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The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker
by Sami al Jundi Jen MarloweAs a teenager in Palestine, Sami al Jundi had one ambition: overthrowing Israeli occupation. With two friends, he began to build a bomb to use against the police. But when it exploded prematurely, killing one of his friends, al Jundi was caught and sentenced to ten years in prison. It was in an Israeli jail that his unlikely transformation began. Al Jundi was welcomed into a highly organized, democratic community of political prisoners who required that members of their cell read, engage in political discourse on topics ranging from global revolutions to the precepts of nonviolent protest and revolution.Al Jundi left prison still determined to fight for his people's rights-but with a very different notion of how to undertake that struggle. He cofounded the Middle East program of Seeds of Peace Center for Coexistence, which brings together Palestinian and Israeli youth.Marked by honesty and compassion for Palestinians and Israelis alike, The Hour of Sunlight illuminates the Palestinian experience through the story of one man's struggle for peace.
The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker
by Sami al Jundi Jen MarloweAs a teenager in Palestine, Sami al Jundi had one ambition: overthrowing Israeli occupation. With two friends, he began to build a bomb to use against the police. But when it exploded prematurely, killing one of his friends, al Jundi was caught and sentenced to ten years in prison. It was in an Israeli jail that his unlikely transformation began. Al Jundi was welcomed into a highly organized, democratic community of political prisoners who required that members of their cell read, engage in political discourse on topics ranging from global revolutions to the precepts of nonviolent protest and revolution. Al Jundi left prison still determined to fight for his people's rights -- but with a very different notion of how to undertake that struggle. He cofounded the Middle East program of Seeds of Peace Center for Coexistence, which brings together Palestinian and Israeli youth. Marked by honesty and compassion for Palestinians and Israelis alike, The Hour of Sunlight illuminates the Palestinian experience through the story of one man's struggle for peace.
Death of the Liberal Class
by Chris HedgesThe liberal class plays a vital role in a democracy. It gives moral legitimacy to the state. It makes limited forms of dissent and incremental change possible. The liberal class posits itself as the conscience of the nation. It permits us, through its appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define ourselves as a good and noble people. Most importantly, on behalf of the power elite the liberal class serves as bulwarks against radical movements by offering a safety valve for popular frustrations and discontentment by discrediting those who talk of profound structural change. Once this class loses its social and political role then the delicate fabric of a democracy breaks down and the liberal class, along with the values it espouses, becomes an object of ridicule and hatred. The door that has been opened to proto-fascists has been opened by a bankrupt liberalismThe Death of the Liberal Class examines the failure of the liberal class to confront the rise of the corporate state and the consequences of a liberalism that has become profoundly bankrupted. Hedges argues there are five pillars of the liberal establishment – the press, liberal religious institutions, labor unions, universities and the Democratic Party— and that each of these institutions, more concerned with status and privilege than justice and progress, sold out the constituents they represented. In doing so, the liberal class has become irrelevant to society at large and ultimately the corporate power elite they once served.
Death of the Liberal Class
by Chris HedgesFor decades the liberal class was a defense against the worst excesses of power. But the pillars of the liberal class -- the press, universities, the labor movement, the Democratic Party, and liberal religious institutions -- have collapsed. In its absence, the poor, the working class, and even the middle class no longer have a champion. In this searing polemic Chris Hedges indicts liberal institutions, including his former employer, the New York Times, who have distorted their basic beliefs in order to support unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization, and staggering income inequalities. Hedges argues that the death of the liberal class created a profound vacuum at the heart of American political life. And now speculators, war profiteers, and demagogues -- from militias to the Tea Party -- are filling the void.
Tragedy in Crimson: How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost the Battle with China
by Tim JohnsonTragedy in Crimson is award-winning journalist Tim Johnson&’s extraordinary account of the cat-and-mouse game embroiling China and the Tibetan exile community over Tibet. Johnson reports from the front lines, trekking to nomad resettlements to speak with the people who guard Tibet&’s slowly vanishing culture; and he travels alongside the Dalai Lama in the campaigns for Tibetan sovereignty. Johnson unpacks how China is using its economic power around the globe to assail the Free Tibet movement. By encouraging massive Chinese migration and restricting Tibetan civil rights, the Chinese are also working to dilute Tibetan culture within Tibet itself. He also takes a sympathetic but unsentimental look at the Dalai Llama, a popular figure in the West who is regarded as a failure by many of his own people. Staggering in scope, vivid and audacious in its narrative aims, Tragedy in Crimson tells the story of a people on the brink of cultural extinction and the rising nation that is quashing them.
Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex
by William D. HartungEnthralling and explosive, Prophets of War is an exposé of America's largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his famous warning about the dangers of the military industrial complex, he never would have dreamed that a company could accumulate the kind of power and influence now wielded by this behemoth company.As a full-service weapons maker, Lockheed Martin receives over 25 billion per year in Pentagon contracts. From aircraft and munitions, to the abysmal Star Wars missile defense program, to the spy satellites that the NSA has used to monitor Americans' phone calls without their knowledge, Lockheed Martin's reaches into all areas of US defense and American life. William Hartung's meticulously researched history follows the company's meteoric growth and explains how this arms industry giant has shaped US foreign policy for decades.
Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex
by William D HartungEnthralling and explosive, Prophets of War is an expos' of America's largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his famous warning about the dangers of the military industrial complex, he never would have dreamed that a company could accumulate the kind of power and influence now wielded by this behemoth company. As a full-service weapons maker, Lockheed Martin receives over 25 billion per year in Pentagon contracts. From aircraft and munitions, to the abysmal Star Wars missile defense program, to the spy satellites that the NSA has used to monitor Americans' phone calls without their knowledge, Lockheed Martin's reaches into all areas of US defense and American life. William Hartung's meticulously researched history follows the company's meteoric growth and explains how this arms industry giant has shaped US foreign policy for decades.
Winning at All Costs: A Scandalous History of Italian Soccer
by John FootThe 2006 World Cup final between Italy and France was a down-and-dirty game, marred by French superstar Zidane's head-butting of Italian defender Materazzi. But viewers were also exposed to the poetry, force, and excellence of the Italian game; as operatic as Verdi and as cunning as Machiavelli, it seemed to open a window into the Italian soul. John Foot's epic history shows what makes Italian soccer so unique. Mixing serious analysis and comic storytelling, Foot describes its humble origins in northern Italy in the 1890s to its present day incarnation where soccer is the national civic religion. A story that is reminiscent of Gangs of New York and A Clockwork Orange, Foot shows how the Italian game - like its political culture - has been overshadowed by big business, violence, conspiracy, and tragedy, how demagogues like Benito Mussolini and Silvio Berlusconi have used the game to further their own political ambitions. But Winning at All Costs also celebrates the sweet moments - the four World Cup victories, the success of Juventus, Inter Milan, AC Milan, the role soccer played in the resistance to Nazism, and the great managers and players who show that Italian soccer is as irresistible as Italy itself.
The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
by Chris HedgesMany liberals are disappointed with Barack Obama. Some talk of "betrayal,” while others are writing abject letters to the White House asking the president to come back to his "true self.” Chris Hedges, however, is a progressive who doesn't feel betrayed. "Obama was and is a brand,” he argues. "He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged by the corporate state.” In his newest book, Hedges argues that the conscious inertia of the left is destroying the progressive movement. Inaction and empty moral posturing leads not to change, but to an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity.Hedges argues that the gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although the right may well inherit power. Instead, the threat comes from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.
Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence
by Christian ParentiFrom Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism"--a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.
Who Are We -- And Should It Matter in the 21st Century?: And Should It Matter In The 21st Century?
by Gary YoungeFrom those who insist that Barack Obama is Muslim to the European legislators who go to extraordinary lengths to ban items of clothing worn by a tiny percentage of their populations, Gary Younge shows, in this fascinating, witty, and provocative examination of the enduring legacy and obsession with identity in politics and everyday life, that how we define ourselves informs every aspect of our social, political, and personal lives. Younge--a black British male of Caribbean descent living in Brooklyn, New York, who speaks fluent Russian and French--travels the planet in search of answers to why identity is so combustible. From Tiger Woods's legacy to the scandal over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, he finds that identity is inescapable, but solidarity may not be as elusive as we fear.
Who Are We -- And Should It Matter in the 21st Century?: How Identity Politics Took Over The World
by Gary YoungeFrom those who insist that Barack Obama is Muslim to the European legislators who go to extraordinary lengths to ban items of clothing worn by a tiny percentage of their populations, Gary Younge shows, in this fascinating, witty, and provocative examination of the enduring legacy and obsession with identity in politics and everyday life, that how we define ourselves informs every aspect of our social, political, and personal lives. Younge -- a black British male of Caribbean descent living in Brooklyn, New York, who speaks fluent Russian and French -- travels the planet in search of answers to why identity is so combustible. From Tiger Woods's legacy to the scandal over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, he finds that identity is inescapable, but solidarity may not be as elusive as we fear. We are more alike than we are unalike. But the way we are unalike matters. To be male in Saudi Arabia, Jewish in Israel or white in Europe confers certain powers and privileges that those with other identities do not have. In other words, identity can represent a material fact in itself.As Gary Younge demonstrates in this classic book, now featuring a new introduction,, how we define ourselves affects every part of our lives: from violence on the streets to international terrorism; from changes in our laws to whom we elect; from our personal safety to military occupations. Moving between fascinating memoir and searing analysis, from beauty contests in Ireland to the personal views of Tiger Woods, from the author's own terrifying student days in Paris to how race and gender affect one's voting choices, Gary Younge makes surprising and enlightening connections and a devastating critique of the way our society really works.
The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict
by Philip Weiss Adam Horowitz Lizzy Ratner editorsThe Goldstone Report is one of the most controversial UN reports ever published. It alleges that both Israel and Hamas committed atrocities when Israel invaded Gaza in January 2009 as a part of Operation Cast Lead. Justice Richard Goldstone, a celebrated South African and Jewish human rights lawyer, oversaw the UN fact-finding mission after the invasion. What Goldstone found, and later published, caused a maelstrom within Israel and the international community at large. Goldstone was demonized by many who claimed bias, intimating the report unfairly vilified Israel. Though the findings are of enormous historical, political and moral significance, few have actually read the document in its entirety—thus the furious political debate that mushroomed in the wake of its publication has supplanted any true understanding of the report&’s discoveries. The Goldstone Report: The Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict of 2008-2009 will change this. Edited by three progressive American Jews, Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner and Philip Weiss, The Goldstone Report is an edited and annotated edition of the report that contains analysis, original essays and a context for the debate.
Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama
by Eric AltermanIn this “agenda-setting” polemic, journalist and historian Eric Alterman explains what is really happening with the Obama presidency. While Obama’s many compromises have disappointed liberals, Alterman argues that these concessions are largely due to a political system that is rigged against progressive change. These structural impediments to democracy have made the keeping of Obama’s campaign promises all but impossible. Brilliantly blending incisive political analysis with a clear agenda for change, Kabuki Democracy cuts through the clichés of conservative propaganda and lazy mainstream media analysis to demonstrate that genuine “change” will come to America only when people care enough to challenge the system.
The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica
by Ian ThomsonNamed the Dolman Travel Book of the Year, The Dead Yard paints an unforgettable portrait of modern Jamaica. Since independence, Jamaica has gradually become associated with twin images--a resort-style travel Eden for foreigners and a new kind of hell for Jamaicans, a society where gangs control the areas where most Jamaicans live and drug lords like Christopher Coke rule elites and the poor alike. Ian Thomson's brave book explores a country of lost promise, where America's hunger for drugs fuels a dependent economy and shadowy politics. The lauded birthplace of reggae and Bob Marley, Jamaica is now sunk in corruption and hopelessness. A synthesis of vital history and unflinching reportage, The Dead Yard is "a fascinating account of a beautiful, treacherous country" (Irish Times).
Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation
by Walter MosleyIn his late teens and early twenties, Walter Mosley was addicted to alcohol and cigarettes. Drawing from this intimate knowledge of addiction and recovery, Mosley explores the deviances of contemporary America and describes a society in thrall to its own consumption. Although Americans live in the richest country on earth, many citizens exist on the brink of poverty, and from that profound economic inequality stems self-destructive behavior.In Twelve Steps to Political Revelation, Mosley outlines a guide to recovery from oppression. First we must identify the problems that surround us. Next we must actively work together to create a just, more holistic society. And finally, power must be returned to the embrace of the people.Challenging and original, Recovery confronts both self-understanding and how we define ourselves in relation to others.
Grassroots: Politics . . . But Not as Usual
by Phil CampbellThis offbeat true story is a comedy and a tragedy about politics, from anti-globalist protest to domestic turmoil. It's about idealism, obsession and failure in Seattle, a progressive city on the fringe of America's continent and consciousness. Grant Cogswell is a poet, a punk rock-fan, an anarchist, a grassroots activist, and one very temperamental character. He loves Seattle so much he has the city logo tattooed on his arm. In the summer of 2001 he decides to run for city council. He's so determined to win that he'll even wear a polar-bear suit to a city hall meeting. Phil Campbell, the author, is a burnt-out recently fired alt-weekly reporter, a manic depressive who sees few reasons to live. Inspired by his friend Grant's passion, and without anything better to do, he agrees to manage Grant's campaign. For eighteen weeks, Phil devotes himself to Grant's grassroots challenge-all the while fending an overzealous roommate challenging him for his position as manager of their shared house. Overshadowing the story is the tale of U.S. Rep. Marion Anthony Zioncheck, a legendary boozer and forgotten lefty radical from the 1930s. As Grant's campaign unfolds, so does the story of Zioncheck's tragedy - his rise and fall from an energetic young politico to a madman who is sent to the insane asylum. The question: Is Zioncheck's tale a lesson already learned, or a prophecy waiting to be repeated?
The Interrogator: An Education
by Glenn L. CarleTo his friends and neighbors, Glenn L. Carle was a wholesome, stereotypical New England Yankee, a former athlete struggling against incipient middle age, someone always with his nose in an abstruse book. But for two decades Carle broke laws, stole, and lied on a daily basis about nearly everything. &“I was almost never who I said I was, or did what I claimed to be doing.&” He was a CIA spy. He thrived in an environment of duplicity and ambiguity, flourishing in the gray areas of policy. The Interrogator is the story of Carle&’s most serious assignment, when he was &“surged&” to become an interrogator in the U.S. Global War on Terror to interrogate a top level detainee at one of the CIA&’s notorious black sites overseas. It tells of his encounter with one of the most senior al-Qa&’ida detainees the U.S. captured after 9/11, a &“ghost detainee&” who, the CIA believed, might hold the key to finding Osama bin Ladin.As Carle&’s interrogation sessions progressed though, he began to seriously doubt the operation. Was this man, kidnapped in the Middle East, really the senior al-Qa&’ida official the CIA believed he was? Headquarters viewed Carle&’s misgivings as naïve troublemaking. Carle found himself isolated, progressively at odds with his institution and his orders. He struggled over how far to push the interrogation, wrestling with whether his actions constituted torture, and with what defined his real duty to his country. Then, in a dramatic twist, headquarters spirited the detainee and Carle to the CIA&’s harshest interrogation facility, a place of darkness and fear, which even CIA officers only dared mention in whispers.A haunting tale of sadness, confusion, and determination, The Interrogator is a shocking and intimate look at the world of espionage. It leads the reader through the underworld of the Global War on Terror, asking us to consider the professional and personal challenges faced by an intelligence officer during a time of war, and the unimaginable ways in which war alters our institutions and American society.
EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want
by Frances Moore LappeIn EcoMind, Frances Moore Lappé-a giant of the environmental movement-confronts accepted wisdom of environmentalism. Drawing on the latest research from anthropology to neuroscience and her own field experience, she argues that the biggest challenge to human survival isn't our fossil fuel dependency, melting glaciers, or other calamities. Rather, it's our faulty way of thinking about these environmental crises that robs us of power. Lappé dismantles seven common "thought traps”-from limits to growth to the failings of democracy- that belie what we now know about nature, including our own, and offers contrasting "thought leaps” that reveal our hidden power. Like her Diet for a Small Planet classic, EcoMind is challenging, controversial and empowering.
The Noir Forties: The American People From Victory to Cold War
by Richard LingemanFrom one of our finest cultural historians, The Noir Forties is a vivid reexamination of America's postwar period, that "age of anxiety” characterized by the dissipation of victory dreams, the onset of the Red Scare, and a nascent resistance to the growing Cold War consensus. Richard Lingeman examines a brief but momentous and crowded time, the years between VJ Day and the beginning of the Korean War, describing how we got from there to here. It evokes the social and cultural milieu of the late forties, with the vicissitudes of the New Deal Left and Popular Front culture from the end of one hot war and the beginning of the cold one-and, longer term, of a cold war that preoccupied the United States for the next fifty years. It traces the attitudes, sentiments, hopes and fears, prejudices, behavior, and collective dreams and nightmares of the times, as reflected in the media, popular culture, political movements, opinion polls, and sociological and psychological studies of mass beliefs and behavior.
Desert Reckoning: A Town Sheriff, a Mojave Hermit, and the Biggest Manhunt in Modern California History
by Deanne StillmanNorth of Los Angeles - the studios, the beaches, Rodeo Drive - lies a sparsely populated region that comprises fully one half of Los Angeles County. Sprawling across 2200 miles, this shadow side of Los Angeles is in the high Mojave Desert. Known as the Antelope Valley, it's a terrain of savage dignity, a vast amphitheatre of startling wonders that put on a show as the megalopolis burrows northward into the region's last frontier. Ranchers, cowboys, dreamers, dropouts, bikers, hikers, and felons have settled here - those who have chosen solitude over the trappings of contemporary life or simply have nowhere else to go. But in recent years their lives have been encroached upon by the creeping spread of subdivisions, funded by the once easy money of subprime America. McMansions - many empty now - gradually replaced Joshua trees; the desert - America's escape hatch - began to vanish as it became home to a latter-day exodus of pilgrims.It is against the backdrop of these two competing visions of land and space that Donald Kueck - a desert hermit who loved animals and hated civilization - took his last stand, gunning down beloved deputy sheriff Steven Sorensen when he approached his trailer at high noon on a scorching summer day. As the sound of rifle fire echoed across the Mojave, Kueck took off into the desert he knew so well, kicking off the biggest manhunt in modern California history until he was finally killed in a Wagnerian firestorm under a full moon as nuns at a nearby convent watched and prayed.This manhunt was the subject of a widely praised article by Deanne Stillman, first published in Rolling Stone, a finalist for a PEN Center USA journalism award, and included in the anthology Best American Crime Writing 2006. In Desert Reckoning she continues her desert beat and uses Kueck's story as a point of departure to further explore our relationship to place and the wars that are playing out on our homeland. In addition, Stillman also delves into the hidden history of Los Angeles County, and traces the paths of two men on a collision course that could only end in the modern Wild West. Why did a brilliant, self-taught rocket scientist who just wanted to be left alone go off the rails when a cop showed up? What role did the California prison system play in this drama? What happens to people when the American dream is stripped away? And what is it like for the men who are sworn to protect and serve?
Crude Awakening: Money, Mavericks, and Mayhem in Alaska
by Amanda Coyne Tony HopfingerCrude Awakening is the rollicking story of politics in America’s last frontier and oil province—Alaska, the nation’s most wild and mysterious state, where politics and oil blurred on the day wildcatters struck it big in 1968. Living in a northern Never Land, where oil companies and the federal government kept the state living high and wild, a handful of players ran the show. Among them were the late Sen. Ted Stevens and oilman Bill Allen, the Tony Soprano of Alaska who controlled the political machine until the FBI arrived to root out corruption, only to be accused of playing as dirty as those they were investigating. These characters and events paved the way for Sarah Palin’s rise to fame and fall from glory in Alaska. Authors Amanda Coyne and Tony Hopfinger chart the epic tale of these three characters, set in a state of soaring hopes, fading dreams, drying oil fields and an uncertain future.
The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame
by Peter DreierA hundred years ago, any soapbox orator who called for women's suffrage, laws protecting the environment, an end to lynching, or a federal minimum wage was considered a utopian dreamer or a dangerous socialist. Now we take these ideas for granted- because the radical ideas of one generation are often the common sense of the next. We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of radicals and reformers who challenged the status quo of their day. Unfortunately, most Americans know little of this progressive history. It isn't taught in most high schools. You can't find it on the major television networks. In popular media, the most persistent interpreter of America's radical past is Glenn Beck, who teaches viewers a wildly inaccurate history of unions, civil rights, and the American Left.The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century, a colorful and witty history of the most influential progressive leaders of the twentieth century and beyond, is the perfect antidote.
The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame
by Peter DreierA hundred years ago, any soapbox orator who called for women's suffrage, laws protecting the environment, an end to lynching, or a federal minimum wage was considered a utopian dreamer or a dangerous socialist. Now we take these ideas for granted -- because the radical ideas of one generation are often the common sense of the next. We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of radicals and reformers who challenged the status quo of their day. Unfortunately, most Americans know little of this progressive history. It isn't taught in most high schools. You can't find it on the major television networks. In popular media, the most persistent interpreter of America's radical past is Glenn Beck, who teaches viewers a wildly inaccurate history of unions, civil rights, and the American Left.The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century, a colorful and witty history of the most influential progressive leaders of the twentieth century and beyond, is the perfect antidote.
The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again
by Robert W McChesney John NicholsAmerican journalism is collapsing as newspapers and magazines fail and scores of reporters are laid off across the country. Conventional wisdom says the Internet is to blame, but veteran journalists and media critics Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols disagree. The crisis of American journalism predates the Great Recession and digital media boom. What we are witnessing now is the end of the commercial news model and the opportune moment for the creation of a new system of independent journalism, one subsidized by the public and capable of safeguarding our democracy.