Many of you have bought the most interesting books, even a DVD, through our new partner, Powell’s, the large independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon.

Your anonymity is safe: We can’t see who buys which books, but we do see the titles. And we were so intrigued, we thought everyone would want to see some of the titles too:


Best of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog


It happens that Triumph is one of my favorite people, er dogs, er puppets. His completely obnoxious foray with Conan O’Brien into Quebec last year was so damn hilarious. The French Canadians hated him! Maybe all of Canada hates him!

I went to Triumph’s site a few months ago and signed up for his newsletter. It always arrives in my e-mail when I need a laugh! And here’s a bit from Triumph’s extensive bio at his site: “Music is a companion on the lonely road, where Triumph lives year-round, away from his wife Erma, his mistress, Ladyfluff, and his 284 illegitimate children. Triumph has toured worldwide, from Alaska to Morocco, and has acquired gonorrhea from Pekingese, Chihuahuas, Lhasa Apsos, and an Amazon howler monkey, among many others. ”

It is no surprise then, that his album encompasses a wide variety of musical styles, from the Caribbean calypso of “Underage Bichon,” to the traditional Irish drinking song “Lick Myself,” to the harder-edged anti-spaying diatribe, “Bob Barker,” Triumph’s venomous attack on the castration-happy quizmaster, howled with the aid of Jack Black.


Here’s another great selection by someone here at BooTrib that I hope I’ll read someday, although I hear it requires beefy biceps: Crossing the Rubicon: 9/11 and the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. The longtime progressives I know through ProgressiveTalk all rave about this book. They are extremely well-read people, but they learned much from Crossing the Rubicon, and discussed it at length on the list.


The next order. I must say that I found this order somewhat worrisome: Use of Weapons.

Who would order a book about the “Use of Weapons”? More about THAT book below. And just remember that these selections are anonymous. None of us will ever know who you are …

Okay, I’m not so worried now that I’ve read the synopsis Use of Weapons.



Synopsis:

Cheradenine is an ex-“special circumstance” agent who had been raised to eminence by a woman named Diziet. Skaffen-Amtskaw, the drone, had saved her life and it believes Cheradenine to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine intelligence can see the horrors in his past.


Okay. That’s cool. Whatever.


Luck to you, Cheradenine and Skaffen-Amtskaw. And anonymous buyer. 🙂


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NEXT: I think there’s someone among us who is having Agent Smart fantasies!



Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America


“The author has decided to remain anonymous because this was the only way she felt completely free to explore a woman’s secret life. As she writes in the afterword to the novel, “That doesn’t mean this is a memoir; it’s many things to me, fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and fact, a quilt pieced together not just from my own stories but those of my friends.”She was also inspired to embrace anonymity by the book that inspired her own, an anonymous and very daring Elizabethan manuscript entitled A Woman’s Worth..”


The author is anonymous. However, Powell’s dutiful computer has converted Anonymous to Michael Scheuer! (I’ll write Powell’s a note to tell them. i hope they’re not embarrassed … they’re so sweet and kind that way.)


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Here are a few more books I’ve noticed while I’ve been exploring Powell’s site:



Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington: The Brit Who Set Congress Straight about Iraq


That should be a fun one. It’s written by Mr. Galloway himself.


A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City
by Anonymous/bell

With shocking and vivid detail, the journal of a woman living through the Russian occupation of Berlin in 1945 tells of the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject and describes the common experience of millions.


Soon the Russians were everywhere; liquored-up Russian soldiers raped women indiscriminately. After being raped herself, Anonymous decided to ‘find a single wolf to keep away the pack.’ Thanks to a small series of Russian officers, she was better fed and better protected at night. Her story illustrates the horror war brings to the lives of women when the battles are waged near a home front (rather than a traditional battlefield). In retrospect, she advises women victimized by mass rape to talk to each other about it. Once the war was officially over, the real starvation began; by the time the author’s soldier boyfriend returned to Berlin, she was too hungry and hurt to deal with him. When the radio reported concentration camp horrors, she was pained but unable to quite take it in. The author, who died in 2001, has a fierce, uncompromising voice, and her book should become a classic of war literature. First published in 1954, it was probably too dark for postwar readers, German or Allied. Now, after witnessing Bosnia and Darfur, maybe we are finally ready. New translation includes previously untranslated portions.”


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Now, more about the great selection, Crossing the Rubicon:

Publisher Comments: on Crossing the Rubicon: 9/11 and the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil


The attacks of September 11, 2001, were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Crossing the Rubicon discovers and identifies key suspects-finding some of them in the highest echelons of American government-by showing how they acted in concert to guarantee that the attacks produced the desired result.


Crossing the Rubicon is unique not only for its case-breaking examination of 9/11, but for the breadth and depth of its world picture-an interdisciplinary analysis of petroleum, geopolitics, narcotraffic, intelligence and militarism-without which 9/11 cannot be understood.


The US manufacturing sector has been mostly replaced by speculation on financial data whose underlying economic reality is a dark secret. Hundreds of billions of dollars in laundered drug money flow through Wall Street each year from opium and coca fields maintained by CIA-sponsored warlords and US-backed covert paramilitary violence. America’s global dominance depends on a continually turning mill of guns, drugs, oil and money. Oil and natural gas-the fuels that make economic growth possible-are subsidized by American military force and foreign lending.


In reality, 9/11 and the resulting war on terror are parts of a massive authoritarian response to an emerging economic crisis of unprecedented scale. Peak Oil-the beginning of the end for our industrial civilization-is driving the C)lites of American power to implement unthinkably draconian measures of repression, warfare and population control. Crossing the Rubicon is more than a story. It is a map of the perilous terrain through which, together and alone, we are all now making our way.


Michael C. Ruppert is the publisher and editor of From the Wilderness, a newsletter read by more than 16,000 subscribers in 40 countries. A former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics investigator, he is widely known for his groundbreaking stories on US involvement in the drug trade, Peak Oil and 9/11.