Loren Coleman — author of Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, from Cosimo imprint Paraview, and Mysterious America: The Ultimate Guide to the Nation’s Weirdest Wonders, Strangest Spots, and Creepiest Creatures, from Paraview Pocket Books — was recently noted for his culture contributions to the city of Portland, Maine:

At last night’s Portland Phoenix annual “Best of Portland” Red Carpet VIP Dinner and Awards Party, the International Cryptozoology Museum won, in its first year of operation, as this year’s “Best of Portland” winner for “Best Museum.” In a night filled with surprises, where the awards to be announced were picked randomly out of a presentation box, the “Best Museum” award came first. I found myself having to break the ice by going up to receive my plaque at the start of the evening, not even knowing if an acceptance speech was part of what was expected. (They were not, thus making the event of scores of awards go by, thankfully, “quickly,” between 7 and 10 p.m.)

Incredibly, against five listed and previously nominated choices, minutes later, it was announced that I ran away with the write-in victory, as the 2010 “Best of Portland” award-winner for “Best Author.” The host, the Portland Phoenix managing editor, yelled out to the audience that I was the author of not 17 books, but 30 books. So much for my low profile in Portland for all these years, in this, my 50th year of cryptozoology!

Cosimo congratulates Coleman on his awards.

Cosimo books are available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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The Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, by Danny Schechter, is now a movie. In the hard-hitting Plunder: The Crime of Our Time:

Schechter… [t]he “News Dissector” explores how the financial crisis was built on a foundation of criminal activity uncovering the connection between the collapse of the housing market and the economic catastrophe that followed. To tell this story Schechter speaks with bankers involved in these activities, respected economists, insider experts, top journalists including Paul Krugman, and even a convicted white-collar criminal, Sam Antar, who blows the whistle on intentionally dishonest practices.

(Visit Schechter’s blog News Dissector for ongoing coverage of the financial crisis.)

Schechter discusses Plunder, and specifically how this issue is not a business story but a crime story:

About the film, the Wall Street Journal blog Deal Journal says:

[T]he movie promises to serve up some interesting footage: The film begins with protestors outside Morgan Stanley Chairman John Mack’s Connecticut house. Schecter also has interviews with former Bear Stearns bankers and one of the executives indicted in the Crazy Eddie accounting fraud case from the 1980s.

Schecter insists he is no Michael Moore. For one, Moore has backing from Hollywood and Schecter is on a shoe-string budget. Also, Schecter says he isn’t indicting capitalism, as Moore did in his most recent film. “It is the system we live under,’’ Schecter said. “The question is: is it working? No, it is not. Why? Because people are scamming the system.”

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Graydon Carter in Vanity Fair calls Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine “the work of our greatest financial journalist, at the top of his game… essential reading.” But Danny Schechter, author of the Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, begs to differ. At Media Channel, he writes:

Lewis has criticized those who criticize Goldman Sachs, according to Bloomberg, writing earlier, “Bashing Goldman Sachs is Simply a Game for Fools.”Which side is he on? I would guess, his side? On 60 Minutes, TV’s top newsmagazine, he was described as a former trader. Not according to Janet Takakoli who runs her own financial firm: “Imagine my surprise to see him billed as a trader on 60 Minutes, since he was actually a junior salesman,” she writes on Huffington Post, “Well-heeled male peacocks strutted the trading floor, and junior salesmen were girlie-men, mere eunuchs serving their pashas.”

She also notes that he was among the “experts” who downplayed the warnings about the very financial crisis that he has suddenly, thanks to validation from CBS and MSNBC, become THE expert on, charging, “he ridiculed their concern of a pending crisis due to the surge in derivatives demand and called it “this year’s case in point.” Then Michael showed how dangerous it is to be a brilliant writer with a poor command of facts and their true meaning.”

And:

Lewis, like many non-fiction novelists, prefers character-based story telling or “yarns” to more objective analytical investigation. The reason: it makes for better narratives, and bigger best sellers. It also gets interviewers laughing instead of crying. Why? Because there are only smart men doing things that turn out to be stupid, it makes us all feel superior to them even if they had the last laugh on the way to the bank. If no one is to blame, then everyone is to blame, etc..Sorry, “The Big Short” seems short—short of a serious consideration of what really drove the financial crisis and the reason that 82% of the American people recently said they want a crack down on Wall Street, not a chance to feel sorry for the “delusions” of its masters of the universe. They want a jail out—not a bailout.

Cosimo books are available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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When news of a mysterious creature captured in central China — allegedly an “Oriental Yeti,” or “abominable snowman” — began to spread through the Western news media, there was only one person for journalists to call on for comment: Cosimo author Loren Coleman, perhaps the most famous cryptozoologist in the world.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

“This is not a true yeti. This is more media madness,” says Loren Coleman, author of more than 30 books on mythical creatures, including “Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America” published by Simon and Schuster.Photos today show a four-legged, thick-tailed, hairless animal caught in Sichuan province, reports The Telegraph. The mystery beast is now being sent to scientists in Beijing for DNA testing.

“It looks a bit like a bear but it doesn’t have any fur and it has a tail like a kangaroo,” one of the Chinese hunters said. “It also does not sound like a bear – it has a voice more like a cat and it is calling all the time – perhaps it is looking for the rest of its kind or maybe it’s the last one?”

If it sounds like a cat, then it probably is a cat, says Mr. Coleman, who opened the International Cryptozoology Museum in November in downtown Portland, Maine. The museum features hair samples and some 150 foot casts credited to Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and the yeti.

More comments from Coleman can be found at AOL News, Discovery News, Metro, and Nu.nl.

Coleman’s cryptozoology books include Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, from Cosimo imprint Paraview, and Mysterious America: The Ultimate Guide to the Nation’s Weirdest Wonders, Strangest Spots, and Creepiest Creatures, from Paraview Pocket Books. Cosimo and Coleman have recently been bringing back into print in beautiful new editions older and harder-to-find classics in the field, as part of the Loren Coleman Presents series:

• The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould

• The Romance of Natural History by Philip Henry Gosse

• The Great Sea Serpent by A. C. Oudemans

• Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life by Ivan T. Sanderson

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Tom Croft, author of the Cosimo title Up From Wall Street: The Responsible Investment Alternative, discusses what constitutes a responsible investment alternative.”

Part 1:

Part 2:

For more on Croft’s insightful approach to investing, see videos The Future of Socially Responsible Investing: Part 1 and The Future of Socially Responsible Investing: Part 2, from Marlboro College Graduate School’s symposium on Socially Responsible Investing, held December 11, 2009. The moderator was Anders Ferguson of VERIS Wealth Partners, and the panelists were Peter Kinder, Senior Strategic Advisor for RiskMetrics Group and founding president of KLD Research and Analytics; Cary Krosinsky of Trucost; Terry Mollner of Stakeholders Capital and the Trusteeship Institute; and KC Burton of Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.

Up From Wall Street is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Darwin Gillett, author of the Cosimo book Noble Enterprise: The Commonsense Guide to Uplifting People and Profits asks, “Can an ‘Ordinary’ Business be NOBLE and Successful?” at his blog Notes on Noble Business. The answer, of course, is yes. From one case history:

IT’S ALL ABOUT PEOPLE: How can one build a Noble Enterprise out of a pizza company? Now that’s a concept! After all, the typical employee is a teenager trying to pick up some extra cash as he or she goes through high school – and usually moving on after a short time. What do they care? In fact, the typical turnover rate for pizza businesses is about 200% (that is, each job has to be filled three times a year), whereas turnover at Nick’s is about 20% (that is, only one out of every five jobs has to be filled each year!) – a remarkable stat, given that most of his employees are teenagers! Ninety-six percent of those hired stay at least a year.How in the world did/does he accomplish that? It’s a long story, sprinkled with innovative people-centered ways of hiring, training, rewarding and advancing people – and of giving them scope to do the job on their own. It’s also about growing people, so (even at a pizza place) he has found ways for people to develop themselves and their skills. And it’s about creating a sense of community, of oneness.

People outside the business can hardly believe the loyalty and excitement the staff has for the company and their role in it. You probably won’t be surprised that only one out of every twelve applicants gets hired by Nick’s. One 25-year old server reflected, “When I come here, I really don’t feel like I’m coming to work” (sic). She works only on the weekend and has a full-time job at an advertising agency during the week. “My boyfriend doesn’t understand it. I just like to be here.” Wouldn’t you do just about anything to have employees who feel that way about your company and their role in it?

Visit Notes on Noble Business for the full article.

Noble Enterprise is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Yasuhiko Genku Kimura, author of the Paraview Cosimo title The Book of Balance — a modern, visionary translation of the classic ancient text Tao Teh Ching — recently visited Brazil, and was inspired by the beauty of the landscape and his interaction with it to pen “The Soul of Nature, The Soul of Brazil: Meditations in the Heart of the Rainforest”:

To know the soul of nature is to tap-in to the illimitable source of creativity and to tune-in to the perennial celebration of plenitude. To know the soul of nature is to overcome and transcend any notion of scarcity. Yet, the notion of scarcity is a fundamental assumption that imprisons the mind and controls the action of humanity.

In reality, nature as a whole is abundant and knows no scarcity. Humanity, because of its highly evolved adaptive capability, explored and lived in every conceivable environment and location, overcoming any regional or seasonal scarcity with its creativity and ingenuity. Even if the outer natural resources may be locally limited or scare, the inner human resourcefulness is non-locally unlimited and plenteous. The abundance of nature thus becomes transformed to the ampleness of the human resourcefulness—i.e., intelligence, creativity, imagination, and ingenuity.

The full text is available for download as a PDF.

Cosimo books are available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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The new Union Plus Book Club, a project of the AFL-CIO “that will delve into the latest publications by leading experts on vital working family and workplace issues,” has announced its first selection: Cosimo’s Up From Wall Street: The Responsible Investment Alternative, by Thomas Croft. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who supplied the foreword for Up From Wall Street, named the book the club’s first main selection for matching its goal of “creat[ing] labor movement dialogue about current issues and… inspir’ing] thought-provoking conversations within our union community.”

Author Croft will be speaking at the Sustainable Opportunities Summit in Denver in March. On Wednesday, March 3, Croft will appear on the panel “Financing Sustainability: Is Wall Street Buying the Opportunity?” Please see the Summit’s site for more information, including schedules and how to register.

Up From Wall Street is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Hazel Henderson, coauthor of the Cosimo book The Power of Yin and a longtime advocate for global financial reform, has written an editorial for CSRwire, which covers corporate social responsibility and sustainability, framing the Supreme Court’s decision to treat corporations as “persons” not as a debacle for democracy but as an opportunity for corporate social responsibility. From her editorial:

Including unions in the new Court ruling is a red herring since unions represent real people while corporations are chartered to delver profits to shareholders. Key proposals [for fighting the SCOTUS decision] can include: tightening corporate governance through regulatory agencies, particularly the SEC, so that corporations must get prior approval from their shareholders for such new political financing while enforcing immediate public disclosure of such funds and recipients.

The full editorial is available at CSRwire.

Also: see economist Dean Baker’s “simple route around the Supreme Court’s ruling” at truthout, and the video interview, at Democracy Now!, with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose new film Casino Jack and the United States of Money is debuting at Sundance this month.

The Power of Yin is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

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Danny Schechter, author of the Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, appeared yesterday on the English-language Net news channel Russia Today to discuss the U.S.’s response to the earthquake in Haiti:

Schechter — always a vocal voice in progressive activism — now appears weekly on Progressive Radio Network with his News Dissector radio show.

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