Tomdispatch Guest Writers

Anthony Arnove is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal published in the American Empire Project (American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books) and, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories).

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), earned a doctorate in modern history from the University of Oxford in 1996. He has taught military cadets at the Air Force Academy, officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. His books and articles, focusing primarily on military history, include Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005). He can be reached at wastore@pct.edu.

Frida Berrigan is Senior Program Associate with the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. She is a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus and a contributing editor at In These Times magazine. She is the author of reports on the arms trade and human rights, U.S. nuclear weapons policy, and the domestic politics of U.S. missile defense and space weapons policies. She can be reached at berrigan@newamerica.net.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.

John Brown is a former diplomat who resigned from the State Department over the planned invasion of Iraq. He compiles the Public Diplomacy Press Review.

James Carroll, a columnist for the Boston Globe, is at work on a television documentary based on his bestselling book Constantine's Sword. His post September 11th, 2001 columns have been collected in Crusade, Chronicles of an Unjust War. His most recent book is House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.

Ira Chernus is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.

Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are Failed States, The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy and Hegemony or Survival, both in the American Empire Project series at Metropolitan Books. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Judith Coburn covered the war in Indochina from 1970-73 for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Village Voice, and Pacifica Radio. She is working on a memoir about Vietnam and the 1960s.

Patrick Cockburn is the Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent. He was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting. His book on his years covering the war in Iraq, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction.

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book is Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.

Catherine Collins, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, is a Washington-based writer. She is the co-author with Douglas Frantz of The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets... and How We Could Have Stopped Him (Twelve, 2007).

Renato Redentor Constantino is a writer and painter based in Quezon City in the Philippines. He is the author of The Poverty of Memory: Essays on History and Empire. He can be reached via his website.

Mark Danner, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and former New Yorker staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History. His work can be found at markdanner.com.

Mike Davis is the author of Planet of Slums, among many other books. His history of the car bomb, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, which grew out of a two-part Tomdispatch article has just been published by Verso.

Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in The Nation magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She writes regularly for Tomdispatch.com. She is the author of United States v. George W. Bush et al, a Tomdispatch book project.

Ariel Dorfman has written extensively about the relationship between the American-backed Chilean coup of September 11, 1973 and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., particularly in his book of provocations, Other Septembers, Many Americas. He is also the author of Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North and a novel, Burning City , written with his youngest son, Joaquin, among many works, including novels, plays, poetry, essays, and memoirs. His website is: www.adorfman.duke.edu.

John Dower, Ford International Professor of History at M.I.T, is the author of War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II , which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, published in the American Empire Project Series by Metropolitan Books. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for the American Prospect, Mother Jones, and The Nation. He is also a regular contributor to TomPaine, the Huffington Post, Tomdispatch, and other websites, and writes the blog, The Dreyfuss Report.

Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and a contributor to Newsday, In These Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and TomPaine. He is author of the forthcoming How to Rule the World: The New Politics of Fighting Empire in the Post-Bush Era (Nation Books, Spring 2008). He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com.

Susan Faludi is the author of The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9-11 America. She wrote the bestselling Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and has written for many publications, from the Wall Street Journal to The Nation.

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003) among other books.

Douglas Frantz, the former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a senior writer at Conde Nast Portfolio. He is, most recently, the co-author with Catherine Collins of The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets... and How We Could Have Stopped Him (Twelve, 2007).

Steve Fraser is co-founder of the American Empire Project and Editor-at-Large of the journal New Labor Forum. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator, A History of Wall Street in American Life, and most recently co-editor of Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky is a writer from New York City and a recent graduate of the new homeland security campus. He has written for the Nation Online, Z Magazine, Common Dreams, and the Harvard Crimson, where he was a columnist and editor, and his work has also appeared in Poets Against the War (Nation Books). He was a recipient of the New York Times James B. Reston Award for young journalists and Harvard's James Gordon Bennett Prize for his writing on collective memory.

Greg Grandin is the author of the other book endorsed by Hugo Chavez on his 2006 New York visit: Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, published in American Empire Project Series by Metropolitan Books.

Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center for Law and Security at the NYU School of Law and is the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib. She also edited The Torture Debate in America.

David Hilfiker spent his medical career as a physician with low-income people in rural Minnesota and inner-city Washington DC. No longer in active practice, he is the Finance Director for Joseph's House, a ten-bed home and community for formerly homeless men with AIDS. Along with numerous articles, he is the author of three books, Healing the Wounds: A Physician Looks at His Work, Not All of Us Are Saints, and most recently, Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen.

Dilip Hiro is most recently author of Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources as well as Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After and The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies, all published by Nation Books.

Adam Hochschild is the San Francisco-based author of six books, including Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, a finalist for the National Book Award, and King Leopold's Ghost. He is writing a book on the First World War.

Arlie Hochschild is a retired professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley and the author of The Commercialization of Intimate Life as well as The Time Bind and The Second Shift.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who reported from Iraq for over eight months from 2003-2005, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Jordan. His reports have been published by the Independent, the Guardian, and the Sunday Herald in the U.K. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service, as well as for Tomdispatch, and is currently finishing a book about his experiences in Iraq.

Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of Asian Studies at the University of California, San Diego. From 1968 until 1972 he served as a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency. Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the final volume in his Blowback Trilogy, has just been published in the American Empire Project Series by Metropolitan Books. In 2006 he appeared in the prize-winning documentary film Why We Fight.

Sheila K. Johnson is an anthropologist, an editor for the Japan Policy Research Institute, and the wife of Chalmers Johnson.

Ann Jones, writer and activist, is the author of 8 books, including Women Who Kill, Next Time She'll Be Dead, and Looking for Lovedu: Days and Nights in Africa. Her recent book, Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books), reports what she learned in Afghanistan in 4 years (2002-2006) as an aid worker. She currently works with the UN and the International Rescue Committee to combat violence against women in war torn countries. More can be found at her website.

Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes the Middle East and other international conflicts. He also runs his own website, Rootless Cosmopolitan.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the defense correspondent of The Nation magazine. He is the author, most recently, of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum published in the American Empire Project Series by Metropolitan Books.

Mark LeVine is a professor of modern Middle Eastern History at University of California, Irvine and author of Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil and Heavy Metal Islam. His website is www.culturejamming.org.

Robert Lipsyte, the Jock Culture Correspondent for Tomdispatch.com, is a former sports journalist for The New York Times as well as CBS and NBC network news. His most recent book is the controversial Young Adult novel, Raiders Night, which has been described as a kind of "Friday Night Darks." Lipsyte believes that sports is the most fun you can have, legally, with your body in public, and anything else is child abuse.

Jen Marlowe, a documentary filmmaker and human rights activist, is the author of Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival (Nation Books). She is now directing and editing her next film, Rebuilding Hope, about South Sudan, and writing a book about Palestine and Israel. Her most recent film was Darfur Diaries: Message from Home. She serves on the board of directors of the Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre and is a founding member of the Rachel's Words initiative. Her email address is: jenmarlowe@hotmail.com.

Alfred W. McCoy is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, published in the American Empire Project Series by Metropolitan Books, as well as The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade and a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Bill McKibben is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

Jack Miles is senior fellow for religious affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and professor of English and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning God: A Biography, among other works.

Roger Morris, who served in the State Department and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia. He then worked as a legislative advisor in the U.S. Senate and a director of policy studies at the Carnegie Endowment. A Visiting Honors professor at the University of Washington and Research Fellow of the Green Institute (his work appears on its website), he is an award-winning historian and investigative journalist, including a National Book Award Silver Medal winner, and the author of books on Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and the Clintons. More recently, he co-authored, with Sally Denton, The Money and the Power, a history of Las Vegas as the paradigm of national corruption. His latest work, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of U.S. covert interventions and policy in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century, will be published in 2007 by Knopf.

David Morse is a writer whose articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends Journal, The Nation, the New York Times Magazine, The Progressive Populist, and various on-line publications including Alternet, Counterpunch, Mother Jones, and Salon. He is now writing a book about the Darfur situation.

Ruth Rosen, historian and former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A new edition of her most recent book, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America, with an updated epilogue has just been published.

Jay Rosen teaches Journalism at New York University, and is the creator of the blog, PressThink. He also writes for the Huffington Post. In July 2006 he started NewAssignment.Net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. He is the co-publisher with Arianna Huffington of OfftheBus, a collaboration between NewAssignment.Net and the Huffington Post in which citizen journalists tackle the '08 campaign.

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz are the authors most recently of Are We Ready? Public Health Since 9/11. Rosner is Professor of History and Public Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Markowitz is Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center.

Rasha Salti, a Lebanese curator and writer who has published in the London Review of Books and elsewhere, splits her time between New York City and Beirut.

Jonathan Schell is The Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. He is the author of The Unconquerable World and many other books.

Orville Schell is the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and a contributor to the New York Review of Books as well as Tomdispatch. His most recent book is Virtual Tibet, Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood.

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency as well as on American business and government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited with Clarence Lo). His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites including Tomdispatch.com, Asia Times, Mother Jones.com, and ZNet, and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine.

Jonathan Schwarz is a frequent contributor to Mother Jones and co-author with Michael Gerber of Our Kampf, a collection of their humor from the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Saturday Night Live. His website is named after a saying of George Orwell's: "Every joke is a tiny revolution."

Rebecca Solnit lives in and loves the peninsular republic of San Francisco, where she is working on a new book. Her most recent books are Hope in the Dark and A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

David Swanson is the Washington Director of Democrats.com and co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and of the Backbone Campaign. He serves on a working group of United for Peace and Justice. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign. His website is davidswanson.org.

Sandy Tolan is the author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East. He directs the Project on International Reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an I.F. Stone Fellow. He has produced dozens of documentaries for National Public Radio, reported from the Middle East since 1994, and from more than two dozen countries over the last 25 years. He has also served as an oral history consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Doug Troutman was with the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam in 1966/67. He was later a Park Ranger in Yosemite National Park and then a Wilderness Specialist and Outdoor Recreation Planner with the Bureau of Land Management. He lives in a small town in eastern Oregon away from the madding crowd.

Nick Turse is the Associate Editor and Research Director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives and his website is NickTurse.com.

Tam Turse is Tomdispatch's official photographer. She is a photojournalist working in New York City. Her latest photos for a piece at the site can be viewed by clicking here.

Chip Ward is a political activist, writer, environmentalist, and a former library administrator. He is the author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land.

Howard Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove of Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) and of the international best-selling A People's History of the United States.

Hope in the Dark

Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

By Rebecca Solnit

"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

Nation Books