Irregular Books

Read The Hero and the Outlaw as an introduction to the realm of strategy beyond the flip wisdom of market segmentation and focus groups, if you like. Just don’t believe the hype presented by the authors, who would like you to believe that the archetypes are as deep as marketing analysis can get.

If you want a one-sided piece of schlock that will offer a predictably rosy picture of religion and evangelism, The Faith of Billy Graham is for you. If you’re looking for something more sophisticated than the literary pretensions of Grit magazine, look elsewhere, oh spiritual seeker. This bitter, angry leader of corporate religion is not for you.

The Audubon Society has done as good a job as anyone could with such an abbreviated format. Limitations aside, this is a pretty thick little book, and it covers a huge number of fungal species, from the many-headed slime to the aromatic milky, from the big laughing gym to the dryad’s saddle. If you’re curious about a mysterious growth out by your back stoop, you’ve got a chance of finding it between the covers of this field guide, but then again, you’re just as likely not to.

A short summer reading list for Torture Awareness Month.

Intelligent Design ideas are motivated by the terror that God might not exist after all. This terror is reasonable if one has been raised to depend on the absolute truth of a single book such as the Bible. The trouble many Christians still have with evolution is that it shows that belief God and all the other supernatural characters of the Bible just isn’t necessary.

Marketing for Dummies, if that’s what you think of yourself, is suited exactly for you. If you’re not a dummy, you can do better.

Of all the articles in the book, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: The Challenge of Reading in a Reservation Classroom by Greg Sarris is the most interesting. This essay examines the difficulties of making reading a culturally significant activity through the description of an attempt to do so on the Kashaya Reservation in California.