BOOKS:Our Best Reading of 1994

...Chomsky seems to have it both ways in this muddled passage: "It would be unfair to charge Broder and others with believing what they say...

...and Greenwood, Mississippi, where he encounters Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Julian Bond, James Farmer, and Bob Moses, as well as many unsung heroes whose praise he sings...

...Our lives were neither a betrayal of our beliefs nor a collusion with all we had fought to change in this society," she writes...

...It is a must-read...

...She recounts the corrosive "sex wars" within the lesbian and feminist movement in the 1980s—the clash between the anti-pornography camp and the pro-sex camp...

...The Reagan Administration turned Costa Rica into the "southern front" in the war against Nicaragua, with a devastating effect on Costa Rica...

...This is an ideal book to acquaint high-school or college students with the rich tradition of American radicalism, and it is a handy guide for leftists of any age...

...The truth is that growing up female with the mass media helped make me a feminist, and it helped make millions of other women feminists, too...

...Her nuanced reading of / Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Bewitched, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, and myriad other sitcoms and movies act as a counterbalance to those who would render a hasty, totalitarian judgment on the sexist messages of the culture...

...Rather than taking a reductionist view of the media, Douglas points out that the media conveyed both feminist and anti-feminist messages...

...I just hope their next book will be on the unnamed stars that shine in our firmament...

...Yes, I have a conflict of interest reviewing Elayne Rapping and Susan Douglas...

...intervention in Central America in the 1980s...

...I longed to read about Cesar Chavez, Randy Shilts, Adrienne Rich, Ralph Nader, Robin Morgan, Noam Chomsky, or Jesse Jackson...

...Halfway through the poem, Hacker mentions "the day I meet/the lump in my breast," and her cancer will return throughout the book...

...This autobiography by the great activist and historian (who wrote the pioneering multicultural history, A People's History of the United States, long before the term "multi-culturalism" was in vogue) provides an eloquent, personal account of the struggles for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, and a universal paean to protest and resistance...

...The poem begins: We had no place to put them so we piled them, boots pointed to the sky, by the mess tent...

...She succeeds admirably...

...By scrimping on recent or current radicals, the book gives the faulty impression that there are no leaders or movements today that are carrying the radical banner...

...On May 30, 1984, a bomb went off at a press conference for the contra leader, Eden Pastora...

...Chicanas are women without a country, she says...

...Winter Numbers, by Marilyn Hacker (Norton) This is the seventh volume of poems by Marilyn Hacker, who for the last few years was the editor—and a brilliant one at that—of The Kenyon Review...

...Skin, by Dorothy Allison (Firebrand Books) This is my other favorite nonfiction book of the year, and I can't recommend it enough...

...When Faludi's book came out, Rapping gave it a negative review in Women's Review of Books, writing that "Faludi finds an almost uninfected landscape of hostility and intentional injury toward women," whereas Rapping finds nuance, contradiction, and occasionally progressive messages in between the sexism...

...Or take this throwaway update of Yeats: "The Left lacks all conviction, and the Right— capitalism with a human face...

...Honey and her husband, Tony Avirgan, were free-lance journalists in Costa Rica covering the contra war, and Avirgan had gone to La Penca for the press conference...

...First, the U.S...

...She argues persuasively that some offerings of the culture contain progressive messages, and that they do so as a result of agitation from feminists...

...Lusane raises a number of strategic political issues: Should African-Americans rely on elected officials or grass-roots activists for leadership...

...It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness," he writes on the last page of his book...

...Ilove poetry...

...At an early age we learn that our race is undesirable," she writes, noting that Chicanos are not first-class citizens in Mexico, and certainly not first-class citizens in the United States...

...He contends that the Cold War itself was merely a continuation of U.S...

...The American Radical, edited by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Harvey J. Kaye (Routledge) This is a useful biographical primer on forty-six individual radicals throughout American history—including Tom Paine, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, Eugene V. Debs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman, W.E.B...

...When we profess a vision of a world where a woman is not raped somewhere in the United States every three minutes, where one of every three female children does not experience sexual molestation, where the Mexican female is not the lowest paid worker in the United States—we are not male-bashing or hating whites because overall they live a healthier life than we do, we are trying to change the facts of our condition...

...By the 1960s, my old belief in a 'just war' was falling apart...

...How far can this go...

...In her essay, "A Question of Class," she delves into the hidden psychological wounds that poverty inflicts on people in this country...

...Such was the case with Rafael Campo...

...World Orders Old and New, by Noam Chomsky (Columbia University Press) If you want a coherent, systematic account of U.S...

...Douglas is less kind to the nightly newscasts...

...It doesn't matter to Rapping that they simply want to profit from the audience...

...His mother managed the household...

...No one is better than Chomsky at itemizing the grotesqueries of U.S...

...To be sure that we would remain focused on our own outrageousness, we chose our deliberately provocative name and concentrated on attracting members whose primary sexual orientation was s/m, butch/femme, fetish specific, or otherwise politically incorrect...

...And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand Utopian future...

...Matthew Rothschild is the Editor of The Progressive...

...Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong, by Kevin Bowen (Curbstone Press) The author served in the Vietnam war during 1968 and 1969, and in this work, he wrestles with his experience then and the emotions he felt upon returning to Vietnam in the 1980s...

...As Black America stands at the crossroads of its future, this question gnaws at the intestines of the Black community and its leadership," he writes...

...Melvin has AIDS...

...It is a finely researched case study of how the U.S...

...Obviously, Campo does identify with him, befriends him, and comforts him until the end: Unrecognizable to anyone But me, he left my needles deep inside His joking heart...

...Both, he argues, are designed to aid the rich and powerful people in the rich and powerful nations at the expense of the poor and the powerless around the world...

...It was she who brought Campo to my attention...

...Zinn himself was knocked unconscious...

...Should African-Americans continue to vest hope and resources in the Democratic Party, or should they pursue a third-party option...

...In "Year's End," she mourns: Men and women, mortally wounded where we love and nourish, dying at thirty, forty, fifty, not on barricades, but in beds of unfulfilled promise...

...Government actions...

...She views these as virtues, and she proclaims a specific "feminine principle" and spirituality...

...But the narrator disagrees: I swear he followed us his soul, a surplice trailing the jungle floor...

...what's worse, the bombing mission used not the traditional weapons but "jellied gasoline," Zinn recalls...

...He is especially telling in his criticism of such leading journalists as Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and David Broder of The Washington Post...

...Will it really be possible to construct an international society on something like the Third World model, with islands of great privilege in a sea of misery—fairly large islands, in the richer countries—and with controls of a totalitarian nature within democratic forms that increasingly become a facade...

...The poverty I knew was dreary, deadening, shameful," she says...

...One soldier said, "Don't mean nothing...

...And in the final poem, "August Journal," she acknowledges that "My future, though, is coming toward me fast/from elsewhere, and I cannot know where from...

...Most of the poems are not about the gore...

...Some poems are quieter, some less urgent, some are filled with reconciliation, but they are all informed by Bowen's reflective sensibility, and they are all etched with precision and grace...

...where, by the way, is Fannie Lou Hamer...

...By the end of the day, the morbid scene grew even more macabre, as incoming bodies were charred "black and crisp...

...First Casualty" (great title...

...From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy," he writes...

...Anonymous phone-callers urged her boss to fire her...

...Castillo tries to reinterpret and reclaim "behavior long seen as inherent in Mexic Amerindian woman's character, such as patience, preseverance, industriousness, loyalty to one's clan, and commitment to our children...

...I have promised myself to break the habit of lying, to try to make truth everyday in my life, but it is not simple...

...The twists and turns leading up to this discovery are fascinating, and Honey's honesty in following the trail wherever it leads is admirable...

...But ultimately, her relentless quest for the truth about La Penca came to a surprising conclusion when she discovered definitively that the bomber was a Sandin-ista agent...

...One of these, "Honest," begins: "All honesty is made from shame./ I feared my father was ashamed of me...

...In the first part of the book, "The South and the Movement," Zinn discusses his days as chair of the history department at Spelman College in Atlanta, and his eventual firing for encouraging his students—including Alice Walker and Marian Wright—to participate in civil-rights protests...

...She does not simplify her story at the end, though, as many news reports have...

...The current state of debilitating circumstances confronting large and growing sectors of the Black community demands a new, imaginative vision, a new agency by Black leadership, and a new sense of historic purpose on the part of African Americans...

...But the big stars are not the only ones who make history, and by focusing on them, this book obscures the thousands of little stars that also make history...

...Sexuality is not a distraction but a vital issue in any political organizing...

...While Lusane does not provide definitive answers to these questions, he does sketch an agenda for action and, above all, he stresses the urgency of new thinking: "Which way forward...

...In "The Distant Moon," Campo tells of treating an AIDS patient: I can't identify with him...

...As a lesbian who lives part-time in America, Hacker writes with tremendous force about bigotry, AIDS, and breast cancer...

...the book has only three entries: Michael Harrington, Abbie Hoffman, and Audre Lorde...

...Zinn went, and took his turn carrying a banner...

...Media-tions: Forays into the Culture and Gender Wars, by Elayne Rapping (South End Press) In this collection of essays from the last twenty years, Elayne Rapping, the "Culture" columnist for The Progressive, covers some of the same ground as Susan Douglas...

...Each one, unique as our lives are, taints what's left with complicity, makes everyone living a survivor who will, or won't bear witness for the dead...

...An autopsy was done...

...indeed, I invited them to do so for the same reason that I review their books now: because I believe they are among the best in the business...

...The common wisdom about the unremitting sexism of popular culture, and our lemming-like acquiescence to it, can't be quite right," she says, since girls who devoured the media's offerings soon became feminists...

...At bottom, Zinn, like all humanitarian radicals, has nurtured throughout his life "an indignation against the bullies of the world, those who used wealth or military might or social status to keep others down," he writes...

...We have been marginalized in every sense of the word by U.S...

...The first occurred when he was ten, and the New York Post offered its readers a set of the complete works of Charles Dickens if they sent in the requisite number of coupons...

...In "Elysian Fields," she points out the gap between rich and poor in America...

...The only question I have with Chomsky here, as in previous works, is that of inten-tionality: Do the members of the mainstream media lie, or are they themselves hoodwinked by the prevailing ideology...

...She sets out to denounce the stereotypes, discrimination, and exploitation that Chi-canas face...

...Selma, Alabama...

...The Cold War confrontation provided easy formulas to justify criminal action abroad and entrenchment of privilege and state power at home...

...For me, the struggle came down to an inner demand that I again look at sexual fear from my own perspective, without giving in to the impulse to hide, deny, or wall off desire itself...

...In my tour through the images of the past four decades, my goal is to expose, review, and, at times, make fun of the media-induced schizophrenia so many of us feel...

...society...

...She has a lovely section on what she calls the "girl group music" of the 1960s ("Will You Love Me Tomorrow...

...As a Jew who lives part-time in Paris, her "chosen diaspora," Hacker writes hauntingly of the Holocaust...

...In the first part of this impressive work, Chomsky revisits the Cold War with a refreshing analysis...

...I was concluding that while there are certainly vicious enemies of liberty and human rights in the world, war itself is the most vicious of enemies...

...I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country...

...his father was a waiter and failed candy-store owner, who banged his head on the American dream but didn't make a dent...

...For the next several years, Honey and Avirgan dedicated themselves to finding out who was responsible for the bombing, suspecting the CIA all along...

...The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World, by Rafael Campo (Arte Publico) Every once in a while, I'll come upon an astonishing piece of writing from someone I'd never heard of before, and I will make a note to pursue that writer...

...foreign policy, or at ridiculing the journalists who stooge for the powerful...

...Zinn credits Dickens for arousing in him "a profound compassion for the poor...

...foreign policy from a radical perspective, this is the place to go...

...She recounts that her stepfather sexually abused her for years...

...Agency for International Development subverted Costa Rica's economy by pressuring the government to privatize sectors of the economy, including banking, and to open up the economy to more foreign investment...

...For an ice-cold atheist like me, spirituality is beyond my grasp, and I fall on the side of equality feminists, not "difference feminists...

...Hacker writes tenderly of her lesbian lovers, and of her daughter, now grown...

...I hate The fact that he's my age, and that across My skin he's there, my blood-brother, my mate...

...Lush with rhymes and modified traditional forms, Hacker's poetry echoes and reverberates...

...So sue me...

...The poems that struck me the most (the pages that I rabbit-eared) fall into two categories: his relationship with his father, and his treatment of AIDS patients...

...Erstwhile colleagues called her an antifeminist and worse...

...Zinn defies chronological and autobiographical order and jumps right into the action...

...True to her faith in openness, she writes explicitly about what turns her on...

...I especially enjoyed Thomas C. Holt's piece on Du Bois and Staughton Lynd's on A.J...

...Two events propelled Zinn into politics...

...foreign-policy aims under a new guise...

...The most compelling is the story about the La Penca bombing, which fundamentally altered Honey's life...

...Previously the editors of the Encyclopedia of the American Left, the Buhles (along with Harvey J. Kaye in their current book), are doing yeoman's work by dusting off the hidden history of radicalism in the United States...

...What I admire about this book is its insistent demand for justice...

...At night, after the crunch of work and the chaos of kids at home, I need a retreat...

...I look forward to reading more of Campo's work...

...But what matters to Rapping is that feminism affects the products they offer in a progressive manner...

...The U.S...

...Rapping's review brought a heated exchange in the letters-to-the-editor page of the Women's Review and Rapping, to her credit, reprints the letters here...

...I have always passionately loved good books—good stories, and beautiful writing, and most of all, books that seemed to me to be intrinsically important, books that told the truth, painful truths sometimes, in a voice that made eloquent the need for human justice," she writes in "Believing in Literature...

...The media have been schizophrenic about women, providing a vast array of mixed messages, thus explaining the love-hate relationship that many women have toward the media...

...But what I enjoy even more is to come upon new, fresh, startling works of poetry—especially with some political content to them...

...Rather, they doubtless genuinely believe that their own professed values—freedom, secularism, dignity of the individual, human rights, and so on— are upheld by the elements helped to power around the world by U.S...

...Castillo feels more kinship with other Third World women than with middle-class white feminists in the United States, and her criticism of mainstream white feminism shows again that the questions of race and class still roil the women's liberation movement...

...While the top priorities of those who control media are profits and ideological control," she writes, "they have often been dragged, kicking and screaming, away from those ends by progressive pressures...

...The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory...

...Muste since the authors added their own personal accounts of these men or their times...

...She concludes, quietly, beautifully: All I can know is the expanding moment, present, infinitesimal, infinite, in which the late sun enters without comment eight different sets of windows opposite...

...He follows his involvement in the movement to Albany, Georgia...

...But it is the specter of death that lends this work its unforgettable power...

...After Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr...

...It is also an in-depth account of the 1992 Presidential campaign, and how African-Americans—both at the leadership level and at the grass roots—responded to the Democrats and to fledgling third-party efforts...

...The world told us that we were being spanked, not beaten, and that violent contempt for girl children was ordinary, nothing to complain about...

...African Americans at the Crossroads: The Restructuring of Black Leadership and the 1992 Elections, by Clarence Lusane (South End Press) Here is a sober look at the current condition of African-Americans, the inability of many of their leaders to respond to the crisis in the African-American community, and the challenges that face the community and its leaders in the years to come...

...Then AID chipped away at the nation's health-care system and redirected its agriculture from self-sufficiency and the production of staple goods to what Honey calls the "agriculture of desserts...

...Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, by Ana Castillo (University of New Mexico Press) "I am a brown woman, from the Mexican side of town," begins this powerful collection of essays on Chicana feminism, or "Xicanisma," as Castillo calls it...

...Instead of producing rice, corn, sorghum, and beans, Costa Rica, as a condition of receiving AID grants, was required to produce luxury crops—"melons, strawberries, macadamia nuts, pineapples, flowers, and ferns"—for the U.S...

...Like Allen Ginsberg, she is not afraid to let it all hang out and to celebrate "the holy act of sex" in great personal detail...

...Allison recounts in painful detail how the 1982 Barnard College Conference on Sexuality and its aftermath disrupted her life...

...Yes, they both write columns for The Progressive...

...Government sought to undermine Costa Rica's democratic institutions in the 1980s...

...The more I read, the more I thought about World War II, the more I became convinced that the atmosphere of war brutalizes everyone involved, begets a fanaticism in which the original moral factor (which certainly existed in World War II—opposition to a ruthless tyranny, to brutal aggression) is buried at the bottom of a heap of atrocities committed by all sides," he writes...

...and "He's So Fine" and "Sweet Talking Guy"), seeing them as catalysts for women to get together, as precursors of the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s...

...Allison was among the latter, a founding member of the Lesbian Sex Mafia, "an old-fashioned consciousness-raising group whose whole concern would be the subject of sex...

...I have never been able to make clear the degree of my fear, the extent to which I feel myself denied...

...This openness, and Allison's public championing of the cause, quickly got her into trouble with other feminists...

...For now, I'd like to draw attention to several especially worthy works of nonfic-tion, as well as a few works of astonishing poetry...

...The opening long poem, "Against Elegies," sets the tone from the very first lines: James has cancer...

...Showing an appallingly encyclopedic grasp of popular culture, Douglas takes the reader on a breezy tour through the sitcoms, the nightly news shows, the fashion magazines, the popular music scene...

...They didn't use the word, and I only realized long after the war that this was an early use of napalm...

...is only twenty short lines long, but it haunts...

...she recognizes that TV plays largely to a female audience during the day, anyway, and that TV executives and producers understand that feminism has informed much of this audience and so adapt the contents of their shows...

...Still, this is a worthy part of the popularizing project the Buhles have set for themselves...

...Allison, the author of the prize-winning novel Bastard Out of Carolina and the prize-winning short-story collection Trash, revisits many of her earlier themes in this startling collection of essays...

...He chronicles the falsehoods, omissions, double-standards, and cheerleading of the mainstream media, and it is a devastating indictment...

...The other book is less dramatic but valuable, nonetheless...

...Zinn also credits John Hersey's Hiroshima for transforming his view of "just wars...

...She presents ample evidence of the primitive sexism with which newscasters greeted the onset of the feminist movement (Harry Reasoner, Eric Severaid, Walter Cronkite), and the tendency of the media to put down feminism and pit feminist women against antifeminist women in "cat fights...

...Right after that description, the poem ends with this: "Dawn, we flew them out in bags/mopped up the mess for chow...

...The inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it," she writes...

...And by what means can African-Americans ensure accountability of their leaders...

...Song for My Father" consists of sixteen little poems...

...Rapping elevates these so-called lower cultural planes...

...I can almost tirelessly leaf through ancient Oscar Williams anthologies of the classics, which went for sixty cents on my tattered copies...

...You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train, by Howard Zinn (Beacon) Here's a personal favorite...

...Second, I have a problem with the focus on the big stars...

...Entitled "Skin, Where She Touches Me," this piece is a treasure...

...Catherine has cancer...

...When the bomb went off, Avirgan was injured, as was Pastora...

...The editors have assembled some of the best left-wing historians practicing today to write the sketches...

...In "Body Count: The Dead at Tay Ninh," Bowen uses even a sparer, more matter-of-fact style to depict the grotesque...

...The subtext of this collection is a dispute Rapping occasioned with Susan Faludi, author of Backlash...

...In "Shotgun Strategies," she talks about her first consciousness-raising group, and what a transformative experience it was for her...

...In The Other Man Was Me, Campo explores the themes of his Hispanic heritage, wrestles with his father and the difficulty he had accepting his son's homosexuality, exalts the man he marries, celebrates the son they adopt (despite resistance from bureaucrats and his brother), and confronts the plague of AIDS he sees all around him...

...Then the police came, some on horseback, and started smashing people with clubs...

...Here are three offerings from this year, a year overflowing with good political poetry...

...she was expelled from the Lesbian Sex Mafia, and she lost her ability to have sex for a year...

...But she recovered, and stuck by her guns...

...The other event occurred when Zinn was a teenager...

...The narrator starts simply enough: "They carried him slowly/down the hill...

...Allison does not hide, deny, or wall it off in this collection...

...Zinn was a bomber in World War II, an ardent believer in the need to fight fascism by force of arms...

...One pivotal event came when Zinn and his fellow pilots were ordered to bomb a few thousand German soldiers who were trapped in Royan, France, a few weeks before the war ended...

...Whom will I call, and get no answer...

...market...

...she is well aware of that...

...With his customary mastery of the historical record and his command of enormous amounts of source material, Chomsky here debunks the notion that the "new world order" of Bush and Clinton is different in any essentials from the old world order...

...To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic...

...Like Douglas, Rapping rejects a simplistic view of TV...

...The tiniest acts of protest in which we engage may become the invisible roots of social change...

...So, too, was the incest...

...To give a glimpse of this universe, we are publishing a partial listing of left-wing titles at the end of this section...

...friends withdrew...

...Yet Campo writes that "I know he loves me," and at the end, Campo offers him "my pretty verse,/So fearful, shameful— honest, yet perverse...

...not only that I am queer in a world that hates queers, but that I was born poor into a world that despises the poor," she writes...

...Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media, by Susan J. Douglas (Times Books) Susan Douglas, "Pundit Watch" columnist for The Progressive, has written a witty, perceptive account of the conflicting images the media have displayed about women from the 1950s to the present...

...The last section of the book, "Cancer Winter," contains three poems, and they are among the most draining I've ever read...

...In the process, they uncovered the vast machinations which were later to become known as the Iran-contra scandal...

...She writes beautifully, directly, and powerfully about being a "transgressive lesbian," and about growing up poor—and the stigma attached to both...

...Zinn waits until Chapter 12 to give his personal background—son of Austrian Jewish and Russian immigrants, who settled in Brooklyn and never had any money...

...There are just too many questions left, too many cover-ups and lies by the U.S...

...Hostile Acts: U.S...

...But Douglas does not write off the news and entertainment media: "They are still our worst enemy and our best ally in our ongoing struggle for equality, respect, power, and love...

...There was nothing to be gained militarily from the action...

...Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s, by Martha Honey (University Press of Florida) There are two good books here...

...Allison also celebrates literature...

...Poverty was not voluntary, as right-wingers claim...

...And that while some societies can rightly claim to be more liberal, more democratic, more humane than others, the difference is not great enough to justify the massive, indiscriminate slaughter of modern warfare...

...One of the other women in the group revealed her own experience with physical and sexual abuse...

...Government subverted not only the economy of Costa Rica, but its tradition of neutrality and its commitment to a nonmilitary society, as well...

...Allison's essay on her mother's death, weaved in with the death of her first love, is heartbreaking to read...

...nor was it ennobling, as some left-wingers claim...

...But the section begins with Zinn's discussion of his evolution as a pacifist, and this account took on a particular poignance for me, since it reminded me of many conversations I'd had with Erwin over the years on the very question of pacifism in the face of Hitler—a position I still have trouble accepting...

...It mostly discusses the many Vietnam protests which Zinn participated in, spoke at, or helped lead, and it recounts the trip he and Daniel Berrigan took to Vietnam in 1968 to bring back three American pilots whom the North Vietnamese government was releasing...

...Chomsky brings his analysis up to date, pinioning Clinton for his policy toward Haiti, for his support of the brutal government in Colombia (this section alone on Colombia is worth the price of the book), for the continuation of a bankrupt policy toward the Middle East, and for his obeisance to the "corporate mercantilism" of NAFTA and GATT...

...Along with the Chris-tic Institute, they brought suit against many of the Iran-contra figures (Honey here tells of her frustration with lead attorney, Daniel Sheehan...

...Some of the guys he played basketball and football with in the neighborhood were communists, and they invited him to a demonstration in Times Square...

...Here is a book about sex, about class, but above all, about honesty, freedom, defiance, justice, art, and love...

...This slights the insurgents and insurgencies of the last twenty-five years...

...Government about La Penca, to rule out the possibility that the CIA may have been involved in some way...

...He uses his training both as a historian and an activist to preserve hope, even as the clouds gather, as they seem to be right now...

...But I have two problems with it...

...Allison is driven by the need to uncover the hidden...

...The second part of the book is simply entitled, "War...

...What we discovered talking to each other—and eventually there were four or five others discovering this together—is that we were cut from the same cloth...

...The world lied, and we lied, and lying becomes a habit," she writes...

...Or will popular resistance, which must itself become internationalized to succeed, be able to dismantle these evolving structures of violence and domination, and carry forward the centuries-old process of expansion of freedom, justice, and democracy that is now being aborted, even reversed...

...I first met Campo in the fall 1993 Kenyon Review, which published some of his remarkable poetry, along with a devastating essay, "AIDS and the Poetry of Healing...

...First, it is lopsided in favor of radicals in the Nineteenth and the first two-thirds of the Twentieth Century...

...Far from the bestseller list, far from The New York Times Book Review, far even from The New York Review of Books, there exists a thriving universe of left-wing books across a vast area of subject matter...

...Chomsky asks...

...And her sense of humor is refined, as in the sendoff she gives her students in "Groves of Academe," who want to write poems for Vanity Fair...

...But that's me...

...That was my life she was talking about," Allison writes...

...Intensely personal, this opening poem and others in the collection also reflect on the crimes of this century, in which we made death humanly obscene Soweto El Salvador Kurdistan Armenia Shatila Baghdad Hanoi Auschwitz...

...Set in an upscale cafe in Manhattan, the poem describes how "cappuccino drinkers" watch the poor from the comfort of the coffee house...

...Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr...

...But last summer she was cashiered, she told The Advocate, suspecting that her lesbian orientation and radical politics were too much for that tightly buttoned magazine— another brave moment in publishing, Death stalks this book...

...I'm a word man, so it is to poetry that I flee...

...While she has trouble stitching the two books together, Honey has added greatly to the literature of U.S...

...Campo is gay, and a doctor, and that combination—along with his Cuban-American identity—gives him his own unique perspective and voice...

...Howard Zinn is an apostle of protest...

...In essays on soap operas, day-time talk shows like Oprah, and made-for-TV movies, Rapping labors to demonstrate the openings the media have presented for the discussion of important feminist themes—not least, the overcoming of domestic abuse and incest...

...Certainly, leaders are important, not least for the role models they provide...

...Zinn's parents, who didn't know Dickens but knew their son liked to read, dutifully clipped and mailed the coupons...

...For all of us, the family had been a prison camp—a normal everyday horror, fully known and hidden...