Depression Books

This book Is a good description and selection of Depression glass. Most of the photos are B&W with a few color plates in a section there are 225 pages with a 22 point table of contents and a decent index.
This covers glass from the early 20's through the 30's this was machine-made and fairly inexpensive. They used bright colors including ruby, amethyst, bright green, iridescent carnival orange, aquamarine, cobalt blue, pail pink and yellow. The pieces are mostly tableware.

What was it like for young men, out of work and money, during the Great Depression? Professor Melzer has written a sensitive, very thorough, yet readable, book on the boys who worked the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in New Mexico, 1933-1942. It is obvious that Melzer interviewed many of the CCC boys (many have passed away by 2006), read the New Mexico newspapers, researched in the archives. I especially appreciate his liberal use of quotes from the men themselves, from their letters and the reports they wrote. Highly recommended.

Finally a book on depression that is a real person. As a ministers wife, Mary was struck with severe clinical depression and panic attacks. She tells her tale of recovery, the root of her depression, real life stories and how she is doing today. She talks about how embarresing it was for her, of all people to not want to lead the choir anymore, or attend church anymore. She gives great insight into what she did on her darkest days, parts of the bible that inspire and uplift you. For the first time I felt like I can get better, and that being blue is not a punishement for sin. Mary reveals what was at the heart of her depression and what triggered her major breakdown. She provides simple and direct steps to take to start to feel better. Mary is also very careful not to underestimate the need for medical help. She also doesn't believe it's all in your head or that you should just fake it. This is an outstanding and uplifting book. I wish every person (believer or not) that is suffering, has suffered, or has family suffering from depression could have a copy of this book. God Bless Mary Sutherland!!

I've known the author of "Computer Science Reconsidered" for almost thirty years, so while I'll try to be objective, expect some personal bias as well as some disagreements with Karl. Traditional computer science places the sequential algorithm and Boolean logic at the heart of computer science. Karl takes a much wider view. He sees computer science as the theory of "process expression" - for instance, given the process of adding a million numbers, how is this process physically accomplished(physically expressed) and symbolically represented(symbolically expressed)? In general, this will be done most efficiently concurrently, and not necessarily by specifying an algorithm, but perhaps by using some clockless physical system that is smart enough to 'resolve' the problem in some partially specified, automatic manner. Karl's book takes clockless concurrent process to be fundamental(as it is in nature). He describes very primitive processes in a new and idiosyncratic language that may be off-putting to some readers, but in truly concurrent processes, notions like 'state' and 'register' are far too narrow and completely inappropriate, so much traditional process language must be abandoned. It seems obvious to me that Karl is on the right track - his approach seems radical until one starts to be embarrased at the primitive, unnatural state of today's computer science, where timing circuits must still be designed (yet nature doesn't do this), and all process details must still be specified (nature doesn't do this). Besides, the foundation of today's c.s. is about Turing Machines and the question, "Is a given process possible," when pragmatically c.s almost always instead asks, "How is a given process best done?" Every revolution takes place in a context. I have found that Karl's ideas intersect in bits and pieces with Carver Mead's ideas on making computers more like Fruit Fly brains (low power - millions of times more efficient than those clunky silicon things), and Judea Pearl's causality flow diagrams (where, as in Boolean Logic, equations by themselves are incomplete symbolic process expressions), the Relational Quantum Mechanics of Carlo Rovelli (where there are no objective, universal system states), and my recent work on human psycology and religion, where moral rule following (like an algorithm) is treated as an immature, autistic form of ethical behavior, compared to the spontaneous ethical behavior of famous religious figures. Karl's book is a new foundation. Don't expect to read a handbook with complete hardware and software languages spelled out. Those are being worked on, or in his previous book. Read Karl's new book like you're reading a mix of Copernicus and Tesla - lots of wild new ideas, ocassionally stunning insights and many sparks!

If you have any interest in Depression-era art, this is a must read. Frank Long's writing style flows smoothly and makes for an absorbing and entertaining experience. Full of humerous anecdotes, this book evokes the period eloquently.
The author is my father (deceased, 1999), but I would have said all these things even if I had no relation to him.

April 7, 2008
Reviewing The Confiscation of American Prosperity: From Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression, Michael Perelman, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
By Seth Sandronsky

Michael Perelman, a professor of economics at California State University, Chico, has written a compelling new book which puts the current social crisis into historical context. As the U.S. credit and housing bubbles crash, mortgage defaults and home foreclosures are tearing a hole in the nation's social fabric. For Perelman, the main story line which got the American nation to this point of instability begins in the early 1970s, the end of the "Golden Age" of the U.S.'s post-World War II prosperity. As the balance sheets of German and Japanese rivals rose, corporate America's fell.

Its recovery points to the winners and losers of this process to restore profitability to U.S. corporations. In a main theme of the book, American politicians and think tanks united to weaken corporate regulation and taxation. Accordingly, Perelman's book reads a bit like a crime story. One of the figures who loom large in it is Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. His 1971 memo, penned as a corporate lawyer, set off alarm bells for big business. It was time, Powell said, to ideologically and politically confront the popular movements (Civil Rights and Vietnam War) of the day. Later, the two U.S. political parties, in response to their large corporate funders, targeted social policies of the New Deal and Great Society protecting the American people from the scourge of hunger and poverty due to loss of jobs, health care, etc.

Powell's role in Main Street's declining fortunes since the end of the Vietnam War illustrates Perelman's close attention to class interests. He brings into sharp focus the reasons for and results of a one-sided upper-class campaign over the past three decades. The extent to which a small but strong minority of Americans hoarded the bulk of growth from the sweat of a diverse labor force, increasingly female, boggles one's mind.

Consider this data. As the nation's gross domestic product tripled from 1970 to 2003, the "top 13,000 tax-paying households ... saw its wages and salaries increase fifteen-fold," Perlman writes. Meanwhile, for the bottom 99 percent of Americans, average income remained basically unchanged between 1970 ($36,008) and 2004 ($37,295).

One outcome has been working Americans' growing reliance on credit to make ends meet, Perelman explains in jargon-free prose. Such clear language from a professor of economics may startle some readers who might be accustomed to opaque English from the likes of Alan Greenspan, former head of the nation's central bank.

Perelman reminds readers that pro-business policies of deregulation are not the monopoly of the GOP. The weakening of government oversight of industry took off under Democratic President Jimmy Carter. So did the high-interest rate policy of Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve Bank chief. This one-two policy punch buckled the knees of the U.S. working class.

Likewise, former actor-turned-California Governor Ronald Reagan did his part as president to batter organized labor. Reagan fired striking federal air-traffic controllers who had earlier campaigned for him. Later, private employers aped Reagan, terminating their work forces during union actions throughout the 1980s and beyond. Unionized Americans have been backpedaling since, mainly in the private sector, in which workers creates profits (what Marx termed surplus value), unlike the public sector.

Political right-wingers pushing corporate-friendly policies have left no stone unturned. Some public schools whose students fail to score well enough on highs-stakes achievement tests and consequently face closure. One option is to re-open them as private charter schools. The owners who are politically connected to business leaders and political officials can then void employees' union contracts and earn profits.

And who helps shape public opinion as the upper-class rollback proceeds? Perelman answers in part with a look at the Heritage Foundation, which grew with funds from beer mogul Joseph Coors. This think tank became a service provider of so-called expert commentators to news media, increasingly in the hands of fewer and fewer global corporations such as News Corp. and its chair Rupert Murdoch.

On that note, Perelman's radical viewpoint runs counter to the mainstream notion that income and wealth inequality are regrettable but inevitable outcomes of market forces that free people's productive potential. He evaluates the research on the past three decades in the U.S. and finds that this notion is a false assumption. Alternatively, Perelman suggests that such inequality disrupts and obstructs economic growth.

Lastly, Perelman critiques the economics profession and Professor Martin Feldstein. In brief, his research said Social Security harmed the U.S. economy by cutting personal savings. In time, Feldstein's methods were found to be fatally flawed. Yet he stayed close to the White House and remained a Harvard professor, shaping the world views of policy makers and corporate execs.

What is to be done with a profession that basically serves moneyed interests? "In the longer run, a total rethinking of economics is needed," Perelman writes in conclusion. "Economists can make a contribution to this transformation by deemphasizing competition, while learning to understand more humane motives of behavior than profit maximization."

Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento.

From the cover: This volume makes available a neglected but important document in the history of the New South. The introduction provides excellent background for the report as well as crucial information on the New Deal and southern liberalism. The additional primary documents offer rich source material for analysis and discussion.

Robert Prechter wrote this book in the first quarter of 2002, yet it reads as if he already knew what would happen to the stock market, economy and politics at present. His uncannily accurate forecasts were based on Elliott wave behavioural theory which holds that herd instinct drives the public's mood in distinct and discernible wave patterns that last and overlap for long, medium and short terms. Once a wave starts it persists its course and is only very temporarily interrupted by real events (e.g. Sept 11th destruction of Twin Towers, Government bailout of banks, etc) before resuming its relentless course. His prognosis is that based on wave theory the bear market that started in 2000 will be worse than the three previous depressions of 1929-32, 1835-42 and 1720-84. Furthermore it's ramifications will last until about 2016.One could dismiss all this as the work of Cassandra except that Prechter was alone in anticipating the 1982-2000 credit fuelled boom period back in the late 1070s and called the 2000 share market bust in 1995. When the bull market resumed in 2003 he accurately foresaw that it was a false rally that would eventually result in a deep bear market which has already wiped out almost half the value of listed corporate stock. His monthly Elliot Wave International Forecast newsletter brings one up to date with his 2002 book. Its recount of where we are in the global financial crisis is frighteningly consistent with his original outlook.
The first half of his book is an analysis of financial markets over the last 300 years and how they follow a cyclical five wave up and three wave down pattern (whose form is always similar, though whose scale and timing vary). At Dec 2008 he saw the stock market and economy as being towards the end of the first of three waves down with a lot further to go whereas most analysts were predicting a strong market recovery in 2009. Time will tell whether his socionomics wave theory proves right again. If it is we are in for the most disruptive financial, economic, social and political era in 300 years. I genuinely hope he is wrong because otherwise we should sell all our long-term assets and go into cash or treasury bills until the storm blows over. Also we should reduce our debt as much as possible because in a deflationary climate where asset values are falling high debt is a trap that destroys net wealth.
P. Allan (Dec 27th 2008)

this book provided insight into my body that medical doctors do not either know or understand. It answered so many of the questions I had. Excellent information and problem solvers. If people would be more open to natural cures and self disipline instead of the next quick fix pill from the medical community, we would have a much healthier and happier world.

I bought Cope before it came to Amazon. It's about time it's being sold here! Having tried other kinds of self-help books and tapes for depression, Cope is truly different. "Mass market paperback" is NOT the right description. With Cope you actually use booklets and a free telephone system that can be used 24/7. I've never seen anything like Cope, and I've tried a lot of self-help programs for my depression. The examples used in Cope and the interactive exercises were really helpful. It only took a few weeks before I began feeling better, and the booklets have continued to provide support for me. Cope was better than some of the live therapists I've gone to. While the voice on the telephone is prerecorded, it's hard to tell because he responds to your issues and is really comforting. I know that sounds hokey, but it's true. Cope really helped me.