“The political and commercial morals of the United States,” observed Mark Twain, “are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.” Indeed, with that spirit in mind, GOOD GOLLY, IT’S GOVERNMENT FOLLY pokes fun at our system of government and politics through a poetic and mirthful lens. The potpourri of verses presented, patriotic or just plain satirical, entertains in a light-hearted manner the American history of government, the Presidency, our many scandalous events, Congress and Senators and Representatives, the often adversarial political parties, the Supreme Court, all sorts of other governmental offices, the always controversial mass media, political nicknames and traditions, and our memorialization of American history. Here is an excerpt from a selection lampooning the Presidency, entitled “TO IMPEACH OR NOT TO IMPEACH: THAT IS THE QUESTION”. “Impeachment is a tumultuous event for sure And thus it has not been a common thing, As it startles and jolts the country And forcefully rocks the West Wing. High crimes and misdemeanors, you ask? Why Donald Trump must have done them with every task! He misled the nation with bleach and refusing to mask, Only in disgrace and infamy will the 45th President bask.”

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

In 1974, when John Dominelli was twenty years old, he left his home in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, on what he originally thought would be a six-month “working holiday” in New Zealand. However, not long into his journey, feeling the seductive pull of the vast and mysterious world, what started as a planned sojourn eventually turned into an epic three-year spiritual odyssey, taking him from New Zealand to Australia, Asia, India, Europe, and many points between. John’s journey was interrupted and enriched by a psycho-emotional “meltdown,” two serious illnesses, a powerful psychedelic interlude with psilocybin mushrooms, and a mystical encounter with Nisargadatta Maharaj, the now well-known sage from Bombay. An epic coming-of-age memoir that is part love letter to a bygone age and part inspirational text, stirring a desire in readers to seek out a life less ordinary.

In the spirit of Dr. Strangelove and The Atomic Café, a blackly sardonic people’s history of atomic blunders and near-misses revealing the hushed-up and forgotten episodes in which the great powers gambled with catastrophe Rudolph Herzog, the acclaimed author of Dead Funny, presents a devastating account of history’s most irresponsible uses of nuclear technology. From the rarely-discussed nightmare of “Broken Arrows” (40 nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War) to “Operation Plowshare” (a proposal to use nuclear bombs for large engineering projects, such as a the construction of a second Panama Canal using 300 H-Bombs), Herzog focuses in on long-forgotten nuclear projects that nearly led to disaster. In an unprecedented people’s history, Herzog digs deep into archives, interviews nuclear scientists, and collects dozens of rare photos. He explores the “accidental” drop of a Nagasaki-type bomb on a train conductor’s home, the implanting of plutonium into patients’ hearts, and the invention of wild tactical nukes, including weapons designed to kill enemy astronauts. Told in a riveting narrative voice, Herzog—the son of filmmaker Werner Herzog—also draws on childhood memories of the final period of the Cold War in Germany, the country once seen as the nuclear battleground for NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries, and discusses evidence that Nazi scientists knew how to make atomic weaponry . . . and chose not to.

Samuel Steward (1909-93) was an English professor, a tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, a sexual adventurer who shared his considerable range of experiences with Alfred Kinsey, and a prolific writer of everything from scholarly articles to gay erotica (under the penname Phil Andros). Given this biography, he sounds like a most unlikely contributor to a trade magazine like the Illinois Dental Journal.