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 Book Review: I dove into “Compass and Blade” with some anticipation. I do love a rollicking swashbuckler-fantasy, and quite a few people were saying great things about it. Initially, I found the story quite captivating; an island culture of wreckers who lure unsuspecting ships onto the rocks so they can pillage the cargo, and a female protagonist who seems strangely more at home in the waves than on land. Then the lately deceased mother who has left deeply mysterious secrets behind. Ratchet up the tension with the arrest and imminent execution of our heroine’s father, giving an urgent and consequential problem to solve. Finally, add in the steamy shipwrecked love interest and pirates, and – hey presto – instant popcorn flick fun. The story spun out in a very enjoyable fashion until about mid-way through the book. Then, for some inexplicable reason, the whole narrative seemed to devolve into an endless series of excuses for our protagonist to have mixed simmering sexual feelings...

  Book Review:    This time around, I highlight the classic work by Herman & Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media”, new to the SSS Library collection. Being published in 1988 (with updates in 2002), one might imagine this work on use of the propaganda model of communication in western media to massage and manipulate the masses, to be outdated. On the contrary, while the medium of media has changed dramatically in the almost four decades since publication, the methods remain virtually the same. Herman and Chomsky assert that mass media companies… "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive   propaganda  function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and  self-censorship , and without overt coercion", by means of the  propaganda model  of communication. ”   Today’s volume and rush of internet content from independent creators comment...