Reviews for Prospering Putting the Business to Work for You and Your Family in 5 Basic Steps

The average rating for Prospering Putting the Business to Work for You and Your Family in 5 Basic Steps based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-25 00:00:00 Corky Barlegal From a longer review: Punk Productions is a series of essays by (Mr.) Stacy Thompson, whose areas of expertise can only be rewarded financially by the largesse of the American University system. Thompson's teaching interests are marxism, psychoanalysis, film studies, and utopian studies - a line that runs from dementia to delusion. This book is an American update of the equally masturbatory Subculture, The Meaning Of Style, by Dick Hebdige. Thompson manipulates and fabricates punk history in economic/political terms using the jargon of theories formulated for an era over 160 years ago - which in practice has consistently led to suffering, fascism and genocide. Unfinished Business is laughable but not funny, and it's a shame a mind as large as Mr. Thompson's couldn't be put to positive use, like solving crossword puzzles. Instead he practices educational pedophilia. A healthy portion of the book is unreadable if you're not familiar with marxist concepts, which are wordy, esoteric and self-referential in order to appear consequential. By necessity I skimmed through most of the marxist phraseology, which had all the allure of NAMBLA's rationalizations for child fricking. Buried in the book is a decent amount of accurate information on times and dates, so at least it has that, but the fun of the book is reading how he deliberately misrepresents certain scenes so they'll fit his narrative. The ones he covers are New York, California, Washington DC, Hardcore, first wave Straight Edge, Riot Grrrl, and Lookout's Pop-Punk. As a follower of the generally discredited field of psychoanalysis he also likes to pepper in stupidity from that branch of the talking cure. Most things in the book are dealt with in terms of "desire". He gets the 70s NY scene wrong, saying the CBGB's scene was a desire to resist commercial labels and financial gain. Of the Ramones, who thought their competition for the airwaves was the Bay City Rollers, Thompson writes "The first Ramones album and the cost of its production spoke to punk's desire to gain and democratize access to the means of production." Occam's Razor, that the simplest of two competing theories is usually correct, is mandatory for whacking through the weeds of this book. He intellectualizes things that don't require it, and then manipulates that into validations for his proselytizing. Thompson pretends punks are mindful, willing participants in the narrative of seizing the means of production, opposing capitalism and not creating commodities. Pure BS. The NY scene was all about getting signed to a major and selling as many units as will sell. Everybody knows that. The Ramones were given very little time and money to record a record that didn't need studio trickery and a lot of time to record. That's all that was. There's a certain level of intellectualism that's proportionate to a subject. Once crossed it's all nonsense and becomes less about the subject and more about the writer's agenda, which in Stacy Thompson's case is the underpinnings of recent history's most spectacular mass murders and shared misery. I'm no great intellect. I prefer the simple explanations of complex ideas. Hooray for smart people, but a beautiful mind is a terrible thing to waste on toilet droppings. Marxism is how smart people prove how dumb they are. Punk Productions only proves the thesis that the world's filled with over-educated idiots, many who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-09 00:00:00 Robert Keene The first (and still only) book about punk subculture that moves beyond just analyzing band lyrics, and instead analyzing its cultural products, economics, and primary behaviors. Essentially examining what punks do and not just what punks say, which any participant in this subculture should realize can be very different. In a sense, it loses a little bit of the psychic sense of punk (alienation, personal charismas, gang mentalities, furious personal creativity and sacrifice) but its analysis of the social activity and production, and its attempt to impose objective/empirical research rules, was very thought-provoking.