Books about Useless from Amazon.com

“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?

Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.

Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.

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Price: $16.15 [Notify me when price goes down.]

You: The Owner’s Manual meets The Book of Useless Information in this fun and quirky guide to little known facts about the human body.

This delightful book is full of random and, at times, scatological facts about the human anatomy Broken down by the systems of the body, it answers questions you may be too embarrassed to ask or even think about, such as:

- Do bugs live in your eyelashes?
- What does human flesh taste like?
- Can you really catch a cold by standing in the rain?
- How do astronauts poo in space?
- What foods can cure a hangover?
- Why is yawning contagious?
- Is eating boogers bad for you?

This oddball yet erudite book is full of fascinating factoids that those of us in search of guilty pleasures (or gross thrills!) will delight in..
Price: $6.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

At twenty-two, Alan Corey left his mom’s basement in Atlanta and moved to New York City with one goal in mind: to become a millionaire by the time he was thirty. His parents and friends laughed, but six years later they were all celebrating his prosperous accomplishment–at a bar Corey owned in one of Brooklyn’s hippest neighborhoods.

No, Corey didn’t climb the corporate ladder to build his fortune. In fact, he worked the same entry-level 9-to-5 job for six years straight. But by pinching his pennies and making sound investments, he watched a pittance blossom into a seven-digit bank account. In A Million Bucks by 30, Corey recounts his rags-to-riches journey and shares his secrets to success.

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE THIS BOOK UNLESS YOU ARE PREPARED TO BECOME FILTHY RICH.

“What a steal . . . For any entrepreneur the advice  in these pages is worth more than a million bucks.”
–Barbara Corcoran, founder, The Corcoran Group

“This is the best personal finance book I’ve ever read. Part self-help, part brass-tacks money guide; Corey’s confessional tales of making it to the million dollar mark are as hilarious as they are helpful.”
–John Reynolds, writer, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.
Price: $7.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Bigger, better, and more useless than ever!

In their groundbreakingly useless book, The Book of Useless Information, the members of the Useless Information Society proved that knowledge doesn't have to be useful to be entertaining. Now they present a new collection of their most fascinating, hilarious, and wholly trivial findings. The Ultimate Book of Useless Information includes such "did you knows" as:

- Peanuts are one of the ingredients in dynamite
- The average person spends two weeks of their life kissing
- And giraffes have no vocal cords.
Price: $1.38 [Notify me when price goes down.]

If you've ever felt there was something holding you back in life, ruining your plans and stopping you from being who you want to be, you were right. The fact is, there is a single source of all your problems, stress, unhappiness and self-doubt It's called the reactive mind - the hidden part of your mind that stores all painful experiences and then uses them against you. Dianetics gets rid of the reactive mind. It's the only thing that does. With over 20,000,000 copies in dozens of languages, Dianetics has remained a bestseller for more than fifty years. Now used in more than 150 nations, Dianetics brings dramatic and permanent improvement to people all over the world.
Read Dianetics and discover:
* The real reason for unexplained pains, negative emotions and unhappy relationships in your life.
* Exactly what is destroying your belief in yourself and how Dianetics helps you get rid of it so you become more you;
* The precise technology that blows away the barriers in your life - forever.
Don't live with insecurity, negative thoughts and irrational behavior. Use Dianetics and get rid of your reactive mind.
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Price: $3.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Discover what all the other encyclopedias leave out

This is the superbly satisfying compendium of weird factoids too interesting to be contained in your average encyclopedia. Daring to cross-reference the un-cross-reference-able, to alphabetize what cannot be alphabetized, and to deliver the highest concentration of fun that can fit in one book's spine, this information is too useless to waste:

In Denmark, pigs go 'knor'; in Germany, horses go 'prrrh'; in ancient Greece, dogs went 'au au.' Italians sneeze 'ecci ecci.'

A teacher in Italy was disciplined in 1996 for passing students exam answers hidden in salami sandwiches.

In 1957 the U.S. air force completed a survey of the Atlantic Ocean but refused to divulge its width on the grounds that the information might be of military use to the Russians.

In Paris in 1740 a cow was hanged in public following its conviction for sorcery.
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Price: $7.74 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Thousands of things you didn't think you needed to know-and probably don't.

All you never needed to know, and couldn't be bothered to ask.

One person's useless information could prove invaluable to someone else. Then again, maybe not. But to The Useless Information Society, any fact that passes its gasp-inducing, "not-a-lot-of-people-know- that" test merits inclusion in this fascinating but ultimately useless book.

Did you know...
- That fish scales are used to make lipstick?
- Why organized crime accounts for ten percent of the United States's annual income?
- The name of the first CD pressed in the U.S.?
- The shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar?
- How much Elvis weighed at the time of his death?
- What the suits in a deck of cards represent?
- How many Quarter Pounders can be made from one cow?
- How interesting useless information can be?

The Book of Useless Information answers these teasers and will captivate readers with the joy of pursuing pointless knowledge..
Price: $0.82 [Notify me when price goes down.]