giroux wastes no time condemning the "assault against youth" being waged by all those blind to the radical realities of youth, and especially those of color being confined by way of policy and legislation. An example of this is provided in the case of Deamonte Driver, a seventh grader from Prince George's County, Maryland, who "died because his mother did not have the health insurance to cover an $80 tooth extraction."

Under the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, Giroux writes, there was at least a "willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their future, and provide the educational conditions necessary for them to be critical citizens." But all advancements made in that era were rolled over as one neo-conservative administration after the other found its way into the White House. And the most devastating of them, in theory and practice, Giroux insists, was the 43rd one.

But government alone isn't responsible, he notes, because anti-Youth legislations couldn't be established as law without a media complex that has "habitually" reinforced representations, however false, of young people as "variously lazy, stupid, self-indulgent, volatile, dangerous, and manipulative." It's important to note that these suggestions "do more than degrade young people and resonate with their underlying marginality and disposability"; they also "legitimate the passage of draconian measures, policies, and laws at the highest levels of government."

So, it then makes sense when schools become transformed into secondary stations for police officers, military personnel, and other agents of the State.

The message: Kids and, especially, Youth are a threat to society - a threat which must be watched with close scrutiny, dealt with diabolically, and, when necessary, punished with the power of the law.

Students are, as a result, targeted and treated as potential criminals, paving way for a society in which "children who commit a rule violation as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell."

In Youth in a Suspect Society, Giroux also takes special time out to dive deeper into the challenges confronting children, as they try to navigate a world where giant corporations see them as nothing but disposable commodities - to be bought and sold.

Children, Dr. Giroux writes, "constitute the primary index through which a society registers its own meaning, vision, and politics." And today's children are having to become more accustomed to a speed-driven society; a society that treasures punctuality over poignancy, and impatience over incandescence. Thus, kids are being encouraged to revel in "the suspension of judgment, the inability to think critically, [and] the avoidance of responsibility." (Never mind that these very kids are still ultimately barraged with blame for low test scores or poor performance on state standardized tests.)

Kids would also have to get used to "a society that measures its success and failure solely through the economic lens of the Gross National Product (GNP)"; a society unable to "define youth outside of market principles determined largely by ... market growth and the accumulation of capital."

This society, children should be aware, sees them not only as an "expansive and profitable market but as the primary source of redemption for the future of capitalism."

Examples of such thinking abound in Youth in a Suspect Society. Giroux's meticulous research unearths numerous reports of kids being selected by toy companies to act as representatives (unpaid employees), such as a GIA-sponsored event, "Slumber Party in a Box," which enlists "agents" to "invite their friends to an overnight party, hand out free products to them, and then provide ëfeedback through quizzes' to GIA headquarters." Corporations have found kids and pre-teens great resources - peer pressure power - to use in expanding their brand - even if it commodifies the non-market value of friendship.

Giroux also turns a sharp gaze on pro athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, who, he says, appear more interested in inflating their back account figures than "using their celebrity status for educating young people about character, hard work, the value of sportsmanship, and the sheer joy of athleticism."

But there's another angle to this, which hasn't gotten as much press among progressive circles. As Giroux writes:

More and more youth have been defined and understood within a war on terror that provides an expansive, antidemocratic framework for referencing how they are represented, talked about, and inserted within a growing network of disciplinary relations that responds to the problems they face by criminalizing their behaviors and subjecting them to punitive modes of conduct.

The war on terror and drugs, Giroux asserts, has added a new target: Youth.

This war, unlike the more glamorous cross-national disputes, doesn't necessarily involve two sides in contentious combat. This war is characterized by "4th grade reading scores and graduation rates [being] used to determine how many prison cells will be built." This war is against the growing population of "pint-size nihilists" amongst us. Extinguish them!

And so,

Instead of being viewed as impoverished, minority youth are seen as lazy and shiftless; instead of being recognized as badly served by failing schools, they are labeled uneducable and pushed out of schools; instead of being provided with decent work skills and jobs, they are either sent to prison or conscripted to fight in wars abroad; instead of being given decent health care and a place to live, they are placed in foster care or pushed into the swelling ranks of the homeless.

These enemies of our peace are then rightfully placed in schools where the squeaking sound of metal detectors is omnipresent, where police forces are dominant, where arrests, suspensions, and expulsions are as commonplace as being frisked, cussed-out, or strip-searched by security officers on your way to class. These enemies of our peace might be too young to legally "marry, drive a car, get a tattoo, or go to scary movies, but not too young to be put in prisons for the rest of their lives."

And while we're at it, let's make sure they're excluded from "various forms of student aid," post-conviction, including but not limited to "welfare payments, Medicaid, veterans' benefits, food stamps, and ... public housing."

Isn't it so heartwarming to know that young people growing up have such a splendid future awaiting them?

Giroux calls on "intellectuals" of great courage to "take a stand" against these "collective problems" putting at risk "not only young people and adults ... but the very possibility of deepening and expanding democracy itself." But how many of these intellectuals wouldn't have to be summoned from the dead?

As he rightly notes, the university has witnessed a radical shift in vision this past decade. Through hysteria whipped up by right-wingers following 9/11, many liberal or left-leaning professors have been silenced or fired to quell the paranoia expressed by some students that they're being brainwashed. Their professors tried to force upon them "Marxist" and "Socialist" values - values that go by such scary prospects as critical thinking, intellectual freedom, and independent reasoning.

These young people, Giroux writes, have been bamboozled by the likes of David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, who've "hijacked political power and waged a focused campaign against the principles of academic freedom, sacrificing the quality of education made available to youth in the name of patriotic correctness."

Cheated out of an enlightening educational experience, Giroux contends, are young people, who, in exchange for being provided the tools to "critically engage what they know and to recognize the limits of their own knowledge," are infantilized by appeasing academics. They are denied "opportunities to engage knowledge critically ... [and] assume responsibility for what it means to know something."

Giroux's hopes are for a "larger public dialogue about how to imagine a democratic future," in the context of a Youth-centered pedagogy. Unfortunately, "We have entered a period in which the war against youth, especially poor youth of color, offers no apologies because it is too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance." Nonetheless, this ambassador of hope reassures: "... [P]ower as a form of domination is never absolute, and oppression always produces some form of resistance."

And though the laborious work of resistance must engage all sectors of society, Giroux's call to young people is direct: "[G]o out into the world and actively try to change it."

Youth in a Suspect Society is an unnerving prophetic call to action. Through tedious research and meditation, Giroux has provided a blueprint that all concerned can use in restoring the faith Youth once had in society - faith planted in the soils of non-privatized, non-corporatized values.

This faith, however, has been uprooted by years of indifference and antipathy, callousness and bellicosity.

Children are now much too aware of the degree of disregard society disses them with. And they respond to it in ways that anger some and amuse others.

But the concrete work of restoring this faith has hardly been addressed, let alone acted upon, before the publication of Youth in a Suspect Society.

I recommend it with inestimable gratitude to Dr. Giroux for his moral vigor and matchless vitality.

--------

BlackCommentator.com columnist, Tolu Olorunda, is a Nigerian native and cultural critic. Click here to reach Mr. Olorunda.

• US readers may purchase this book by clicking HERE.
• UK readers by clicking HERE.

MobiVerse (R) service for poets

MobiVerse (R) is a new publishing service for poets, using the Mobipocket software, which allows ePublications to be read on any mobile phone or PC. At this stage, the project is in a formative staqge and I am looking for short poems (100 lines or less; no limit on later submissions, so Homeric epics possible, also novels, plays etc) to include in the sample MobiVerse (R) anthology. There will be no payment for inclusion in this anthology, but when the project is up and running, future publications will go online with DRM (digital rights management) encryption, so a fee will be charged for each download, and royalties on sales passed to contributors.

Readers will need to download the free Mobipocket reader from http://bit.ly/17BbzM.

Submissions should be sent to mobiverse@f2s.com.

Please circulate/forward this message to as many poets as possible.

The Sixties, by Jenny Diski (Profile Books, £10.99)

The Sixties were when they packaged up counter-revolution and sold it to us as revolution.

The Sixties were when the establishment observed the aspirations of the millions of working class kids coming out of the grammar schools and art colleges and held up a hand that said: Thus far and no further.

The Sixties were when we were asked if we really wanted our wives and servants to read about Lady Chatterley.

The Sixties were the time when, as Frank Zappa pointed out so perceptively, the CIA attacked the new generation with chemical warfare. (And, I might add, when the HIV/AIDS virus escaped from the US biological warfare labs – either accidentally or deliberately, the jury is still out, though the evidence suggests the latter – to attack its primary targets, the gays and black Africa.)

The Sixties were when, like Allen Ginsberg, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” (though that was originally written in the mid-1950s). We mourned, and still mourn, those who died on the front line, Hendrix and Brian Jones and Mama Cass (and, most recently, Davey Graham, cos the Sixties aren’t over yet).

The Sixties is a book written by Jenny Diski, who doesn’t seem to know shit about what really went down in the decade she revisits, 40 years on.

Of course, there were always people like Diski around as we fought off the police in Grosvenor Square* and tried to overcome the restraints that had so restricted our parents from fulfilling the promise of modernism. For the Sixties didn’t just happen at midnight on December 31, 1959; the ferment between the wars, from Picasso to Dick Sheppard’s “peace is indivisible”, Beveridge, and the 1944 Education Act, were all part of the same story.

What Diski’s narrative does not engage is the sheer hard work that went into the demo’s and be-ins and boutiques that were the hedonistic tip at the top of the Sixties pyramid. While she and her kind were lying around in squats zonked out of their brains, or shopping in Biba, we in the vanguard were working our arses off to keep the show on the road.

Yes, we used drugs. Like the graphic designers for rock magazines who needed piles of coke to get them out on time; and yes, they’d then smoke a joint to get over the inevitable come-down.

And yes, the counter-revolution won, but as Jim Morrison said, they might have the guns, but we’ve got the numbers.

A truncated version of this review was published in the Morning Star.

* I might also have mentioned the Hyde Park "free Hoppy" demo, and in particular the time we blocked the News of the World from getting its newsprint supplies delivered in protest at its campaign to "get" Mick Jagger. Though I was on both actions, the driving force in these campaigns came from below, and was not driven primarily by politicos like me. Knowing my experience, however, I was asked to provide my "expertise" in their organisation.

Click HERE to buy this book from Amazon UK, and others on the Sixties

The US edition will be published in September. Click below to pre-order from Amazon.

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Black Mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia

Black Mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia, by John Gray (Penguin, £18.99)
Despite a sensationalist title that makes it seem like a Dennis Wheatley horror, this is a stimulating enquiry into the religious roots of present-day conflict. It is rare to come upon a philosophical work which underpins its theses with examples from the real world, like the errors of the neocon agenda for the "New American Century" to the western origins of Islamic fundamentalism.
It's a total page-turner from start to finish, written in accessible language free from academic jargon, with a expanding assertion on virtually every page that will sharpen up your wits, even if you end up disagreeing with his fundamental thesis.
This is that most belief systems, including Christianity and Islam (but not, interestingly, Judaism), communism, fascism, western-style democracy, Darwinism, and atheism, are all inadequate responses to the complexities of reality because they are all rooted in a one-size-fits-all eschatological view of the world which sees history leading inexorably to a conclusion, which could be the Last Times Armageddon of the American Christian right, or the communist solution to the evils and inefficiencies of crisis-torn capitalism.
Though given to sweeping side-wipes which dismiss, for instance, historical materialism as "cod-science", and a tendency to take on board cod-history (to coin a phrase) like the various contradictory estimates of the millions who allegedly died in the Soviet gulags or during Mao's Great Leap Forward, these minor blemishes do not invalidate his basic argument, which is that utopia is not only unattainable, but leads to worse inhumanities than the inhumanities it seeks to redress.
That this has happened is demonstrably true, from the Catholic Inquisition to the Moscow trials, though I am doubtful that it is inevitable, which it is, only if you share his pessimistic view of the unchangeability of human nature.
His image of the human condition is basically of a Hobbesian war of all against all. He dismisses the idea of a "primitive communism" in pre-history, asserting that there are no known examples of such economic communities in human history. However good a philosopher Gray may be, he is obviously no anthropologist, for his assertion is totally untrue.
Buy Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia from Amazon

Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell

Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell, by
Michael Gray (Bloomsbury, £25)
Blind Willie McTell was a blue singer different from the familiar
cliches of white bluesology.
As Michael Gray says in this exhaustively researched and (to be
honest) sometimes exhausting to read story, "McTell explodes every
archetype about the blues musician. He is no roaring primitive, no
Robert Johnson-esque devil-dealing womaniser. He didn't lose his
sight in a juke-joint brawl, or hopping a freight train. He didn't
escape into music from behind a mule plough in the Delta. He
didn't die violently or young."
But the fact remains, as Bob Dylan put it in a masterly musical
tribute, "I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie
McTell."
William Samuel McTell was born in 1901 and died after a stroke in
1958. He lived and played most of his life in his home state of
Georgia, though he travelled to New York city and Chicago to make
some of his early recordings. His most productive period was
between 1927 and 1936, though he also made some commercial
recordings in 1949 and 1950.
The folklorist, John A. Lomax (father of the now more famous Alan)
recorded McTell's speech and songs for the US Library of Congress
in 1940.
His repertoire was not large, and nor was it as innovative as,
say, Robert Johnson's. His greatest "hit", the magnificent
Statesboro Blues, covered notably by the Allman Brothers, and
rather less grandiloquently by Taj Mahal, borrowed a lot from
Sippie Wallace (whose version was also the source of Canned Heat's
Goin' Up the Country, familiar to millions as the opening music of
the Woodstock movie.)
In his day, he was a rare exponent of the 12-string guitar, and
his lighter, more delicate style is an interesting contrast with
the heavier ostinato of the more influential Huddie Ledbetter
(Leadbelly).
McTell's biography and discography would make a very thin book,
but in telling the bluesman's story, Gray has meticulously
researched and documented his genetic origins (descended from a
white slave-owner who fought on the Confederate side in the
American revolution), and set his life against the social
background of his times.
For instance, he lists in horrifying detail some of the lynchings
that took place in Georgia (491 between 1882 and 1962), many of
them close to McTell's home or that of his extended family.
He examines the sexual fear that generated such hatred among white
males who thought it OK to take their pleasure from black girls,
but saw no contradiction in their opposition to black-on-white
"miscegnation".
Along with this obsession with the African American "threat" (some
lynchings were justified by literally demonising their victims as
"devils") came a view of them as non-persons.
"When he sat out on the front porch of the Jaeckel Hotel in
Statesboro, resting between numbers played for the tobacco
salesmen," comments Gray, "they might talk unguardedly as they
never would among others. They forgot he was there - he didn't
count. He wasn't any kind of threat."
Gray also tells the story of his own researches, poring over dusty
and often illiterately written records of births, marriages and
deaths, navigating his way through the various spellings of the
names of McTell's ancestors (McTear, McTier, McTyeir, McTyre) at a
time when blacks weren't considered sufficiently important to be
recorded properly.
While establishing Gray's credentials (already, surely,
unbeatable, on the basis of his books on Bob Dylan) as an
assiduous researcher, and no doubt of great interest to
genealogists, at times, when several pages are devoted to tracking
down a single fact, I was sometimes tempted to throw down the
432-page tome in irritation, crying: "Tell us about the music,
Michael, for God's sake!" Surely the genealogical aspect could
have been covered by printing a family tree, from his white
forebear, Reddick McTyeir, up to the present day.
Of course Gray does not neglect what made McTell's style so
unique, but these references are scattered through the book.
Though well indexed, the fact that chapter titles are just numbers
doesn't make finding these brief analyses any easier.
There is an 11-page discography (including a sad and frustrating
listing of the "lost recordings").
All things considered, this is a wonderful book, fascinating in
its detail, wide-ranging in its vision, not only of an artist
better known by name than for his actual music, but also of an era
and geography that helps us to understand his strange, tortured
superpower homeland.
A shorter version of this review appeared in the Morning Star.
Buy the following products relating to this review:
CDs

• The Classic Years 1927-1940
• King of the Georgia Blues
• Atlanta Strut: Twenty Legendary Recordings
• Guitar of Blind Willie Mctell [2006]

DVD

• Guitar of Blind Willie Mctell [2006]

This Book (reviewed above)

• Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes - In Search of Blind Willie McTell