Nation Books
During the course of American history, wrongful events have occurred and certain Americans have stood up and spoken out against these wrongs: Tom Paine, Edward R. Murrow, Daniel Ellsberg. Vincent Bugliosi takes his place in this special pantheon of patriots with his powerful, brilliant, and courageous expose of crime by the highest court in the land. When an article he wrote on this topic appeared in The Nation magazine in February 2001, it drew the largest outpouring of letters and e-mail in the magazine's 136-year history, tapping a deep reservoir of outrage. The original article is now expanded, amended, and backed by amplifications, endnotes, and the relevant Supreme Court documents.
When Gore Vidal's recent New York Times bestseller Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace was published, the Los Angeles Times described Vidal as the last defender of the American republic. In Dreaming War, Vidal continues this defense by confronting the Cheney-Bush junta head on in a series of devastating essays that demolish the lies American Empire lives by, unveiling a counter-history that traces the origins of America's current imperial ambitions to the experience of World War Two and the post-war Truman doctrine. And now, with the Cheney-Bush leading us into permanent war, Vidal asks whose interests are served by this doctrine of pre-emptive war? Was Afghanistan turned to rubble to avenge the 3,000 slaughtered on September 11? Or was "the unlovely Osama chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan?" After all he was abruptly replaced with Saddam Hussein once the Taliban were overthrown. And while "evidence" is now being invented to connect Saddam with 9/11, the current administration are not helped by "stories in the U.S. press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must- for the sake of the free world- be reassigned to U.S. consortiums."
When financial journalist Eamonn Fingleton anticipated the meltdown of the New Economy in the late nineties, his predictions were dismissed by mainstream economic writers as "farfetched." Now, with the New Economy in ruins and America mired in recession, Fingleton's avowedly contrarian take on mainstream economic thinking is all the more urgent. Written in clear, lucid prose that renders the complexity of the world economy clear to the general reader, Unsustainable is a masterly survey of how the U.S. economy's turn from manufacturing to a more service-based, "postindustrial" economy -- based on finance, entertainment, and computer software -- has been an unmitigated disaster for working- and middleclass America and threatens the long-term viability of the U.S. economy. Taking on free market ideologues like Thomas Friedman, Fingelton shows how those who claim that a global service economy is the key to America's salvation are living in a fool's paradise. Completely revised and updated, this timely contribution is an indispensable survey of American's economic downturn.
Great investigative journalism is present-tense literature: part detective story, part hellraising. This is the first anthology of its kind, bringing together outstanding (and often otherwise unavailable) practitioners of the muckraking tradition, from the Revolutionary era to the present day. Ranging from mainstream figures like Woodward and Bernstein to legendary iconoclasts such as I. F. Stone and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the dispatches in this collection combine the thrill of the chase after facts with a burning sense of outrage. As American history, Shaking the Foundations offers a you-are-there chronicle of great scandals and debates as reporters revealed them to their contemporaries: Jim Crow and financial trusts, migrant labor and wars, witch-hunts and government corruption. As journalism, these readings -- from writers as diverse as Henry Adams and Ralph Nader, Lincoln Steffens and Barbara Ehrenreich -- are a source of inspiration for today's muckrakers. For the general reader, Shaking the Foundations reveals investigative journalism as a storytelling force capable of bringing down presidents, freeing the innocent, challenging the logic of wars, and exposing predatory corporations. Other selected contributors include Henry Adams, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Edward R. Murrow, Rachel Carson, Jessica Mitford, Susan Brownmiller, Anthony Lukas, Neil Sheehan, Drew Pearson, and Jack Anderson.
When Congressman Dennis Kucinich delivered his speech, "A Prayer for America," to the Southern California chapter of Americans for Democratic Action, it electrified the whole country. In his speech, Kucinich -- a 2004 presidential candidate -- warned against an America that had discarded the constitutional liberties integral to its identity: "Let us pray that our nation will remember that the unfolding of the promise of democracy in our nation paralleled the striving for civil rights. That is why we must challenge the rationale of the Patriot Act. We must ask why should America put aside guarantees of constitutional justice?" A Prayer for America collects Kucinich's essays and speeches. It represents his holistic worldview and carries with it a passionate commitment to public service, peace, human rights, workers' rights, and the environment. His advocacy of a Department of Peace seeks not only to make nonviolence an organizing principle in our society, but to make war a thing of the past. A Prayer for America includes an introductory essay from Kucinich that reflects on his political journey from his election as the youngest mayor of a major American city to his role as a dynamic, visionary leader of the Progressive Caucus of the Congressional Democrats.
Taking Back America is a direct challenge to the Bush administration. This important collection of essays, drawn from the historic Take Back America Conference in Washington D.C. and the pages of The Nation, exposes the radical, reactionary scope of the Bush agenda and the damage that it will do if left unchecked. Included in Taking Back America are outstanding essays by leading figures within the progressive movement. Barbara Ehrenreich explores how working people can be empowered; William Greider analyzes Bush ambitions and their destructive potential; Ralph Neas of People for the American Way explains the war Bush is waging against the American people and their rights; Danny Goldberg describes how youth can be mobilized; Ben Barber and Tom Andrews challenge the destabilizing Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, and Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel lay out a progressive strategy for the future. Anchoring the collection is an electrifying address by Bill Moyers that places the current struggle into historic context, and shows how it is democracy itself that is at stake.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Jonathan Schell wrote wise and passionate words that appeared in The Nation . From these words blossomed a regular column by the former New Yorker writer on the new American way of living, dying, and killing. Fierce and elegant, infused with Schell's typical compassion, these meditations were incisions into the received wisdoms of post-9/11 America. Drawing from historical precedents to comments on the current political and cultural situation, Schell presents compelling arguments against America's imperial ambitions, explores the dangers posed by the resurgence of nuclear proliferation, and argues that the public can and must hold their leaders accountable for their actions. As Schell warns, "Attention must shift from the deceiver to the deceived. The corruption threatens to spread from the teller to the hearer -- from the Administration to the country, from them to us. Today's lies, exaggerations, contradictions and broken promises litter the mental landscape, like uncollected garbage, polluting and poisoning the intellectual and moral air. A fog of amnesia covers the scene. What was said ten minutes ago is forgotten. What was promised yesterday never appears, and no one cares . . . Cognitive torture calls for cognitive indignation. And indignation should lead to action."
The collapse of both sets of Arab-Israeli negotiations in 2000 led not only to recrimination and bloodshed, with the outbreak of the second intifada, but to the creation of a new myth. Syrian and Palestinian intransigence was blamed for the current disastrous state of affairs, as both parties rejected a "generous" peace offering from the Israelis that would have brought peace to the region. The Truth About Camp David shatters that myth. Based on the riveting, eyewitness accounts of more than forty direct participants involved in the latest rounds of Arab-Israeli negotiations, including the Camp David 2000 summit, former federal investigator-turned-investigative journalist Clayton E. Swisher provides a compelling counter-narrative to the commonly accepted history. The Truth About Camp David details the tragic inner workings of the Clinton Administration's negotiating mayhem, their eleventh hour blunders and miscalculations, and their concluding decision to end the Oslo process with blame and disengagement. It is not only a fascinating historical look at Middle East politics on the brink of disaster, but a revelatory portrait of how all-too-human American political considerations helped facilitate the present crisis.
Born and raised in Brooklyn with a street fighter's instinct and sharp Jewish wit, Mickey Knox leaves the army for the bright lights of Hollywood. But when the rise of McCarthyism puts an abrupt end to his hopes of working in American films, Knox debarks to France and Italy to work in European cinema. It turns out to be the best move of his life. This book -- where every major film actor and writer of the last century appears -- is a wonderful, gossipy history of European cinema as seen through the observant eye of Knox. From arguing with John Wayne, teaching Anna Magnani to articulate English, to fending off Zsa Zsa Gabor's advances and getting lost in Italy with a hungry Orson Welles, Knox was in the midst of it all, watching with a dry smile and a witty comeback. Of the colorful cast of characters who have passed through his life -- Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Anthony Quinn, Henry Fonda, Burt Reynolds, Sam Fuller, Elvis Presley, Gore Vidal -- one lasting friendship runs throughout the text. That friend -- Norman Mailer -- writes a preface to "a rare warrior of that rarely heroic world of stage and screen." Black-and-white photographs are included.
Killed resurrects remarkable articles that prestigious publications such as The New Yorker , the New York Times Magazine , Harper's , and Rolling Stone assigned to accomplished writers for sizeable fees, then discarded for reasons having nothing to do with their quality and everything to do with their potential for unwanted controversy, political incorrectness, or undue pressure from an advertiser. Read for the first time Mike Sager's profile of Palestinian militants involved in the intifada of 1987 that was killed by the Washington Post Magazine because his story did not side with Israel, and Ted Rall's essay on his deadbeat dad that was deemed too dark by the New York Times Magazine for its Father's Day issue. While the notion of a killed article is nothing new, the breakneck pace of media consolidation has raised the stakes for contrarian writers and readers as independent publishers dwindle. Killed arises out of this moment, bringing these outstanding pieces of censored journalism into the public arena for the first time. Some of the other contributors included are Rich Cohen, Daniel Asa Rose, Alec Wilkinson, Noam Chomsky, Douglas Rushkoff, Pat Jordan, Robert Fisk, Clive Thompson, Silvana Paternostro, Glenn O'Brien, Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, and Luc Sante.
"I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there was no other 'profession' that would have me. I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information." Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases America's leading polemicist's rejection of consensus and cliché whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud"), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael Bloomberg. Hitchens began the nineties as a "darling of the left" but has become more of an "unaffiliated radical" whose targets include those on the "left," who he accuses of "fudging" the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens shows in his reportage, cultural and literary criticism, and opinion essays from the last decade, he has not jumped ship and joined the right but is faithful to the internationalist, contrarian and democratic ideals that have always informed his work.
Since its launch in 1974 by cultural outlaw and international drug smuggler Thomas King Forçe, High Times magazine has served as a preeminent showcase of the American counterculture. Conceived to "bring a new consciousness into the media," the magazine's first issue sold 25,000 copies. Although the past 30 years have spanned three editorial reigns, High Times has remained committed to its sharp defense of free speech, constitutional rights and the freedom of the individual. The High Times Reader will chronicle the evolution of American counterculture over the past three decades, offering a unique historical perspective on the current tendencies toward suppressing American civil liberties. Contributions will include Timothy Leary's space-travel manifesto Terra II from the magazine's inaugural issue, articles by Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Ron Rosenbaum, Legs McNeil and Paul Krassner -- who wrote a column entitled "Brain Damage Report" -- interviews with Johnny Rotten, Larry David, and an 8-page photo insert of the most infamous sexy High Times centerfolds, along with some of their more memorable covers.
A "deserter from death," Polish-born Daniel Singer narrowly escaped the Holocaust to become one of the left's leading social and political commentators of our time. Deserter from Death collects Singer's writing, from when he was a young correspondent for The Economist to his years at The Nation . Much of the material will be new (and a revelation) to Singer's followers, including his coverage of the Algerian crisis in the late fifties and the effervescent events of May '68. Deserter from Death is a social history of the past half-century, a memorial to one of our great correspondents, and a reminder of what we lost when we lost Daniel Singer. Showcasing Singer's writing over the course of his long and illustrious career, this collection is introduced by his old friend, the great polymath and intellectual George Steiner.
Since the end of the Cold War so-called experts have been predicting the eclipse of America's "special relationship" with Britain. But as events have shown, especially in the wake of 9/11, the political and cultural ties between America and Britain have grown stronger. Blood, Class and Empire examines the dynamics of this relationship, its many cultural manifestations -- the James Bond series, PBS "brit Kitsch," Rudyard Kipling -- and explains why it still persists. Contrarian, essayist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens notes that while the relationship is usually presented as a matter of tradition, manners, and common culture, sanctified by wartime alliance, the special ingredient is empire; transmitted from an ancien regime that has tried to preserve and renew itself thereby. England has attempted to play Greece to the American Rome, but ironically having encouraged the United States to become an equal partner in the business of empire, Britain found itself supplanted.
After five centuries of Eurocentrism, many people have little idea that Native American tribes still exist, or which traditions belong to what tribes. However over the past decade there has been a rising movement to accurately describe Native cultures and histories. In particular, people have begun to explore the experience of urban Indians -- individuals who live in two worlds struggling to preserve traditional Native values within the context of an ever-changing modern society. In Genocide of the Mind , the experience and determination of these people is recorded in a revealing and compelling collection of essays that brings the Native American experience into the twenty-first century. Contributors include: Paula Gunn Allen, Simon Ortiz, Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maurice Kenny, as well as emerging writers from different Indian nations.