Look, Bill, either read the damn book or shut up about it. Don't get me wrong; I'm pretty much with you issue-wise, and the book reeks like a pile of bollocks from a distance, but that's no way to win an argument. If John says, "Here's an interesting book that taught me a lot of things, and you should read it, too" - and you reply, "I'm not gonna read your book because the back cover already told me that it was written to unilaterally pamper your point of view which I don't agree with," you can only lose the argument. The proper way to win it would be to read the book and then pick it apart on this newsgroup, all of which would be extremely boring and off-topic to boot. John sounds like a nice enough fellow; if you ever get to S.F. I'm sure he'd be happy to discuss both politics and electronics with you over a couple (or case) of beers.
So let it lie. You cited tons more books (among them some of S. J. Gould's, which I like a lot but find hard to ingest) than any other "contestant" and I'm sure nobody has read a single line of them. Resolving complicated issues of any kind takes both time and dedication, and in an electronics forum you can't expect people to devote either on politics.
Of course going to a politics newsgroup doesn't help either. I once looked into one, but found myself confronted with a high-frequency barrage of postings running to hundreds and thousands of lines, so I decided that I could put up with a few lines of off-topic abuse and ill-quoted, never-to-be-read books much better than with real politics.
robert