The full text of Pepe’s brilliant new book, GLOBALISTAN: HOW THE GLOBALIZED WORLD IS DISSOLVING INTO LIQUID WAR, is now available under a Creative Commons license in both PDF and html format (warning: about 6 MB). Individual chapters will be released over the next few days. Per the CC license, you are entirely welcome to read, republish, and remix the text in any way you see fit, so long as the uses are attributed, noncommercial, and shared.

I see some interesting similarities between Pepe Escobar and Peter Watts. Both are polymathic contrarians with a provocative message. And Escobar, like Watts, has written a complex, heavily researched, deeply insightful book whose message needs some extra help to get through the cluttered market.

In BLINDSIGHT, Watts argued that sentience is an evolutionary asterisk, too expensive, in the end, to sustain. In GLOBALISTAN, Escobar makes somewhat the same argument about the current version of globalization. GLOBALISTAN is a stunningly knowledgeable and articulate brief for “alterglobalization”, and the best alternative I have ever seen to the aggressive homogenising swarm behavior of which Thomas Friedman and so many others are so enamored.

Why doesn’t everyone release electronic versions of their books via a CC license? I don’t know. I think it’s the coming thing. If your book is a trifle, easily skimmed and forgotten, you might actually cannibalize some of your sales; but the risk of cannibalization by online reading seems remote with a complex 368-page paperback that is powerful enough to change minds and lives.

Tom Englehardt of the Nation and Tomdispatch.com says: “Pepe Escobar is always provocative, always surprises, and so I read his essays at Asia Times without fail.”

Les Blough of Axis of Logic: “splendid new book … an impressive analysis obviously stemming from exhaustive research…”

Skip Conover of Tsunami of Blood writes: “Tour de Force! That’s the only way to describe Pepe Escobar’s remarkable achievement with Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War. In page after page, Mr. Escobar demonstrates his remarkable erudition gained in a peripatetic career, spanning the caves of Tora Bora to the slums of Sao Paolo and Mumbai; from the halls of venality to the palaces of the gluttonously wealthy; from conversations with forgotten Pentagon warlords to raps with Brazilian gang lords.”

Wayne Madsen of WayneMadsenReport.com says: “Thanks to Pepe Escobar’s new book, GLOBALISTAN: HOW THE GLOBALIZED WORLD IS DISSOLVING INTO LIQUID WAR,
we can all better peer through the opaqueness of the “flat earth” of Lexuses and olive trees created by the globalist bureaucrats and multi-billionaires and which has been obscured by the corporate media. This book is a must read for those who want to keep ahead of this threatening “brave new world.”

John Judis of the New Republic says: “He is one of the most interesting–and as far I can tell, informed–journalists writing about the Middle East. He travels there, and seems to speak and read several of the languages… Escobar thinks that much of what passes for the war on terror is a war for energy. I think he is right about this.”