Book reviews written in 2008 by Brendan Tripp.
Titles covered in this volume are:
The Bell Curve
Richard J. Herrnstein & Charles Murray
The Lopsided Ape
Michael C. Corballis
Rewriting History
Dick Morris
Secrets of the Ancient Incas
Michael Peter Langevin
Teachings of Gurdjieff
C.S. Nott
The Unknowable Gurdjieff
Margaret Anderson
The First American
C.W. Ceram
Our Universe
S. Alan Stern
The Mind of God
Paul Davies
Wisdom of the Buddha
F. Max Müller
Why I Am Not A Christian
Bertrand Russell
Salome
Oscar Wilde
Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword
John Whiteside Parsons
Strange Angel
George Pendle
Intelligence, Race, and Genetics
Frank Miele
Because He Could
Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home
Rupert Sheldrake
Women Astronomers
Mabel Armstrong
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Nature of a Liberal College
Henry M. Wriston
Prometheus Bound
Aeschylus
About Faces
Terry Landau
The Meaning of Masonry
W.L. Wilmshurst
The Celts
Frank Delany
When Character Was King
Peggy Noonan
2012
Mark Borax
Rosslyn
Tim Wallace-Murphy & Marilyn Hopkins
Stonehenge
Julian Richards
The Age of Reason
Thomas Paine
High Crimes and Misdemeanors
Ann Coulter
Ellis Island
Pamela Reeves
Old Path White Clouds
Thich Nhat Hanh
A History of the Arab Peoples
Albert Hourani
The Mummy
Joyce Tyldesley
Wine For Dummies
Ed McCarthy & Mary Ewing-Mulligan
A Chronicle History of Forts and Fortresses
Martin Brice
Blake
Peter Ackroyd
Our Visit To Israel
Emmanuel Dehan
Emotional Intelligence
Daniel Goleman
Personal Mythology
David Feinstein & Stanley Krippner
What Would Buddha Do?
Franz Metcalf
The Cerebral Symphony
William H. Calvin
Art Is a Way of Knowing
Pat B. Allen
The Four Agreements Companion Book
Don Miguel Ruiz & Janet Mills
The Gurdjieff Work
Kathleen Riordan Speeth
Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow
Marsha Sinetar
Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain
Dr. Elio Frattaroli
American Indian Stories
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin / Zitkala-Sa
About Time
Paul Davies
The Art of Leadership
J. Donald Walters
The Secret Services Handbook
Michael Bradley
Yucatan Before and After the Conquest
Friar Diego de Landa
Kabbalah
Perle Epstein
Killing The Buddha
Jeff Sharlet & Peter Manseau
Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain
Dr. Euan W. MacKie
Mystery of the Nile
Richard Bangs & Pasquale Scaturro
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
William Blake
The Revolution
Ron Paul
Beyond Stonehenge
Gerald S. Hawkins
1066: The Year of the Conquest
David Howarth
Return from Death
Margot Grey
Comic Insights
Franklyn Ajaye
The Way Things Ought to Be
Rush Limbaugh
Decoding the Universe
Charles Seife
Chicago Poems
Carl Sandburg
The Book Of Lies
Aleister Crowley
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Douglas Adams
Jump Start Your Brain
Doug Hall
About the Author: Brendan Tripp began writing poetry in high school, continued into college, and expanded his writing in his years as a P.R. Executive and Publisher. He eventually settled into a pattern of writing 250 poems per year, and continued doing so for a dozen or so years in the 80's and 90's. Every year he'd produce a comb-bound collection of all of that year's output, and this new series of releases is replicating those collections, but in perfect-bound paperback editions. His better-known chapbooks were put out every couple of years, and were essentially "best of" collections featuring 10% of the 500 poems composed during a particular 2-year span. Eventually these will likely be pulled together into one volume and re-issued here as well. Brendan has been very active on-line from the very early years of the Web, and has published a good deal of his poetry on his blog, which he began in 2000. This, from time to time, included reading audios of various poems. Due to the large number of pieces involved, this has never been been systematically addressed, but that is an element that is being considered for future development, possibly through a Blog Talk Radio channel, or via YouTube videos. As is evident from even a cursory reading of Tripp's poetry, most of this is dark, brooding, anguished, and fraught with despair. Eventually the process of giving these sorts of inner states a physical form began to take a toll, creating something of a neuro-linguistic feedback loop of increasing morbidity, and around 2004 he took the dramatic step of no longer writing poetry on a regular basis. After having composed so much for so long, this came as quite a shock to Tripp's system, and the various publishing projects that he had in the works (including a web site with three decades' worth of poems) fell by the wayside. It was only in the past year, following his being hired to consult on a book project, that the idea of using one of the now easily-accessible on-demand publishing services (Amazon's "Create Space") came up, and he has begun the major process of developing new editions of these annual collections. While Brendan Tripp has no plans to resume writing poetry, he is quite interested in getting his "life's work" out there, both in print, and eventually in e-books and other media. Tripp lives in Chicago where he is a consulting Marketing Communications pro, and freelance writer. He can be found all over the Internet as "BTRIPP" (except for where he's not).
