Little Book Reviewed on Bookshine and Readbows

 

Available in many places.

A blast from back-in-the-day as book review blog Bookshine and Readbows passed judgement on my New Age satire, The Little Book of Big Enlightenment. Inside its electronic pages, gurus, marketers, and the author battle over the true meaning of the Eckhardt Tolle-like musings of visionary Lompoc Tollhaus. Or, as Bookshine and Readbows remarked:

"Don't expect to find any genuine enlightenment . . . but to instead be entertained by a rollicking riot of flim-flam, shicanery and bickery in-fighting . . . ."

Find the Little Book in most spots where fine ebooks are sold.

Promotions and Reviews and Book Sales, Oh, Goodness Me!!

 Coming Soon! You Have Been Warned!

Amazon

It's only fair. With the release of my book on perseverance, acceptance, and running a lot, the early launch of the paperback edition, and a busy August, the next two weeks will be a blizzard of promotional back-scratching, self back-patting, and old-fashioned look-at-me-ism. 

Deals are lined up and in the pipeline on a variety of fronts. I am obliged to promote; promote loudly. Then I will fade quietly away until its time to hawk the next book. That's why the stinking things don't sell very well. I reward myself with little vacations that stretch into considerable time blocks. 

In any case, the levee has been breached. The marketing flood waters surge. You will know of this book.

Book Review: Google Archipelago

Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom by Michael Rectenwald
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The Google Archipelago has emerged and will expand, effectively becoming conterminous with the full range of human activity, enveloping every social space where people may be found."

Having envisioned the future in this short, non-fiction work, retired academic Rectenwald believes technology—Big Tech—is fashioning a digital gulag similar in its zeal for conformity and repression as the brutal 20th Century Soviet model.

Big Tech is defined as mega-data services, media, cable, internet services, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence, bots and the apps that dot our phones like chicken pox. Given the homogenized political and social nature of Big Tech, the author describes a grim time ahead for those out of favor with their norms.

In the West, deplatforming, brigading, social shaming, ostracism are taking the place of work camps, firing squads and torture. (Though the current Chinese template of cyber control in the form of social scores backed by prison camps and forced organ harvesting seems an unappealing hybrid.)

There are a few sections where I lost the narrative thread, but the author's overall message of society's absorption into the Google blorg is not hard to believe and easily observable in action.

Readers interested in tech trajectories and their effect on freedom of speech, among other menaced freedoms, should find this a suitable companion.



View all my reviews

"Little Book" Review

A tip of the pointed hat to Lillyana Shadowlyn over at The Faerie Review for her kind words on The Little Book of Big Enlightenment.

"In this lighthearted fictional look at New Age products and marketing, Tollhaus and his co-author snark, snipe, and leak each other's embarrassing personal information into the pages of a book alerting readers about a fantastic new method for reaching total consciousness in less than five minutes."

Lillyana awarded my metaphysical fiction novella 5 Faeries, stating, "In these crazy times this book has been a welcome break from the norm."

Available on Amazon.

Smashwords.

And coming soon in authentic little book softcover format!

Fear the corporate creep of Big Spirit!