For reasons of space, the Weekly must often slightly truncate the pieces and also sees fit to change the name of the piece. So, what you read there isn’t always what I sent them. This is one of the reasons I wanted to put this book out. Also, knowing there are a lot of people out there without the time to go to some website and read something every week, I thought it would be a good idea to have the articles all in one place. I hope you enjoy the book and thank you. - Henry

    Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

    He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free.This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.

    The Purple Decades brings together the author's own selections from his list of critically acclaimed publications, including the complete text of Mau-Mauing and the Flak Catchers, his account of the wild games the poverty program encouraged minority groups to play.

    Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

    The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths.In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that “man”—man as a subject of scientific knowledge—is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture.

    In this, we are rich. We begin with abundance. But while much is written about our city these hard days, it is typically meant to explain Detroit to those who live elsewhere. Much of this writing is brilliant, but our anthology, this anthology, is different: it is a collection of Detroit stories for Detroiters. Through essays, photographs, poetry, and art, this anthology collects the stories we tell each other over late nights at the pub and long afternoons on the porch. We share them in coffee shops, at church social hours, in living rooms, and while waiting for the bus. These are stories addressed to the rhetorical “you”—with the ratcheted up language that comes with it—and these are stories that took real legwork to investigate. We may be lifelong residents, newcomers, or former Detroiters; we may be activists, workers, teachers, artists, healers, or students. But a common undercurrent alights our work that is collected here: we are a city moving through the fire of transformation. We are afire.Featuring essays, photographs, poetry, and art by Terry Blackhawk, Grace Lee Boggs, John Carlisle, Desiree Cooper, dream hampton, francine j. harris, Steve Hughes, Jamaal May, Tracie McMillan, Ken Mikolowski, Marsha Music, Shaka Senghor, Thomas J. Sugrue, and many others.

    It was an open secret that 'Constant Reader' was Dorothy Parker, though her name never appeared. Her original books of poems and short stories were being published in those same years, but no one collected the Constant Reader pieces - partly, perhaps, because of the convention of pseudonymity, which would have prevented the use of her name. Yet these light-hearted essays about reading and writing played as much part in creating the Parker legend, and were as much a part of the times, as her stories and poems. They were a new and very personal kind of book reviewing. Without pretending to the Higher Criticism, they were still far from being merely fun. In the more close-knit literary world of the late twenties and early thirties, they often made or unmade reputations. And time has confirmed most of her judgments.Of the forty-six Constant Reader pieces that appeared, thirty-one have been reprinted here in whole or in part."

    She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.Arranged into five sections--In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free--this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network--and Facebook itself--really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes--and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive--and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.

    A compendium of in-depth reports from all over the world, including Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, Japan, Pakistan, Israel, Africa Turkey and China.

    In these twenty-six pieces, Dr. Dalrymple ranges over literature and ideas, from Shakespeare to Marx, from the break-down of Islam to the legalization of drugs. The book includes "When Islam Breaks Down," named by David Brooks of the New York Times as the best journal article of 2004.Informed by years of medical practice in a wide variety of settings, Dr. Dalrymple's acquaintance with the outer limits of human experience allows him to discover the universal in the local and the particular, and makes him impatient with the humbug and obscurantism that have too long marred our social and political discourse.His essays are incisive yet undogmatic, beautifully composed and devoid of disfiguring jargon. Our Culture, What's Left of It is a book that restores our faith in the central importance of literature and criticism to our civilization.

    The government's financewatchdog- the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) - found the government had pickedfavourites and avoided open and competitive bidding which would have generatedfar more revenue for a cash-starved state. The CAG concluded that India hadlost ` 1.861akh crore (over $ 30 billion) in theprocess, all of which went to the private companies. It was the biggestrecorded seam in the history of India. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI),India's premier investigation agency, then filed an FIR against the top officerin the coal ministry-Secretary PC Parakh and industrialist Kumar MangalamBirla. Parakh had by then earned a fine reputation for ability and integrity inover three decades. as a civil servant. His stint as the top bureaucrat in thecoal ministry was his last posting in a sterling career. The FIR outraged thecivil services and corporate India and was widely condemned by theintelligentsia of the country. The book isn't just about the coal seam. It isalso about working with some of the biggest Indian politicians, starting withchief ministers of Andhra Pradesh. It is about life in the coal ministry withMamata Banerjee, Shibu Soren and Dr. Manmohan Singh, who was also the PrimeMinister. It is about the lessons learnt before Parakh met any of thesedignitaries. It is an account that startles with never-before revealed information. About the Author PC

    Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward in the dense and poorly organized Understanding Media. McLuhan's ideas about the nature of media, the increasing speed of communication, and the technological basis for our understanding of who we are come to life in this slender volume. Although originally printed in 1967, the art and style in The Medium is the Massage seem as fresh today as in the summer of love, and the ideas are even more resonant now that computer interfaces are becoming gateways to the global village.

    With subjects ranging from history to baseball to crime novels, A Jacques Barzun Reader is a feast for any reader.

    Oriana Fallaci was granted access to countless world leaders and politicians throughout her remarkable career. Considering herself a writer rather than a journalist, she was never shy about sharing her opinions of her interview subjects. Her most memorable interviews—some translated into English for the first time—appear in this collection, including those with Ariel Sharon, Yassir Arafat, the former Shah of Iran, Lech Walesa, the Dalai Lama, Robert Kennedy, and many others. Also featured is the famous 1972 interview in which she succeeded in getting Henry Kissinger to call Vietnam a "useless war" and to describe himself as "a cowboy." To this day he calls the Fallaci interview "the most disastrous conversation I ever had with the press."