Dangerous Books

Edward Abbey, The monkey wrench gang. Salt Lake City: Dream Garden Press, 1985 (null) Add Review: This a great book that keeps you on edge one adventure to the next...an inspirational story about folks fed up with the corrupt system and taking action against goverment & corporations. --Jacob Edit

Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990 (1970) Add Review: This book discusses how the Black Power and other Black liberation movements came to be, and how the corporate and government response has been similar to the colonial response. Allen's analysis is brilliantly thorough. --tr Edit

Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung. NYC: Vintage Books, 1988 Add Review: Must be read by all who wish to understand the 70's. Lester was the great seer, man. His so-called "rock writing" was very certainly cultural critique and angry liberating iconoclastic aesthetic philosophy of the finest kind. As I try to write this I keep getting caught by the short pieces - the death of Elvis, the death of Pere Ubu's cofounder and original guitarist Peter Laughner, and, famously, his recognition of the Stooges in the late 60's. --snw Edit

Bommi, How It All Began. Munich/Vancouver: Trikont Verlag/Pulp Press, 1975 Add Review: Personal journal of one of the ringleader West German urban guerillas of the late 1970's, Michael "Bommi" Baumann. This is an interesting if crudely fashioned autobiographical tale of youthful revolt disintegrating into competitive posturing, infighting, and grimly humorless violence. At the same time it is one of the few documents we have, written from the inside of the German action groups of the Baader Meinhoff era and is pretty fascinating if intellectually disappointing. Baumann does present an honest seeming self-portrayal of an apprentice laborer dropping out of the rigid German trades system, turning on with really a lot of hashish all the time, and then smashing the state with a motley band of similarly minded friends. He tells some quite amusing stories of poorly thought-out street actions and hair-raising escapes, and paints a picture of youthful left-wing hijinks that compels the reader to press on to the later underground months - years, in his case - while the German security apparatus cracked down mercilessly and often fatally on the the Left after 1977 and the kidnapping and murder of industrialist and ex-SS man Hanns-Martin Schleyer, on theboard of Daimler-Benz by the Red Army Faction. Baumann's thin tome is an interesting read for fans of the revolutionary memoir. --snw Edit

Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco. Berkeley: UC Press, 1999 Add Review: A good farewell gift for your friends who've been forced out of the Bay Area by the most recent real estate scams. Gives the long view of the power elite who continue to control land and resources in the contado of San Francisco, and an inkling of the toxins left behind by their various businesses. From mine tailings to nuclear waste, Brechin outlines 150 years of trash dumped on California by once-profitable plunders (which most likely contribute to the Bay Area's alarming cancer rates). Brechin emphasises the secretive and self-protective nature of this small corp of historical and contemporary robber barons. --gw Edit

George Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990 Add Review

James Brook, Iain Boal ed., Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. San Francisco: City Lights, 1995 Add Review: Devastatingly critiques the role technology plays in our lives. A collection of essays relentlessly declawing the almost universally unquestioned assumptions that computerization benefits society and workers in particular, that quality of life has been perpetually improving, and that our humanity is furthered by computer-mediated experience, among others. --tr Edit; Iain Boal's introduction provides an insightful discussion of contemporary luddism, and a refreshing viewpoint on the history of the Luddites themselves. --gw Edit

Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy. New York: Verso, 1991 Add Review: Chomsky eloquently shows how the US became the global military power by an astounding margin, and details the endless atrocities it has committed once gaining this power. The full text can be found online on Z Magazine. --tr Edit

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: why they succeed, how they fail. New York: Vintage, 1979 Add Review: once i'm done... --tr Edit

CrimethInc, Days of War, Nights of Love. Canada: CrimethInc, 2000 Add Review: Cutting-edge revolutionary dogma. A very readable guide to far-left opinion ranging from alternative forms of social organization to hygiene and historical anti-revisionism. What they have to say for themselves. --tr Edit; The most liberating book ever written. Grow a brain, and actually think for yourself. That is the simple message, and it truly seems that you have problems with this....especiall since you deem this sort of thinking "Dangerous". --Tray Edit

Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983 Add Review: An excellent exposition of the Divide and Conquer attacks perennially used against liberation groups. Understanding the ways in which the histories of racism, sexism, and classism are really facets of a larger concept of oppression is crucial to successful resistance. --tr Edit

Mike Davis, City of Quartz. London: Verso, 1990 Add Review: Long Summary
Using Los Angeles as the grisly example, Davis shows us the forces at work in our cities and what they will become if the consolidation of power continues. --tr Edit

G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America?. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967 Add Review: Long Summary
There is an updated edition. Using the "sociology of leadership" method, this book argues that contrary to popular myth, America has a nearly totally closed and cohesive ruling class consisting of approximately the richest 0.5% of the population. Most shocking is the degree to which the boards of directors of major corporations, governmental organizations, "non-profit" insitutions, and banks overlap. We are being horribly violated. --tr Edit

Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World - Computers & the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997 Add Review: A fabulous history of the intertwined origin and destiny of computers and Cold War strategic "thinking". Details of the development of the gigantic missile detection networks in the 50's fill much of the book, but this is used as catalyst for Edwards' primary thesis on the intractability of any project to depoliticize the computer itself. His bracing, tireless effort to convey this inevtiable conclusion is effective if, ultimately, he does go on a bit. This is a critically significant aspect of 20th century political, technological, and military history, but it has been pointedly eliminated from the educational canon of the great technocracies. --snw Edit

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. New York: Modern Library, 1994 (1952) Add Review: This is the only novel I've read three times. Ellison's cohesive theme is that identity is formed entirely within a person through thought, and he devastates any idea that any presupposition about a person's mind can be either accurate or just. And the book is a beautiful piece of art. --total revolution Edit; To Whom It May Concern: Keep this Cracka Girl Running. --kgb Edit; how many pages are in the book --pages Edit; publisher Random House, Inc., and the number of pages of the book is 439 --publisher and pages Edit; I want to know about the 2002 edition --2002 edition Edit

Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964 Add Review: A collection of social, political, and literary criticism probing deep into Faulkner, Malraux, Dostoevsky, Twain, Wright and others. In addition to being brilliant work, the illumination this gives of Ellison's early intellectual life adds immensely to the reading of Invisible Man. --tr Edit; What is the call number of the oldest copy of Ellison's Shadow and Act? PS153.N5 E4 1964 --Anonymous Edit; to get the call number --katepa Edit; I want to know what the call number is to the oldest copy of the book --call number Edit

Erik H Erikson, Identity and the life cycle. New York: Norton, [1980] Add Review

Ernst, Three Faces of Fascism. : Holt, Reinhart, Winston, 1966 Add Review: One of the classic texts; both an exercise in comparative fascism between the Italian and German interpretations, and a broader attempt at deriving a theoretical framework that might be used to understand and describe the phenomenon of European fascism. The english translation is a little lumpy - in the same way Arendt's translations tend to read, i.e. the German convolutions and compound wordsmithing is kept intact - but the book is lucid and very clearheaded. He very interestingly discusses most all of the between-wars Fascist organizations, parties, and movements in Europe, critiquing them and comparing them to the two instances of most concern, Italian and German Fascism. He spends some time on the French contribution, in particular the Action Francaise, due to the (predictable) relative verbosity and attempt at a theoretical synthesis by the Gauls. Primarily the book provides a substantial historical background on both Mussolini's and Hitler's trajectories, then compares them closely, looking for the commonalities as well as the differences. Nolte's book is referenced by virtually every other book that came after it on this topic. Justly so. --snw Edit

Stuart Ewen, PR!: A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic, 1996 Add Review: Mental mercenaries... Ewen documents the rise of public relations in the US roughly from the cover-up artists of the turn of the century to the modern media portals from which untruths spill like sewage. His preoccupation with liberal democratic, public-sphere ruminations distracted me a bit from the meatier material concerning school programs designed to instill capitalist values in the brave youth of tomorrow... who now hold political offices, etc. --total revolution Edit

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963 Add Review

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1979 (1975) Add Review

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000 (1970) Add Review: A must-read for anyone planning on staying radical or revolutionary for any length of time. Friere's response to the faltering revolutions of the 60's, this book explains how to become a true educator/revolutionary and articulates a quite concrete set of concepts neccessary to any true liberation work. --tr Edit

Yves Fremion, Orgasms of History: 3000 Years of Spontaneous Insurrection. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2002 Add Review: Some of the many inspiring events in our shared history, "of widespread self-management, or of attempts in that direction."
"Let no one kid themselves: a book is no substitute for a rifle. But it can train one's sights that bit better. A book can never be a substitute for an orgasm. But it can help to while away the time between attacks, be they political, social or, amorous." --total revolution Edit

Ovid (ed. Horace Gregory, The Metamorphoses. New York: Penguin, 2001 Add Review: The Greek and Roman myths which were ancient when this book was written (by 23 AD) are retold as an epic poem. You'll get a solid feeling for the inside of this cat's head, at least: he spent most of the day thinking about sex, wine, tyrrany, and why everything must be so very ruthless. So in the end, what began as innocent nymph, satyr, and Jove stories become scathing and sensuously telluric indictments of militarism and capital. This cat pays attention to what matters in life, waves of wheat quietly and rustlingly discontent with merely vegetating, not-so-innocent nymphs guzzling streams of wine and honey in the silver shade of the mountain, and kicking Whitey's ass for making us fight his wars to win The Man some loot.

I include a small taste for your reading pleasure. --adam wight Edit

David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2004 Add Review: This is Griffin: a tenured professor of philosophy and religion at the Claremont School of Theology in CA. This is what he did: Read 9/11 conspiracy theory websites, freaked out, did some research, was appalled, published findings. Though certain parts are of course questionable on his part, a lot of dubious shit he presents is just common sense. For example, a 125 foot wide Boeing 747 crashed and made an 18-foot wide hole in the Pentagon's outside wall. It then blew up and burned so hot that there were no remains of the plane whatsoever, and when asked how victims were identified on Flight 77, officials say they were able to fingerprint everybody on board. What? Right. Griffin raises some good questions about the physics of how the Twin Towers and WTC-7 burned and fell, and questions why the wreckage was hauled off to China and Korea so quickly. Some dirty stuff about terrorist intelligence agents knocking each other off before and after 9/11. I'd say 10% of the book is sketchy, but the other 90% is right on, or at least in the right direction. Defnintely worth reading because everyone knows that those planes should not have been able to hit the Towers--and definitely NOT the Pentagon. If our air traffic control and airforce, with all their fancy toys, are that inept, we might as well hire Israel's airforce to protect us--I heard they can get planes off the ground, in the air, and into action in eight minutes--(not the record 9/11 timing of forty-five minutes). I also give props to Griffin for mentioning Project for a New American Century (PNAC)--my new favorite neo-con think tank I just love to hate. They're Skull and Bones with absolutely no shame--it's great! And they're winning! READ. --kgb Edit

Ulrike Heider, Anarchism: Left, Right, and Green. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1994 Add Review: An excellent survey and history of the ideologies currently calling themselves "anarchist." Heider admits that the book is heavily biased towards anarcho-syndicalism, to the point of not discussing any other Left forms of anarchism, but this doesn't detract from the book's value. --tr Edit

Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom. New York: Verso, 1997 Add Review: Editor of the Left Business Observer, an excellent antidote to The Economist, Henwood completely demystifies "The Market." He shows us how financial instruments operate, what is really being traded in the NYSE, and why governments seem to have a mysterious and uniquely contemporary habit of going perversely into debt... --tr Edit

Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing in Chicago 1940-1960. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998 (1983) Add Review: Documents how the ghettos that exist today have been engineered by corporations and governments. Also, this process of ghetto formation and "urban renewal" is close analogue to the more poorly funded race riots. --tr Edit

bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994 Add Review

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994 Add Review

Myles Horton, The Long Haul. New York: Teacher's College, 1998 (1990) Add Review: This autobiography of the founder of the Highlander School (attended by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks) describes the development of Horton's revolutionary consciousness. One of his fundamental priciples is that anyone truly committed to social change is in it for "the long haul." --tr Edit

Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1997 Add Review

George Jackson, Blood In My Eye. New York: Random House, 1990 (1971) Add Review: I am a retard and don't know about george jackson --Anonymous Edit; ... --Anonymous Edit

Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse. New York: Pantheon, 1986 Add Review: Welfare in America has never been intended to eliminate poverty. The objective has always been the slight alleviation of poverty, a balance between death and hunger in the interest of securing a permanent cheap labor pool. Eliminating poverty would mean workers could afford to choose their employer, for instance. --tr Edit

Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor. New York: Pantheon, 1989 Add Review

Elaine Katzenberger, First World, Ha Ha Ha!: The Zapatista Challenge. San Francisco: City Lights, 1995 Add Review: A collection of essays on the Zapatista revolution. Several essays are excellent and insipirational, while many are throughly lame. --tr Edit

Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace. Add Review

Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities. New York: Crown Publishers, 1991 Add Review

Jacobsen Krausnick, Buchheim, Broszat, Anatomy of the SS State. NYC: Walker & Co, 1965 Add Review: Four important postwar German historians each provide one quarter of the text of this collection. Each covers a particular aspect of the history of the Nazi regime: persecution of the Jews; "command and compliance" ideology, the manipulation of will; the early conception and methodical legalization of concentration camps; and finally the deliberate mass executions of Soviet POWs by the Einsatzkommandos on the Eastern Front. The great value of these papers, which vary in readability due to the different translators used for this English edition, is their attention to the ominous significance of legislative changes made by the Nazi party. Virtually all significant actions and policy manifestations were preceeded by formal changes to the German legal corpus. This is a crucial point for civil society. --snw Edit

Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists. New York: Routledge, 2000 Add Review: An exhaustively researched look at the current state of international neo-Nazism, with a strong focus on actual first-generation Nazis in the postwar world. Horrifying and sarcastic and breathtaking and most certainly worth reading for anyone seeking a highly readable survey of late 90's brownshirt tomfoolery. --snw Edit

Pepi Leistyna, Arlie Woodrum, Stephen Sherblom ed., Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy. Cambridge: Harvard Educational Review, 1996 Add Review: Collection of extremely radical essays on teaching. Covers, among other subjects, the instrumentality of "education" in perpetuating ignorance and complicity, a dialogue with Chomsky examining the social effects of capital, and critique of the "methods fetish" in contemporary education. --tr Edit; blah --Anonymous Edit
Out of print -- censored?

Louis Joughin and Edmund M. Morgan, The Legacy of Sacco & Vanzetti. Princeton: Princeton University, 1948 Add Review: uh, oh! --tr Edit

George Orwell, 1984. New York: Knopf, 1992 (1949) Add Review: Classic masterpiece quite reasonably equating state socialism with fascism. --tr Edit

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1980 (1938) Add Review: A great aspect of this book is Orwell's honesty about his own motivations. He paints himself as basically clueless - an enthusiastic British Anarchist thrown headlong into the utter insanity of the Spanish Civil War. This levels the playing field in a sense, allowing him to lampoon his comrades and quasi-comrades - to say nothing of the Fascists just across the lines - and provide a convincingly rocky and discombobulated picture of what was, after all, one of the great and hopeful moments of the last century. --snw Edit; Orwell's experiences fighting with the militia in the Spanish Civil War. Perfect companion to <u>1984</u>, as every element of that book derives almost exactly from this. Of particular interest are his descriptions of cities functioning anarchistically. --tr Edit

Peter Phillips, Project Censored, Censored 2000. New York: Seven Stories, 2000 Add Review: The latest book in a series that summarizes the most important events that American media has censored. Among other issues, this edition discusses the fact that the sponsors of Breast Cancer Awareness Month are the manufacturers of both chemicals that cause breast cancer and the leading (minimally effective) treatment drug. The "Awareness Month" focuses on treatment and not the elimination of carcinogenic substances from our food and environment. They have a website here. --tr Edit

John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World. London: Verso, 2003 Add Review: The New Rulers of the World is an insightful review of significant hitorical events. The only times I would put this book down was to wipe the tears from my eyes. Everyone should read this. "All of us have break the silence.."(Pilger 100). --sk Edit

Ralph, Deadly Deceits - My 25 years in the CIA. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1983 Add Review: McGehee is yet another CIA flameout, who ran headlong into his conscience in a hotel room near Saigon in 1968. The introduction opens with a fairly riveting description of this crisis. The body of the book begins at his recruitment in the early 50's, his progression through various positions until he moves his family to Thailand and becomes deeply embroiled in the Southeast Asian "troubles". There is a lot of interesting description of the hamlet pacification psywar campaign; worth reading if for no other reason. His annotations and bibliography are tremendous - this book led me to a number of other spookhistorical classics. McGehee is sympathetic and believable - his interest in his victims is conflicted and sincere. This seems to be an honest as well as detailed descent into the heart of darkness. --snw Edit

Jeffrey Reiman, ...And The Poor Get Prison: Economic Bias in American Criminal Justice. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996 Add Review: Using the Establishment's own data, Reiman shows that direct corporate neglect and inadequate medical care kill twice as many people (60,000 a year) as our standard notion of homicide. Of course, the corporations are not held responsible. Even more importantly, he shows that white-collar crime is much more prevalent and much more economically signficant than "blue-collar" crime, then shows how directly race and class play into the "justice" system. --tr Edit

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front. New York: Crest, 1961 (1928) Add Review: Classic anti-war novel following the life of a German youth in the trenches of WWI. Illustrates how stupid wars are, having young men blow each other to pieces for no reason other than their leaders' stupidity. This book even offers a solution: put the respective heads of state in an arena in their boxers, each armed with a club. --tr Edit

Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation--the dark side of the all-american meal. New York: Perennial, HarperCollins, 2002 Add Review: Fast Food Nation was the most well writen and informative book I have read in some time. It is a must read for everyone even if you eat fast food or not. Schlosser does an excellent job of chronicling the book from the mom & pop beginnings to the current corporate enterprises of the fast food industry. He details how the california car culture brought the rise of america's famous fast food resturuants. He talks about the audience this industry aims for, what really goes on behind the counter of your favorite fast food joint, each company's success story, and where, what, & who is in the food you are being served (it definately answered my question why those french fries always tasted so good!). --sk Edit

James Scully, Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988 Add Review: A brilliant critique of decadent notions of liberal intellectualism and freedom. I typed up this chapter for your reading pleasure. --tr Edit
Out of print -- censored?

Assata Shakur, Assata. London: Zed Books, 1987 Add Review: The best autobiography and insight into amerika I've read. --TR Edit; An emotional, inspiring book that makes you wonder why things are the way they are. --sk Edit

Peter Singer, Animal Liberation. NYC: Harper Collins, 1975 Add Review: This book gives details on the ways humans exploit animals and the fact that most goes un-noticed by the average human. Great detail is spent on vivisection, speciesism, and all those great things that go on at our modern "farms". This book gives superb detail as well as bringing up many great points. A must read for all people, regardless of meat eating habits. --Just Another Quaker Edit

Leo Tolstoy, Government Is Violence: essays on anarchism and pacifism. London: Phoenix Press, 1991 Add Review

Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father - a daughter of Cambodia remembers. NYC: Harper Collins, 2000 Add Review: A horrifying tale of a childhood spent in Cambodia after the Kissinger/Nixon-led destruction. Loung Ung describes the displacement and ravaging of her urban middle-class family through the eyes of a 5 to 9 year old. This is very certainly a valuable addition to the body of "witness" literature, appealing if vaguely frustrating in its political naivety - Ung sustains her narrative without resorting to the vast archives of later disclosures and refined historical analyses of the Khmer Rouge nightmare; this is very much a childhood memoir about the dissolution, and bittersweet repatriation of one family. Ung is now a spokesperson for Campaign for a Landmine Free World. --snw Edit

unknown, evasion. : crimethinc, Add Review: this is very dangerous it made me run from the world. a very entriguing story written by ahobo/squatter/actually non-labeled kid just d.i.y.-ing it up . hitting the streets of america,and trains, evading life as the norm would see it and just really having fun living off shoplifting and scams. awesome read but be aware of the power it has i immediately left my job and road my bike half across new york. --nic Edit

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life. : Red and Black, Add Review: "Nowadays ambition and the love of a job well done are the indelible mark of defeat and the most mindless submission."

Everytime I get naseus after filling out a job application, I end up reading Vaneigem's online text of "Revolution of Everyday Life." I makes me happy by affirming that ALL work is SLAVERY. The principle of productivity has replaced the principle of feudal authority, and "forced labor is revealed as belonging purely to the barbaric practices needed to maintain order." Vaneigem and Debord are about as much philosophy as I can handle, or in truth, understand. A lot of it is still bourgois prima-donna bitching, but it's bitching that can often keep one sane. And they're French, so ya know, they've got that going for them. I've yet to find an actual copy of this book, but as stated, it's alive in the mediated world of cyberspace. If for nothing else, you have to love Vaneigem for lines such as this: "The organization of work and the organization of leisure are the blades of the castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning dogs." Get me Diogenes' bathtub and I'm ready to kick it for the day with my main man Raoul... --kgb Edit

Richard Wright, Black Boy. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998 (1945) Add Review: Wright's near-autobiography. Begins with a painfully accurate description of living with hunger and racism. Once Wright learns that he will be killed in the South if he challenges society, he slowly moves to Chicago, where he finds that although racism is not as spectacularly overt and violent, even his ability to read is perceived as a threat to white society. His description of intellectual growth through reading and experience is brilliant. --total revolution Edit

Mark Zepezauer, Take the Rich Off Welfare. Tucson: Odonian, 1996 Add Review: The perfect response to the "welfare queen" myth that the Right has invented, documenting how the government gives welfare to rich individuals and corporations that dwarfs social welfare programs that help the poor. --tr Edit

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492-present. New York: Perennial, 1999 (1980) Add Review

Interesting Books

Abbie, Steal This Book. NYC: Fuck You Press, 1969 Add Review

Fran�ois Baudot, Yohji Yamamoto. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997 (null) Add Review: I DO NOT READ --Anonymous Edit

Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust. : Crown, 2000 Add Review: Very scary. --TC Edit

Tom Bottomore, Classes in Modern Society. London: HarperCollins, 1991 Add Review

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice. London: Cape, 1969 Add Review: Still causing controversy. A Black Panther that later defected about as far as they go (born-again Christian and entrepreneur, attempted Republican Senator), while in jail Cleaver wrote this widely respected social critique of, among other things, American racism. Unfortunately, he also claims that raping a white woman is an insurrectionary act, which took quite a bit of attention away from his actual ideas. --total revolution Edit

Dal, Dali's mustache: a photographic interview. Paris: Flammarion, c1994 Add Review: Where for tho comest??..I was recently in Paris and visited a museum of Dali's art in Momarte..I was impressed and saw on the stairway photos from "Dali's Mustache" in English ..was intrigued and very amused and purchased the French version..having had it translated by a physcian friend from Haiti on the stairwell of the hospital where I work. I would love to see the translated version again..dangerous?? que cuckoo!!! --Lesley Stewart Edit

Angela Davis, Women, Culture, and Politics. New York: Vintage Books, 1984 Add Review: A collection of Davis' essays and speeches written during the Reagan years. She touches on the racist healthcare system, black women against nuclear arms, how the militarization of the economy causes massive unemployment, how black family dynamics monkeywrench the capitalist scheme, and issues in regards to solidarity with women in the "Third World." Personally, she introduced me to several new writers who have been working on womens issues--Nawal El Saadawi, Clara Zetkin, and Fathia al Assal--this is always much appreciated. By far though, Davis' most poignant essay was on America's rape epidemic and its ties to imperialist thinking. I found her quote from Susan Griffin rather telling--"I, like most women, have thought of rape as part of my natural environment." She also provides anecdotes such as the following which are related more to show how prevalent and commonplace rape is than to merely shock and horrify: "I recall an experience I had as a graduate student in San Diego when a friend and I found a young Black woman, beaten and bloody, on the shoulder of the freeway. She had been raped by several white men and dropped by the side of the road. When the police found her, they, too, raped her and left her on the freeway, barely conscious." Davis is Davis. A quick read that vacillates between inspiring and dry, overstated liberalism. --KGB Edit

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. Cambridge: Harvard, 1971 (1845) Add Review

Andres & Others Duany, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000 Add Review: Though written with an audience of urban planners and architects in mind, "Suburban Nation" appeals to anyone who has ever wondered why homogenous clusters of tract housing ever became a middle-class American Dream. It breaks down the inefficiency of suburbs and strip-mall banality, government subsidies for single-occupant automotive transport, the chokehold on funding for public mass transit, the blight of unchallenging, isolated environments, the creation and burden of the soccer mom, the growth of youth cultures coming-of-age behind 7-11 dumpsters, awkward cul-de-sac aesthetics, and the illusion of safety and exclusivity developers market the suburbs as. A quick read filled with disturbing micro-chip photographs. --KGB Edit

Edward, Torture. Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 1985 Add Review: No, this isn't an S&M guide, neither does it dwell on the gory particulars more than necessary for descriptive purpose. But this certainly is a fascinating historical look at the Western European tradition of torture, primarily as a judicial prerogative. Peters goes to some pain to distinguish the inflections of what we may naively call "torture", and I believe the attempt is successful and edifying. He begins at the beginning: ancient Greek "domestic torture", conducted by the house master or his minions, typically in pursuit of a confession to, or simply the facts of, a household crime. The Romans picked it up from there, extending the basic Greek approach and eventually inscribing a bevy of decrees, advisories, and constraints into law. It is this, the Roman Law, which stood for two millenia as the keystone of Western jurisprudence; torture remained unrecognized as a barbaric anachronism until the Enlightenment. Peters describes the many heartfelt moral diatribes which followed from this, extending through the 19th century - then collapsing utterly after WWI. And only getting worse and more institutionalized in the new epoch. --snw Edit

enzensberger, the number devil. ?: ?, fair Add Review: This book is invigorating and encouraging for anybody who has hang-ups about numbers and math. --hl Edit

Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987 Add Review: Brilliantly rescues reason from the destructive and self-deceiving clutches of postmodernity. --tr Edit

Harrison, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. : , 1969 Add Review: The nonaggression pact between Stalin and Hitler was broken dramatically when the Germans turned on Leningrad in the summer of 1941. This book, comprised largely of journals and diaries by Leningrad residents, as well as interviews with 300 survivors, gives a pretty wrenching picture of the resultant horrors that followed the initial blitzkrieg. Salisbury is a quite dreadful writer but does a good job letting others speak in this book. He is very strong on military strategy, and spends considerable time looking into the Stalinist epic behind the disastrous series of decisions made - or not made, as he would have it - by the military and political leaders that led to and amplified the cataclysmic siege. His description of the city after the first few months of war, once the Nazis had dug in fortifcations - codenamed the "Circle of Iron" - for the winter around Leningrad, there to wait for the population to die of hunger or be slaughtered as they surrendered (Hitler's explicit instruction to his generals), is quite jarring even from this historical distance. How bad can things get? The tale presents itself as one possible for-instance. Salisbury is determinedly centrist in leanings, but he seems to empathize to a high degree with the Leningraders, if not uptake some of that Soviet agit prop psywar sentiment periodically. The vast bulk of the book centers on events leading up to the blitz, through the first winter. When people were eating each other, hunting tasty schoolage children, selling patties of them in the desolate frozen wasteland of the former marketplace. When corpses of loved ones were stacked in the unheated rooms of citizens' flats, accumulating sometimes for months as the rations got unimaginably tiny - eg. two spoonfuls of "soup" per diem for nonessential personell - and the city gas and electrical systems repeatedly were taken out by shellfire from the Nazi lines. --snw Edit

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Add Review: Kuhn made it safe to talk about science as nothing more than the currently agreed-upon guesses, introducing the term "paradigm." It's clear that science should always be addressed as something known to be flawed and inaccurate, or we deceive ourselves dangerously. --tr Edit

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer. Paris: Obelisk Press, 1934 Add Review: If you feel lousy or are susceptible to worms, you might like Miller's overture to absolute degeneration. Nordeau would be proud. There are a lot of goddamn cunts and sluts, and an insatiable hunger not only for bread, but for something new. The main character is completely devestated over the loss of his wife, Mona--(June in real life). He and his American friends wander through Paris espousing new philosophies for every prostitute they fuck. Miller bashes the big-bad notion of Progress and all things proprietous which explains why it was banned for obscenity in the States for so long. I dig it. --kgb Edit

Toni Morrison, Sula. New York City: Knopf, 1973 Add Review: Sula and Nel are best friends living in the Bottoms and the Bottoms are the hills above a river valley in Ohio where rich white people live. There is no work in the Bottoms and no road out of the Bottoms. Morrison chronicles the girls' lives and the town life from 1919 to 1965. Personally I love all books that connect the dreams of great grandmothers once removed to the shape of callouses on the feet of neighborhood kids with names like Chicken Little and Teapot, so this book had won me over after the first three pages. Quick synopsis: Nel grows up solely with her conservative Catholic mother, and Sula comes from a house full of crazy people--borders, a one-legged mother, three orphans named Dewey, a sister and a brother who both burn to death, etc. Inevitably, their polar opposite upbringings attract them to one another. It's a really quick read full of interesting life stories. Thumbs up. --kgb Edit

Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene - Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge MA: Harvard, 1988 Add Review: Wow! What a creepy story this is. The Nazis' careful reconstruction of the notion of health, medicine, and ultimately the nature of humanity is exhaustively described and sharply analysed. This is a long but rewarding book filled to the brim with absolutely horrific facts and implications. Proctor is lucid and admirably to-the-point in his handling of the material and it's implications. The intersection of politics and science here is very important to try to grasp and keep hold of. The one distorts the other, and vice versa, in an endless oscillation that is rarely exemplified by such brutal clarity. This is a brave book in the sense that Proctor acknowledges the "good" (i.e. the strong organic foods, anti-tobacco, healthy living initiatives) as well as the obvious BAD in the history. --snw Edit

erich maria remarque, the black obelisk. : , Add Review

Charles Seife, Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe. London, England: Viking Penguin, 2003 Add Review: I borrowed this book from the pastry baker at my work in hopes of (a) attempting to read something "scientific" and (b) attempting to talk to my co-worker about something more interesting than why cinnamon rolls are more pesky than pecan tarts. The book starts out by laying out the progression of "cosmological thought." Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Hubble, Einstein, blah blah blah. Besides a basic understanding of 2,000 years of thought passed down to us by what I deem the "space-science hero people," I learned about an interesting man named Tycho Brahe who was born in 1546. For his amusement, he kept a dwarf hanging around and fed him table scraps. Brahe not only lost part of his nose in a duel and had to have it replaced with a silver prosthesis, but he was such a ruthless glutton that he died from over-eating! Now that's some scientific shit I wanted to know about! Oh yeah, the book. So then the book talks about relativity, and the fire walls of the universe, and how scientists really can't account for all the goddamn matter in the universe. I was digging the book up until this point. Then it spent six chapters delving into the world of particle physics. Except for learning about supersymmetry and its possibilities concerning "sparticles" (woohoo), I was bored to tears. If you care about neutrons, neutrinos, muons, quarks, leptons, protons, etc., this book will rock your world. If your like me however, you'll finish six long chapters and think to yourself, wait a minute, they spent how many billions of fucking dollars on a particle accelerator? In conclusion, I had a decent conversation with the pastry baker about the first half of the book--which is the only part she read. Apparently particle physics isn't her cup of tea either. --kgb Edit

Edward J. Blakely & Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 1997 Add Review: "Fortress America" doesn't tell you anything you probably couldn't have guessed about gated communities beforehand, but it's highly valuable in that there is so little research on this rapidly-growing monstrosity/phenomena which took hold in the '80's starting with places like Leisure World. Blakely and Snyder provide several studies of gated communities within the six major areas of "gated growth": Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange County, the San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, and Miami. Some disturbing quotes and facts on Home Owners Associations. A rather dry, inconclusive ending on race, class, and land values. It blatantly brands itself as a made-for-acadamia research piece by name-dropping William Julius Wilson and Moynihan. --KGB Edit

Polly Toynbee, Hard Work : Life in Low-Pay Britian. London: Bloomsbury, 2003 Add Review: Informative review of trying to live on the minimum wage in a country "that has the lowest social spending and highest poverty in Europe." This book is a british version to the American Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. --sk Edit

William, Sideshow - Kissinger, Nixon, and the destruction of Cambodia. NYC: WSP/Pocket Books, 1979 Add Review: All the dirt on the startlingly filthy "secret" bombing campaign conceived of by Henry K and Nixon's lads in the late 60's. Refreshingly unrestrained prosecution of our leaders' utter venality. Shawcross gives us the broad picture of the geopolitics involved as well as the grim and horrifying results of the Khmer Rouge madness. His critiques of Sihanouk and Lon Nol are fascinating, as much as our criminal warmonger poster boys Hank and Dick do, in the end, glean most of the book's attention. A totally worthwhile read, and must I add directly relevant to the reign of Bush the Lesser. --snw Edit

Richard Wright, Lawd Today!. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1963 Add Review: Jake Jackson is a black man working in the Chicago Post Office during the Depression. The book is A Day in the Life, and the Day in particular happens to be Lincoln's birthday; hence, throughout the novel, Wright includes snippets of a radio program detailing Lincoln's life, and the lives of other great white men who've done so much for black people. In general, there's cool fucking references to 1930s media which I thought was really interesting. Gruesome work scenes, some gruesome wife beating scenes, and gruesome scenes of human debasement. Since Jake Jackson works the best job a black man could have at the time, there's always the pervasive sense of "Is this all? This is the best I can do with my life? I can't go any further?" Richard Wright is just a damn good writer, and anyone who feels oppressed or limited in the world can always empathise.
Tangentially, I recently learned that Wright hung out with Camus for awhile. Cool... --kgb Edit

Richard Wright, Native Son. New York: HarperCollins, 1998 (1940) Add Review

Know the Enemy

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Penguin, 1963 Add Review

Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, Bushwhacked. New York: Vintage Bookes, 2003 Add Review: Molly Ivins is the funniest, most sarcastic muckraking reporter there is. She also reminds me that not everything that comes out of Texas is bad, just most of it. Her book, written along with a cohort who I'll pay no mind to, is a compilation of essays laying out some of the most priceless jewels of GWB both as a Texas governor and as self-pronounced, PNAC-backed U.S. dictator. Her essays cover such topics as Harken Energy and Bush's Energy Octopi, the war on the poor, No Child Left Behind (scandalous), environmental pollution and the further retarding of the EPA, more on the meat industry (if you've read one book on meat, you can skip over these essays--we all know milk is infected cow pus and chickens have no beaks or wings), the Perpetual War complex from the imaginative minds of neo-conservative gangstas, the Supreme Court appointees, and of course, God (can't write a book without the Big Dude). You can read the first half of the book all the way through and feel real excited, but then the essay format and even Ivins writing saturate your brain and you have to take a break. Highly reccommended. I learned something. --kgb Edit

Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor In Society. New York: The Free Press, 1984 (1893) Add Review: This book (Durkheim's doctoral dissertation) is often referred to in defense of specialization. Amusingly enough, it makes an excellent argument against the division of labor. The fragmentation caused by specialization makes us unable to recognize each other's humanity or communicate, and makes those without the "proper credentials" feel that they aren't qualified to gauge their own health, make political decisions, or even think at work. --tr Edit

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 1992 Add Review: Great entertainment... Fukuyama exemplifies the ignorance of the Right while trying to argue that capitalism is the ultimate form of human social organization. His basic argument is that, since the big socialist government went capitalist recently, capitalism must be the only way to do things. Among other annoying habits, he insists on freely exchanging the terms "liberal democracy," "capitalism," and "America," showing either his dishonesty or total lack of understanding of these terms. He hints that America may not be quite perfect, but that any deficiencies will correct themselves. --tr Edit

Iain Levison, A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir. New York: Soho Press Inc., 2002 Add Review: "In the last ten years, I've had forty-two jobs in six states. I've quit thirty of them, been fired from nine, and as for the other three, the line was a little blurry. Sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what happened, you just know it wouldn't be right for you to show up any more."

"It's Sunday morning and I am scanning the classifieds. There are two types of jobs in here--jobs i'm not qualified for and jobs I don't want. I'm considering both. There are pages and pages of the first type--jobs I will never get. Must know this, must know that. Must be experienced in this and that, for at least six years, and be fluent in Chinese, and be able to fly a jet through antiaircraft fire, and have SIX YEARS experience in open-heart surgery. Starting salary $32,000. Fax your resume to Beverly. Who is Beverly, I wonder, and what does she know that I don't? She knows she's getting a paycheck, for starters. She can't do anything required for the job, I'm sure, or she would be doing them instead of fielding phone calls..."

What a catharsis. For anyone who was conditioned as I was that their future held a job they might possibly "like," Levison confirms for us all that this is simply hogwash. What I suspected was true--I am facing at least 50 more years of debasing employment--none of which will provide me with health care, benefits, savings, a retirement plan, or a sense of accomplishment. Instead of cynicism, it is only right to turn towards absurdist humor--or just humor--as Levison does. As I read this, the words of my older brother echoed in my head: "Work sucks. That's that. All jobs are gonna suck, but you have to work. Your best bet is to work for the city. They're always looking for women and ethnics, and it's as close to job security as you'll ever get. Look at me, I've been working their eight years now and I make $12/hr."
I just hope that all my friends write a book like this twenty years into their careers in employment under capitalism. Cheers. --kgb Edit

Benito Mussolini, My Rise and Fall. New York: Da Capo, 1948 Add Review

Tony Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. : , 2004 (null) Add Review: Can be read as a sequal to The Ugly American but with no polite story line, only truth . Literally a mans confession , soul searching for forgiveness for his involvement in the process of making the poor poorer. A "how the third world was duped into submission to the United States". If you knew what the corporatocracy was planning in Global supremacy and can predict the knee jerk,i.e. 911, eurodollar oil market, U.S. defeat...don't bother reading this wining ,sniveling expose`. --jam Edit

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead. : , Add Review: An excruciatingly well-written and entertaining read, as long as one isn't bothered by the implicit assumptions of the phenomenon/s of genetic and/or irreversibly deterministic superiority. --Anonymous Edit

Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory. Add Review: Arch-evil explanation of why affirmative action isn't needed anymore. Basically boils down to the "Well, I made it" school of thought. --TR Edit