Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century


Nan Enstad - 1999
    While consumerism did not make women into radicals, it helped shape their culture and their identities as both workers and political actors.

Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus


Alex Halberstadt - 2007
    A role model for generations of writers and performers, Doc was renowned for his mastery of virtually every popular style, from the gutbucket rhythm and blues of “Lonely Avenue” to the symphonic soul of “Save the Last Dance for Me” to the pure pop of “Viva Las Vegas.” His songs-“This Magic Moment,” “A Teenager in Love,” “Hushabye,” “Little Sister,” “Turn Me Loose,” and many others-have been recorded by everyone from Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, and B. B. King to Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and Bruce Springsteen, with sales exceeding $100 million. Doc was ready-made for literature. His collaborator Mort Shuman once described him as an “entire rollicking soul neighborhood rolled into one man.” Garrulous, profane, hilarious, and Rabelaisian, Doc was never inhibited about offering his opinions and his friendship. His confidants, collaborators, and discoveries included Duke Ellington, John Lennon, Dr. John, Jimmy Scott, Bette Midler, and Lou Reed. In the words of renowned producer Jerry Wexler, “If the music industry had a heart, it would be Doc Pomus.” Despite, or more likely because of, his successes, few acquaintances knew that this writer of jukebox hits led one of the most dramatic and unlikely lives of his time. Spanning extravagant wealth and desperate poverty, suburban domesticity and the depths of New York’s underworld, worldwide fame and near-total obscurity, enduring love and persistent loneliness, Doc’s story remains one of the great untold American lives. Its chapters comprise a back-room history of rock ’n’ roll, touching on more than a half-century of American popular music-from the blues Doc performed with Lester Young to his collaborations with the luminaries of New York’s punk scene, shot through with vivid portraits of virtually every major player. Lonely Avenue is the first biography of this American original, so elegantly rendered that it reads like a novel, and fortified by full, exclusive access to Doc Pomus’s family, friends, voluminous journals, and archives.

All Things Censored


Mumia Abu-Jamal - 2000
    Abu-Jamal writes on many different topics, including the ironies that abound within the U.S. prison system and the consequences of those ironies, and his own case. Mumia's composure, humor, and connection to the living world around him represents an irrefutable victory over the "corrections" system that has for two decades sought to isolate and silence him.The title, All Things Censored, refers to Mumia's hiring as an on-air columnist by National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," and subsequent banning from that venue under pressure from law and order groups.

The Rose Journal: Rose Gardner Journal Entries


Denise Grover Swank - 2020
    Rose Gardner Journal entries between Come Rain or Shine and When the Bough Breaks.

Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background


Paul Avrich - 1990
    It divided the nation in the 1920s, and it has continued to arouse deep emotions, giving rise to an enormous literature. Few writers, however, have consulted anarchist sources for the wealth of information available there about the movement of which the defendants were a part. Now Paul Avrich, the preeminent American scholar of anarchism, looks at the case from this new and valuable perspective. This book treats a dramatic and hitherto neglected aspect of the cause c�l�bre that raised, according to Edmund Wilson, "almost every fundamental question of our political and social system."

The Revolt of the Black Athlete


Harry Edwards - 1969
    This Fiftieth Anniversary edition of Harry Edwards's classic of activist scholarship arrives even as a new generation engages with the issues he explored. Edwards's new introduction and afterword revisit the revolts by athletes like Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos. At the same time, he engages with the struggles of a present still rife with racism, double-standards, and economic injustice. Again relating the rebellion of black athletes to a larger spirit of revolt among black citizens, Edwards moves his story forward to our era of protests, boycotts, and the dramatic politicization of athletes by Black Lives Matter. Incisive yet ultimately hopeful, The Revolt of the Black Athlete is the still-essential study of the conflicts at the interface of sport, race, and society.

The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism


Todd May - 1994
    What poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard offer instead is a political philosophy that can be called tactical: it emphasizes that power emerges from many different sources and operates along many different registers. This approach has roots in traditional anarchist thought, which sees the social and political field as a network of intertwined practices with overlapping political effects. The poststructuralist approach, however, eschews two questionable assumptions of anarchism, that human beings have an (essentially benign) essence and that power is always repressive, never productive.After positioning poststructuralist political thought against the background of Marxism and the traditional anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon, Todd May shows what a tactical political philosophy like anarchism looks like shorn of its humanist commitments--namely, a poststructuralist anarchism. The book concludes with a defense, contra Habermas and Critical Theory, of poststructuralist political thought as having a metaethical structure allowing for positive ethical commitments.

No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority


Lysander Spooner - 1870
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism


Melinda Cooper - 2017
    Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives.Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom.In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.

Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement


Marshall Ganz - 2008
    Since the 1900s, large-scale agricultural enterprises relied on migrant labor--a cheap, unorganized, and powerless workforce. In1965, when some 800 Filipino grape workers began to strike under the aegis of the AFL-CIO, the UFW soon joined the action with 2,000 Mexican workers and turned the strike into a civil rights struggle. They engaged in civil disobedience, mobilized support from churches and students, boycottedgrowers, and transformed their struggle into La Causa, a farm workers' movement that eventually triumphed over the grape industry's Goliath. Why did they succeed? How can the powerless challenge the powerful successfully?Offering insight from a longtime movement organizer and scholar, Ganz illustrates how they had the ability and resourcefulness to devise good strategy and turn short-term advantages into long-term gains. Authoritative in scholarship and magisterial in scope, this book constitutes a seminalcontribution to learning from the movement's struggles, set-backs, and successes.

Washington Bullets


Vijay Prashad - 2020
    It is a book of fluent and readable stories, full of detail about US imperialism, but never letting the minutiae obscure the larger political point. It is a book that could easily have been a song of despair – a lament of lost causes; it is, after all, a roll call of butchers and assassins; of plots against people’s movements and governments; of the assassinations of socialists, Marxists, communists all over the Third World by the country where liberty is a statue.Despite all this, Washington Bullets is a book about possibilities, about hope, about genuine heroes. One such is Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso – also assassinated – who said: ‘You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.’Washington Bullets is a book infused with this madness, the madness that dares to invent the future.

A.A. Gill is Further Away: Helping with Enquiries


A.A. Gill - 2011
    His book includes essays on Sudan, India, Cuba, Germany and California. In each piece, there is a central image as the key to unlocking the personality of a place.

Riot. Strike. Riot.: The New Era of Uprisings


Joshua Clover - 2016
    Tottenham. Clichy-Sous-Bois. Oakland. Within capital’s core, the riot looms increasingly large within the repertoire of struggles. Rather than inchoate spasms or immiserated absence of the revolutionary idea, this book locates the riot within longue durée of capitalist transformation: facts not failures. Just as the turn to the strike two centuries ago signaled recompositions of class and society, the return of the riot testifies to current possibilities of anticapitalist struggle, featuring radicalized struggle beyond the labor market. Following the post-1600 course “riot-strike-riot,” the book departs from lapsed models of party and revolution, showing how shifting global strategies to restore profitability since the 1970s must inevitably open onto “circulation struggles” which pass through riot, and whose horizon is the commune.

I Am a Conservative: Uncensored, Undiluted and Absolutely Un-PC


Kurt Schlichter - 2012
    Too often, conservatives have kept silent in the face of insanity, inanity, and outright idiocy. That ends here!From mocking Democrat poobahs and Hollywood nitwits to beating on the wimps at the helm of the GOP, "I Am a Conservative" goes straight for the throat and says what everyone else only dares to think.

The Wire Re-Up: The Guardian Guide to the Greatest TV Show Ever Made


Steve Busfield - 2009
    Nothing like it has been made before and—to its millions of fans—nothing as good will ever be made again. It is a show that prompts endless debate, and the debates continue here. Is Omar Little the coolest criminal since Robin Hood? Which series has the best theme tune? Will Bubbles survive Baltimore? Avon or Stringer? How does McNulty have so much success with women? With the show now over, these and hundreds of other questions are discussed in this brilliant collection of features and comments from the Guardian's Wire Re-up blog. Together with interviews with the show's creators and stars, running totals per episode (murders, Bunk drunk, Herc screw-ups, and much more), and a quiz created by the stars themselves, this book will guarantee fans that one last fix they've been craving.