In the dry language of development reports and economic projections, the true misery of the 312 million who live below the poverty line, or the 26 million displaced by various projects, or the 13 million who suffer from tuberculosis gets overlooked. In this thoroughly researched study of the poorest of the poor, we get to see how they manage, what sustains them, and the efforts, often ludicrous, to do something for them. The people who figure in this book typify the lives and aspirations of a large section of Indian society, and their stories present us with the true face of development.

    Simpson, the evidence in the case, and the role of the prosecution and defense.

    Like Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine has been favorably compared to Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus for its ability to brilliantly navigate such socially and politically sensitive subject matter within the confines of the comic book medium.Sacco has often been called the first comic book journalist, and he is certainly the best. This edition of Palestine also features an introduction from renowned author, critic, and historian Edward Said (Peace and Its Discontents and The Question of Palestine), one of the world's most respected authorities on the Middle Eastern conflict.

    Maass examines how an ordinary Serb could wake up one morning and shoot his neighbor, once a friend--then rape that neighbor's wife. He conveys the desperation that makes a Muslim beg the United States to bomb his own city in order to end the misery. And Maass does not falter at the spectacle of U.N. soldiers shining searchlights on fleeing refugees--who are promptly gunned down by snipers waiting in the darkness. Love Thy Neighbor gives us an unflinching vision of a late-20th-century hell that is also a scathing inquiry into the worst extremes of human nature. Like Michael Herr's Dispatches (also available in Vintage paperback), it is an utterly gripping book that will move and instruct readers for years to come.

    For four centuries, it existed as a quiet residential area in a charming city long known for its ethnic and religious tolerance. On this street of 240 families, Muslims and Christians, Serbs and Croats lived easily together, unified by their common identity as Sarajavans. Then the war tore it all apart.   As she did in her groundbreaking work about North Korea, Nothing to Envy, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick tells the story of the Bosnian War and the brutal and devastating three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo through the lives of ordinary citizens, who struggle with hunger, poverty, sniper fire, and shellings.   Logavina Street paints this misunderstood war and its effects in vivid strokes—at once epic and intimate—revealing the heroism, sorrow, resilience, and uncommon faith of its people.   With a new Introduction, final chapter, and Epilogue by the author

    Murrow and his legendary band of CBS radio journalists - Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, William Shirer, Eric Sevareid, and others - as they "paint pictures in the air" from the World War II front. Brimming with personalities and anecdotal detail, it also serves up a sharp-eyed account of where the craft went wrong after the war, when vanity and commercialism increasingly intruded."This is history at its best," said Ted Anthony of AP News.

    Defying simplistic conservative and liberal arguments about why the black underclass persists, Dash puts a human face on their struggle to survive despite both disastrous personal choices and almost insurmountable circumstances.The book spans a half-century of hardship, from Rosa Lee Cunningham's bleak early life in the Jim Crow South to her death from AIDS at age fifty-nine. Rosa Lee gave birth to her first child at fourteen, was married at sixteen, and ultimately bore eight children whom she had no legitimate means of supporting. When her welfare checks proved insufficient to feed her family, she turned to prostitution and selling stolen clothes and drugs. Yet Rosa Lee maintained a flickering desire to do what was right. Two of her sons did escape the ghetto to enter mainstream life, and after Dash's series of articles ran in The Washington Post, she made public speeches, hoping to encourage other people to avoid her destructive choices.Rosa Lee is the worthy successor to such works as Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age. It offers no easy answers, but is instead challenging, thought-provoking, and utterly unforgettable.

    His father, a Depression migrant trained as a welder, helped build dams and later worked at the secret Hanford plutonium plant. Now he and his neighbors, once considered patriots, stand accused of killing the river.As Blaine Harden traveled the Columbia-by barge, car, and sometimes on foot-his past seemed both foreign and familiar. A personal narrative of rediscovery joined a narrative of exploitation: of Native Americans, of endangered salmon, of nuclear waste, and of a once-wild river now tamed to puddled remains.Part history, part memoir, part lament, "this is a brave and precise book," according to the New York Times Book Review. "It must not have been easy for Blaine Harden to find himself turning his journalistic weapons against his own heritage, but he has done the conscience of his homeland a great service."

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    . . .  Jazz aficionados . . . should be grateful to have so much good writing on the subject in one place."--The New York Times Book Review"Alluring. . . . Capture[s] much of the breadth of the music, as well as the passionate debates it has stirred, more vividly than any other jazz anthology to date."--Chicago TribuneNo musical idiom has inspired more fine writing than jazz, and nowhere has that writing been presented with greater comprehensiveness and taste than in this glorious collection. In Reading Jazz, editor Robert Gottlieb combs through eighty years of autobiography, reportage, and criticism by the music's greatest players, commentators, and fans to create what is at once a monumental tapestry of jazz history and testimony to the elegance, vigor, and variety of jazz writing.          Here are Jelly Roll Morton, recalling the whorehouse piano players of New Orleans in 1902; Whitney Balliett, profiling clarinetist Pee Wee Russell; poet Philip Larkin, with an eloquently dyspeptic jeremiad against bop. Here, too, are the voices of Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus, Albert Murray and Leonard Bernstein, Stanley Crouch and LeRoi Jones, reminiscing, analyzing, celebrating, and settling scores. For anyone who loves the music--or the music of great prose--Reading Jazz is indispensable.  "The ideal gift for jazzniks and boppers everywhere. . . . It gathers the best and most varied jazz writing of more than a century."--Sunday Times (London)

    Also collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and originally published in Harper's, this is another travelogue turned existential rumination that shows unabashedly and hilariously the horrors of society (this time via a cruise ship) and really says more about the author himself.

    "An Easy Burden"&nbsp is required reading for everyone who wants to better understand Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement and the ongoing struggle for social justice that continues in his name." -- Coretta Scott King

    Above all about the idea that there is often no greater obstacle to freedom than the assumption that it has already been attained. What prison, after all, could be more secure than that deemed to be "the world," where boundaries of action and thought are assumed to define not the limits of the permissible, but the limits of the possible.In the past we have been prisoners of tyrants and dictators, and consequently have needed to win our freedom in very concrete, physical terms. We now need to free ourselves not from a slave ship or a concentration camp, but from many of the illusions fostered in our democratic society.“[A] wise and acute analysis of the way our minds are controlled, not in a totalitarian state, but in a ‘democratic’ one. Edwards also suggests how we can escape this control in a self-help book which, unlike other books of this genre, connects our inner world of alienation with the world outside.”—Howard Zinn“[A] treatise on what freedom truly means.… Burning All Illusions is an important philosophical and psychology text that should be on every political science curriculum reading list!”—Wisconsin Book Watch

    In this collection, Remnick's gift for character is sharper than ever, whether he writes about Gary Hart stumbling through life after Donna Rice or Mario Cuomo, who now presides over a Saturday morning radio talk show, fielding questions from crackpots, or about Michael Jordan's awesome return to the Chicago Bulls -- or Reggie Jackson's last times at bat.Remnick's portraits of such disparate characters as Alger Hiss and Ralph Ellison, Richard Nixon and Elaine Pagels, Gerry Adams and Marion Barry are unified by this extraordinary ability to create a living character, so that the pieces in this book, taken together, constitute a splendid pageant of the representative characters of our time.

    Veteran journalist Pete Hamill never covered just politics. Or just sports. Or just the entertainment business, the mob, foreign affairs, social issues, the art world, or New York City. He has in fact written about all these subjects, and many more, in his years as a contributor to such national magazines as Esquire, Vanity Fair, and New York, and as a columnist at the New York Post, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and other newspapers. Seasoned by more than thirty years as a New York newspaperman, Hamill wrote on an extraordinarily wide variety of topics in powerful language that is personal, tough-minded, clearheaded, always provocative. Piecework is a rich and varied collection of Hamill's best writing, on such diverse subjects as what television and crack have in common, why winning isn't everything, stickball, Nicaragua, Donald Trump, why American immigration policy toward Mexico is all wrong, Brooklyn's Seventh Avenue, and Frank Sinatra, not to mention Octavio Paz, what it's like to realize you're middle-aged, Northern Ireland, New York City then and now, how Mike Tyson spent his time in prison, and much more. This collection proves him once again to be among the last of a dying breed: the old-school generalist, who writes about anything and everything, guided only by passionate and boundless curiosity. Piecework is Hamill at his very best.

    accompanied by fifty taste-tempting recipes for a variety of meats. sauces. and side dishes. including Lady Causeys Overnight Cabbage Slaw. Oklahoma Joes Brew-BQ Ribs. and Moonlight Mutton Dip. Reprint.. It was while eating a big ol 'plate of steaming ribs that journalist Lolis Eric Elie and photographer Frank Stewart decided to traverse the country to investigate America's obsession with smoked meat. Their quest took them from all-night barbecue binges on Chicago's south side to barbecue competition circuit events like Memphis in May and Big Pig Jig in Vienna. Georgia. where people drop thousands of dollars to spend a sleepless night smoking meat. In SMOKESTACK LIGHTNING. Elie and Stewart profile the down-home ...

    The crime stunned the school, terrified students, and mystified the FBI. The case remains unsolved. In Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, award-winning investigative reporter Ted Anton shows that the murder is what Culianu's friends suspected all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil.

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    It would be a darkly humorous understatement to say that this collection is not intended for the squeamish. Peter Sotos is the world's foremost practitioner of verbal brutality. His words achieve a nearly inconceivable level of intensity while offering the most cohesive, insightful commentary on pornography currently available. And he serves it up without detached, hypocritical hand-wringing or the sticky postmodern safety net of camp humor. Devotees of blandly moralistic “true crime” writing and pockmarked collectors of “horror” fiction won't find much to suit their tastes here. Total Abuse features nearly all of Sotos's written output since 1984... PURE. The world's first self-published true-crime fanzine, PURE was so convincingly written that it led to police surveillance of the author and his subsequent arrest. The first two issues of PURE have been endlessly photocopied on the bootleg circuit; their complete text is reprinted herein. The text to both volumes of PURE III, written in 1985, is being published here for the first time anywhere. Included are the author's essays on child pornography; anal rape; Nazi fetishes; Prostitutes' crushed skulls; homosexual slaughter; and a close-up lens on the bawling faces of victims' family members. TOOL. A brief collection of fictionalized psycho sexual narratives, the first chapter of which caused seismic levels of uneasiness when printed in ANSWER Me! #4. Sotos regales the reader with thoughts on his arrest; child abuse; gay-bashing; race-baiting; project-dwelling crack whores; peep-show dancers; murdered male hookers; and the inexorable pain of surviving friends 'n' family. PARASITE. Pornography examined, prodded, deconstructed, and understood as never before. Originally published as twenty issues of a monthly newsletter, PARASITE is literary criticism seamlessly woven with personal psychodrama. Sotos scrutinizes gay glory-hole porn; true-crime untruths; gang-bang videos; and his favorite philosophical ghetto, radical feminism. He delivers surprisingly witty one-liners regarding the current glut of empowerment-theory, sexual-healing, self-help gibberish. He ruminates about the “money shot” and its degrading potential. More abused kids. More crying mothers. More bad feelings on all sides. Total Abuse contains a brief introduction by Jim Goad and an extensive interview with Peter Sotos. WARNING: TOTAL ABUSE is not for the squeamish!!!

    Drained of cash and spirit, Wood could not hold out much longer against a devouring giant, the Gannett Company. As editor and publisher of the nationally distinguished weekly Santa Fe Reporter, McCord had successfully fended off Gannett's "Operation Demolition" when it moved into town. Now Wood was seeking the help of a survivor.Startling case histories of the dubious tactics practiced by Gannett, unsparing insights into the newspaper industry, and harsh conclusions all come together in the dramatic story of these two men's efforts to save the small Green Bay daily from being obliterated at the hands of the nation's largest newspaper chain. Their success is a metaphor for one of the oldest triumphs of the world: that of David over Goliath."McCord has done something marvelous with this. He's taken a deeply disturbing nationwide trend and put it on a small midwestern stage with real characters. The Chain Gang's message needs to be heard by as many Americans as read newspapers. Already Gannett's monopoly tactics have impoverished communities across the country. McCord is one man fighting back, coolly, rationally, creatively, and stubbornly. Let's join him."—Michael Shnayerson, Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair"More graphically than almost any other available record of the era, the Gannett piracy is what has happened to this country, tolled where the price is truly paid, in the lives of communities and people."—Roger Morris, winner of the Investigative Reporters and Editors' National Award for Distinguished Investigative Journalism"Richard McCord's The Chain Gang takes the losing battle for the soul of American newspapers from the euphoric accounts on financial pages to show what corporate news chains can mean in human terms to the people and the vitality of the victimized cities and towns. His is a unique account of the power and depredations of the Gannett Chain under its glib empire builder, Allen Neuharth. It goes behind the facade of slick public relations and financial killings for investors to show what happens when a ruthless and ambitious wheeler-dealer gets control of our news."—Ben H. Bagdikian, media critic and Pulitzer Prize winner

    Bernard tells the tale of his life, loves and failures over forty years.

    involvement in Vietnam. In his gripping account of this highly charged case, Rudenstine examines new evidence, raises difficult questions, and challenges conventional views of a historic moment.

    While documenting the extraordinary and rapid ascent of the school's basketball program from among the nation's worst to the Final Four, Going Bigtime also covers the entire sweep of UMass basketball history, which includes the college careers of Julius Erving and Rick Pitino.Dobrow doesn't ignore the price a bucolic state university pays for going bigtime: a grades scandal, a brilliant but erratic coach, the infamous "John Chaney incident" and a star player taking illegal payments from agents, in UMass's case.Primarily Dobrow emphasizes UMass's 1995-96 season, one of the most fascinating in the history of college basketball. Included are non-pareil profiles of protagonists like National Player of the year Marcus Camby -- "...more goldenrod than dandelion -- physically, intellectually and emotionally, he was a late bloomer" -- and Coach John Calipari --" the man from Moon reaching for the stars" -- as well as many unreported moments and anecdotes from that near-championship season.When John became UMass basketball coach in 1988, he inherited one of the country's worst programs. When he left in 1996, the Minutement were America's darlings.

    All our cultural institutions are based on the intellectual idea that an enlightened citizenry could govern its affairs with reason and responsibility. In the late 20th century, however, we are witnessing the disintegration of much of our cultural heritage. Wood argues that this is due to our evolution into a ^Upost-intellectual society^R--a society characterized by a loss of critical thinking, the substitution of information for knowledge, mediated reality, increasing illiteracy, loss of privacy, specialization, psychological isolation, hyper-urbanization, moral anarchy, and political debilitation. These post-intellectual realities are all triggered by three underlying determinants: the failure of linear growth and expansion to sustain our economic system; the runaway information overload; and technological determinism. Wood presents a new and innovative social theory, challenging readers to analyze all our post-intellectual cultural malaise in terms of these three fundamental determinants.

    Bryant's stormy life is the enthralling story of one woman's struggle to live by her convictions. Queen of Bohemia connects a brave and beguiling woman to an era of stunning transformations.

    In the 1980s, Frady was chief writer and host of ABC News Documentary Series "Closeup," for which he won two Emmy's, the Cine Golden Eagle, and the duPont-Columbia Award, and a correspondent for "Nightline." In the 90's, he co-wrote the screenplay for the TNT miniseries "George Wallace," directed by John Frankenheimer, which won three CableACE awards, a Golden Globe for best miniseries, the Humanitas Award for writing, three Emmy awards and the Peabody Award. He also wrote and narrated the PBS "Frontline" Documentary, "The Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson." He was the author of seven books: Wallace (1968), Across a Darkling Plain: An American's Passage Through the Middle East (1971), Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (1979), Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey (1980), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (1996), and Martin Luther King Jr. (2002), a volume in the Penguin Lives series. He died on March 9, 2004.

    In this sequel to his popular and critically acclaimed Real Florida, Klinkenberg, a native of Miami and a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, takes us to the winter preserve of the sandhill crane, in search of the rare ghost orchid and the Okeechobee gourd, which was believed to be extinct. We get to attend a conch reunion and a sponge-o-rama and to visit the last wild man of the Everglades, the Highwaymen who painted glorious Florida landscapes and sold them by the side of the road, gandy dancers and a man who stalks lightning.

    Julia was a young physician and mother-to-be kidnapped from a medical clinic and found years later in a clandestine grave along with 334 other corpses. Who were those thousands of victims? Who was Julia? By reconstructing Julia's life, Eric Stener Carlson gives voice to the thousands of citizens who were "disappeared." In doing so, he must use the pseudonym "Julia" to protect the people she left behind. Julia's poignant story is told through the emotional memories of childhood friends and family, classmates and colleagues, an ex-lover, and fellow prisoners whose lives intersected with hers in the government torture centers. Interspersed between the personal testimonies are the commentaries of a military general, a priest, a politician, a human rights activist, and a prosecuting attorney in the war crimes tribunal, giving her story a political and social context.

    Taking as an example the Clinton health care reform initiative, the authors show how a policy that aimed to please everyone ended by satisfying no one due to pressure groups, political gamesmanship and the inertia of the American 'system'.

    The author draws on years of research, personal interviews, documents and rare recordings to recover the stories of one-hit wonders, overnight successes and riches-to-rags tragedies from half a century of country and early rock music.

    Diaries, letters, journals, media reports and more. Beautifully and dramatically illustrated.18 books are contained within this volume series (Voices of the Civil War)

    This explosive guide to the big money sources behind the presidential candidates features hard-hitting facts culled from public records, detailed pie charts and easily referenced top ten lists of financial supporters for all the candidates who have already declared their intentions to run, as well as those judged likely to declare.

    In these essays, James Kilgo seeks the common ground between his roles as a man, as husband and father, and as heir to his family legacy. Pausing at mid-life to make an eloquent, understated stand against our era's rootlessness, he honors friendship, kinship, nature, and tradition.In the opening section, Kilgo focuses on the tension between his need for ritualistic male camaraderie and his familial obligations. Searching the woods for arrowheads, sitting around the dinner table at a hunting lodge, or careening down an abandoned logging road in a pickup, he seems ever-prone to the intrusions of domesticity and civilization: a sudden memory of miring the family station wagon in the sand on a beach trip, an encounter with a couple on their sixtieth wedding anniversary, a stream littered with trash and stocked with overbred hatchery trout.Restlessness and responsibility converge and again clash in the second series of essays, in which domestic themes are explored in settings that range from Kilgo's own living room to Yellowstone Park and the deep waters off the Virgin Islands. Through such images as a hornet's nest, a gale-force storm, a grizzly bear, and a marlin, Kilgo gauges the strengths and vulnerabilities of his family and moves toward an existence that is part of, not apart from, the women in his life.The long title essay composes the book's final section. Reading through a cache of letters exchanged between his two grandfathers, Kilgo recovers and revises his memories of them. What he learns of their open, passionate friendship reveals an essentially feminine aspect of their patriarchal natures, enriching, but also confusing, Kilgo's earlier understanding of who they were. As some of the more unhappy or unpleasant details of his grandfathers' lives come to light, they first heighten, then assuage, Kilgo's ambivalence about a family heritage built as much on myth as on truth.The manner in which Kilgo makes such intensely personal concerns so broadly relevant accentuates what might be called the "told," rather than the "written," quality of Inheritance of Horses. He is foremost a storyteller, working in a style that is classically southern in its pacing and its feel for the land, but all his own in its restrained humor and lack of self-absorption. Guided by a storyteller's respect for common people and common feelings, Kilgo never prescribes or moralizes but rather brings us to places where principled choices can be made about what we need and value most in our lives.

    His scathingly funny takes on today's headlines, and the people behind them, keep the worst offenders honest and the rest of us laughing. This book showcases the first collection of side-splitting and thought-provoking cartoons by this national syndicated cartoonist.

    These essays, originating in Goytisolo's travels in the late 1990s, provide rich historical analysis and moving first-person reportage of life in four explosive war-zones: Sarajevo, Algeria, the West Bank and Gaza, and Chechnya. From the 17th century to the Gulf War, the West has regarded Islam as the enemy on the doorstep, and this book elucidates how relations between Islam and the West continue to be shaped in a climate of ideological, political, and cultural confrontation.Goytisolo examines the fratricidal frenzy in Algeria and the war waged by French police against North African migrants in France, and he describes a besieged Sarajevo transformed into a concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire. He contemplates the despair and poverty of Palestinian youth living in the Occupied Territories and details the brutality of the Russian war in the Caucasus. Whether reporting on the fate of the Bosnians after the break up of the former Yugoslavia or analyzing the growing appeal of fundamentalisms - Islamic, Jewish, and Russian Orthodox - Goytisolo displays the same blend of intelligence, vision, and warm fellow-feeling that has made him one the most imposing literary figures of our time.Many of these succinct and eloquent essays first appeared in Spain's leading newspaper El Pais, and English translations were published in the Times Literary Supplement (London).Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. In 1993 he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary achievement and contribution to world culture. His translated works include a two volume autobiography, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, the trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian and Juan the Landless, and the essays, Saracen Chronicles. Other works by him and published by City Lights Publishers includeThe Marx Family Saga, published in 1999, and A Cock-Eyed COmedy published in 2005.Peter Bush is Director of the British Center for Literary Translation and translated Juan Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga, which was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclan.

    Now, the best of this award-winning columnist's compelling writing about his home town has been collected in a book for the first time. These 104 essays cover Cleveland politics, sports, crime, people (famous, infamous, and ordinary), and timeless tough issues from 1968 to today. A vivid depiction of a city's colorful and not always picture-perfect past. Dick Feagler is also author of "Did You Read Feagler Today?"

    Hackworth is one of America's most decorated soldiers, having served at the end of World War II, and in Korea and Vietnam. Retired from the military since 1971, he has completed second tour of battlefield duty -- this time as a war correspondent -- accompanying our nation's fighting men and women to the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Somalia, Korea and Haiti. What he learned of high-level military incompetence, futility and corruption in the heat and fury of Desert Storm -- and in the desperation of the Balkans and Mogadishu -- is shocking, frightening and infuriating...and it must be told.Hazardous Duty is a necessary wake-up call for military reform -- a no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled exposé that calls America's top political and military leaders to account for selling out duty, honor and country. It is riveting, real-life adventure of courageous warriors on the world's new battlefields -- and of their systematic betrayal by the weakness of an increasingly wasteful and inept high command. It offers essential solutions to problems that must be addressed if our nation is to remain the foremost military power in a volatile and ever-changing world.

    And he allows that there is "no discernible theme; subjects range from owls to Alice in Wonderland, Michelangelo to Michael Jackson, the joy of napping to the horror of very nearly being murdered by a madman." It's that diversity, coupled with the very high quality of the writing, that makes this such a special book. Anyone who enjoys the essay form would find at least several essays in The Best American Essays 1996 that appeal to some of their interests, and there's a good chance that new interests will be sparked.

    It includes information on over 60 bands, as well as indie labels and clubs.