BOOKS

...This little book does the job...

...In the score of years we have been teaching this class, none of the students has been able to identify Haywood...

...4.95 (paper...

...A jury of twelve men found Haywood and his fellow workers guilty...

...they let the trustees or money managers do the job, invariably in a dry, abstract manner, like a sex lecture in school...

...History seems to have drawn a cover of oblivion over him...

...Yet "Big Bill" Haywood was one of the most fiery, pugnacious, and imaginative labor leaders, a dissenter from the mainstream labor movement...

...810 pp...

...203 pp...

...To tens of thousands of workers he was a hero...

...living standards...

...But Old Money has one great virtue: It should lay to rest, once and for all, the silly notion that class doesn't play much of a role in shaping life in these United States...

...Unfortunately, Peter Gay fails to resist the temptation to psychoanalyze the psychoanalyst...

...Still, this is at times a fascinating look at one of our century's most influential figures...

...Who said, "No one in his right mind could possibly suppose there was a connection between the concentration of economic markets and political power...

...Among the names on the list is William "Big Bill" Haywood...

...Much of the book consists of conversations with individuals whose work life is being rudely transformed...

...invasion in 1983, and explains why it did not occur...

...But his focus on the day-to-day events leads him to conclude that the Reagan Administration simply drifted into the confrontation with Nicaragua, when it seems a logical consequence of the President's ideology...

...Gutman's book provides an excellent guide to the personalities and players in the conflict, including what he terms the secret "war party" within the Administration...

...The deputy director of engineering at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency told her: "The only thing in the world getting cheaper and faster is computers...

...The heart of the book is the chapter called "The Gray Zone"—Levi's term for the greater or lesser degree to which prisoners joined their oppressors in evil...

...These pieces, models of thorough, careful, calm, but nonetheless passionately committed journalism, have been reissued with a thoughtful introduction by Schell...

...The second half of the book consists of thirty-six case studies of corporate venality—from Agent Orange, Bhopal, the Corvair, and the Dalkon Shield to J.P...

...184 pp...

...And the old rich are different from the new rich, as Nelson W. Aldrich Jr...

...404 pp...

...She takes us behind the scenes at McDonald's to show how unskilled teenagers (and, more recently, senior citizens) are subjected to an environment in which beeping and buzzing devices control their movements and eliminate any need for judgment...

...7.95 (paper...

...Occasionally, however, Garson's indignation rises to the point where she preaches to her interview subjects...

...Martin's Press...

...F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right: The rich are different from you and me...

...On the opening day of the quarter in a class called "Remarkable Lives" that my wife and I team-teach at a Chicago university, we ask our students to identify certain individuals who fall into the categories of muckrakers, dissenters, and Utopians...

...In the select company of honest and incisive war correspondents, none deserves higher honors than Jonathan Schell, who, in two long dispatches to The New Yorker, helped promote an understanding of the situation in Vietnam at a critical time—in 1967, when "The Village of Ben Sue" was published, and in 1968, when "The Military Half appeared...

...Its only consistent objective is control for the sake of control...

...management] to take out the control...

...The Notions off Wealth OLD MONEY: The Mythology of America's Upper Class by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr...

...Aldrich, writing from the inside of America's old-money aristocracy, has a keen eye for the curious folkways of the rich—their manners and morals, the schools they attend, the hobbies they pursue...

...His name always draws a blank, despite the fact that for over two decades he dominated the labor news...

...People aren't getting cheaper and faster...

...he only wishes it were done more systematically and more rationally...

...Democratic Socialist THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER by Michael Harrington Henry Holt...

...He renounces the facile claim that all human beings are murderers: To confuse perpetrators with their victims, he says, "is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation, or a sinister sign of complicity...

...Who said erosion of the ozone layer is no problem for "people who don't stand out in the sun...

...The last work of the Italian author and Auschwitz survivor, this book explains better than any other (with the possible exception of Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors) how human beings could participate in the most revolting Nazi atrocities...

...Levi explores the psychological and systemic incentives to prisoners who did the Nazis' dirty work...

...With exhaustive reporting, he places into context the blunders of the policy: from the mining of Nicaragua's harbors and the issuing of a CIA assassination manual to the diversion of funds that became known as the Iran-contra scandal...

...history has been staffed by so many nincompoops—and that's saying a lot...

...Garson knows this...

...Big Bill" Haywood is the story of the man and his relationship with women, with his fellow-workers, with theWestern Federation of Miners of which he was an organizer and an officer prior to his association with the Industrial Workers of the World...

...That's why they infuriated the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Administrations and are still denounced and despised wherever hawks gather...

...A discussion of such a group as Nine to Five, one of whose reports is cited in her bibliography, would have added a greater degree of hope to the text...

...To President Theodore Roosevelt he was an "undesirable citizen...

...Schell's compelling reporting ought to be required reading for Quayle and his ilk...

...Levi takes as his subject not the Nazi soldiers but the prisoners in the camps who collaborated with them...

...Yet, it was the idea of "Big Bill" Haywood, the idea of industrial unionism, that captured the imagination of most workers in the 1930s as they organized behind the Committee for Industrial Organization (later to be called the Congress of Industrial Organizations...

...For anyone interested in the Democratic Socialists of America, this book is a must: Harrington offers a blow-by-blow account of the organization's founding, its small triumphs, and its lingering disappointments...

...In this, his tritely titled second autobiography, Michael Harrington—the author of The Other America and founder of the Democratic Socialists of America—recounts his personal and political experiences, primarily over the last two decades...

...She writes: "The goal of modern management—to dictate exactly how a worker does his job and to make him accountable for every minute of the working day—is irrational...

...For leftists, the book disappoints, since it offers no clue as to why or how Freud's theories were adapted by some neo-Marxists...

...She notes that some workers are quietly resisting the increasing regimentation of the job, and she is honest enough to admit that for some—like the personal secretaries who are "divorced" from their bosses and put into clerical "clusters"—the changes may at first lead to more rather than less power...

...Martin's Press...

...by Philip Matt era Imagine that while you are reading this, your eye movements are being recorded electronically and the data are being fed into a computer that measures your speed and the number of times you allow yourself to be distracted...

...The Drowned and the Saved is a powerful suicide note that haunts and shakes our soul...

...It is the tale of his participation in Cripple Creek and Coeur d'Alene strikes during his WFM days and of the Lawrence and Paterson strikes during his IWW affiliation...

...As the Reagan gang passes into history, its idiotic public utterances are worth preserving for posterity...

...Words from the Worst PRESIDENT RON'S APPOINTMENT BOOK: Stirring Quotations from Reagan's Fanatics, Finaglers, and Featherheads by Morton Mintz and Roberta Mintz St...

...There was a Utopian tinge to his thinking as he talked about the industrial commonwealth he hoped to help bring into being...

...Garson is in a league with Studs Terkel when it comes to getting people to make poignant observations about themselves and what they are experiencing...

...Arthur Weinberg (Arthur Weinberg, a Chicago writer, is coauthor with his wife, Lila, of the award-winning biography, "Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel...

...Roy Gutman, national-security correspondent for Newsday, analyzes the obsession, documents the bureaucratic infighting, and exposes the ideological biases and overheated rhetoric that led to the campaign to overthrow the Sandinistas...

...These chapters demonstrate that corporate crime is not isolated or random, but the logical outcome of a free-enterprise system that places profits above all else...

...BIG BILL'HAYWOOD by Melvyn Dubofsky St...

...This biography of the founder of psychoanalysis captures the excitement of Sig-mund Freud's discoveries, explains his theories, follows (in almost painful detail) the infighting between Freud and his disciples, and accompanies him on his tardy flight from the Nazis...

...398 pp...

...Senator from Idaho, was one of the prosecution attorneys...

...Who said that in the event of a nuclear war, "everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around...

...When she urges the automation expert for a union of welfare workers to resist electronic monitoring, he responds: "How can I tell them Philip Mattera, a writer based in New York City, is working on a book about the erosion of U.S...

...But the author only glibly treats Freud's controversial abandonment of his seduction theory, and tries at some length but fails to rescue Freud from his hopelessly backward views on women...

...Electronic monitoring, at least of individual workers, must be eliminated, Garson avows, though she does not tell us how this might be done...

...He defends his commitment to working within the Democratic Party, stresses the importance of the labor movement to the U.S...

...25.00...

...It is the saga of Haywood as a defendant in the Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone case in which the three men were charged with the murder of the former governor of Idaho who had turned on labor after labor had supported him in two elections...

...126 pp...

...He demonstrates the very real risks of a U.S...

...19.95...

...Each quotation is carefully sourced and annotated to explain the context...

...Left, and warns against unblinking adulation of Third World revolutions...

...Garson's main contribution is not in advancing this theory, which derives from the work of Harry Braverman and David Noble, but in showing how electronic control is moving higher up the occupational hierarchy...

...In a thoughtful, almost scholarly introduction, Mokhiber dissects our "legal system biased in favor of the corporate violator and against its victim...

...Even more fascinating is Garson's description of these trends in the military...

...She describes computers that dePAUL CORIO skill the work of such well-paid white-collar workers as stockbrokers and engineers...

...450 pp...

...He offers a mea culpa for the "middle-aged tantrum" he threw at the founding of Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, and he also apologizes for coming late and haltingly to an appreciation of feminism...

...By scholarly I don't mean pedantic...

...He then offers a fifty-point "law-and-order program to curb corporate crime...

...The students are adults, ranging in age from twenty-four to sixty...

...260 pp...

...When he died, the communists paid tribute to him and buried half of his ashes in the Kremlin...

...Garson, author of the celebrated play Macbird, approaches her subject not as a dispassionate analyst of the labor process but as a Gulliver entering strange new worlds...

...When she allows herself to step back and analyze, she states emphatically that most computerized work systems have little to do with efficiency...

...The development of "expert systems" is transferring the knowledge of such professionals into computers and making the human practitioners superfluous...

...Vietnam as It Was THE REAL WAR: The Classic Reporting on the Vietnam War by Jonathan Schell Pantheon...

...19.95...

...The Vietnam war, he notes, "refuses to lie quiet in its historical grave...

...A chapter on the Socialist International drags, and the personal section of the book, while poignant at times, is marred by the author's overindulged ego...

...The Vietnam war produced a crop of brilliant young American journalists—Charles Mohr, David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Gloria Emerson, among others—who described the war as it really was, not as Government propaganda tried to depict it...

...Alfred A. Knopf...

...19.95...

...His seven years in the Soviet Union were years of disillusionment...

...Alas, no such luck...

...She shows us how the conversations of airline reservationists are carefully scripted, timed, and monitored to be sure that callers are pressured into booking a flight...

...A chapter called "Shame" dealing with survival guilt may partially explain why Primo Levi took his own life after completing this book...

...Who said bribery is "probably one of the clearest instances of the free market at work...

...Obsessed with Nicaragua BANANA DIPLOMACY: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua 1981-1987 by Roy Gutman Simon & Schuster...

...This attitude, along with the computer snafus Garson relates, is what makes Star Wars such a terrifying prospect...

...And, like many national-security reporters, Gutman falls into the trap of accepting the underlying premises of U.S...

...Big business continues to enjoy, as Russell Mokhiber demonstrates in this book, a virtual unconditional pardon for the felonious and highly injurious acts it commits...

...She describes how social workers have been converted into not-so-glorified clerks who must document their activities in terms of tasks measured in tenths of an hour...

...right to intervene...

...While out on appeal, Haywood forfeited his bond and fled to the Soviet Union, which was then looked upon by many radicals as "the future [that] works...

...Example: "Most parents of the Old Rich cannot bring themselves to talk to their children about their forthcoming inheritances...

...Crimes in the Suites CORPORATE CRIME AND VIOLENCE by Russell Mokhiber Sierra Club Books...

...Much of the program is well-considered, though Mokhiber seems, in places, to echo the worst of our traditional penal code: lusting for incarceration and long sentences, and urging that corporations be held to a standard of proof weaker than "reasonable doubt" (the author suggests a new standard: "on the balance of probabilities...

...Soul of Auschwitz THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED by Primo Levi Summit Books...

...While some of Garson's discoveries— the fast-food assembly line, for instance-are already fairly well known, she does an excellent job of dramatizing the ways in which spontaneity and personality are being wiped out by systems of computer control...

...So if I have to bet on anything, I'll bet on computers...

...Man of the Couch FREUD: A Life for Our Times by Peter Gay W.W...

...They received sentences ranging from five to twenty years, with Haywood receiving the latter...

...makes amply clear in this intermittently interesting bit of pop sociology...

...Melvyn Dubofsky, author of We Shall Be All, a history of the Industrial Workers of the World (of which Haywood was a founder), has written a scholarly volume that brings Haywood to life...

...Just as most old-fashioned sweatshops were eradicated, the high-tech variety can be fought by a movement to restore human values to the workplace...

...Clarence Darrow, the famed criminal defense lawyer, represented the union men...

...It is written in a sprightly style, vigorous and colorful...

...Dubofsky calls Haywood an "American original," but the more radical he became the fewer workers he represented, and his organization, the IWW, was increasingly out of touch with the mass of workers...

...his intrusions are obvious, arch, and speculative in the extreme...

...Unlike the more typical labor leader, who began his career as a radical, found success and became more conservative, Haywood opened his labor career as a moderate, discovered some success, and grew more radical...

...the other half was shipped to the United States to be buried near the graves of the Haymarket labor martyrs...

...Computer monitoring has not yet invaded our political reading, but in The Electronic Sweatshop Barbara Garson documents the frightening extent to which just this sort of electronic control is taking over offices and other workplaces...

...He was unable to adjust to the authoritarianism of the communists...

...With the Republicans making crime a major campaign issue this season, the issue of corporate crime might be expected to come to the fore...

...above all, it is precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth...

...The reason for that—as the recent controversy over Senator Dan Quayle's military record showed—is that the lessons of Vietnam are still to be absorbed...

...policy toward Nicaragua: He does not question the U.S...

...William Borah, just before he took his seat as U.S...

...Unfortunately, such occasional insights and amusing anecdotes are undermined by an arch style and a deplorable tendency to draw large conclusions from small samplings...

...Probably no Administration in U.S...

...But it didn't "work" as far as Haywood was concerned...

...Norton...

...Stevens, Love Canal, Nestle, and Thalidomide...

...It is also the story of Haywood as defendant with more than 100 other Wobblies charged with interfering with the Government's World War I efforts...

...Those brilliant statements (delivered, respectively, by Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Thomas K. Jones, Secretary of the Interior Donald P. Hodel, Interstate Commerce Commissioner Fredric N. Andre, and Assistant Attorney General William F. Baxter) are among dozens of similar gems collected in President Ron's Appointment Book...

...Haywood was found not guilty as was Pettibone, and the case of Moyer was dropped...

...Mokhiber succeeds in portraying what he terms "the human consequences of our failure to curb the excesses of corporate power...

...Haywood, who was widely feared and loved during his lifetime, was a practical union organizer with a dream that went far beyond "pure and simple" unionism...

...But Harrington has more than paid his dues, and his book provides many insights about American politics and raises crucial questions for the Left...

...aid to the contras...

...10.95...

...Garson rightly affirms that the problem is not the machines themselves but the goals and values of the people controlling their use...

...Middle-ranking officers, like middle-managers in the corporation, are becoming slaves to computerized decision-making...

...He judges with subtlety and understanding, absolving some, condemning others, but always drawing distinctions among kinds and degrees of evil...

...And he traces the Congressional restrictions on U.S...

...Control is what the system is about...

...Haywood's life followed no well-defined pattern," Dubofsky points out...

...For the past eight years, the Reagan Administration has been obsessed with the Sandinista government in Managua...

...309 pp...