The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization


Diana West - 2007
    Diana West sees a US filled with middle-age guys playing air guitar and thinks "No wonder we can't stop Islamic terrorism."  She sees Moms Who Mosh and wonders "Is there a single adult left anywhere?"  But, the grown-ups are all gone.  The disease that killed them was incubated in the sixties to a rock-and-roll score, took hold in the seventies with the help of multicultralism and left us with a nation of eternal adolescents who can't decide between "good" and "bad", a generation who can't say "no".  From the inability to nix a sixteen year-old's request for Marilyn Manson concert tickets to offering adolescents parentally-funded motel rooms on prom night to rationalizing murderous acts of Islamic suicide bombers with platitudes of cultural equivalence, West sees us on a slippery slope that's lead to a time when America has forgotten its place in the world.  In The Death of the Grown-Up Diana West serves up a provocative critique of our dangerously indecisive world leavened with humor and shot through with insight.

KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money


J.M.R. Higgs - 2012
    They had awards, credibility, commercial success and creative freedom. They deleted their records, erased themselves from musical history and burnt their last million pounds in a boathouse on the Isle of Jura.And they couldn’t say why.This is the story of The KLF, told through the ideas that drove them. It is a story about Carl Jung, Alan Moore, Robert Anton Wilson, Ken Campbell, Dada, Situationism, Discordianism, magic, chaos, punk, rave and the alchemical symbolism of Doctor Who. Wildly unauthorised and totally unlike any other music biography, ‘KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money’ is a trawl through chaos on the trail of a beautiful accidental mythology.

United States: Essays 1952-1992


Gore Vidal - 1993
    It also provides the best, most sustained exposure possible to the most wide-ranging, acute, and original literary intelligence of the post—World War II years. United States is an essential book in the canon of twentieth-century American literature and an endlessly fascinating work.