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 December
26, 2006 In 1976 the body of Anna Mae Aquash, an American Indian luminary, was found frozen in the Badlands of South Dakota — or so the FBI said. After a suspicious autopsy and a rushed burial, friends had Aquash exhumed and found a .32-caliber bullet in her skull. Using this scandal as a point of departure, Hendricks opens a tunnel into the dark side of the FBI and its subversion of American Indian activists. He also discovers things the Indians would prefer to keep buried. What unfolds is a sinuous tale of conspiracy, murder, and cover-up that stretches from the plains of South Dakota to the polished corridors of Washington, D.C. Hendricks sued the FBI over several years to pry out thousands of unseen documents about the events. His work was supported by the prestigious Fund for Investigative Journalism. Hendricks is an investigative journalist who has written for such publications as the San Francisco Chronicle , The Nation, the Boston Globe, DoubleTake, and Seattle Weekly.
December
19, 2006 In
1944, the U.S. government feared the flood of returning World War II
soldiers as much as it looked forward to peace. To avoid economic catastrophe,
FDR, the American Legion, William Randolph Hearst, and others began crafting
the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. It would be the single
most transformative bill of the twentieth century. Humes’s numerous books include School of Dreams, Mean Justice, No Matter How Loud I Shout and the bestselling Mississippi Mud.
December
12, 2006 Today in America between 1 in 4 and 1 in 6 women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape in their lifetime, and one prominent study found that at least 20% of adolescent girls have been physically or sexually abused by a date or a boyfriend. Katz
provides women with original and creative ways of thinking about how
to reverse this ongoing national tragedy. He also makes a case to men
that the only way to end the abuse and mistreatment of women is for many
more self-identified “good guys” to make these issues their
own.
December
5, 2006 In the
spring of 1970, artist Ralph Steadman went to America in search of work
and found more than he bargained for. At the Kentucky Derby he met a
former associate of the Hell’s Angels, one Hunter S. Thompson.
Their working relationship resulted in the now-legendary Gonzo Journalism.
November
28, 2006 Nothing’s
the matter with Kansas: Americans voting their values are responding
to a real moral crisis. And in this follow-up to The Cheating Culture, Callahan
argues that the problems for most Americans are not abortion and gay
marriage but rather issues that neither party is addressing — the
selfishness that is careening out of control, the effect of our violent
and consumerist culture on children, and our lack of a greater purpose.
As Republicans veer into zealotry, liberals can find common ground with
the moderate majority. But to alleviate the moral anxieties that drove
GOP electoral victories they need a powerful new vision.
November
21, 2006 As globalization and terrorism intensify the pressure to close America's doors, Wucker argues that to do so would be catastrophic. The US economy depends more than ever on immigrants, not only for stereotypical low-skilled jobs, but much more so for maintaining our technological edge and promoting American products and services abroad. So far, America has reaped the lion's share of the gains of globalization. But for the first time ever, the world's best and brightest no longer see this country as the only destination of choice. In Lockout, Wucker documents the mistakes that led to our predicament today, and clarifies why it would be a catastrophic error of judgment, as well as a demonstration of a colossal lack of self-knowledge, if America attempted to turn its back on rest of the world and in so doing on the best of itself. Until August 2001, Wucker was Latin America bureau chief at International Financing Review, where she edited a biweekly magazine on Latin American capital markets and managed a real-time screen service on Latin American debt. She has written extensively about emerging-market politics and economies for International Financing Review's on-line capital markets analysis service, for Dow Jones newswires and the Wall Street Journal. Most recently she has been a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute at The New School in New York City.
November
14, 2006 Chandrasekaran, the Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief looks at the Green Zone: into a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America — a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up in hot pants, a movie theater that screened shoot-’em-up films, an all-you-could-eat buffet piled high with pork, a shopping mall that sold pornographic movies, a parking lot filled with shiny new SUVs, and a snappy dry-cleaning service — much of it run by Halliburton. Most Iraqis were barred from entering the Emerald City for fear they would blow it up. Chandrasekaran tells the story of the people and ideas that inhabited the Green Zone during the occupation, from the imperial viceroy L. Paul Bremer III to the fleet of twentysomethings hired to implement the idea that Americans could build a Jeffersonian democracy in an embattled Middle Eastern country. Chandrasekaran is an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post. He heads The Post's Continuous News department, which reports and edits breaking news stories for washingtonpost.com, and he helps to shape the newspaper’s overall multimedia strategy. He will be speaking at UCI on November 16, 5-6 pm at Social Science Plaza A 1100, as part of the International Studies Program Fall Series. The event is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democracy.
November
7, 2006 Basing much of Not in His Image on the Nag Hammadi and other Gnostic writings, John Lamb Lash explains how a little-known messianic sect propelled itself into a dominant world power, systematically wiping out the great Gnostic spiritual teachers, the Druid priests, and the shamanistic healers of Europe and North Africa. They burned libraries and destroyed temples in an attempt to silence the ancient truth-tellers and keep their own secrets. But as Lash reveals, when the truth is the planet Earth it cannot be hidden or destroyed. Not in His Image delves deeply into the shadows of ancient Gnostic writings to reconstruct the story early Christians tried to scrub from the pages of history, exploring the richness of the ancient European Pagan spirituality—the Pagan Mysteries, the Great Goddess, Gnosis, the myths of Sophia and Gaia—and chronicles the annihilation of this Pagan European culture at the hands of Christianity. Lash is an exponent of the practice of mythology. He is principal author of the Marion Institute's website, an inquiry into the contemporary meaning of humanity's myths and beliefs, and is author of a number of books, including The Seeker's Handbook, Twins and the Double, The Hero — Manhood and Power, and Quest for the Zodiac.
October
31, 2006 In Why We Believe What We Believe, University of Pennsylvania professor Andrew Newberg bridges science, psychology, and religion to uncover how the brain transforms our perceptions of the world into beliefs that create meaning, spirituality, and truth in our lives. One of the founders of the field of neurotheology and author of the bestselling book Why God Won’t Go Away, Newberg explains how beliefs are formed, why we maintain them — even in the face of opposing evidence — and the myriad ways in which our beliefs affect our lives.
October
24, 2006 People — especially Americans — are by and large optimists – almost blind optimists. They are much better at imagining best-case scenarios (I could win the lottery!) than worst-case scenarios (A hurricane could destroy my neighborhood!). This is true not just of their approach to imagining the future, but of their memories as well: people are better able to describe the best moments of their lives than they are the worst. In Never Saw It Coming, Professor Karen A. Cerulo considers the role of society in fostering this attitude. What kinds of groups and communities develop this pattern of thought, which do not, and what this says about human ability to evaluate possible outcomes of decisions and events. Cerulo is a Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. She is also the author of Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation, a work that won the ASA Culture Section's award for the best book of 1996, and Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Order of Right and Wrong.
October
17, 2006 Politics in America are polarized and trivialized, perhaps as never before. The result, Dworkin writes, is a deeply depressing political culture, as ill equipped for the perennial challenge of achieving social justice as for the emerging threats of terrorism. Yet this need not be. Dworkin, one the world's leading legal and political philosophers, identifies and defends core principles of personal and political morality that all citizens can share. He shows that recognizing such shared principles can make substantial political argument possible and help replace contempt with mutual respect. Only then can the full promise of democracy be realized in America and elsewhere. Dworkin lays out two core principles that citizens should share: first, that each human life is intrinsically and equally valuable and, second, that each person has an inalienable personal responsibility for identifying and realizing value in his or her own life. He then shows what fidelity to these principles would mean for human rights, the place of religion in public life, economic justice, and the character and value of democracy. Dworkin is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University, and Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London.
October
10, 2006 For more than twelve years, Kingston has led writing-and-meditation workshops for veterans and their families. The contributors to this volume — combat veterans, medics, and others who served in war; gang members, drug users, and victims of domestic violence; draft resisters, deserters, and peace activists — are part of this community of writers working together to heal the trauma of war through art. Reading their words, we witness worlds torn apart then rebuilt. This epic and timely work is the distilled wisdom of warriors and their loved ones, expressing themselves with breathtaking artistry and truth. Kingston’s other books include The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, The Fifth Book of Peace. In 1997, President Bill Clinton presented her with a National Humanities Medal.
October
3, 2006 In a series of columns and essays that Blumenthal wrote in the three years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a unifying theme began to emerge: that George W. Bush, billed by himself and by many others as a conservative, is in fact a radical-more radical than any president in American history. In How Bush Rules, Blumenthal provides and account of the progression of Bush's radical style — from his reliance on one-party rule and his unwillingness to allow internal debate to his elevation of the power of the vice president. Blumenthal argues that these radical actions are not haphazard, but deliberately intended to fundamentally change the presidency and the government. He shows not only the historical precedents for radical governing, but also how Bush has taken his methods to unique extremes. Blumenthal is a regular columnist for the Guardian of London and for Salon, and has been a staff writer for the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and other major publications. His books include, most recently, The Clinton Wars. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security.
September
26, 2006 Prins shows how the “conservative” agenda affects your wallet — and not just your money. Linking each card in a typical wallet to shortsighted policies, blunders, and scandals, she demonstrates how skewed national priorities have diminished America — but not the American spirit. In Jacked, she recounts her travels across the country; people she met, stories they shared, and opinions they have. You'll find someone like yourself in Jacked no matter who you are, where you live or what you think of life or politics. Before becoming a journalist, Prins worked on Wall Street as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, running the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London, and as a strategist at Lehman Brothers. Prins is the author of Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, Fortune, The Guardian (UK), The Nation.com, The Left Business Observer, LaVanguardia, and Against the Current.
September
19, 2006 In his latest book, Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea, Kurlansky discusses nonviolence as a distinct entity, a course of action, rather than a mere state of mind. Nonviolence can and should be a technique for overcoming social injustice and ending wars, he asserts, which is why it is the preferred method of those who speak truth to power. Kurlansky also brings into focus just why nonviolence is a “dangerous” idea, and asks such provocative questions as: Is there such a thing as a “just war”? Could nonviolence have worked against even the most evil regimes in history? Kurlansky draws from history twenty-five provocative lessons on the subject that we can use to effect change today. He shows how, time and again, violence is used to suppress nonviolence and its practitioners — Gandhi and Martin Luther King, for example; that the stated deterrence value of standing national armies and huge weapons arsenals is, at best, negligible; and, encouragingly, that much of the hard work necessary to begin a movement to end war is already complete.
September
12, 2006 A highly educated
British Muslim, Moazzam Begg spent three years in U.S. custody, nearly
two of them in Guantánamo, before being released without charge
in January of 2005. Moazzam Begg was born and raised in Birmingham, England, where he established an Islamic bookstore and aided in relief efforts in Bosnia and Afghanistan. He moved to Kabul with his family in 2001. Since his release he has returned to Birmingham, and speaks and lectures widely.
September
5, 2006 Science is on the defensive. Half of Americans reject the theory of evolution and “Intelligent Design” campaigns are gaining ground. Classroom by classroom, creationism is overthrowing biology. In Why Darwin Matters, Shermer explains how the newest brand of creationism appeals to our predisposition to look for a designer behind life’s complexity. Shermer decodes the scientific evidence to show that evolution is not “just a theory” and illustrates how it achieves the design of life through the bottom-up process of natural selection. Shermer, once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, argues that Intelligent Design proponents are invoking a combination of bad science, political antipathy, and flawed theology. He refutes their pseudoscientific arguments and then demonstrates why conservatives and people of faith can and should embrace evolution. He then appraises the evolutionary questions that truly need to be settled, building a powerful argument for science itself.
August
29, 2006 Nunberg explains how the political right has ushered in a new world order, aided unwittingly by the liberal media. Democrats are well known for their "lousy bumper stickers," as Joe Klein puts it. As liberals wade through the semantics of "social security lockbox," "single payer," and other wonky locutions, the right has become harder, meaner and better at getting out the message: the estate tax became the more menacing "death tax" and a contentious education initiative was wrapped in the comforting (and memorable) blanket of "No Child Left Behind." But Nunberg shows that the real story is more subtle than just a bumper sticker war. Conservatives' main goal wasn't to win voters over to their positions on healthcare, education, or the environment. They had a much more dramatic ambition. By changing the meaning of words like "values," "government," "liberal"; "faith," and "freedom," conservatives have shifted the political center of gravity of the language itself to the right. "Whatever our politics," Nunberg observes, "when we talk about politics nowadays, we can't help using language that embodies a conservative world-view." Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the Berkeley School of Information. He is chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. His commentaries on language and politics are regularly seen in the Sunday New York Times and other publications. A winner of the Linguistic Society of America's Language and the Public Interest Award, he is also the author of The Way We Talk Now and Going Nucular.
August
22, 2006 As one of the world's leading scientists. Collins works at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God and scripture. He believes that God cares about us and can intervene in human affairs — on rare occasions, even miraculously. Collins has personally discovered some of the scientific evidence for the common descent of all living creatures, even though he repudiates the materialist, atheistic worldview argued by many prominent Darwinists. In short, Collins provides a satisfying solution for the dilemma that haunts everyone who believes in God and respects science. Faith in God and faith in science can be harmonious — combined into one worldview. The God that he believes in is a God who can listen to prayers and cares about our souls. The biological science he has advanced is compatible with such a God. For Collins, science does not conflict with the Bible, science enhances it. Collins considers and rejects several positions along the spectrum from atheism to young-earth creationism — including agnosticism and Intelligent Design. Instead, he proposes a new synthesis, a new way to think about an active, caring God who created humankind through evolutionary processes.
August
15, 2006 The first work to provide an in-depth analysis of the topic, Evil Incarnate uses anthropology, the history of religion, sociology, and psychoanalytic theory, to answer the questions "What causes people collectively to envision evil and seek to exterminate it?" and "Why does the representation of evil recur in such typical patterns?" Frankfurter discusses such diverse subjects as witch-hunting, the origins of demonology, cannibalism, and the rumors of Jewish ritual murder, demonstrating how societies have long expanded upon their fears of such atrocities to address a collective anxiety. Frankfurter is Professor of Religious Studies and History at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of the acclaimed Religion in Roman Egypt, which won the 1999 award for excellence in the historical study of religion from the American Academy of Religion.
August
8, 2006 In the early 1970s, Coleman married Daniel, a young Vietnam veteran and fellow photographer. Soon, Daniel became deeply troubled, falling victim to multiple addictions and becoming strangely insecure. He suffered from what we now call posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). After Coleman left him, he committed suicide. Struggling to understand Daniel's experience, Coleman began investigating the history of PTSD; she found clear cases of the disorder as far back as the Civil War. In Flashback, Coleman deftly weaves psychology and military, political, oral, and cultural history to trace the experience of PTSD in the military up through the Vietnam War. She then focuses on Vietnam to show why this war in particular led to such a high number of PTSD cases, many of which ended tragically in suicide. Like the soldiers listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall, these men are casualties of war. With record numbers of American soldiers returning from the Middle East already suffering from PTSD, Flashback provides a necessary lesson on the real tragedy of battle for soldiers and their families, something that continues long after the war ends. Coleman, the author of Village Elders, teaches photography and photojournalism at the International Center for Photography and at New Jersey City University. She lives with her partner in New York City.
August
1, 2006 In
the course of more than sixty years spent covering Washington politics,
Thomas has witnessed a raft of fundamental changes in the way news
is gathered and reported. Gone are the days of frequent firsthand
contact with the president. Now, the press sees the president only
at tightly controlled and orchestrated press conferences. In addition,
Thomas sees a growing — and alarming — reluctance among
reporters to question government spokesmen and probe for the truth.
The result has been a wholesale failure by journalists to fulfill
what is arguably their most vital role in contemporary American life — to
be the watchdogs of democracy. Today's journalists, according to Thomas,
have become subdued, compromised lapdogs. July 25, 2006 Our guest is Sasha Abramsky author of Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House. More than four million Americans, mainly poor, black, and Latino, have lost the right to vote. In some states, as many as a third of all African American men cannot take part in the most basic right of a democracy. The reason? Felony disenfranchisement laws, which remove the vote from people while they are in prison or on parole, and, in several states, for the rest of their lives. In Conned,ward-winning journalist Sasha Abramsky takes us on a journey through disenfranchised America, detailing the revival of antidemocratic laws that came of age in the post-Civil War segregationist South, and profiling Americans who are fighting to regain the right to vote. From the Pacific Northwest to Miami, with stops in a dozen states in between, Abramsky shows for the first time how this growing problem has played a decisive role in elections nationwide—from state races all the way up to the closely contested 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Abramsky, a Senior Fellow for Democracy at the public policy organization Demos, has written for the New York Times, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and LA Weekly, among others. He is the author of Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built a Prison Nation, and teaches at the University of California, Davis.
July
18, 2006 Ashford confronts the reality of a world awash in weapons and the belief that war is inevitable, with people powerless to change the system and provides an alternative perspective based on solutions known to be successful because they have been used already. She describes the culture of violence that has led the world to this precipice of hopelessness, and then points to signs of hope that a different future is possible. Focusing on the power of ordinary people to make a difference and packed with effective nonviolent success stories — often in a setting of hate and provocation — Enough Blood Shed provides guidance, inspiration, hope and empowerment that peace is not only possible, but can be fun along the way. Ashford is Past President of International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War which won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
July
11, 2006 Off the lush coast of Kauai sits the almost unknown island of Niihau. Its inhabitants — mostly Hawaiian natives — lead a quiet, simple life. They work the ranch of the island's owner, Aylmer Robinson, an eccentric haole who insists that Niihau remain isolated from the outside world; no phones, cars, electricity, or other conveniences are allowed. According to Robinson's Christian view, his people must be protected from modern evils, and his island haven kept as pure as Eden before the Fall. Then a plane crash-lands on Niihau. The Hawaiians have no idea that it's a Japanese Zero, and that the pilot — who survives the landing — has just taken part in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Concerned primarily with the fact that visitors aren't allowed, Niihau's residents await Mr. Robinson's monthly visit from Kauai. But unknown to them, the outside world is now at war. Only the island's one Japanese-American couple, Irene and Yoshio Harada, realize the significance of the downed soldier. Convinced that Japan has successfully invaded the United States, and pressured by the desperate pilot, the Haradas face a growing dilemma. Are they loyal to America, their country, but one that has bruised them with prejudice? Or should they help the pilot, betraying their Hawaiian neighbors but saving themselves? As the Zero smolders in the Niihauan soil, and the Niihauans slowly figure out that the modern world has encroached on their remote island whether they like it or not, the Haradas see cracks in their own shaky marriage beginning to widen. Paradise, once within reach, slowly falls victim to its own isolated innocence. Based on a little-known true event, East Wind, Rain is a provocative and compelling debut novel of people thrust unwittingly into a war — not only of nations, but of American identity — with devastating and irrevocable consequences for them all.
July
4, 2006 Voters don't choose politicians-politicians choose voters by manipulating election rules. What can we do to restore power to the people? While politicians spew shallow sound bites that describe a "free" American people who govern themselves by selecting their representatives, in reality politicians from both parties maintain control by selecting particular voters. Incumbent politicians maintain thousands of election practices and bureaucratic hurdles that determine who votes and how votes are counted — such as the location of election district boundaries, long lines at urban polling places, and English-only ballots. In Stealing Democracy, Overton uses real-life stories to show how these seemingly insignificant practices channel political power and determine policies on war, schools, clean air, and other issues that shape our lives. He also exposes the pressure points in this Orwellian system and provides strategies toward restoring self-government, such as making voting easier for all Americans, removing redistricting power from self-interested partisans, and renewing parts of the Voting Rights Act that expire in 2007. Overton's insights are vital to the future of our democracy.
June
27, 2006 Arnove sets out a compelling case for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Countering widespread arguments made in support of the occupation by conservatives and liberals alike, Arnove insists that the U.S. presence is the major source of instability and suffering for the Iraqi people. He challenges the idea that George W. Bush has ever been interested in bringing democracy to the country and explores the real reasons behind the invasion, which centrally involve control over strategic Middle Eastern energy resources. And he sets out a constructive vision for the antiwar movement, one that involves soldiers, military families, and the many communities affected by the occupation, who together can build a coalition to bring the troops home. Arnove is the editor of Iraq Under Siege and co-editor, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of a People’s History of the United States. His writing has appeared in the Financial Times, The Nation, Mother Jones, Monthly Review, Le Nouvel Observateur, Z Magazine, and other publications.
June
20, 2006 Before the 2004 election, and during the ensuing months when many Americans were trying to understand how an administration marked by cronyism, disregard for the national budget, and poorly disguised self-interest had been reinstated, Goldberg traveled through the heartland of a country in the grips of a fevered religious radicalism: the America of our time. In Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage. In an age when faith rather than reason is heralded and the values of the Enlightenment are threatened by a mystical nationalism claiming divine sanction, Kingdom Coming brings us face to face with the irrational forces that are remaking much of America.
June
13, 2006 With much of Latin America now in open rebellion against U.S. domination, Grandin concludes with a vital question: If Washington has failed to bring prosperity and democracy to Latin America — its own backyard “workshop” — what are the chances it will do so for the world?
June 6,
2006 In his latest book, The Culture Struggle, Parenti shows us that culture is a changing process and the product of a dynamic interplay between a wide range of social and political interests. It is not enough to study the prevailing political realm; we also must grasp developments throughout the entire civil society. In short, to understand a society we need to understand the problem of culture as well as that of power. Drawing from cultures around the world, Parenti demonstrates that beliefs and practices are readily subjected to political manipulation, and that cultures are instruments of social power. Many parts of modern culture are being commodified, that is, packaged and sold to those who can pay. Folk culture is giving way to a corporate market culture. Art, science, medicine, psychiatry, and even marriage have been used as instruments of cultural control across the centuries. Powerful interests also employ racism, sexism, and class supremacy to maintain their existing politico-economic rule. Culture is both something to be contained and itself an instrument of domination. Parenti has taught at a number of colleges and universities, in the United States and abroad. He is the author of eighteen books, including Superpariotism, The Assassination of Julius Caesar, and Inventing Reality.
May
30, 2006 Do you ever wonder if there's a connection between the increasingly frequent corruption scandals in the news and the steady decline in the quality of life for millions of Americans? Do you ever wonder what corporations get for the millions of dollars they pour into the American political system? Do you ever think the government has been hijacked by forces hostile to average Americans? Do you ever want to fight back? If your answer to any of these questions is "yes," then Hostile Takeover is your guide. In Hostile Takeover, Sirota seeks to open the eyes of ordinary Americans and show us exactly how corporate interests have conquered our democracy, aided and abetted by their lackeys in our allegedly representative government. At a time when more and more of America's major political leaders are being indicted or investigated for corruption, Sirota takes readers on a journey that shows how all of this nefarious behavior happens right under our noses, how it is all symptomatic of a diseased political system, and how the high-profile scandals are merely one product of a political system and a political debate wholly owned by Big Money interests.
May
23, 2006 In the 1950s, the exclusion of women and of black and Latino men from higher-paying jobs was so universal as to seem normal to most Americans. Today, diversity in the workforce is a point of pride. How did such a transformation come about? In Freedom is Not Enough, Nancy MacLean shows how African-American and later Mexican-American civil rights activists and feminists concluded that freedom alone would not suffice: access to jobs at all levels is a requisite of full citizenship. Tracing the struggle to open the American workplace to all, MacLean chronicles the cultural and political advances that have irrevocably changed our nation over the past fifty years.
May
16, 2006 For every dollar owned by the average white family in the United States, the average family of color has 18 cents. Why do people of color have so little wealth? Robles show that for centuries, people of color have been barred by laws and by discrimination from participating in government wealth-building programs that have benefited white Americans. The Color of Wealth — published in conjunction with one of the country’s leading economics education organizations, United for a Fair Economy — makes the case that until government policy tackles disparities in wealth, not just income, the United States will never have racial or economic justice.
May
9, 2006 People on the right are furious. People on the left are livid. And the center isn’t holding. There is only one thing on which almost everyone agrees: there is something very wrong in Washington. The country is being run by pollsters. Few politicians are able to win the voters’ trust. Blame abounds and personal responsibility is nowhere to be found. There is a cynicism in Washington that appalls those in every state, red or blue. The question is: Why? The more urgent question is: What can be done about it? Klein is as angry and fed up as the rest of us, so he has decided to do something about it — in Politics Lost, he vents, reconstructs, deconstructs, and reveals how and why our leaders are less interested in leading than they are in the “permanent campaign” that political life has become. Klein is the author of five previous books, including Primary Colors and The Natural.
April 25, 2006 Our guest is Elizabeth Kolbert author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man Nature and Climate Change. Americans have been warned since the late nineteen-seventies that the buildup of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere threatens to melt the polar ice sheets and irreversibly change our climate. With little done since then to alter this dangerous course, now is the moment to salvage our future. By the end of the century, the world will likely be hotter than it’s been in the last two million years, and the sweeping consequences of this change will determine the future of life on earth for generations to come. In Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Kolbert travels to the Arctic, interviews researchers and environmentalists, explains the science and the studies, draws frightening parallels to lost ancient civilizations, unpacks the politics, and presents the personal tales of those who are being affected most — the people who make their homes near the poles and, in an eerie foreshadowing, are watching their worlds disappear. Growing out of a groundbreaking three-part series for the New Yorker, Field Notes from a Catastrophe brings the environment into the consciousness of the American people and asks what, if anything, can be done, and how we can save our planet. Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1999. Prior to that she was a reporter for the New York Times. She received the American Association for the Advancement of Science's magazine writing award for the New Yorker series on which this book is based.
April
18, 2006 In her new book George and Martha, George W. Bush and Martha Stewart meet in a seedy motel room on the night before the Republican National Convention. Their affair goes way back, before George stole the election, before Martha built an empire on fascist domesticity. As usual, George numbs his pain over waging perpetual war with cocaine and the promise of kinky sex. Martha is forced to take a long view of her life as she suffers the public humiliation of corporate scandal, on the brink of going to prison. Written in the style of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, George & Martha is Karen Finley’s most scandalous work to date, a hilarious satire that takes a radical stand on political power, psychosexual relations between men and women, and the current state of affairs. Finley has performed and exhibited her artwork at cultural centers and universities worldwide. Her books includes Shock Treatment, A Different Kind of Intimacy, Enough Is Enough and Living It Up. She teaches Art and Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
April
11, 2006 In the late 1960s, Kevin Phillips wrote The Emerging Republican Majority, a book later described as “the political bible of the Nixon Administration.” In it, Phillips predicted a new era of GOP control of the presidency based on the realignment of the South. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he was viewed as one of the GOP's top theoreticians and electoral analysts. Today, however, Phillips is warning that the party — and the country as a whole — is headed for potential disaster. In American Theocracy, Phillips demonstrates that every world-dominating power — from Ancient Rome to the British Empire — has been brought down by a related set of causes: a lethal combination of global over-reach, militant religion, resource problems, and ballooning debt. It is this same axis of ills that has come to define America’s political and economic identity in the past decade. Military miscalculations in the Middle East, the surge of fundamentalist religion, the staggering national debt, the costs of U.S. oil dependence — together these factors are undermining our nation’s security, solvency, and standing in the world. If left unchecked, the same forces will bring a debt- bloated, preachy, energy-starved America to its knees.
April
4, 2006 Despite the popularity of John Paul II, opposition to many of his policies had hardened among Catholics by the time of his death. The Church had become more doctrinaire, the voices of millions of dissenters ignored. Now Robert Blair Kaiser examines the most important and divisive issues confronting the Church: the sex abuse scandal, a shortage of priests due to the insistence upon celibacy, the ban on contraception, the roles of women and gays in the Church, the failure to reach out sincerely to other faiths, the increased participation of laypeople in Church affairs. Kaiser gives in-depth portraits of six of the cardinals who gathered in Rome in April 2005 to choose a new pope — Ratzinger from Germany, Mahony from the United States, Murphy-O’Connor from Britain, Rodríguez Maradiaga from Honduras, Arinze from Nigeria, and Darmaatmadja from Indonesia—and through them makes clear why Catholics worldwide are increasingly leaving the Church or defying Church doctrine. Finally, he explains why Ratzinger’s ascendance was assured, and what this might mean for the future. Kaiser spent ten years in the Jesuits before he left to pursue a career in journalism. He was a religion reporter for The New York Times, Time, and CBS, and is now a contributing editor in Rome for Newsweek. He is the editor of JustGoodCompany, an online journal of religion and culture. His books include Clerical Error; The Politics of Sex and Religion; and Pope, Council, and World. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, and in Rome. March
28, 2006 Strapped looks at the new obstacle course facing young adults-the under 35 crowd-as they try to build careers, buy homes and start families. As Draut explains, getting ahead is getting harder. A college degree is the new high school diploma — but it now costs a fortune to get that degree and students graduate with crippling debts. Good jobs are scarcer thanks to stagnant wages and disappearing benefits. And, the cost of everything — starter homes, health coverage, childcare — keeps going up and up. Budding families, even those with two incomes, struggle to pay the bills, while Visa and Mastercard have become the new safety net. Young adults are starting out behind the financial eight ball-borrowing their way into adulthood and wondering whatever happened to the American Dream. Draut is director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos — a national think tank headquartered in New York. Her work on debt has been covered extensively by dozens of newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
March
21, 2006 While the Greatest Generation deserves our praise for surviving the Depression and fighting in World War II, the Baby Boomers, according to Steinhorn, are in many ways as great a generation — if not greater — for how they have advanced equality and freedom at home. It’s fashionable to mock Boomers as self-involved and materialistic. But what really is the true legacy of the Boomers? To understand how Boomers have changed America, think back to the 1950s — but without the nostalgia. Women were kept at home, minorities were denied their dignity, homosexuality was a crime, and anyone who marched to a different drummer was labeled un-American and viewed as a threat. Today we live in a far more open, inclusive, tolerant, and equal America than at any other time in our history. And that’s because — as The Greater Generation explains — Baby Boomers, from the Sixties onward, have fought a great cultural war to free America from its prejudices, inequalities, and fears.
March
14, 2006 Since the 1970s, the U.S. economy has been sending more and more of its rewards to fewer and fewer people. Once seen as a global exemplar of egalitarianism and middle-class opportunity, America has become the most unequal of developed nations — a land where corporate leaders earn hundreds of times the pay of average workers, and the only population group growing faster than millionaires is the uninsured. Statistics aside, this quarter-century-long trend has changed the texture of American life in ways that threaten our deepest values. Drawing on the best and latest research, Inequality Matters explores the story the numbers tell about how America has changed; dimensions of inequality (education, health, and opportunity); causes of inequality — looking past the usual suspects of technology, trade, and immigration; the persistence of racial disparities; the erosion of democracy and community; and inequality as a moral and religious problem. Not just a catalog of inequality's ills, the book concludes with a plausible and hopeful policy path—beyond redistribution—to a more just and humane economy. Lardner is the founder of Inequality.org and has written for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Nation, U.S. News & World Report, and New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of Fast Forward: A Machine and the Commotion It Caused, and the co-author, with Thomas Reppetto, of NYPD: A City and Its Police.
February
28, 2006 In Dean's estimation, the secrecy with which Bush and Dick Cheney govern is not merely a preferred system of management but an obsessive strategy meant to conceal a deeply troubling agenda of corporate favoritism and a dramatic growth in unchecked power for the executive branch that put at risk the lives of American citizens, civil liberties, and the Constitution. Dean sets out to make his point by drawing attention to several areas about which Bush and Cheney have been tight-lipped: the revealing by a "senior White House official" of the identity of an undercover CIA operative whose husband questioned the administration, the health of Cheney, the identity of Cheney's energy task force, the information requested by the bi-partisan 9/11 commission, Bush's business dealings early in his career, the creation of a "shadow government", wartime prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, and scores more. He theorizes that the truth about these and many other situations, including the decision to go to war in Iraq, will eventually surface and that Bush and Cheney's secrecy is a thus far effective means of keep a lid on a rapidly multiplying set of lies and scandals that far outstrip the misdeeds that led directly to Dean's former employer, Richard Nixon, resigning in disgrace. Dean has written many articles on law, government,and politics. He has recounted his days in the Nixon White House and Watergate in two books, Blind Ambition (1976) and Lost Honor (1982). He works as a writer, lecturer, and private investment banker.
February
21, 2006 For more than two decades, Bamford has been a noted investigative journalist focusing on intelligence-gathering in the United States. He exposed the ultra-secret National Security Agency two decades ago in The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, both award-winning bestsellers. He has testified as an expert witness on intelligence issues before committees of both the Senate and House of Representatives as well as the European Parliament in Brussels and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Bamford's most recent book, A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, examines intelligence-gathering related to the Iraq War and 9/11. Bamford was until recently Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and has written investigative cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine.
February
14, 2006 In The Empty Tank, Leggett, an internationally renowned geologist and energy entrepreneur who spent the 1980s working for Big Oil, shows how major energy producers have been exposed providing false information about climate change and underground reserves. He describes how governments collude with private enterprise and one another to keep the global economy hooked on oil. And he explains the science behind oil extraction, demonstrating with unimpeachable expertise why the well is indeed running dry a lot faster than we think. The Empty Tank explains how we became addicted to oil and why that addiction is leading us toward disaster. Yet Leggett also points the way forward. All the technology we need to get off the road to disaster is already at hand. A new Manhattan Project for energy can save us if we can wake up and confront the problem directly, as this important book urges us to do.
February
7, 2006 Hersh's legendary career as an investigative reporter began in 1969, when he broke the My Lai Massacre story. His considerable skill and well-placed sources inside the government, intelligence community, military, and the diplomatic corps have given him access to a wide range of information unavailable to most reporters. Chain of Command is packed with specific details and thoughtful analysis of events since the attacks of September 11, 2001, including intelligence failures prior to 9/11; postwar planning regarding Afghanistan and Iraq; the corruption of the Saudi family; Pakistan's nuclear program, which spread nuclear technology via the black market (and admitted as such); influence peddling at the highest levels; and the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, among other topics. Hersh's lectures at the Newport Beach Public Library on February 10-11 are sold out. Visit the library's website for more information about their outstanding Martin W. Witte Distinguished Speakers Lecture Series.
January
31, 2006 In Nuclear Shordown, Chang points out that both America's pre-eminence and the universal appeal of democratic principles are increasingly questionable propositions and suggests a way out: partial nuclear disarmament by the U.S. in order to kick-start an international mission to force Kim to abandon nuclear arms. The current administration, however, is doing exactly the opposite by attempting to win approval for a new generation of tactical 'mini nukes.' It's a strategy that has both eroded international sympathy and exposed the great hypocrisy behind America's nuclear nonproliferation initiatives. If we lose, I will destroy the world, said Kim Jong Il, supreme leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Kim's regime insults all of us. Its very existence is an affront to humanity's sense of decency and challenges accepted notions of politics, economics, and social theory. More important, North Korea threatens us. The Great
Leader, as Kim now calls himself, can change the course of history with
an act of unimaginable devastation. He possesses an arsenal of nuclear weapons
and the ballistic missiles to deliver them. Today he can hit most of the
continent of Asia and even parts of the American homeland. In a few years-probably
by the end of this decade-the diminutive despot will cast his shadow across
the globe: He will be able to land a nuke on any point on the planet.
January
24, 2006 After the 1991 Gulf War, Ritter helped lead the UN weapons inspections of Iraq and found himself at the center of a dangerous game between the Iraqi and US regimes. As Ritter reveals in Iraq Confidential : The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein, Washington was only interested in disarmament as a tool for its own agenda. Operating in a fog of espionage and counter-espionage, Ritter and his team were determined to find out the truth about Iraq’s WMD. The CIA were equally determined to stop them. The truth, as we now know, was that Iraq was playing a deadly game of double-bluff, and actually had no WMD. But to have revealed this would have derailed America’s drive for regime change. Iraq Confidential charts the disillusionment of a staunch patriot who came to realize that his own government sought to undermine effective arms control in the Middle East. Ritter shows us a world of deceit and betrayal in which nothing is as it seems. A host of characters from Mossad, MI6 and the CIA pepper this powerful narrative, which contains revelations that will permanently affect the ongoing debates about Iraq.
January
17, 2006 Truth, Torture, and the American Way offers both well-documented evidence of the CIA’s continuous involvement in torture tactics since the 1970s and moving personal testimony from many of the victims. Most important, Harbury provides solid, convincing arguments against the use of torture in any circumstances: not only because it is completely inconsistent with all the basic values Americans hold dear, but also because it has repeatedly proved to be ineffective: Again and again, “information” obtained through these gruesome tactics proves unreliable or false. Worse, the use of torture by U.S. client states, allies, and even by our own operatives, endangers our citizens and especially our troops deployed internationally.
January
10, 2006 Here is the story behind one of the most remarkable Internet successes of our time. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, the book takes you inside the creation and growth of a company whose name is a favorite brand and a standard verb recognized around the world. Its stock is worth more than General Motors’ and Ford’s combined, its staff eats for free in a dining room that used to be run by the Grateful Dead’s former chef, and its employees traverse the firm’s colorful Silicon Valley campus on scooters and inline skates. The Google Story is the definitive account of the populist media company powered by the world’s most advanced technology that in a few short years has revolutionized access to information about everything for everybody everywhere. In 1998, Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, in their own words, “change the world” through a search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free. While the company has done exactly that in more than one hundred languages, Google’s quest continues as it seeks to add millions of library books, television broadcasts, and more to its searchable database.
January
3, 2006 In past years, the project's annual book, Censored, has been instrumental in helping push underreported stories into the mainstream. In the 1997 edition, Karl Grossman’s article "Risking the World: Nuclear Proliferation in Space" led to 60 Minutes doing a national feature on the subject. Censored 1999 featured Monsanto’s "terminator seed" project, which was subsequently discontinued because of negative publicity. Censored 2001 exposed the disasterous impact of the increasing privatization of the global water supply, a story that is rapidly becoming one of the major issues of the twenty-first century. We can expect more of the same vital and aggressive coverage from Censored 2006.
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