I found this note on Reddit and have been reading this excellent book online. I can’t recommend it enough to anyone wanting to learn about the origins of terrorism.
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Left my DoD Counterterrorism Analysis job, took on $87,932 in debt, and put my Harvard degree to use writing a book about how the social and economic inequalities created by the War on Drugs will be the most likely cause of terrorism. Had an agent for a bit but now it’s up online for free, AMA
So after enough time writing up reports that went directly into an electronic black hole I figured I was too young to feel like I was wasting my life stuck behind a desk. Now the most important thing I’ve ever written is a book all up on the intertubes totally for free.
Maybe I just took Fight Club a little too seriously.
But I decided to leave the DoD to write a colloquial and accessible book about terrorism, I’d studied Government while in college, getting Harvard’s equivalent of a minor in Arabic and taking as many classes about the Middle Eastern history and Islamic politics as I could – what’s happening now in the Middle East is pretty much exactly what I studied, what’ll happen when democracy finally comes along and sweeps across the region. So after doing the query letter thing I managed to land myself an agent who seemed pretty awesome. And then the literary industry began to collapse, and then the economy tanked. So we amicably parted ways and I set off on my own.
At that point I begin to seriously question my decision to leave my desk job and take on $87,932 of debt to try and get what I thought was an important message out there, and also be able to keep coaching high school sports year-round.
Coaching has been an invaluable way of getting in touch with exactly where our upcoming generation is at in terms of race relations and values – I’ve coached both welfare kids and some of the wealthiest and notoriously privileged private school kids in the country.
After being loosely affiliated with a couple social media companies, I decided to just go ahead and throw the entire thing up online where you can read it for free. If you want to get an idea of what it’s like, this post is a general overview of my take on terrorism, and this one gets into specifics about just how damaging the War on Drugs has been.
In the same way that you can go into a bookstore and browse as long as you’d like or listen to just about anything online totally for free, but to really take something with you, you have to pay for that convenience – if you’d like to keep reading offline you can buy an e-copy of the book for your Kindle or Nook.
All that said – ask me anything!!
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