The Girl Who Dated Herself


Susannah Shakespeare - 2018
    You didn’t choose it and you can’t get out of it. After a lifelong quest to find “the one” a British writer living in L.A. finds herself single again in her mid-thirties and admits defeat. But instead of blaming the string of past ex-boyfriends, she turns the spotlight on herself. Taking a year off dating men, she tries to date herself in a search for some answers. A fun “honeymoon period” concludes with a shocking discovery. She starts to dig deeper, seeking the source of her problems, but the truth is a bitter pill to swallow. The Girl Who Dated Herself begins as an entertaining “rom com for one” but evolves into an engaging and thought-provoking journey that ultimately questions our preconceptions about love and the foundations of self worth. A book for women and men of all ages, this creative memoir is endlessly amusing and endearing. It touches on subjects painfully familiar to some and uncomfortably shocking to others. A journey of self-discovery, it is also a beautiful love letter to Los Angeles, taking the reader to the real world behind the glitz and gloss of Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

What Is Property?


Pierre-Joseph Proudhon - 1840
    

The Ego and Its Own


Max Stirner - 1844
    The work also constitutes an enduring critique of liberalism and socialism from the perspective of an extreme eccentric individualism. Stirner has latterly been portrayed variously as a precursor of Nietzsche, a forerunner of existentialism, an individualist anarchist, and as manifestly insane. This edition includes an Introduction placing Stirner in his historical context.

Muzzled: From T-Ball to Terrorism-True Stories That Should Be Fiction


Michael A. Smerconish - 2006
    With humor and chutzpah, attorney, commentator, and popular radio host Michael Smerconish takes on today's oversensitive culture with a collection of entertaining, outlandish anecdotes about PC gone wild-stories that are hilarious, horrifying, and unbelievably true.Why are sports leagues handing out trophies to losers? Why are little old grandmas hired to guard 200-pound prisoners? Why are newborn babies and old men with walkers singled out at the airport while likely terrorists are ushered through security with ease?This book shows through these absurdities that today's atmosphere of censorship and multiculturalism is paving the way for serious threats to our cultural identity and national security: "It's one thing for the forces of political correctness to muzzle our day-to-day lives here at home in the US, quite another when that same cancer metastasizes into the war on terror."We must eradicate the PC disease. Our sanity-and our very lives-depend on it."Michael Smerconish talks the talk: If you say unpopular things, watch out! Using vivid examples of PC rubbish, "Muzzled" will lead you into a world that would terrify Rod Serling. An entertaining and provocative book." -Bill O'Reilly"Reads like fiction, too bad it's true." -Nelson DeMille, novelist, author of "Night Fall and The General's Daughter""The PC virus is out of control . . . and it's worse than you think! In this entertaining and important book, Michael Smerconish chronicles just how mindless things have gotten in politically correct America. He tells fascinating stories that will make you laugh . . . right up until the time they make you scream. Thanks to the PC crowd, we are all living in The United States of the Absurd." -Bernard Goldberg, journalist and author of "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America," "Arrogance," and "Bias""I really squirm whenever I find myself agreeing with Smerconish. (I know the feeling is mutual.) I did a lot of squirming while reading this provocative book. All true liberals and conservatives must agree with Smerconish that the PC muzzles must be removed so that people can decide based on the marketplace of ideas." -Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard and author of "Preemption""I don't often find myself on the same side of the political barricades as Michael Smerconish. But "Muzzled" is a witty, provocative, and timely book. Even when Michael is wrong, which is often, he draws you in and keeps you reading." -Arianna Huffington, author of "Pigs at the Trough" and "Fanatics and Fools""In Muzzled, my American Blood Brother of status-quo-obliterating defiance, Michael Smerconish, once again smokes out the cockroaches of political correctness . . . "Muzzled" is a great title for a book that I am convinced every American school kid should read and be tested on. If a new generation doesn't grow some intellectual balls, our Once Great Nation will continue to repeat horrific mistakes and pay the price . . . Read it. Live it." -Ted Nugent, rock star, author, television personality, and hunter extraordinaire

Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals


Jonathan Smucker - 2017
    Hopeful about the potential of today’s burgeoning movements, long-time grassroots organizer Jonathan Smucker nonetheless pulls no punches when confronting their internal dysfunction. Drawing from personal experience, he provides deep theoretical insight into the all-too-familiar radical tendency toward self-defeating insularity and paralyzing purism. At the same time, he offers tools to bridge the divide between anti-authoritarian values and hegemonic strategies, tools that might just help today’s movements to navigate their obstacles—and change the world.

The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States


Paul Avrich - 1980
    Between 1910 and 1960 anarchists across the United States established more than 20 schools wherein children studied in an atmosphere of freedom and self-reliance. The Modern Schools stood in sharp contrast to the formality and discipline of the traditional classroom and sought to abolish all forms of authority. Their object was to create not only a new type of school, but also a new society based on the voluntary cooperation of free individuals. Among the participants were Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Alexander Berkman and Man Ray.

Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing


Melissa Mohr - 2013
    With humor and insight, Melissa Mohr takes readers on a journey to discover how "swearing" has come to include both testifying with your hand on the Bible and calling someone a *#$&!* when they cut you off on the highway. She explores obscenities in ancient Rome and unearths the history of religious oaths in the Middle Ages, when swearing (or not swearing) an oath was often a matter of life and death. Holy Sh*t also explains the advancement of civility and corresponding censorship of language in the 18th century, considers the rise of racial slurs after World War II, examines the physiological effects of swearing and answers a question that preoccupies the FCC, the US Senate, and anyone who has recently overheard little kids at a playground: are we swearing more now than people did in the past?A gem of lexicography and cultural history, Holy Sh*t is a serious exploration of obscenity.

The Coming Insurrection


The Invisible Committee - 2007
    We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it. The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine capable of “spreading anarchy and live communism.” Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.” Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized life forms. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years


David Graeber - 2011
    The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia


Robert Nozick - 1974
    National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion, has been translated into 11 languages, and was named one of the "100 most influential books since the war" (1945–1995) by the U.K. Times Literary Supplement.

For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto


Murray N. Rothbard - 1973
    Rothbard begins with a quick overview of its historical roots, and then goes on to define libertarianism as resting "upon one single axiom: that no man or group of men shall aggress upon the person or property of anyone else." He writes a withering critique of the chief violator of liberty: the State. Rothbard then provides penetrating libertarian solutions for many of today's most pressing problems, including poverty, war, threats to civil liberties, the education crisis, and more.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community


Marc J. Dunkelman - 2014
    What Alexis de Tocquevillecalled the “township”—that unique locus of the power ofcitizens—has been replaced. But with what? In a work thatcombines rich history and keen sociological observation,Marc Dunkelman identifies an epochal shift in the structureof American life. Routines that once put doctors and lawyersin touch with grocers and plumbers have withered as technologyallows us to connect exclusively with a more selectgroup. The rhythms that compelled us to understand thepeople living across town have disappeared. In their placeare new patterns that confound our ability to compromise inpolitics, innovate within the private sector, and care properlyfor the most vulnerable. But the American Age has not yetended, and The Vanishing Neighbor argues that to win thefuture we need to adapt yesterday’s institutions to the realitiesof the twenty-first-century American community.

Anarchism and Other Essays


Emma Goldman - 1910
    A Russian Jewish immigrant at the age of 17, she moved by her own efforts from seamstress in a clothing factory to internationally known radical lecturer, writer, editor and friend of the oppressed. This book is a collection of her remarkably penetrating essays, far in advance of their time, originally published by the Mother Earth press which she founded.In the first of these essays, Anarchism: What It Really Stands For, she says, "Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual." In Minorities Versus Majorities she holds that social and economic well-being will result only through "the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass." Other pieces deal with The Hypocrisy of Puritanism; Prisons: A Social Crim and Failure; The Psychology of Political Violence—note the relevence of these themes to our own time; The Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought; Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty; and The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation. A biographical sketch by Hippolyte Havel precedes the essays.Anarchism and Other Essays provides a fascinating look into revolutionary issues at the turn of the century, a prophetic view of the social and economic future, much of which we have seen take place, and above all, a glimpse into the mind of an extraordinary woman: brilliant, provocative, dedicated, passionate, and what used to be called "high-minded."Unabridged republication of the 3rd (1917) edition, with a new Introduction by Richard Drinnon. Frontispiece. xv + 271 pp. 5-3/8 x 8-1/2. Paperbound.

Warlock: Reign of Blood


Edwin McRae - 2018
    He flees from the reiver slavers who are abducting the village’s NPCs, only to have an agonizing encounter with the wrong end of a ranger’s arrow. After trying and failing to log out of this painfully realistic game, Mark decides to take up his sword, embrace his new Warlock character class, and help the ranger rescue her people.The warlock and his hard-nosed ranger are soon joined by a macabre healer, an earth-shaking druid and a talking fortress. But as Mark takes the fight to the reivers, he uncovers an even deadlier threat. Dark magic is spreading into Garland from a long dead city, and the reiver leader has found a way to harness some of that corrupted power for himself.Level by level, spell by spell, Mark must become the warlock that Garland needs before it falls to the corrupted ambitions of a rising tyrant.If you love…Visceral combatLovecraftian monstersAncient ruinsSwords and sorceryCompletely original spells...then Warlock: Reign of Blood is for you!Warlock is Book 1 in the Chasms of Corruption duology.

In Praise of Love


Alain Badiou - 2009
    Caught between consumerism and casual sexual encounters devoid of passion, love today - without the key ingredient of chance - is in mortal danger. Alain Badiou proposes a vision of love as an adventure of the individual.Liberal and libertine reductions of love to instant pleasure and non-commitment bite the dust as Badiou invokes a supporting cast of thinkers from Plato to Lacan via Karl Marx to create a new narrative of romance, relationships and sex - one that does not fear love.