Cohen diverts from Tocqueville's original journey only by adding California, the new frontier and command center of the information age.
What struck Tocqueville most, back in 1831, was the "equality of conditions" among the Americans then. This, and "self-interest, properly understood" were Tocqueville's greatest impressions and formed the basis of his praise of the American way of life.

Cohen is an expert on Tocqueville and is well-versed in the great man's journals. As he makes his way across America he interviews a diverse sampling (in my opinion, a well sought-out cross-section of the have's and the have-not's) and compares these findings against the fulcrum of equality Tocqueville described.
What does Cohen find?
An ever-widening gap between the have's and the have-nots!
Things have changed. He finds that Tocqueville's work is full of unqualified conclusions and summary statements that do not possibly reflect the general populace of America in the last half century. Beyond being out dated and inaccurate when applied to modern times, it's questionable whether it was even all that accurate at the time it was originally written. By marginalizing his findings on blacks and Indians, Tocqueville trivialized them. By failing to qualify his conclusions he helped to perpetuate an idealized view of America that he never saw.
Tocqueville's findings are further skewed (says Cohen) because the people he interviewed were not a balanced group. Not an unbiased cross-section of "Americans" at the time. They were always successful, professional elite (privileged aristocrats of the time) always male, and always white.
Cohen wants to avoid a similar mistake this time around... and I applaud his riding of buses, to find the pulse of the common man/woman. Every indication seems to point toward a widening gap between the rich and the poor in America, and the author tells the story in an engaging, (humorous where appropriate) way. There is a section where he sends fictitious e-mails to Tocqueville and I just loved this section. The whole book is a gem, and no part lags.
By the way, it is just as NOT anti-American as it is NOT pro-Anything Else... it is just disturbingly truthful. Amazingly, in spite of the facts, it shows that the American spirit is alive and well... as I mentioned above, there is unquestioned disparity, but not despair-ity!
But perhaps the prevailing message of this book can be expressed by the guy right there in Chapter One, the chapter on New York. There was most assuredly a time when any American would have said that a million bucks would be enough to quit working forever. This guy in New York though, he says "Twenty million and I'll walk."
Twenty million!
That's how far we've progressed along the "wealth" continuum... some people honestly feel that they will need twenty million before they quit chasing the red, white and blue!
All aboard!

This book is quite insightful, especially for a Southeast Asian media professional like myself. I recommend this book to everyone, even to those who work in the upper regions of the power sturcture of the media conglomerates critiqued in the collection.

For starters, it is a wonderful overview of how the media economy is shifting all over the world. The US market is saturated, as the book said, and the rest of the world is ripe for picking, especially my country, the Philippines.

This book is a tool to launch our own media analysis of what's happenning in our own countries. And from an analysis, we launch a critique, and from a critique, we launch steps to face the situation.

This book, published by New Media, is invaluable. I first read about it in an issue of Utne Reader. I took down the title and hunted it down in Amazon. I found it, bought it, and consumed it. I loved it because it gave me useful insights to work with.

This is a book I will dog-ear in my attempts to understand what to do in my field, and how to start my own media conglomerate from scratch. I already have my ideas, which I hope aren't just soundbites in my head.

Daniel Cohen's book is based on an assumption that you know musical notation as far as you would learn it in the first few months of normal piano lessons. Apart from that, he starts at square one.

Daniel Cohen's book includes a CD. Even if you read music 100%, the inclusion of a CD is important. Blues rhythms are only approximated by musical notation, so you need to be able to *hear* them if you are going to play them right.

He starts from ground level - the is no assumption that you already know the chords for a 12-bar blues. Step-by-step exercises quickly get you playing simple but satisfyingly authentic sounding blues patterns.

Then he shows you a number of simple building blocks that can be put together to make your own blues solos. He goes on to cover turnarounds and endings - more blues building blocks.

The way Daniel Cohen presents his material all hangs together - for example he gives a demonstration of how the blues scale of the root note sounds fine when played over the three main chords of a blues tune. As soon as you have heard this and learned the notes of the scale, you will be picking out your own blues solo patterns.

One of the nice aspects is how Daniel Cohen's enthusiasm for the music comes across and how he gets you to avoid hangups that might otherwise inhibit your blues progress.

Obviously, one 24-page book (and its 54-track CD) won't cover everything. But if you work through each of the exercises, it will get you off to a very good start on your way to playing blues piano. And you will be on the way to REALLY playing the blues - not just being able to trot out two or three songs with no further way forward.

"Daniel Bennett Cohen Teaches Blues Piano" gets my wholehearted recommendation, with no reservations at all.