Currently Browsing: Current Affairs
A Good War Is Hard to Find
The Art of Violence in America
David Griffith
In the wake of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, American leaders from different fields, politics, journalism, law, psychiatry struggled to understand what happened in the notorious prison, and why. In this astonishingly elegant and passionate series of essays, David Griffth contends that our society’s shift from language to...
Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age
Steve Knopper
For the first time, Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the epic story of the precipitous rise and fall of the modern recording industry, from an author who has been writing about it for more than ten years. With unparalleled access to those intimately involved in the music world’s highs and...
In the end, the greatest challenge of digital living will be to manage the relationship we have with our own selves, as even that most intimate and nebulous connection is more and more mediated by digital technology.
Be a Father to Your Child: Real Talk from Black Men on Family, Love, and Fatherhood
Edited by April R. Silver
The anthology includes poems and lyrics, short stories, essays, interviews, and commentaries on parenting and relationships – all from the perspective fathers and sons born at or during the same time that hip hop culture was birthed. In addition, the book will be accompanied by extraordinary photos of...
Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America
Michael Muhammad Knight
In his quest for an indigenous American Islam, Michael Muhammad Knight embarks on a series of interstate odysseys. Traveling 20,000 miles by Greyhound in sixty days, he squats in run-down mosques, pursues Muslim romance, is detained at the U.S.-Canadian border with a trunkload of Shia literature, crashes Islamic Society of North America...
Bluebird
Vesna Maric
Vesna Maric left Bosnia at the beginning of the war, at the age of sixteen, on a bus full of women and children heading for England. Bluebird is her funny, vivid, and immensely readable memoir of the experience. She describes the beginning of the war—the machine gun fire that sounded like a sewing machine in the distance—and her family’s growing anxiety, which leads to their decision to...
Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger
Can China and India Dominate the West?
Prem Shankar Jha
The media is feeding upon the boastful self-confidence of a newly invigorated entrepreneurial class in India, and on the growing irritation with said Indian upstart in the Chinese leadership. To say that the two countries will dominate the global economy half a century hence if they stay on their present trajectories is...
Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers-An American Tale of Sex and Wonder
Mike Edison
A wild and uncompromising history of four infamous magazines and the outlaws behind them, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! is the first book to rip the sheet off of the sleazy myth-making machine of Hugh Hefner and Playboy, and reveal the doomed history of Hefner’s arch rival, Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, whose...
For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question
A Story of Burma’s Never-Ending War
Mac McClelland
There are bad things going on in Burma that you don’t know about. There’s a civil war (the world’s longest running, in fact) raging between the government and ethnic rebels. A large percentage of the United States’ heroin used to come from Burma. And there’s the small matter that America helped make it all...
Get Your War On
The Definitive Account of the War on Terror, 2001-2008
David Rees
Introduction by Matt Taibbi
In the aftermath of 9/11, when experts and citizens rallied behind President George W. Bush and his worldwide “War on Terror,” a scrappy internet comic called “bullshit” on the whole undertaking and never looked back.
It’s taken years for conventional wisdom to catch up to...
Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen
Reverend Jen
With a very brief introduction by Jonathan Ames
Live Nude Elf chronicles The Reverend Jen Miller’s two-year career as a thirtysomething sex columnist for nerve.com; a sort of elvish-speaking, Lower East Side version of Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw. The columns each detail a different “sexperiment” that ranges from harrowing...
Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks
Bill Hicks
In 1993, not long after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, controversial comedian Bill Hicks found his final, scathing appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman abruptly excised at network demand. Months later, at age 32, he was dead.
Hicks could have been on all the chat shows. He could have had his own show on prime time. He could have got...
No More Prisons: Urban Life, Homeschooling, Hip-Hop Leadership, the Cool Rich Kids Movement, a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Community Organizing, and Why Philanthropy Is the Greatest Art Form of the 21st Century!
William Upski Wimsatt
In this follow-up to the underground best-seller Bomb the Suburbs, William Upski Wimsatt expands his focus from culture into politics. Despite the title, this book is only...
On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City
Erick Lyle, a.k.a. Iggy Scam
Iggy Scam’s Secret History of the City is both a manual, a memoir and a history of creative resistance and fun in a world run rotten with poverty and war. Whether handing out fake Starbucks coupons for free coffee, dropping flyers on mall-goer’s heads that say “aren’t you glad this isn’t a...
Open Letters to America
Essays by Kevin Powell
“Change” has swept America at the end of this first decade of the 21st century, and Kevin Powell, one of our nation’s leading voices, has been both participant and observer. Open Letters to America is Powell’s redemption song for the society he believes possible in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s historic election.
In the first essay, Powell issues a...
