Missive #693 Published 14 April 2026
This book is the first in a series that are essays that have been published as books although they are very short. The Book Review was written by ChatGPT at my request. It is my plan to ask for more such reviews for the books in this series and perhaps for other books. I think what was said here by ChatGPT is of more value to a potential reader than a Book Promo from the publisher and repeated by goodreads.com or Amazon.
Missive #692 Published 13 April 2026
Freehold is a military science fiction novel by , published in 2004 by. [The first book in the Freehold series] The book tells the story of Kendra Pacelli, a young soldier who begins the book in the service of a world-dominant, authoritarian United Nations. Accused of a crime she did not commit, she flees Earth for the Freehold of Grainne where she struggles to adapt to the climate and culture of an ultra-libertarian planet. She eventually joins the Freehold military and fights in a war against a UN invasion.
Missive #689 Published 7 April 2026
In both Europe and North America, populist movements have shattered existing party systems and thrown governments into turmoil. The embattled establishment claims that these populist insurgencies seek to overthrow liberal democracy. The truth is no less alarming but is more complex: Western democracies are being torn apart by a new class war.
In this controversial and groundbreaking new analysis, Michael Lind, one of America's leading thinkers, debunks the idea that the insurgencies are primarily the result of bigotry, traces how the breakdown of mid-century class compromises between business and labor led to the conflict, and reveals the real battle lines.
Missive #686 Published 2 April 2026
"In Distant Neighbors , both Berry and Snyder come across as honest and open-hearted explorers. There is an overall sense that they possess a deep and questing wisdom, hard earned through land work, travel, writing, and spiritual exploration. There is no rushing, no hectoring, and no grand gestures between these two, just an ever-deepening inquiry into what makes a good life and how to live it, even in the depths of the machine age." ― Orion Magazine
Missive #685 Published 30 March 2026
Semiotician, medievalist and linguist, Eco delights in secret codes, cabals and conspiracy theories. He’s got a humdinger in this new high-level whodunit, which features a fictional fellow—Simone Simonini by name—who wanders, darkly, throughout a late-19th-century Europe packed with very real people. Simonini, 67 years old when we meet him in 1897, is detestable. He’s a study in suburban prejudices, among them a virulent strain of anti-Semitism, though, to be fair, he’s got something bad to say about just about everyone: The Jew, he grumbles, is “as vain as a Spaniard, ignorant as a Croat, greedy as a Levantine, ungrateful as a Maltese, insolent as a Gypsy, dirty as an Englishman, unctuous as a Kalmyk, imperious as a Prussian and as slanderous as anyone from Asti.” Did he leave out the Germans? No, they smell bad owing to a surfeit of beer and pork sausage. No one evades Simonini’s withering glare, but it’s the Jews he’s really after, working farragos and guiles to stir up hatred against him through manufactured events up to and including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that tract that gave the Nazis so much fuel for their fires.
Missive #682 Published 23 March 2026
For Leo Davies, a charming, brilliant barrister in one of London's most prestigious chambers, life has been good. But behind the elegant doors of Caper Court, the elite barrister's chamber, are the hard choices, the ethical dilemmas, the overlap between the personal and the professional, the sacrifices, the deceitful politics, the affairs and the corruption. Life at the Bar is gritty behind the gloss and Leo Davies QC is at the centre of another Caper Court drama. Fraser is the daughter of the late George MacDonald Fraser, beloved author of the Flashman novels. Her cleverly entwined plot lines involving Machiavellian office politics, rivalries, protocol as well as scandals and love affairs.
Missive #679 Published 19 March 2026
The book does not offer solutions to environmental questions, but it does offer the hope that there can be new ways of thinking and flexibility in human/environmental relations. Although humans seem alienated from our the natural world, we can develop a new understanding of `self in the world.' The second edition has a new preface and an epilogue in which Evernden analyses the latest environmental sustainable development.
Missive #678 Published 16 March 2026
The long-awaited companion piece to Derrick Jensen's immensely popular and highly acclaimed works A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. Accepting the increasingly widespread belief that industrialized culture inevitably erodes the natural world, Endgame sets out to explore how this relationship impels us towards a revolutionary and as-yet undiscovered shift in strategy. Building on a series of simple but increasingly provocative premises, Jensen leaves us hoping for what may be inevitable: a return to agrarian communal life via the disintegration of civilization itself.
Missive #676 Published 14 March 2026
In this taut thriller, a new kind of technology enables a person’s mind to coexist in another’s body. The two minds in one body are then called Combines, identifiable by their double names, mandala neck tattoos, and green clothing. A government-corporate enterprise, also called Combine, the process is marketed as a way of reducing the population and reversing climate change, but people who don’t merge are punished through government mandates: Most are forced from their homes into government apartment buildings, menstrual cycles are monitored, prison inmates are involuntarily merged, Oxford will only accept Combines. Of course, if you have the money, you can remain as you are.
Missive #674 Published 9 March 2026
As the Derlavaian War rages into its last and greatest battles, allied nations maneuver for positions against each other in a postwar world. But before that time can come, the forces of Algarve, Unkerlant, and their allies must clash a final time, countering army with army and battle magic with ever-more-powerful battle magic. In the midst of it all, the people the war has battered and reshaped must struggle to face their greatest individual challenges, as loves are shattered and found, terrible crimes avenged… and some journeys end forever. And the end of the war may not bring peace…