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By Ilan Pappe
By Reinhold Niebuhr; Robin W. Lovin (Introduction by)
$20
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By Cherilyn Parsons — “The Orphan Master’s Son” by Adam Johnson is a rich, careening, dystopian tale that gives us a visceral hit of life inside North Korea.
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Sony Pictures
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India may be the world’s biggest democracy, but it has a little something to learn about free expression. Film censors have banned the Hollywood version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” because of three sexual and/or violent scenes.
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By Jonathan Yardley —
“Himmler was the complete opposite of a faceless functionary,” Peter Longerich writes in “Heinrich Himmler.” “The position he built up over the years can instead be described as an extreme example of the almost total personalization of political power.”
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By Mr. Fish — Art Spiegelman’s “MetaMaus” is a 300-page user’s guide to his own Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus” (you know, Holocaust-graphic-novel-Jews-as-mice-Nazis-as-cats).
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By William Drozdiak —
In “After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent,” Walter Laqueur explains how Europe’s success in constructing a harmonious community of states actually masked serious social, economic and political vulnerabilities that proved too fragile to bear the world’s most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.
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Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — The true power of the Christian gospel is its unambiguous call for liberation from forces of oppression and for a fierce and uncompromising condemnation of all who oppress.
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By Jean Randich — Lauren B. Davis’ thrilling, polyphonic new novel, “Our Daily Bread,” takes us into a backwoods clan rife with child abuse and incest, and asks the question: “When does another person’s suffering become my responsibility?”
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In this excerpt from Lauren B. Davis’ new novel, “Our Daily Bread,” an elderly woman encounters two troubled boys and the question of whether we ever do enough to help others.
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By Jeff Shesol —
“The desire to be inspired,” William F. Gavin writes in “Speechwright,” “to be uplifted, to be made to feel deeply, to be swept away, and thrilled is the mark of jaded citizens who have forgotten that the major goal of political rhetoric should be to make good arguments, clearly and honestly.”
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By Mel White — According to James H. Cone’s “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” Jesus was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched almost 5,000 black people in this country. The lynching tree is the cross in America.
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In this excerpt from “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” James H. Cone writes that the gospel is found wherever the wronged struggle for justice.
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Illustration from an AP photo by Chad Rachman
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By Robert Scheer — What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state or a claim to the ear of the divine.
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By Julia Frey —
A marvelous new biography of Vincent Van Gogh asks what if it was untreatable epilepsy that drove him mad, he didn’t cut off his lobe for a woman and he was killed by delinquents rather than committing suicide?
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By Christen Clifford —
Jennifer Baumgardner’s new book of essays and interviews, “F ’em! Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls,” connects generations of women thinking about women, from the suffragettes to women’s libbers, from riot grrrls to Lady Bloggers.
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In this excerpt from “F ’em! Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls,” author Jennifer Baumgardner lays out a history of feminism in “waves”: from the rights of citizenship and equality to transgenderism, male feminists and sex work.
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By Kelly Johnson —
Ellen E. Schultz’s “Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers” reveals how fleecing the elderly is just business as usual for corporations. If the retirement industry isn’t reined in, she concludes, we’ll be right back where we were in the 1930s.
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Joseph Voves (CC-BY)
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By Peter Van Buren —
Morris Davis was fired by the Library of Congress not because of his work performance, but because he wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on his own time, using his own computer, as a private citizen. The government just did not like what he wrote.
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David Kennedy, author of “Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America,” spent more than 10 years in the worst corners of the worst cities in the country before going to Baltimore.
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When publishers announced the forthcoming release of “Adios, Mofo: Why Rick Perry Will Make America Miss George W. Bush” in August, The New York Times ran a notice referring to the book only as a work “with an unprintable title.” (more)
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By Rayyan Al-Shawaf —
Howard Jacobson’s novel “No More Mr. Nice Guy” travels well-worn territory: the male midlife crisis in search of laughs.
Posted on Nov 17, 2011
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Edward P. Morgan, in this excerpt from “What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy,” maintains that “the mass media’s ‘’60s’ discourse is chiefly one of ghosts, accusations, and smoke and mirrors that has long played on audience emotions and diverted public attention to what is essentially a symbolic form of spectator politics.”
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Kenny Sun (CC-BY)
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By Amy Goodman — We got word just after 1 a.m. Tuesday that New York City police were raiding the Occupy Wall Street encampment.
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By John Tirman —
In “The Shadow World,” Andrew Feinstein gives us perhaps the most comprehensive account of the global arms trade ever written, an industry in which the supreme ideology is greed.
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Last weekend former Labor Secretary Reich and Truthdig Editor Scheer, who, in his own words, got a little wound up, were among the luminaries teaching in at the Occupy L.A. encampment.
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An excerpt from Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President” looks into the perilous political labyrinth navigated by our nation’s leader.
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An excerpt from Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides’ third novel, “The Marriage Plot,” which centers on a romantic triangle at Brown University in 1982.
Posted on Nov 2, 2011
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By Michael Dirda — “I keep an eye on the love life of the Colorado beetle and work against it,” Samuel Beckett writes in this second volume of his collected letters. “… That is to say by throwing the parents into my neighbor’s garden and burning the eggs. If only someone had done that for me!”
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey
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In this special Web-exclusive Halloween edition of Truthdig Radio, Howie Stier interviews art historian Paul Koudounaris, whose macabre new book explores fetishistic tombs and morbid monuments around the world.
Posted on Oct 27, 2011
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In this special Web-exclusive Halloween edition of Truthdig Radio, Howie Stier interviews art historian Paul Koudounaris, whose macabre new book explores fetishistic tombs and morbid monuments around the world.
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Paul Weiskel (CC-BY)
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By Glenn Greenwald, TomDispatch —
As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious.
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By Michelle Alexander —
Is the massive surge of imprisonment a contagious disease? Does the answer lie in the structure of our democracy? Two new books suggest so.
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White House / Chuck Kennedy
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Can President Obama take advantage of the egalitarian sentiment let loose in the country by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations? The best response comes not from polls but from history.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The authors of a new book claim that Vincent Van Gogh did not kill himself, but was probably shot by a couple of drunken teenagers playing cowboys and artists with a loaded gun. (more)
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By Robin Shamburg — The Internet, for the authors of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire,” is a boggling treasure trove of research on human sexual behavior.
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By Gwen Ifill —
Two new books take radically different approaches to questions of race introspection—one academic, the other anecdotal.
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An excerpt from musician Ry Cooder’s first published collection of stories, set in L.A. after World War II, “a sunny place for shady people.”
Posted on Oct 5, 2011
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By Allen Barra — Two new volumes—a biography and an anthology—shine light on G.K. Chesterton, an inhabitant of the twilight realm of the praised but unread.
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Some lovers of wit rank G.K. Chesterton as one of the greatest aphorists. Here’s a GKC sampler.
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By Nomi Prins — Catastrophic convergence, the “collision of political, economic, and environmental disasters,” is the theme of Christian Parenti’s epic new book, “Tropic of Chaos.”
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By Lee Smith —
Robin Wright’s new book, “Rock the Casbah,” surveys the people of Islam a decade after 9/11 and finds they have turned not toward extremism but moderation.
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Flickr / sskennel (CC-BY)
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Next week Joe McGinniss, the author and so-called journalist who moved in next door to Sarah Palin and her family more than a year ago, will officially release his book about the former Alaska governor, and already his work has received scathing reviews.
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By John Dean — As I mentioned to friends when I started reading Dick Cheney’s memoir, I was doing it so others would not have to. And, as a precaution, I did it alone in case my head exploded. It did not. This book is a bomb, but not the exploding kind.
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This week on Truthdig Radio, in collaboration with KPFK, we hear about the dark side of international freight; the downside of DSK’s dismissal; the power of journalism, and the fall of the Soviet Union.
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey
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This week on Truthdig Radio, in collaboration with KPFK, we hear about the dark side of international freight; the downside of DSK’s dismissal; the power of journalism, and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Posted on Sep 1, 2011
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AP / Ed Zurga
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By Robert Scheer — Behold this unctuous knave, a disgrace to his nation as few before him, yet boasting unvarnished virtue.
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Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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By Amy Goodman — “When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s Reich minister of propaganda, in 1941. Former Vice President Dick Cheney seems to have taken the famous Nazi’s advice in his new book, “In My Time.”
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