[b]"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Loaded is like a blast of fresh air. She is no fan of guns or of our absurdly permissive laws surrounding them. But she does not merely take the liberal side of the familiar debate."–Adam Hochschild, The New York Review of Books [b]"If . . . anyone at all really wants to 'get to the root causes of gun violence in America,' they will need to start by coming to terms with even a fraction of what Loaded proposes." — Los Angeles Review of Books "Her analysis, erudite and unrelenting, exposes blind spots not just among conservatives, but, crucially, among liberals as well. . . . As a portrait of the deepest structures of American violence, Loaded is an indispensable book."— The New Republic With President Trump suggesting that teachers arm themselves, with the NRA portrayed as a group of «patriots» helping to Make America Great Again, with high school students across the country demanding a solution to the crisis, everyone in America needs to engage in the discussion about our future with an informed, historical perspective on the role of guns in our society. America is at a critical turning point. What is the future for our children? Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment , is a deeply researched—and deeply disturbing—history of guns and gun laws in the United States, from the original colonization of the country to the present. As historian and educator Dunbar-Ortiz explains, in order to understand the current obstacles to gun control, we must understand the history of U.S. guns, from their role in the «settling of America» and the early formation of the new nation, and continuing up to the present. Praise for Loaded : "Dunbar-Ortiz's argument will be disturbing and unfamiliar to most readers, but her evidence is significant and should not be ignored."— Publishers Weekly " . . . gun love is as American as apple pie—and that those guns have often been in the hands of a powerful white majority to subjugate minority natives, slaves, or others who might stand in the way of the broadest definition of Manifest Destiny."— Kirkus Reviews "Trigger warning! This is a superb and subtle book, not an intellectual safe space for confirming your preconceptions—whatever those might be—but rather a deeply necessary provocation."—Christian Parenti, author of Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
Gibler's is the first and only book available in English that is based on extensive interviews with survivors of the September 2014 killings and abductions of students in Iguala, Mexico. It is a peerless expose of the crimes and the official cover up. The only other book available in English on the subject («The Iguala 43: The Truth and Challenge of Mexico's Disappeared Students» (Semiotext(e) – February 3, 2017) is, according to Gibler, based on Web searches and conjecture: the writer never once set foot in Ayotzinapa nor spoke with a single survivor or relative of the disappeared.Gibler is an internationally recognized authority on the Ayotzinapa attacks and has been referenced with prestige by the New Yorker and NPR's All Things Considered."The journalists John Gibler (the author of the book “To Die in Mexico”) and Marcela Turati have provided the most complete reports of what happened in Iguala on the night of September 26th." – Francisco Goldman in his New Yorker essay. NPR's All Things Considered reporter Arun Rath says, «Gibler has interviewed more than a dozen survivors and witnesses. He's pieced together the most detailed account yet of what happened that night.»
Immigration and borders continues to be a major issue in the national and international news cycle and Todd Miller's print history ranging from his feature in the New York Times Magazine to Border Patrol Nation position him to address this. As people are displaced from the coast, they being to «challenge» borders. The response unfortunately has been militarization. Population movement due to climate change is an emerging issue and this book is in a unique position to address this as a national security issue. Last year alone, 19.2 million people were displaced as a result of climate change.Immigration, border fortification, and climate change legislation will continue to be subject to ongoing debates, giving Miller many opportunities for op-eds on the top political blog TomDispatch, where he's a regular contributor, as well as The Nation, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Common Dreams and Guernica, where he regularly writes, too.
Written from the perspective of someone who was shot by police, and who advocates for justice for himself and the police officer killed. Mumia gives a voice to African Americans whose lives have been taken by police activity. Mumia names our current political moment in order to transform it. The national Black Lives Matter movement continues to grow and intensify in response to news of police killings of innocent people of color. Mumia is in many ways the moral, intellectual, and political mentor of this movement and the movement's involvement in spreading awareness of the book will add to its success.Mumia is the world's most renowned political prisoner. A large and committed support base for his freedom, writings, and perspectives continues to grow as a result of his intellectual output and a constant flow of support work, media, and films about him and what he represents as an imprisoned black journalist and intellectual.What makes this book particularly marketable is that it is accessible. Each of the 100 commentaries is short, focused, and well argued.Most of the pieces have never been published in any form. Most were written to be heard as radio commentaries, commencement speeches, or as podcasts.
"In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book."–Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History "Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene presents, without extraneous bullshit, what we must do to survive on Earth. It's a powerful, useful, and ultimately hopeful book that more than any other I've read has the ability to change people's minds and create change. For me, it crystallizes and expresses what I've been thinking about and trying to get a grasp on. The economical way it does so, with such clarity, sets the book apart from most others on the subject."–Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy "Roy Scranton lucidly articulates the depth of the climate crisis with an honesty that is all too rare, then calls for a reimagined humanism that will help us meet our stormy future with as much decency as we can muster. While I don't share his conclusions about the potential for social movements to drive ambitious mitigation, this is a wise and important challenge from an elegant writer and original thinker. A critical intervention."–Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate"Concise, elegant, erudite, heartfelt & wise."–Amitav Ghosh, author of Flood of Fire "War veteran and journalist Roy Scranton combines memoir, philosophy, and science writing to craft one of the definitive documents of the modern era."–The Believer Best Books of 2015 Coming home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought–the shock and awe of global warming. Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter. From war-stricken Baghdad to the melting Arctic, human-caused climate change poses a danger not only to political and economic stability, but to civilization itself . . . and to what it means to be human. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in–the Anthropocene–demands a radical new vision of human life. In this bracing response to climate change, Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world, taking readers on a journey through street protests, the latest findings of earth scientists, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature. Expanding on his influential New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with our mortality. Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die. If that’s true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age–for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The trouble now is that we must learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization. Roy Scranton has published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and Theory and Event, and has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, among other media.
– We know other authors have Green New Deal books in the works; most will be urging support for the Green New Deal (The subtitle of Naomi Klein’s September 2019 book «On Fire» is «The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal»). Some may call for combining GND features with carbon taxes, futuristic technologies, and other mechanisms, even including nuclear power. –This is the only book offering a «deep green» solution. Stan Cox advocates for: a direct, declining cap on fossil energy; recognition of the limitations of wind and solar; the need for a society that lives on less energy; the allocation of energy and resources toward meeting universal needs and away from wasteful and luxury production; and fair-shares rationing of energy for years. – Stan Cox’s publishing profile, career, and education positions him has as a credible, common-sense voice for the necessity of making changes to national policy, social norms, and individual lifestyles to prevent catastrophic climate change. – All reputable science indicates that climate change will accelerate and intensify if human use of fossil fuels is not immediately and massively cut and replaced with sustainable sources of renewable energy. This book looks past the proposed Green New Deal to find a way this is actually possible. – Fighting climate change is emerging as the single most important issue of our time –This book is written in clear language for all types of readers, and the book’s proposed solutions are concrete, common sense, and accessible. – The author has an impressive press record, including A-list media interviews and Op-Eds for his previous books including NPR Morning Edition, Marketplace, NPR's «1A», MSNBC, On Point, Here and Now, 99 Percent Invisible podcast, The Weather Channel, WNYC/NPR's The Brian Lehrer Show, CBC Radio, Salon, Architect Magazine, VICE Motherboard, ABC News, Chicago Tribune, Economist, Daily Mail, FOX Business. Featured stories in New York Times, LA Times, Boston Globe, Macleans, and National Post. Op-eds in Washington Post, NY Times, Guardian, Yale e360, Al Jazeera, and the Pacific Standard.
Brad Evans is an emerging voice in radical theory circles who will resonate with the market of public intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek—established intellectuals who command large trade readerships through popular culture.Accessible and serious, fans of the classic Guy Debord book «Society of the Spectacle» will flock to this title. Evans has a close association with Simon Critchley with whom he co-directed the 2012 film «Ten Years of Terror,» which received international acclaim and a screening at The Guggenheim in NYC. (Critchley launched the New York Times's philosophy section, «The Stone.»)Evans is the driving force behind the «Histories of Violence» website (http://historiesofviolence.com) and his co-authorship with Giroux on features for Truthout is helping build a profile in the blogsphere.Evans is a young, prolific, well-connected Brit with a very distinctive 007 look. (Seriously!)Henry Giroux's influence is growing and the readership for his political writing continues to increase as a result of his involvement with Truthout for which he regularly contributes long-form feature pieces that a amass thousands of «likes» within days of posting. His pieces migrate fast, and appear on Huffington Post, Counterpunch and TruthDig.
"Giroux refuses to give in or give up. The Violence of Organized Forgetting is a clarion call to imagine a different America–just, fair, and caring–and then to struggle for it."–Bill Moyers "Henry Giroux has accomplished an exciting, brilliant intellectual dissection of America's somnambulent voyage into anti-democratic political depravity. His analysis of the plight of America's youth is particularly heartbreaking. If we have a shred of moral fibre left in our beings, Henry Giroux sounds the trumpet to awaken it to action to restore to the nation a civic soul."–Dennis J. Kucinich, former US Congressman and Presidential candidate "Giroux lays out a blistering critique of an America governed by the tenets of a market economy. . . . He cites French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman's concept of the 'disimagination machine' to describe a culture and pedagogical philosophy that short-circuits citizens' ability to think critically, leaving the generation now reaching adulthood unprepared for an 'inhospitable' world. Picking apart the current malaise of 21st-century digital disorder, Giroux describes a world in which citizenship is replaced by consumerism and the functions of engaged governance are explicitly beholden to corporations."–Publishers Weekly In a series of essays that explore the intersections of politics, popular culture, and new forms of social control in American society, Henry A. Giroux explores how state and corporate interests have coalesced to restrict civil rights, privatize what's left of public institutions, and diminish our collective capacity to participate as engaged citizens of a democracy. From the normalization of mass surveillance, lockdown drills, and a state of constant war, to corporate bailouts paired with public austerity programs that further impoverish struggling families and communities, Giroux looks to flashpoints in current events to reveal how the forces of government and business are at work to generate a culture of mass forgetfulness, obedience and conformity. In The Violence of Organized Forgetting, Giroux deconstructs the stories created to control us while championing the indomitable power of education, democracy, and hope. Henry A. Giroux is a world-renowned educator, author and public intellectual. He currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. The Toronto Star has named Henry Giroux “one of the twelve Canadians changing the way we think." More Praise for Henry A. Giroux's The Violence of Organized Forgetting: "I can think of no book in the last ten years as essential as this. I can think of no other writer who has so clinically dissected the crisis of modern life and so courageously offered a possibility for real material change."–John Steppling, playwright, and author of The Shaper, Dogmouth, and Sea of Cortez "A timely study if there ever was one, The Violence of Organized Forgetting is a milestone in the struggle to repossess the common sense expropriated by the American power elite to be redeployed in its plot to foil the popular resistance against rising social injustice and decay of political democracy."–Zygmunt Bauman, author of Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? among other works Prophetic and eloquent, Giroux gives us, in this hard-hitting and compelling book, the dark scenario of Western crisis where ignorance has become a virtue and wealth and power the means of ruthless abuse of workers, of the minorities and of immigrants. However, he remains optimistic in his affirmation of radical humanity, determined as he is to relate himself to a fair and caring world unblemished by anti-democratic political depravity."–Shelley Walia, Frontline
This is the follow up to his best-seller «Interventions» Chomsky has a bestseller-size market ever hungry to buy his latest assessment of U.S. politics and world affairs. Making the Future delivers the goods in short, easy to digest pieces.Chomsky's Facebook page, and his web page, are visited by 1000s. We can see from our Google analytics reports, that a posting on both sites about his new books drives a ton of traffic to our own web site, so that people can find out more about his latest publications.
The war in Afghanistan has become the most complex foreign policy problem the United States has ever faced, spreading into Pakistan and involving the conflicting interests of Russia, India, China and Iran. Written as a companion to Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald's widely acclaimed book Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story, Crossing Zero focuses on the nuances of the Obama administration's evolving military and political strategy, the people implementing it, and the long-term consequences for the United States and the region."Fitzgerald and Gould have consistently raised the difficult questions and inconvenient truths about western engagement in Afghanistan. While many analysts and observers have attempted to wish a reality on a grim and tragic situation in Afghanistan, Fitzgerald and Gould have systematically dug through the archives and historical record with integrity and foresight to reveal a series of misguided strategies and approaches that have contributed to what has become a tragic quagmire in Afghanistan. I suspect that many of their assessments while presently viewed as controversial and contentious, will eventually be considered conventional wisdom."—Thomas Johnson "Americans are now beginning to grasp the scope of the mess their leaders made while pursuing misguided military adventures into regions of Central Asia we once called 'remote.' How this happened—and what the US can do to extricate itself from its entanglements in Pakistan and Afghanistan—is the story of Crossing Zero. Based on decades of study and research, this book draws lines and connects dots in ways few others do. It is clear, sober and methodical—an ideal handbook for anyone seeking to understand how the US became the latest imperial power to blunder into this turbulent and fascinating region."—Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men and Reset: Iran, Turkey and America's Future "I loved it. An extraordinary contribution to understanding war and geo-politics in Afghanistan that will shock most Americans by its revelations of official American government complicity in using, shielding, sponsoring and supporting terrorism. A devastating indictment on the behind-the-scenes shenanigans by some of America's most respected statesmen."—Daniel Estulin "Gould and Fitzgerald have identified the triumphalist strain that has marked American foreign policy over the past 100 years and documented President Obama's failure to introduce change to American national security policy. The war in Afghanistan is consistent with previous failures in U.S. policymaking over the past 50 years as well as with the misuse of military force. This book should be required reading at the National Security Council and the Pentagon."—Melvin A. Goodman; CIA Senior Soviet Analyst, 1966-1990; Professor of International Security at the National War College,1986-2004; Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy, Washington, DC. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began working together in 1979 co-producing a documentary for Paul's television show, Watchworks. Called, The Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, they found themselves in the midst of a swirling controversy that was to boil over a few months later with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Their acquisition of the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew in the spring of 1981, brought them into the middle of the most heated Cold War controversy since Vietnam. But the pictures and the people inside Soviet occupied Afghanistan told a very different story from the one being broadcast on the evening news.