Newsweek (June 10, 2002)
"Provocative....Bollier raises issues that almost nobody wants to talk about anymore. If he's not always right, he's always on target."

Washington Monthly (April 2002)
"Silent Theft raises the kinds of questions that Washington typically represses. The book broaches issues that very likely are going to drive the next big turn of the political wheel. Silent Theft confirms the brooding sense, shared by many, of a system out of control."

Business 2.0 (July 2002)
"...Bollier sees a relentless commercial assault on what he calls 'the commons,' resources that should be free to all but, increasingly, are being co-opted for the corporate good."

Norman Lear
"The subject of Silent Theft is urgently important, and Bollier's handling of this complex set of issues is both deft and straightforward. The more people who read Silent Theft, the better our world."

Professor Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School
"America is launched on another great enclosure movement. This beautifully written, carefully argued book shows how little we learned from the past. Free and open resources have always been central to creativity and growth; Bollier shows how in a range of important contexts, free and open resources are being enclosed, to the benefit of the corporate class, and burden of Americans generally."

Bill McKibben, author, The End of Nature
"A calm and reasonable primer on a topic of enormous importance. Buy a copy, and when you've read it, donate it to that wonderful commons called your local library."

Ralph Nader
"How do the American people gain control of what they have always legally owned together — the great commonwealth assets such as the public airwaves, the public lands, the medicines, inventions and many other technologies their taxes have developed, the trillions of dollars in pension funds — from the control of large corporations?

"In this seminal book, David Bollier takes this neglected discourse over what we own but do not control to a new level — one that describes the different impacts on our standard of living and realizable futures as between corporate control or people control. He offers practical ways for 'reclaiming the commons'toward a much more prosperous, sustainable and enlightened economy and a civil culture that safeguards public institutions and public spaces from being given away, exploited or sold forever.

"A tour de force narrative that drives the reader into high alert over what we have lost by allowing business lobbies and their captive governments to turn rampant commercialism into the controlling ideology over our public assets and values. He points the way to recovering the sovereignty of the 'commons'as if people matter first and foremost. He defines with surehanded authority a grand new mission for the beleaguered American commonwealth - that it should be governed by civic values not commercial, unaccountable supremacies. Enter this new world of human possibilities!"

Robert W. McChesney, Boston Review
"Bollier advances a powerful critique of the market über alles nonsense
that is driving our nation and our prospects for genuine democracy into
the ground. He argues, convincingly, that the privatization of the commons
is disastrous even for those generally enthralled with markets and the
profit-motive."

Jim Hightower, Texas Observer
"[This book] get[s] at what I think is the fundamental, primary political issue that can be the underlying value for regenerating progressive politics in our country, and that value is the common good versus private greed."

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