Our Favorite Books of 2007
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By Kate Clinton An Army of Ex-Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News, by Amy Hoffman, is a memoir of early gay liberation in Boston during the 1970s. GCN was a scruffy, challenging, informative,...
...When you turn from history to literature, you find so much written in another era that is chillingly connected to what we are seeing today...
...That White Girl, by JLove, is one of these...
...In sly detail, she interweaves her own gay story, the marginal characters that came and went at GCN, and her attempts to translate it all to her family...
...The dearth of a big, compelling idea, or liberal "argument," as Bai puts it, results largely from his subjects' privileged perch...
...Marie Gottschalk's The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America is eye opening...
...Sure, postal rates for small mags like ours increased dramatically, but more importantly, some independent ones, such as LiP and Clamor, stopped publishing altogether...
...National security and the sanctity of the domestic sphere became twinned over time in popular mythology, producing a "national identity grounded . . . on virile illusion...
...imperialism on the tiny country with a loving portrait of her family...
...Along with the wonderful recent documentary about him, An Unreasonable Man, this book humanizes Nader and restores his well-earned reputation...
...And it is a call to arms to reverse this trend, which Krugman makes quite clear is a danger to the health and future of the country...
...Bai documents Jerome Armstrong's compromising boosterism for his paying client, Mark Warner, during Warner's short-lived Presidential bid...
...Later on in Terrordome, Zirin illuminates the life and legacy of baseball legend Roberto Clemente, the NBA's conflicting attitudes about hip hop, how people in power exploit sports, and numerous other sports-related topics...
...Andrea Lewis is a San Francisco-based journalist...
...Most of the characters he profiles have little on the line, personally, when it comes to the traditional Democratic issues of economic justice and racial equality (though he does have an inspiring description of a MoveOn house party in a working class, African American section of Washington, D.C., hosted, oddly, by Chris Rock's mother-in-law...
...2007 was a tough year for magazines...
...Parents are drafted as an extension of law enforcement...
...The book is both intensely personal and broadly historical, so that his own passionate opposition to the violence of war gives a special weight to his analysis of the futility and immorality of war—all wars...
...But I suspect her story would have been quite different if she'd stumbled on the GCNfamily...
...government and held without charges, without trial, as "enemy combatants...
...military history—a revolution in military affairs...
...Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communications at the University of Michigan...
...To heal the spirit in such times, I will recommend two books that reveal more than we had previously known about men who might have been—or, more precisely, should have been—President...
...They mistakenly thought Joseph volunteered his roof...
...The obsession with crime also encircles the workplace, permitting "a new emphasis on screening potential employees for illegal behavior of almost any sort," writes Simon...
...The anthology is chock full of fantastic pieces, including my favorite, "If Women Ruled the World, Nothing Would Be Different," by Lisa Jervis, co-founder of Bitch magazine...
...There is a depth to Horwitt's research, an elegance in his writing, and a strength to his message that makes this an exceptionally poignant book...
...Both books have fully drawn characters impelled by a wonderful, confusing, liberating lust, denounced by Catholic fundamentalism...
...punishment focus on the past three to four decades, Gottschalk's history refuses to accept the assumption that American puni-tiveness is altogether recent...
...Matt Bai's The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics documents the tug-o'-war among groups that shape Democratic politics...
...He describes how the Democratic leaders in Congress decided to forgo controversial stands, for fear of alienating voters...
...Tipping the Sacred Cow: The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt, 1996-2007, is edited by Brian Awehali, who had the brilliant idea of putting together a magazine that was funny, thought provoking, and iconoclastic...
...By Ruth Conniff It's time for the quadrennial brain-wracking among Democrats and progressives about where the party is headed, and whether winning this time trumps sticking to ideals...
...He is the idealist who refuses to relinquish American values of charity, civics, and sincere patriotism that may seem quaint in this era of bitter Bushism, but that are in fact the only hope for our deliverance...
...I'm not the only one who wondered...
...Daily middle class American lives changed, as well...
...And 2) Could these changes be part of a broader cultural shift...
...Long before the mainstream media and Congress were paying attention, Scahill exposed the workings of this lawless private army...
...Unfortunately, the choice, as presented by our failed political system and the mainstream media that sustains it, will be a narrow one, as none of the frontrunners for the Presidency proposes anything akin to the radical change of course that will be required to get us out of the sorry state in which we find ourselves and our country...
...By chance, Joseph had been planning a trip to Miami that week, to visit some churches...
...Our schools, in their investment in building young lives, once shared the rehabilitative aims of the prison system, Simon argues...
...The Partition of 1947 is also a loud reminder, should we care to listen, of the dangers of colonial interventions and the profound difficulties that dog regime change," Khan writes, adding: "Partition is a lasting lesson of both the dangers of imperial hubris and the reactions of extreme nationalism...
...By Howard Zinn For all those who want an antidote to the sentimental and superficial Ken Burns documentary The War, I suggest you find the recent book by Edward W. Wood Jr., Worshipping the Myths of World War II: Reflections on America's Dedication to War...
...I found myself wondering for a second if she had anything to do with the GCN fire...
...We've seen that revolution fail in the most profound sense, and Scahill shows us why...
...Danticat's parents immigrated to the United States from Haiti when she was a small child, leaving her and her brother Bob in the care of her Uncle Joseph, a charismatic pastor...
...Crime has become so central to the exercise of authority in America, by everyone from the President of the United States to the classroom teacher," he writes, "it will take a concerted effort by Americans themselves to dislodge it...
...Public policy and discourse were infused with hyper-masculine and destructive bravado, and Faludi reminds us how women like Katha Pollitt, Barbara Kingsolver, Susan Sontag, and Naomi Klein were viciously attacked when they questioned the new bellicose patriotism...
...In a final scene, he tells the billionaires of the Democracy Alliance that the Iraq War was a gift to the Democrats, without which they would have nothing at all going for them...
...Author and essayist Sanford Hor-witt's Feingold: A New Democratic Party is every bit as impressive as his enduring biography of social reformer Saul Alinsky...
...Amitabh Pal is the managing editor of The Progressive...
...What was allegedly needed was a massive infusion of ideological testosterone, and what the media gave us was "a chest beater in a borrowed flight suit," a suppression of feminist voices, and a call for women to return to the domestic sphere...
...He argues that the right wing's thirty-five-year assault on the legitimacy of the government to moderate the excesses of capitalism has led to a massive transfer of wealth to the already very rich...
...Give the man a Pulitzer Prize...
...Wood was seriously wounded by artillery fire in September 1944...
...Despite its small circulation, it had a wide reach, not only as a cauldron of progressive gay ideas about class, race, art, and politics but also as a school for scan-dalizers who went on to found and run major national gay organizations...
...By Matthew Rothschild This one is easy: The biggest book of the year is Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army...
...Set against the seething backdrop of busing in South Boston, it is a coming of age story of Ann Ahern, who could have used a Gay/Straight Alliance in her high school...
...It is a Kafkaesque story (though Nabokov did not know Kafka's work when he wrote this) about a man named Cincinnatus, who is imprisoned in an unnamed country, and sentenced to death, for reasons which cannot be determined...
...I am pleased to add two books to the lengthening list of careful and intelligent works on punishment by such writers as David Dow, David Garland, and Michael Tonry...
...Krugman correctly cites the Republicans' cynical use of race as a wedge issue...
...About the politicians themselves, Bai is devastating...
...Poetic, honest, and enlightening, this is the real deal...
...Full disclosure: I know Prashad personally...
...By John Nichols One assumes that, before the year is done, all and sundry good citizens will have confirmed their worst fears about the abusive nature of the Bush-Cheney era by committing to memory the arguments of three exceptional books published in recent months: Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage's Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, Progressive Editor Matt Rothschild's You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression, and Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch's Assault on America's Fundamental Rights, by our late friend Molly Ivins and her able journalistic compatriot Lou Dubose...
...government's immigration policy...
...Now Nelson takes us into his intense initiation into radical politics, theory, and action in a highly segregated and divided America during the '50s and '60s—including his role as this country's leading revolutionary teacher, thinker, and organizer after the 1965 Watts rebellion...
...Why have working and middle class voters supported this...
...His latest book is "The Genius of Impeachment...
...The Conscience of a Liberal is Paul Krugman's passionate call for a new New Deal...
...Condemning the callousness of the British toward the victims of their imperial ambitions, Khan offers pointers for the present...
...His crime is "gnostical turpitude," which is just a hint of the insanity Nabokov introduces us to in brilliant character sketches and nightmarish scenes...
...Howard Zinn is the author, most recently, of"A Power Governments Cannot Suppress...
...Was my uncle going to jail because he was Haitian...
...The new civilian leadership at the Pentagon," Scahill writes, "came into power with two major goals: regime change in strategic nations and the enactment of the most sweeping privatization and outsourcing operation in U.S...
...For Simon, those phrases have broad legal implications, but also political, social, and cultural ones...
...He asked for political asylum when he entered the United States...
...The Third World project included a demand for the redistribution of the world's resources, a more dignified rate of return for the labor power of their people, and a shared acknowledgment of the heritage of science, technology, and culture," Prashad writes...
...Dangerous stuff...
...By Luis J. Rodriguez Sometimes books are important for the powerful impact they have in the ongoing conversation we call community...
...The same sense is conjured by a reading of Ralph Nader's remarkable book of essays, The Seventeen Traditions, which is as close to an autobiography as we have yet gotten from the iconic consumer activist, perennial Presidential candidate, and consummate truth teller...
...Good story...
...Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive...
...But here are a few...
...It's a refreshing counterbalance to the much idealized, much romanticized treatment of that war, as in all the blather about "the greatest generation...
...Danticat weaves together the history of U.S...
...Prashad is slightly too much in awe of Fidel, and a tad too pessimistic about the prospects for a revival of such a Third World project, but nevertheless his book is a handy alternative history of our planet in the postWorld War II era...
...This is a question I still ask myself...
...The government reported two dead during the operation, but more were killed...
...Zirin covers wider ground in his second book of 2007, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports...
...This is a question he probably asked himself...
...His latest book goes much further...
...The city of Boston in the 1970s is a shared setting for race and gender battles...
...Crime concerns led to an institutional rehaul, he argues, with in-school detention and police in the hallways...
...Like John Nichols, I found The Seventeen Traditions surprisingly affecting...
...She joins a black and Chicano "Crips" set in Colorado, becomes a graffiti artist, and takes all the barbs for being vanilla in a vari-ous-shades-of-chocolate world...
...By Anne-Marie Cusac Two questions troubled me during my ten years of reporting on American punishment for The Progressive: 1) How did this country turn to retribution and become the largest penal system in the world...
...The handling of Joseph's case was appalling...
...From the get-go, he was treated as a criminal...
...Danticat asks, pointing out the discrepancy of treatment between Cuban and Haitian refugees...
...If you miss LiP magazine as much as I do, take heart—there's a new anthology of its best stuff in bookstores...
...The words "suspicion of terrorism" are as susceptible of rational examination as "gnostical turpitude...
...Ralph Nader's illuminating and poignant ode to his parents gives you plenty of insights into how he became the principled, if somewhat peculiar, person that he is...
...Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market 'reforms,' " Klein writes...
...The family is treated as a locus of suspicions about crime that requires surveillance and intervention by criminal law institutions," he writes...
...Sports and Resistance in the United States, published in 2005...
...His previous book On Being Wounded tells of that experience in vivid detail...
...Elizabeth DiNovella is the culture editor of The Progressive...
...Most surprisingly, it is an unlikely gay love story, between a Jewish lesbian and a very tall Irish gay man...
...The title and cover (featuring a young, energetic Muhammad Ali) announced that this collection of essays wasn't a typical cheerleading sports book, but one with biting wit and a strong race, class, and gender analysis...
...As an adult, Danticat traveled often to Haiti and kept close ties to her family there, even as the political situation deteriorated...
...It's a novel of a young white girl's struggle to find her unique place in a deeply fractured world...
...By Amitabh Pal Was 2007 a good year for books or did I somehow luck out...
...Kate Clinton is a columnist for The Progressive...
...The first of these is Russ Feingold, the true-blue progressive Democrat from Wisconsin who came to the precipice of campaigning for his party's Presidential nod but backed off when he determined that it was more important to devote his considerable skills to working in the current Congress to end the war, censure the President, and renew the rule of law...
...But Mario Cuomo gets the last word...
...Danticat joined her parents in Brooklyn eight years later, and while she was happy to be reunited with her parents, she still deeply missed her "second father...
...Anne-Marie Cusac is a professor in the Communication Department at Roosevelt University and a contributing writer for The Progressive...
...GCN was a scruffy, challenging, informative, radical weekly newspaper...
...I know that many liberals still have a hard time reconciling themselves with the man they blame for sending Al Gore on the road to the Nobel Peace Prize...
...What is especially creative about the book is that Faludi seeks to embed this media response within a historical overview of the role that heroic masculinity has played over time in the nation's very self-conception...
...We need justice, equity, and peace, but we need it in a creative, ecstatic, natural, and diversely liberatory framework...
...It's an amazingly researched and well-told story of the nexus between far right fundamentalists, the Bush-Cheney war machine, privatization, and profiteering...
...By Andrea Lewis Dave Zirin shook up the world of sports journalism with his first book, What's My Name, Fool...
...We need the marvelous as we struggle...
...Brother, I'm Dying serves as an antidote to the blustering of politicians about immigration, the hot button issue of the 2008 election...
...Noam Chomsky has said that sports "offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance...
...Prashad's book is an account of efforts by developing nations to not be camp followers of either superpower during the Cold War and instead to pursue autonomous economic development and to restructure an unjust global economic order...
...Not long ago, I gave mad props to Nelson's first memoir, Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary, which covered his childhood and youth during the Great Depression and as a soldier in the all-black 93rd Infantry Division in World War II...
...Vijay Prashad's The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World is also a global romp, even down to its chapter scheme, and is, like Klein's books, filled with revealing anecdotes and self-indicting quotes...
...Another such book is Nelson Peery's Black Radical: The Education of an American Revolutionary, 1946-1968...
...The shift in Americans' views of crime and criminals, in turn, reconfigured education...
...The book is essential reading because it so cogently traces the trajectory of the new inequality and brings together data about soaring CEO salaries, flagging union membership, stagnant wages, declining tax rates for the rich, and escalating health care costs...
...This book illustrates how culturally, spiritually, and economically connected working class white, black, and brown really are...
...Although clearly a fan of Ali, Zirin isn't afraid to tackle some of Ali's more controversial actions—like his decision to accept an award from George Bush at a White House gathering in 2005 during the height of the Iraq War...
...Money and focus groups only go so far...
...The social effects are so pervasive and deep, Simon writes, that "governing through crime" threatens to undermine such aims as democracy, financial responsibility, American ingenuity, and racial equality...
...Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is her acidic send-off to free market guru Milton Friedman...
...My favorite book of poetry this year is Teeth, by Aracelis Girmay, a new poet with a powerful, distinctive voice...
...Ahern has a mouth on her...
...Apparently, Moulitsas and Armstrong don't mind how they were portrayed, since they invited Bai to emcee the Democratic candidates' debate at the 2007 YearlyKos convention...
...Instead, they came up with the vapid slogan "Together, America Can Do Better...
...He is not the scold or the arbitrary combatant portrayed by his political and media critics...
...He landed in jail...
...Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, of DailyKos, dreams of vast wealth and power...
...Here you meet Ralph the apple tree climber, Ralph the stamp collector, Ralph the newspaper boy, Ralph the hitchhiker, Ralph the nature lover, Ralph the respectful son, and Ralph the grateful sibling...
...Was he going to jail because he was black...
...She's a tough jock and a romantic, who keeps loving people who are the wrong race and the wrong gender...
...But this warm and incredibly personal book about lessons learned as the son of immigrants growing up in Winsted, Con-necticut—a community rendered closer than one might expect to Thoreau and Emerson's Concord in this telling—reminds a reader of Nader's greatest strength...
...She overdoes the torture-economic shock therapy analogy a bit...
...Grant does right by the complexity of her main character...
...Hoffman's well-researched memoir is an important record of a time pre-AIDS, pre-gay marriage, and pre-gay chic...
...In a globe-trotting survey of the past few decades, Klein insightfully shows the causal relationship of state repression and free market economic restructuring in countries ranging from Chile and Argentina to China, Russia, and—under Paul Bremer's tutelage— Iraq...
...Simon sees a metaphor of crime that permits government intervention in expanding arenas of American life...
...These are not movement people but elites— whether political amateurs or profes-sionals—who want to figure out how to tap movement energy...
...An arsonist's fire destroyed the offices of GCN, and with it, the fierce and fragile energy that had sustained it...
...That aside, the book—chock-a-block with juicy anecdotes and quotes—is an invaluable dissection of the noxious legacy left behind by Friedman and the University of Chicago school of economic thought...
...Simon, a specialist in law and social policy, argues that, in recent decades, politicians have crafted a "civil order built around crime...
...Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive...
...Yasmin Khan's The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan is a superb attempt at a "history from below" of this epochal event...
...He wants to demolish what he calls "the almost unanimous acceptance of the idea that the only way to defeat terrorism is through the politics of war and violence...
...Their love and friendship were no small feat in a time of lesbian and gay male separatism...
...As she explains in her cover story this month, her uncle lived in the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, the site of much unrest during the tumult surrounding the (second) ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004...
...John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, and Washington correspondent for The Nation...
...By Elizabeth DiNovella Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying is tender, funny, and sad—everything I enjoy in a memoir...
...Grant is also wicked funny, as they say in Southie, and tells a rambling, rollicking good story that honors her own Irish roots...
...Steeped in the details of the disaster that has just unfolded, voters will troop to the polls in 2008 with the purpose of undoing the damage done by a Presidency without character or compassion...
...My most recent experience with this was reading one of Vladimir Nabokov's early novels, Invitation to a Beheading...
...Each work stands solidly on its own, but because I read them in tandem, there was a satisfying overlap...
...While demolishing the myths surrounding World War II, his intention is much larger...
...Map of Ireland is a novel by Stephanie Grant also set in Boston in the early 1970s...
...Hoffman is a wicked funny writer...
...Unfortunately, these costly public projects end up being little more than monuments to corporate greed: $500 million welfare hotels for America's billionaires built with funds that should have been spent on clinics, schools, libraries—and levees...
...In short, he is more concerned with the present than with the past...
...He had a valid visa...
...First came the Muhammad Ali Handbook, a beautifully produced addition to the MQ Publications' biographical series that includes titles on Robert Crumb and Che, as well as the Fidel Castro Handbook, written by the British MP and vocal Bush Administration critic George Galloway...
...While Gottschalk's history adds a piece to the puzzle of question #1, Jonathan Simon's Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear provides a partial answer to question #2...
...Dave Zirin persuasively argues that, like it or not, the multibillion dollar sports-industrial complex is a powerfully influential part of our culture that is deeply in need of Zirin's brand of progressive critique...
...Her opening poem, a roundhouse decking Bush for his Iraq War, ends up commemorating his victims, whom the media here ignores...
...In the last ten years, more than $16 billion of the public's money has been spent for stadium construction and upkeep in cities all over the United States," Zirin writes...
...He had a plane ticket...
...Preoccupied with crime and having a level of anxiety disproportionate to the actual threat, many Americans who could afford to do so opted for gated communities and SUVs...
...Ann Ahern's fascination with burning things got her into trouble...
...We are now living with the dire consequences of the illusion that the macho male hero must always ride to the rescue...
...By Susan J. Douglas As we are reminded daily of the national and international wreckage left in the wake of the Bush Administration, Susan Falu-di's The Terror Dream and Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal each distill for us the consequences of Bush's ideological assaults on national life and the national psyche...
...She reveals the historical breadth of the punitive panics that led to the "tough-on-crime" bipartisanship of today...
...The big-money liberals, the bloggers, and the MoveOn activists have had a powerful impact...
...Both state capacity to incarcerate and the legitimacy of the federal government to handle more criminal matters were built up slowly but surely well before the incarceration boom that began in the 1970s," she argues...
...Gang leaders wanted revenge...
...Though snarky in parts, The Argument is a valuable inside account of the party's struggle to remake itself...
...You cannot read this novel without thinking of the prisoners of Guant?namo, or of all those people who, yesterday or tomorrow, were or will be picked up by the U.S...
...Girmay also offers up astonishing poems of love, gratitude, and renewal, making this little volume yield large rewards...
...In the Ali Handbook, Zirin spells out Ali's greatness without attempting to turn him into either a demon or a godlike figure...
...In 2007, Zirin hit bookshelves with a one-two combination...
...The collection of essays takes its title from a Public Enemy song of the same name, and features a foreword by hip hop legend (and Ali fan) Chuck D. In the book's introduction, "The March of Domes," Zirin cogently takes on Hurricane Katrina, the priorities of the Bush Administration, and the era of big city stadium swindles...
...If he were white, Cuban, anything other than Haitian, would he have been going to Krome...
...She was recently named a Stanford University Knight Journalism Fellow for 2007-2008...
...It is impossible to read Feingold's story, to ponder his vision, and not be convinced that he would make not only an ideal Democratic nominee but a greater President than the one we will get in 2009...
...It's also a stinging indictment of the U.S...
...Tipping the Sacred Cow is a "literary fusillade devoted to a marvelous revolt for the overthrow of miserabil-ism," Awehali writes in the intro...
...Faludi's new book, with its bracing analysis of the media's overall response to 9/11, argues that the attacks activated a moral panic about the nation's vulnerability, which all too many pundits equated with the country having been feminized...
...Danticat, through Freedom of Information requests, secured the documentation of her uncle's treatment...
...On the fateful day of October 24, 2004, the Haitian army used her uncle's church roof as a place from which to shoot at people...
...The ever-stretching crime metaphor enwraps the American family, Simon argues...
...Your name, I will have noticed," she writes...
...It took Joseph several days to escape his neighborhood undetected...
...So much of current culture is predicated on "white" being irreconcilably distanced from inner-city America...
...Luis J. Rodriguez has written ten books in poetry, children's literature, fiction, and nonfiction, including "Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times...
...Bai spends an awful lot of time among the very rich and the fairly rich...
...While many studies of recent U.S...
...By engaging in meticulous research, Khan offers a multiplicity of voices to explain what the partition of colonial India into India and Pakistan meant for the ordinary people of the subcontinent...
...Alas, a lack of space prevents me from mentioning most of the ones I enjoyed...
...She is finishing work on a book about American punishment...
...They have done so because "governing through crime" is a tactic that draws votes...
...Here's hoping that progressives, among the most vocal critics of American punitiveness, take the words of these writers as serious warning...
...He was actually hiding inside the church, which he decided to open for services that Sunday morning, despite the ongoing chaos...
...Faludi's book is an important take on how tough-guy masculinity undermines not only women, but also men, and the nation itself...
Vol. 71 • December 2007 • No. 12
