Hazel Henderson, coauthor of the Cosimo book The Power of Yin, has won a 2007 Nautilus Silver Book Award for her book Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy.

The Nautilus Book Awards were conceived to recognize and reward a group of world-changing books, and to celebrate how they contribute to positive social change, spiritual growth, conscious living, high-level wellness, and responsible leadership a prestigious book awards with silver and gold winners.

Cosimo congratulates Henderson on her award.

The Power of Yin is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

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The HBO miniseries John Adams set records on Sunday night when it won 13 Emmys, the most ever by a miniseries. Stars Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney won for best actor and best actress, among other awards.

Get the unHollywoodized story of the American Founding Father and the new nation’s second president in the two-volume biography John Adams, written by his son, John Quincy Adams. One of the most complete biographies ever written about an American president, this is a remarkable effort examining the life and career of the great Revolutionary leader.

Volume 1 covers Adams’s school days as well as his study and practice of law in pre-Revolutionary America. The Boston Massacre is discussed in great depth, along with Adams’s entrance into public life and his landmark term in the Congress of 1774 straight through to the advent of the Declaration of Independence.

Volume 2 covers Adams’s role in the negotiation and signing of the Treaty of Peace with Great Britain as well as his central task in the organization of the government of the newly emerging nation. Also included are Adams’s recollections of his election and service as first vice president to George Washington’s administration and those of his term as second president of the United States.

John Adams is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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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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Danny Schechter, author of the new Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, joined Jesse Jackson on Wall Street to highlight the subprime crisis:

See here for pictures from the event.

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

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

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Danny Schechter, author of the new Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, has checked in on the proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. And it ain’t pretty.

At NewsDissector, Schechter writes:

Is this what a State of Emergency feels like?

Make no mistake about: we have entered the era of a financial coup d’etat with the Treasury Department releasing a THREE PAGE document and then demanding $700 Billion dollars for a system “rescue” as a start and with unlimited and unchecked power. Welcome to another 9/11 with the Bush Administration in effect pre-empting the options of whoever becomes our next President with a measure likely to cost way over a $ trillion or more….

For months, we have been expecting an October Surprise, perhaps an attack on Iran. Instead what we are getting is a September surprise, and an attack on American taxpayers who are being told they/we will now bail out criminally irresponsible bankers, the folks that Franklin Delano Roosevelt once denounced as “BANKSTERS.”

The only thing missing are troops in the streets and, believe me, as I reported last week, that is coming. Troops are being shipped back from Iraq to be on standby for CIVIL UNREST. (The “authorities” don’t believe that the American people will take the strip mining of their lives without a fight. Surely more crime, and other dislocation is coming!)

More at Global Research.ca, where Schechter explains why “The Bush Administration’s Rescue Plan Will Not Work.”

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

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

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Looks like Amazon’s seemingly definitive Kindle e-reader is getting some company. Rumor has it that

On Monday, Netherlands-based iRex Technologies is slated to unveil the iRex Reader 1000, the first in a wave of e-reader devices that promise bigger screens and improved interfaces and functionality. And unlike Kindle or Sony’s Reader, this second generation of e-readers aims to bring innovative E-ink display technology to the more demanding, and possibly more lucrative, world of business.

The iRex Reader 1000 offers a 10.2-inch diagonal E-Inkscreen, far larger than Kindle’s 6-inch screen or even iRex’s own 8.1-inch diagonal iLiad, its last e-book model. That stretched display is designed to work with any file format, be it an e-book, a full-sized PDF, a Word document or HTML. Like earlier iRex devices, it sports a stylus and touch screen for taking notes and marking documents.

The iRex will run from $650 to $850. Ouch. That’s almost the price of a laptop. I think I’ll stick with my old-fashioned paper books for now.

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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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Galveston, Texas, is under mandatory evacuation today as massive Hurricane Ike barrels toward it. According to the Associated Press, “the National Weather Service warned residents of smaller structures on Galveston they could ‘face certain death’ if they ignored an order to evacuate.”

This has all happened before, on September 8, 1900, as detailed by newspaper journalist Nathan C. Green in his book Story of the Galveston Flood: Complete, Graphic, Authentic, available from Cosimo Books. In Chapter 1 he writes:

One of the most awful tragedies of modern times has visited Galveston. The city is in ruins, and the dead will number possibly 6,000. The wreck of Galveston was brought about by a tempest so terrible that no words can adequately describe its intensity, and by a flood which turned the city into a raging sea.

This compilation of news coverage and survivor stories was published almost immediately after the disaster, the turn-of-the-20th-century equivalent of current-events documentary. With a dispassionate eye but with a flair for finding the dramatic in the eyewitness accounts he relays, journalist Green gathers startling accounts of the death and ruin of the city, the national relief efforts that sprung up in the aftermath, and scientific assessment of the storm, and more. In the wake of the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and now the current threat to Galveston, this is a historical story with a fresh new relevance.

Story of the Galveston Flood: Complete, Graphic, Authentic 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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