By Tom Engelhardt
A series of provocative and candid interviews with some of the iconoclastic thinkers - and activists - of our time. These long-form conversations with Howard Zinn, Chalmers Johnson, Cindy Sheehan, Juan Cole, Mike Davis, Mark Danner, Barbara Ehrenreich, James Carroll, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Andrew Bacevich and Ann Wright, focus on the Bush administration's imperial dreams and misguided actions. They suggest new ways to frame American global policy, while catching the white heat of our moment. This is a vivid, original chronicle of our troubling times.
By Tom Engelhardt
Pompeii never had it so bad. Rick Koppes knows a world is ending. The only question is, will he end with it? An editor at Byzantium Press for the last quarter century, he has watched his small, classy publishing house get gobbled up, first by an American publishing giant and then by Multimedia Entertainment, the Hollywood wing of Bruno Hindemann's German media empire. His editing colleagues are being downsized, his authors axed, and in a world where the cultural wallpaper is screaming, he himself hangs on by a fingernail-the latest work of his sole best-selling author, pop psychologist Walter Groth, is racing off bookstore shelves. And that's just where his problems begin-after all, Multimedia is about to make his ex-wife, a publishing executive at another house, his boss, his assistant wants his authors, and a woman who claims her father dropped the bomb on Nagasaki insists he publish her woeful memoir.
Koppes, who came of age in the sixties, is an editor slowly running off the rails. In the six episodes of The Last Days of Publishing, he refights the Vietnam War in a Chinese restaurant, discovers that the paleontological is political in a natural history museum, mixes it up with a flamboyant literary agent who went underground decades earlier, and encounters a hippie cultural oligarch on the forty-fifth floor of Multimedia's transnational entertainment headquarters.
Tom Engelhardt, himself a publishing veteran, has produced a tumultuous vision of the new world in which the word finds itself hustling for a living. By turns hilarious, sardonic, and poignant, his novel deftly captures the ways in which publishing, which has long put our world between covers but has seldom been memorialized in fiction, is being transformed.
To read two excerpts from this irreverent novel about the business of culture, click here and here
By Elizabeth de la Vega
In this book, former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega brings her twenty years of experience and passion for justice to what may be the most important case of her career. The defendants are George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell. The crime is tricking the nation into war, or, in legal terms, conspiracy to defraud the United States.
If the indictment and grand jury are hypothetical, the facts are tragically real: Well over half the people in the U.S. now believe the President misled the country into a war that has left over 3,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, and countless Iraqis homeless. The cost is $600 billion and counting. Faced with an ongoing crime of such magnitude, de la Vega argues, we cannot simply shrug our shoulders and walk away.
Three sections of the book were originally posted on Tomdispatch:
De la Vega's introduction: Bringing Bush to Court
The hypothetical indictment: Indicting Bush
First day of grand jury testimony: A Predisposition to Invade
In this remarkable work, acclaimed author Rebecca Solnit draws on her life as a writer and activist, on the events of our moment, on our deepest past, to argue for hope -- hope even in the dark. Solnit reminds us of how changed the world has been by the activism of the past five decades. Offering a dazzling account of some of the least expected of those changes, she proposes a vision of cause-and-effect relations that provides new grounds for political engagement in the present. Counting historic victories -- from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Zapatista uprising to Seattle in 1999 to the worldwide marches against war in Iraq to Cancun in September 2003 -- she traces the rise of a sophisticated, supple, nonviolent new movement of movements that unites all the diverse and fragmentary issues of the eighties and nineties in our new century.
By Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit's previous books include River of Shadows, Hollow City, As Eve Said to the Serpent, Savage Dreams and Wanderlust: A History of Walking. An activist and cultural historian, she writes about place, environment, politics, and culture. Rebecca Solnit is the recipient of the Lannan literary award and lives in San Francisco.
Hope in the Dark began as a single essay, "Acts of Hope," written and posted at Tomdispatch in May 2003, a bleak moment after the antiwar demonstrations had ended and the Bush administration had launched its war of choice in Iraq. It changed my own way of thinking about the world. This latest edition of the book also incorporates later essays Solnit has done for Tomdispatch like "The Great Grey Whale... Or, This Story Has No Moral."
By Nick Turse
An eye-opening investigation of the all-pervasive, presence of the Pentagon in daily life -- a real-world Matrix come alive.
Here is the new, hip, high-tech military-industrial complex -- an omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sight system of systems that penetrates all our lives. Mapping out what should more properly be called the Military-Industrial-Technological-Entertainment-Scientific-Media-Intelligence-Corporate Complex, historian Nick Turse demonstrates just how extensively the Pentagon, through its little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with America's major corporations, has taken hold of the nation.
From iPods to Starbucks coffee to Oakley sunglasses, Turse investigates the remarkable range of military incursions into the civilian world: the Pentagon's collaborations with Hollywood filmmakers, its outlandish schemes to weaponize the wild kingdom, its joint ventures with the World Wrestling Federation and NASCAR. He shows the inventive ways the military, desperate for new recruits, now targets children and young adults, tapping into the "culture of cool" by making 'friends' on MySpace.
A striking vision of a brave new world of remote-controlled rats and super-soldiers who need no sleep, The Complex will change our understanding of the militarization of America. We are a long way from Eisenhower's military-industrial complex: this is the essential book for understanding its twenty-first-century progeny.
By Michael Schwartz
In this razor-sharp analysis, TomDispatch.com commentator Michael Schwartz turns every mainstream conclusion about Iraq on its head. He shows how U.S. occupation is fueling civil war in Iraq and beyond, and how U.S. officials dismantled the Iraqi state and economy, helping to destroy rather than rebuild the country.
In a popular style reminiscent of the best writing against the Vietnam War, he punctures the myths used to sell the American public on the idea of an endless "war on terror" centered in Iraq. Schwartz shows how the real U.S. interests in that country were rooted in the geopolitics of oil and the expansion of a neoliberal economic model in the Middle East -- and around the globe -- at gunpoint.
War Without End also reveals how the failure of the United States in Iraq has forced American planners to fundamentally rethink the imperial dreams driving recent foreign policy.
This book is the third in a series of very successful books published in cooperation with TomDispatch.com, including the New York Times bestseller United States v. George W. Bush et al. by Elizabeth de la Vega (Seven Stories Press).
By Tom Engelhardt
JUST PUBLISHED: 2007 second edition with a new preface and an afterword on how America's "victory culture" returned in the George W. Bush era, only to crash and burn in Iraq. An updated analysis of the demise of victory culture, from Hiroshima to the Global War on Terror.
In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, "Wanted, Dead or Alive"); how his administration brought "victory culture" roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Hussein's Iraq; and how, from its "Mission Accomplished" moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.
This book is an autopsy of a once vital American myth: the cherished belief that triumph over a less-than-human enemy was in the American grain, a birthright and a national destiny. The End of Victory Culture is a compelling account of how America's premier story - of inevitable triumph against all odds - underwent a dizzying decomposition from Hiroshima to Iraq. As Tom Engelhardt reconstructs a half-century of the crumbling borderlands of American consciousness, he also offers a striking portrait of a post-Vietnam, and then Iraq-mired nation living an afterlife amid the ruins of its national narrative.
To read the preface to the 2007 edition of The End of Victory Culture, click here.
To read an excerpt from the updated afterword of The End of Victory Culture, click here.
TomDispatch's powerful, no-holds-barred essays resonate throughout the global online media. This comprehensive volume offers readers a chance to sample some of the finest political analysis of our age, focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice from Guantamano to the CIA "black sites," not to speak of extraordinary rendition, the response to Hurricane Katrina, global warming, Iraq's black gold and the energy crisis, and, above all, the Bush administration's misbegotten "smash of civilizations." Introduced and edited by TomDispatch's creator Tom Engelhardt, The World According to TomDispatch is an essential primer for anyone seeking guidance along the highways and byways of our post 9/11 world.
The book includes already classic pieces by a dazzling cast of authors, including Chalmers Johnson, Juan Cole, Rebecca Solnit, Mark Danner, Ruth Rosen, Jonathan Schell, Greg Grandin, Noam Chomsky, Karen J. Greenberg, Mike Davis, Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild, Dahr Jamail, Arlie Hochschild, Bill McKibben, Judith Coburn, John Brown, Dilip Hiro, Rasha Salti, Michael Schwartz, Behzad Yaghmaian, Ann Jones, Chad Heeter, Nick Turse, Ira Chernus, Steve Fraser, David Rosner, Gerald Markowitz, and Tom Engelhardt.
"Seemingly lost in the woods of deceit and banality, bereft of hope, we are confronted by Rebecca Solnit and her astonishing flashlight. In a jewel of a book that is poetic in substance as well as style, she reveals where we were, where we are and the step-by-step advances that have been made in human rights, as we stubbornly stumble out of the darkness." --Studs Terkel
In a revelatory examination of urban terror, MacArthur Fellow Mike Davis -- dubbed by the British Independent, "the Raymond Chandler of urban geography" -- charts the car bomb's evolution from obscure agent of mayhem to lethal universality. First used by Italian anarchist Mario Buda, who loaded his horse-drawn wagon with dynamite and exploded it near New York's Wall Street in 1920, car bombs have since spread like a virus across the globe and realigned the battlefields of the 20th and 21st centuries. Far from being an ineffective and inarticulate weapon, the car bomb, Mike Davis argues, is instead the "hot rod of the apocalypse."
Stealth weapons of surprising power and destructive efficiency -- able to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize populations of entire cities -- car bombs are often blaring advertisements for a cause, leader, or abstract principle. They are, to borrow words from Regis Debray, "manifestos written in the blood of others." These "manifestos" -- inexpensive to produce and able to garner tremendous attention -- have allowed formerly unknown and near-powerless terror groups to make their inglorious debut on the world's stage. As Mike Davis writes, car bombs constitute the "poor man's air force."
Building on Planet of Slums ("A brilliant book." -- Arundhati Roy), in which he charts the economic and social changes that have led to worldwide urban poverty, Mike Davis eschews accepted opinion and examines the connections between the world's new majority -- the urban impoverished -- and the First World's devastating "War on Terror." Buda's Wagon is a disturbing and penetrating exploration that is bound to prove once more that Mike Davis is one of the most innovative and incisive historians working today.
This history of the car-bomb began as a two-part series at Tomdispatch:
Part 1: The Poor Man's Air Force
A two-part Tomdispatch interview with Mike Davis (part of Mission Unaccomplished) can be read at:
