Howard Bloom Reviews
The Genius of the Beast by Howard Bloom Is global capitalism on its last legs? Is the era of American leadership over? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does American civilization deserve to survive? These are the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009. A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism.
Howard Bloom: Soul In the Machine: Reinventing Capitalism--A Quick Re-vision of Western History
Global Brain The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century - Howard Bloom
Howard Bloom’s Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In The Machine shares something in common with his two previous critically-acclaimed books, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century. Reinventing Capitalism is what author Leon Uris called, “An act of astonishing intellectual courage." It is what leading business author Dr. Alexander Elder called, “A brilliant, thrilling book on the human condition.” It is what Gear Magazine Publisher Bob Guccione, Jr called, “an epoch-making and culture-defining treatise.” It is what self-help author Kevin Hogan called, “The Bible…a monumental work…that has instant application in the world.” And it’s what reviewer Michael B. Leach called “nothing less than a reinterpretation of the history of civilization.” Reinventing Capitalism offers a perceptual lens with which to view our culture and our values in new ways.
Global Brain: the Evolution of Mass Mind
The Lucifer Principle was a shock to those who believe that the greed of genes turns us into selfish loners, but Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century will come as an even bigger surprise. It presents evidence that this cosmos has been "social" since its first microseconds of existence, and that the first communal intelligence appeared among colonies of cyanobacteria 3.5 billion years ago. These bacteria pioneered the first worldwide research and development system eons before the emergence of women and men.
Global Brain follows the evolution of individual and mass minds from the multi-trillion member collaborations among our bacterial ancestors to the ten-thousand-strong mass marches and claw-to-claw showdowns of ancient spiny lobsters. It demonstrates how the first birds of the Jurassic age gathered in flocks and how their descendants were so tightly data-linked that cultural fads could spread hundreds of miles through the avian grapevine in a matter of mere days.
Underpinning Global Brain's rewrite of the evolutionary saga is a new approach to social theory, one derived not from abstract principles but from observation of the real thing--living communities of all kinds--including the most fascinating of the lot: societies of human minds. Global Brain probes the rise of Stone Age cities thousands of years before Ur and Babylon, and explores how these little-known urban centers changed the very nature of human identity. It shows how transnational subcultures arose in Greece a hundred years before the glory days of Athens, and how these havens for unconventional men and women transformed the mechanism of collective creativity. Then Global Brain reveals how the sometimes brutal political stances promoted by Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato still struggle for dominance at the turn of the 21st century.
Global Brain presents evidence that the shared intelligence of humankind is part of a larger planetary mind, one that combines the learning of microbes, waterfowl, predatory cats, idealists, militants, religionists, and scientists. The book predicts that the great world war of the 21st century will take place between the collective intelligence of humanity and that of a world wide web 96 trillion generations old and billions of years wise-the global internet between microbial societies. Finally, Global Brain anticipates some of the creative paths this planet's team of battlers and borrowers may take during the next hundred and fifty years.
Teachers | Interdisciplinary Science
REVIEWS
Global
Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
is the follow-up to Howard Bloom's first book, The Lucifer Principle:
a scientific expedition into the forces of history, which The Washington
Post called "a mesmerizing mirror of the human condition," and
which critic Mark Graham of Denver's Rocky Mountain Post praised as "a
philosophical look at the history of our species, which alternated between
fascinating and frightening. Reading it was like reading Dean Koontz or
Stephen King: I couldn't put it down."
Global
Brain is"a
soaring song of songs about the amorous origins of the world, and its
almost medieval urge to copulate."
"With this bold vision of evolution and human behavior, Bloom has
raced ahead to explore possibilities that the timid scientific herd may
well end up following."
Don Edward Beck, Ph.D.
"Howard Bloom's work is simply brilliant and there is nothing else
like it, anywhere--we've looked, as have our colleagues. Global Brain
is powerful, provocative, and mind-blowing."