Monday, June 25, 2012

Hold Your Applause! (But not for much longer)

I am hard at work on my next book, The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit, due out in print and digital from New Society Publishers next June. As you can probably imagine, financial collapse is turning out to be a bit of a doozy; I am saving it for the end. And so I decided to take a break from relentless weekly blogging, and instead to republish Hold Your Applause! in Kindle format. It's been out of print for a while now, but people keep asking me for copies, so here it is. In the introduction, it says:
...this book is not so much for you to read as it is for you to slap other people upside their fool heads with. In the coming years, you will no doubt run across countless people who will say to you things like “Nobody could have seen this coming!” or “Who could have ever imagined it would be like this?” or “Why wasn't anyone able to predict this?” That will be your cue to whip out this book, and… give it to them.

This, of course, points out a major downside of ebook readers: the little electronic devices are too fragile to be of use in hand-to-hand combat. And so you will need to hold your temper as well—just until The Five Stages comes out: I plan to make it weighty enough to thrash all cornucopian techno-triumphalist polyannishness (not to mention just plain old cluelessness) out of even the wooliest of heads.

6 comments:

Dispatch said...

I am officially humbled.

Peter Attwood said...

You'll remember Solzhenitsyn's remark that the armor-piercing shell to penetrate iron heads has not yet been invented. Still true, 40 years later. Woolly heads are pretty tough too.

BrandFeelsGood said...

If you are having trouble funding your Five Stages book you could try kickstarter.com for crowd funding.
All you need is a US bank account and SS number. People pledge money to fund your project, I would and I'm sure you could raise the funds easily - risk free to you.

DinkyTwist said...

Count me in too Dmitry - Me and my friends love your work - we will contribute!

dltrammel said...

LOL I used to have a nice heavy stainless steel clip board I would carry. Just the thing to re-start a thought process with a judicious application of blunt force trauma. Maybe I can get one cut down to tape to the back of a e-book reader.

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Anonymous said...

Dmitry,
You regularly write about the state of power infrastructure in US. What's your take on the recent storm, the resulting blackouts and the problems associated with the heatwave?

Looks like many places are going to be out of power for longer than a week, some of the power stations are actually tripping because of excess load due to the heat wave.