Praise for Danny Schechter’s book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, new from Cosimo, is pouring from advocates, activists, economists, and political analysts.

John Taylor, President & CEO, National Coalition on Community investment (NCRC), the nation’s leading housing group fighting foreclosures:

Plunder, like Schechter’s [film] IN DEBT WE TRUST, speaks truth to power about the infectious greed and malfeasance of the financial services sector that hoodwinked our nation and pushed millions of American families into foreclosure and catastrophe.

Professor Robert Manning, author of Credit Card Nation and consumer credit expert:

(Schechter) deserves our appreciation for identifying yet another crucially important issue that has been blissfully ignored by the mainstream media and our national leaders – the consumer debt time bomb.

Max Fraad Wolff, economist:

Schechter has done in Plunder what countless media outlets have done and watchdogs agencies have failed to do. His work offers an exciting guide to how “it” broke, where “it” broke and why.

And this review is just in from Stephen Lendman at Global Research.ca:

Schechter’s book is timely, important, and frightening. He does a masterful job deconstructing a complicated subject. One covered up in the mainstream. Its dark side papered over suppressed.

Schechter explains it fully and clearly for lay readers to understand. It’s essential they do it because it touches everyone. No one knows how bad it may get, but the current crisis has legs. The worst of it may be ahead, and before it ends millions may feel it painfully. “Plunder” provides ammunition. A blueprint of what’s unfolding. Explaining that government help won’t be forthcoming, so we’re responsible for making the best of a very bad situation.

Read the introduction to Plunder here. (Alert: PDF.)

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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The news this week got worse by the day… by the hour, even. First broker Lehman Brothers failed and Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America:

Then the Fed essentially nationalized megainsurer AIG to the tune of $85 billion in taxpayer dough, in exchange for a nearly 80-percent share of the company.

And then the U.S. government decided it needed to step into the subprime crisis and assume $700 billion in bad mortgage debt, nationalizing the loss on the risk that private investors had taken:

The final details of that plan has yet to be worked out, but one thing is clear: We are living in a Plundered America.

In Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, the followup to his 2007 documentary In Debt We Trust — which was the first to expose Wall Street’s connection to subprime loans and predicted the economic crisis that is upon us — investigative reporter Danny Schechter explains how investment bankers turned mortgages, many given to the poorest Americans, into securities that were sold worldwide. Billions were made by blue chip firms, real estate brokers, and middlemen before more than three million families faced foreclosure, banks failed and a round of bailouts began. This scandal has rippled around the world putting the global economy at risk and leading some experts to predict a possible depression.

Plunder is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how this crisis could happen. This book:

● shows how debt has restructured our economy and put Americans under a burden that many will never crawl out of.

● identifies some of the profiteers and calls for an investigation of those behind this shrewdly engineered subprime scheme.

● indicts the regulators who enabled the crisis and the media that missed it.

Read the book’s introduction here. (Alert: PDF.)

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Cosimo is proud to announce the paperback publication of Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal by Danny Schechter.

Read the book’s introduction here. (Alert: PDF.)

With the takeover by the U.S. government of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over this past weekend (which Schechter discussed on his blog, News Dissector, yesterday), the seriousness of the financial and credit crisis is confirmed… as is the timeliness of Plunder.

How did the American economy go from boom to gloom in less than a year with markets melting down, banks writing off billions with regulators standing by or slashing interest rates and spurring unchecked inflation?

“This didn’t just happen in the course of a usual business cycle,” insists investigative journalist and media analyst Schechter. In Plunder he offers an in-depth investigation into the decline of the economy that’s causing millions to lose jobs and face foreclosures and across-the-board price hikes.

“You wouldn’t know it by relying on our media, but the subprime scandal masks massing looting by Wall Street firms using carefully calculated predatory lending schemes enabled by regulators who don’t regulate and a media that looked the other way. We have lost trillions and dislocated millions with no relief in sight. Every American is paying for the greed of our financiers in the grocery store, gas pump and unemployment line. Bank robberies are not new — but banks doing the robbing is.”

Schechter is uniquely qualified to tell this story. Schechter, a.k.a “The News Dissector” spent decades as a truth teller in the media with leading media companies, and as an independent filmmaker with award-winning independent company Globalvision. A graduate of Cornell and the London School of Economics, Schechter was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard,, and a multiple Emmy Award winner at ABC News , where he was among the first  to cover the S&L crisis. He has written on the economic crisis for Nieman Reports, Editor & Publisher, The Nation, The Huffington Post, and other websites including Mediachannel.org, the media issues network he edits.

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Cosimo author Loren Coleman will speak at Scarefest in Lexington, Kentucky, on Friday and Saturday, September 12th and 13th — tickets are available at the door — and at Mass Monster Mash in Boston on Saturday, October 18th; tickets are selling out fast and seating is limited.

The Book of Werewolves, by Sabine Baring-Gould, is the latest volume in Cosimo’s Loren Coleman Presents series of classic cryptozoology books. This 1865 work, published here in a beautiful replica edition complete with the original illustrations, was the first serious academic study of the shape-shifters of mythological lore. Says Coleman in his new introduction:

This work is the most frequently cited early study of lycanthropy and is regarded by most scholars as the foundation work in the field. The Book of Werewolves was so visionary that it foresaw that future discussions within werewolf studies would necessarily travel down many side paths. Indeed, midway through The Book of Werewolves, Baring-Gould treks into the shadowy world of crimes vaguely connected to werewolves, including serial murders, grave desecration, and cannibalism.

The Book of Werewolves is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

UPDATE: Coleman will also appear at the Museum of Science in Boston on Wednesday, October 29, at 7pm to deliver a talk entitled “Bigfoot, Sea Serpents, and Cryptozoology.” The program is free and seating begins at 5:45 for this limited but open-to-the public event. Coleman will be signing books afterwards.

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Investigative Journalist Danny Schechter Investigates “Our Economic Calamity”

Blames Loss of Trillions on Greed on Wall Street, Regulatory and Media Failures

(more to come!)

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Cosimo is proud to announce the publication of a new, updated edition of Spiritual Places In and Around New York City, by Emily Squires and Len Belzer.

Even in the most hectic, most busy, most never-sleeping city in the world, comfort for the heart, mind, and soul is only a step away. And here’s your quick-and-easy guide to finding it. Spiritual Places In and Around New York City is your roadmap to the myriad spaces and places around the boroughs that soothe the psyche and gladden the spirit (as well as a few extraordinarily peaceful destinations worth venturing over the city line for).

From restful gardens to quiet galleries to restaurants that feed both our corporeal and incorporeal bodies, and more, Emily Squires and Len Belzer share those locations — some almost secret, others surprisingly public — that help them maintain their sanity amid the frenetic pace of the city. In brief sketches of these spiritual respites, they reveal the insights they’ve come to while visiting each, and convey a palpable sense of the wise and serene essence each imparts upon us.

Newly updated, with even more calming locales for you to explore and enjoy, this is a must-have for harried New Yorkers and curious visitors alike.

Click here to buy at Amazon.

(Technorati tags: Spiritual Places In and Around New York City, Emily Squires, Len Belzer)

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On Halloween night, Cosimo is proud to announce the publication of the first two books in Cosimo’s new series Loren Coleman Presents, classic works of cryptozoology in beautiful new editions with new introductions by Loren Coleman, one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists.

The Romance of Natural History, by British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, was a bestseller in its day. First published in 1860, this is a charming, passionate around-the-world journey through nature wild, serene, and mysterious, from a night-attack of wolves in Mongolia and nearly fatal combat with a kangaroo to comic scenes with “the Elephant” and an examination of a supposed sea-serpent.

“In the annals of cryptozoology,” says Coleman, “Gosse is credited as one of the grandfathers of the discipline… In this book, one finds his records of the sea serpent, giant snakes, African unicorn, South America ape, and Ceylonese devil-bird, reflecting this early interest in romantic zoology, the precursor of cryptozoology.” This new edition is complete with the original elegant illustrations.

The Great Sea Serpent, from pioneering cyptozoologist Antoon Cornelis Oudemans, is the legendary 1892 survey of the reports of monsters of the sea — it was the first of its kind, and had previously been difficult to find in print. Gathering sightings from around the globe and across the centuries, Oudemans eliminates the obvious hoaxes or honest mistakes and then, from dozens of legitimate sighting, draws conclusions about sea-serpent physiology, geographic distribution, and more. This astonishing book “still influences thoughts and theories about the great unknowns in the oceans,” according to Coleman.

Click here to buy The Romance of Natural History at Amazon; click here to buy The Great Sea Serpent at Amazon.

(Technorati tags: Loren Coleman, Romance of Natural History, Great Sea Serpent)

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Out-of-control wildfires, racing through bone-dry plantlife, are devouring Southern California. Lingering drought is devastating the southeastern U.S. and southern Australia. Global warming isn’t merely a future danger to the world’s supply of fresh water — the threat is already manifest today. In the new Cosimo book Water: The Blood of the Earth: Exploring Sustainable Water Management for the New Millennium, Allerd Stikker — chairman and founder of the Ecological Management Foundation — discusses present and upcoming options for ensuring the supply of clean water even as demand increases around the planet. He also explores the human relationship with water and the spiritual meanings we ascribe to it.

Praise for Water: The Blood of the Earth, from Charles Louis de Maudhuy, advisor to the chairman of Veolia Water:

Allerd Stikker has always reminded me of Alexis de Tocqueville, who would have chosen to study the problem surrounding water rather than the American democracy. He has the same insatiable curiosity, the same energy, same passion, same ease in mixing analysis with intuition, the capacity to draw together different cultures, the same capacity to listen and to dialogue with those who reason from different starting blocks. Water: The Blood of the Earth is the outcome of reflection and action of a cosmopolitan who has remained loyal to his native land, mixing some European thinking of the Age of Enlightenment with some futuristic viewpoints.

And from Antony Burgmans, former chairman of Unilever:

Lack of access to clean and sufficient water in many parts of the world, especially in Asia and Africa, will be a major issue in the coming decades. This book presents an overall view on the diversity of problems and solutions, based on the author’s involvement in water-related projects. Over the course of the years I have followed some of these projects with interest; they inspire us to take concrete actions.

Water: The Blood of the Earth is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

(Technorati tags: Water The Blood of the Earth, Allerd Stikker, environmental issues, global warming, desalination, drought)

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“Self-help” may be one of the most popular book genres today, with bookstore shelves overloaded with myriad volumes of advice for fixing everything that worries, angers, or frustrates us. But here is a new approach to the age-old desire to solve our personal problems. Instead of taking advice from a stranger, from an author who doesn’t know us, here, in The Self-Inquiry Process: Using Powerful Questions to Awaken Awareness, by integral psychotherapist and energy healer Linda Brierty, new from Cosimo, we learn how to get to know ourselves — and so help ourselves — better than we ever have before.

The Self-Inquiry Process is experiential in nature. With its guidance, you will embark on a process of introspection that will increase your self-awareness and bring your unconscious into consciousness. While other “self-help” books claim to have the answers, this ones asks the questions. It introduces a unique framework with which to understand yourself, and goes on to ask direct questions, some quite challenging, some provocative, others simple and to the point. The questions reveal the sources of suffering that can hinder our everyday experience. Other questions point the way to fulfillment and joy. Each question in the book can take you deeper into relationship with your own Self, and closer to the Self-love that makes so many things possible, including loving others and the world.

The Self-Inquiry Process is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

(Technorati tags: Self Inquiry Process, Linda Brierty, self-help, self-analysis)

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Dreams can inspire inventions and inspire our waking lives. They worry us and scare us. Some people seek to intensify their dreams, while other discover — inadvertantly — that intense dreams can be prompted by the most unlikely of situations. We all wonder about our dreams and how to interpret them in a way that’s meaningful to us.

And now there’s an indispensable new guide to learning how to pay attention to our dreams and really hear what they are telling us: A Dream Come True: Simple Techniques for Dream Interpretation and Precognitive Dream Recognition, by David L. Kahn, brand new from Cosimo.

Every night when you fall sleep, you have the opportunity to gain new insights into your life, your work, and your relationships through your dreams. Here, in this friendly, down-to-earth guide to interpreting and even guiding your nighttime reveries, discover:

• how emotions are the building blocks of your dreams
• the strength to embrace the fears your dreams reveal
• training your dream habits to mimic your waking habits
• the particular power of lucid dreams
• important differences between long and short dreams
• appreciating color, music, and visual metaphors in dreams
• tapping into your extrasensory perception via dreams
• interpreting precognitive dreams
• and much more.

A sample of Kahn’s friendly style:

If you find yourself having dreams about being chased or fighting something, make a conscious decision next time to stop running and stop fighting. Turn around and face whatever “it” is. This sounds hard to do. How can you love some hideous-looking creature that you perceive is trying to hurt you? You must remember that this is merely a physical representation of your fears and anxieties. Do not fear these dreams. They are opportunities to heal yourself, and to rid yourself of harmful habits. Show your monster love.

Eschewing the hard-and-fast deterministic approach of traditional “dream dictionaries,” while never denying the power of cultural symbols that influence us all, professional dreamer David L. Kahn shows you how to listen to your subconscious and gives you the tools you need to determine what your unique dreams mean to you.

Royalties from the sale of this book benefit The Aid for Traumatized Children Project.

A Dream Come True is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

(Technorati tags: Dream Come True, David L Kahn, dream analysis, dream interpretation)

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