How the World Works (Real Story (Soft Skull Press))

How the World Works (Real Story (Soft Skull Press))
Noam Chomsky (Author), Arthur Naiman (Editor), David Barsamian (Contributor)
(21)

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Democracy

According to The New York Times, Noam Chomsky is Aarguably the most important intellectual alive.” But he isn’t easy to read . . . or at least he wasn’t until these books came along. Made up of intensively edited speeches and interviews, they offer something not found anywhere else: pure Chomsky, with every dazzling idea and penetrating insight intact, delivered in clear, accessible, reader-friendly prose.

Published as four short books in the famous Real Story seriesAWhat Uncle Sam Really Wants; The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many; Secrets, Lies and Democracy; and The Common GoodAthey’ve collectively sold almost 600,000 copies.

And they continue to sell year after year after year because Chomsky’s ideas become, if anything, more relevant as time goes by. For example, twenty years ago he pointed out that Ain 1970, about 90% of international capital was used for trade and long-term investmentAmore or less productive thingsAand 10% for speculation. By 1990, those figures had reversed.” As we know, speculation continued to increase exponentially. We’re paying the price now for not heeding him them.

• Rank: #14628 in Books
• Published on: 2011-09-us.html
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.11" h x .91" w x 5.51" l, .95 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Description #1 by OnlineBookPlace.com:

Joseph Guiteau is a working actor who moved to New York to escape a tragic family history in the Midwest. Wandering through a city transformed by the attacks of September 2001, he frequents gatherings of conspiracy groups, trying to make sense of world events and his own personal history. Looming over his life is a secret that threatens to undermine his new marriage to Del, a snake expert at a city park, whose work visa is the only thread keeping her from deportation back to her native Greece. The new marriage influences the lives of those around them: William, a dark and troubled actor whose sanity is fading as quickly as his career, leading him to perform increasingly desperate acts; Madi, a young entrepreneur who will have to face the moral complications of a business made successful by the outsourcing of American jobs to India; and her brother Raj, Del's former lover, a promising photographer whose work details the empty rooms of an increasingly alienated city. Christopher Bollen's first novel captures the atmosphere of anxiety and loss that exists in Manhattan. It is a story of the city itself, and the interconnected lives of those attempting to navigate both Manhattan and their own mortality.

Description #2 by Alibris:

Description #3 by Rakuten.com Shopping - Better World Books:

Lyrical, violent, and surprisingly passionate, Skels is an inventive yet realistic portrait of the urban underworld from a paramedic's point of view. The story is based on an unusual idea: What would happen if the ambulance world was permeated with the works of past authors, and the homeless patients (the "skels") carried the consciousness of the writers? What would a paramedic do if she met a great poet, dirty and covered with lice, and was granted the chance to save him - not from dying but from his own life? A funny, gritty urban thriller, Skels pits corrupt cops, bumbling firemen, drunken softball tournaments, and careening transvestites against this surreal literary environment, realistically portraying a New York City of 1979 rich with an ancient truth that is all but invisible from the outside. The characters within it must face brutality and illness, vengeance and despair, and find help in tenderness and the threads that connect them to the past.