POLITICAL BOOKNOTES

...To read his analysis is to be reminded of what a pity it is that the American left has had nothing interesting to say about government for 20 years...

...But his plan to shrink the active duty military in favor of a larger, more competent reserve force is hardly a reform...

...The compulsive drug user is locked into the same sad cvcle...

...Throughout the book, we meet working women, mainly blue-collar, who share their schedules, their economic need to work, and their guilt...

...Yet the fact is that today’s military failures have little to do with good citizenship (or rhc lack of it) by men and women in service...

...But the question I think about most these days is not how to create a better system but why that’s so unlikely to happen...

...Don’t get into comparative suffering, Dr...

...He and his compatriots are forever-tired because they are seeking a nirvana that will forever elude them...

...Estimates are that Americans spend between $40 and $50 billion a year on illegal drugs...

...He was not alone...

...That’s not to say that some form of national service - military or not - couldn’t be an unforgettable lesson in citizenship for Ivy Leaguers as well as those bruised by ghetto life...

...I’m talking here not just about addicts, low-level dealers, or innocent bystanders in the inner city, but also about a group of people who can never vote because they aren’t even Americans...

...The reason...

...JOHN MARTIN is a national correspondent for “ABC News...

...He has delegated military policy to William Cohen who, as did Clinton, avoided military service during Vietnam...

...For the reality of the barracks today, Hart leans on retired officers who collectively have 13 stars and the baggage of being a general officer...

...Just then, several squad cars pulled up and police officers jumped out, hands on their guns...

...Because they speak to that deep, dark place where the ideal of the good mother lives inside all of us...

...To be fair, Hart is at least instigating a serious dialogue about the shape of the defense establishment outside the confines of the Pentagon, which is more than can be said for-most politicians who shunned military service...

...Clinton and Hart worked in the 1972 presidential campaign of Sen...

...House Speaker Newt Gingrich angrily denounced President Clinton’s drug policy as “the definition of failure...

...He became a born-again Christian, and then, for God’s sake, perhaps, declared himself a conservative Republican...

...The m t h is that we are not just galaxies away from real reform...

...Enter part three, which delves into public policy...

...The trouble was that, while much of this coverage was manifestly unfair, some of the revelations were profoundly disquieting, even to many of Kavan’s most fervent supporters...

...Children of working mothers can do fine, some prominent theorists insist, but their colleagues disagree...

...Ultimately, all three taste the bitterness of failure...

...In 1968, facing charges of attempted murder and parole violation, he fled overseas...

...Erastus Holmes, a quartermaster in the 5th Indiana Cavalry, was captured and held in the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia...

...One admires the author’s passion, but wonders if it could not be applied more usefully...

...in a dozen ingenious ways, a Czech smuggles supplies and documents to the underground...

...The long ball Hart hits is his observation that so little thinking has been done about the defense program that still takes the largest slice of federal income tax dollars...

...Lawrence Weschler’s Calamities of Exile is an account of three men living on the same perimeter between politics and revolution, facing the same tumultuous pressures as Cleaver...

...SLOYAN, the senior correspondent for Newsday’s Wmhington Bureau, won the Pulitzer prize fm his cmerage of the 1992 Persian Guywar The Wrong Battle by Joshua Wolf Shenk N THE SAME STRANGE WAY that pet owners resemble their animals, advocates of the war on drugs bear an uncanny likeness to the drug users they deplore...

...We all know how that story turned out...

...that keeps the lobbies circling past the toll booth, dropping in campaign contributions as they go...

...The core of the book is data the author gleaned by examining the records of Indiana asylums from 1861 to 1919...

...The first reason is that warriors believe they’re helping the people they’re hurting...

...As it happens, Silverstein has written one of the better descriptions of postmodern Washington in action...

...Alerted by radio calls, a photographer and I positioned ourselves beside the pumps...

...She may, however, be overstating her case in this section...

...in disguise, a South African slips into his native country on a clandestine mission...

...PATRICKJ...

...Each man chose to follow the courage of his convictions rather than submit to the gravitational pull of family and convention that would keep most of us on the sidelines...

...it is headed by the ex-Congressman who used to protect its subsidies, and in the 1995-96 election cycle its political action committee gave $773,000 to about 360 congressional candidates...

...That study, commissioned by Richard Nixon to document the dangers of marijuana, instead concluded that it didn’t cause crime, was less dangerous than alcohol, and ought to be decriminalized for personal use...

...Chira dissects “attachment theory,” which professes that mothers who work early in their child’s life threaten that child’s self-esteem and sense of trust...

...Kavan’s entire life was being splayed open and combed for intimations of treachery...

...There is no call for reactivating the compulsory military service that once provided the only meaningful link between young Americans and the federal government...

...Doubtfire” and “This Is My Life” to Benjamin Spock and Penelope Leach, authors of the baby care books her friends recommended...

...Then and now, Clinton remains aloof from national security matters, despite his role as Commander-in-Chief...

...What makes people like Gray optimistic...

...troops flown to the 1992 Persian Gulf w3r arrived on commercial airliners that were readily available for Pentagon leasing...

...This violates one maior rule laid down by veterans’ counselor Jonathan Shay in his brilliant book Achilles in Vietnam, a compassionate study of how poor military leadership in that war increased the combat trauma of those who served...

...This took me safely out of range...

...Again, we hear more of Chira’s own voice...

...Fair enough, I suppose...

...The author’s empathetic portrayal of the Civil War vet is soured by his pissing on the Viemam vet, who is depicted as a softie and a whiner...

...Army itself in the West - its high suicide rate in that era, its treatment of the Native American population - affected by the traumas that some of its people suffered...

...A tantahzing hint of this comes late in this book when the author refers in passing to the sense of unsettledness that led some vets to lives of wandering, with one drifting across the high plains...

...We allow fathers this power from a distance, even death,” she writes, “but we say that mothers forfeit it if they spend eight to ten hours a day apart from their children...

...By the end of this section, the message about day care still seems confusing...

...British and French troops were parachuted into Egypt...

...As his country’s most gifted and celebrated writer in Afrikaans, Breytenbach was a thorn in the side of the regime...

...If they wanted to wipe out everybody by 1980,” one American Motors executive said of GM in 1976, ‘Ithe only one who could stop them is the government...

...Publication not only placed Makiya at odds with his father, a master archtect drafted by Saddam to refashion the capital, but drew enraged attention from the authorities in Baghdad, causing him to fear for his life...

...The most recent argument in Waslungton over drug policy is illustrative...

...Given radical changes in the post-Soviet security environment,” he writes, “the absence of any deeper debate over the long-range meaning and militarv demands of our national security is remarkable, if not dumbfounding,” Hart says...

...Even when the book becomes too dense or complex, such nuggets pop up to keep you reading and thinking...

...The violence and corruption there is breathtaking, and if you’ve become inured to the constant reports, consider the work of a single individual named Pablo Escobar...

...in which the great democratic bazaar would act to reflect the public good, if only the corporate baddies and their vampiric K-Street minions could be prevented from cormpang the process...

...Gifted as a writer and helped by friends in the white publishing community, Cleaver was a paroled convict who could have settled into a comfortable role as an author but chose activism...

...One afternoon in 1967, a dozen Panthers pulled into a gas station near the state capitol in Sacramento...

...Even though the Pentagon spends billions on research every year, there is little original thought from its string of think-tanks and university professors...

...Mike Gray shows as much in Drug Crazy, which is passionate, thoughtful, and unsettling...

...Second, drug prohibition weighs on a group of people whose lives, sadly, mean very little to the powers that be...

...In those days, it seemed obvious that American government and American conservatism were both front groups for corporate oligarchs...

...The debate is nearly as acrimonious as the argument over abortion...

...Like Cleaver, they attempted to mount public, even armed opposition, something we all might attempt, as the book jacket says, “if only we were much more courageous than we are...

...Political Booknotes Stuck in the ’70s by Jonathan Rauch GREW UP, IN THE 1970s, gulping down books with titles like Taming the Giant Corporation and Corporate Power in America...

...Someone such as Harold Brown, defense secretarv under President Jimmy Carter, should organize a really Deep Think...

...President Clinton’s ignorance and incompetence produced the 1993 massacre of American Army Special Forces and Rangers in Mogadishu, where they also massacred at least 800 Somalians in a single day...

...Suddenly I realized we were in the line of fire from both sides...

...Otherwise, the men and women who are the military will continue to be whittled away willynilly by a national political leadership who share one area of military expertise: They how how to evade military service...

...The author concludes that “these men did indeed suffer from what we would today think of as PTSD” - that is, the “posttraumatic stress disorder” frequently associated nowadays with troubled veterans of the Vietnam War...

...Silverstein is certainly right to smell somethug rotten in Waslungton’s cynical lobbylst-for-hire culture...

...First, the moving historical material is sometimes Gamped in unreadable, jargon-laden discussions of methodology that should have been relegated to the internal exile of an appendix...

...That includes the book‘s title...

...If you have ever seen WiKam Bennett, slumped into a chair on the set of ‘Wightline” or “Charlie Rose,” his body weary from too many cigarettes and his eyes gleaming with venom, you’ll understand this intuitively...

...The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is renowned for its lobbying clout...

...The argument of this interesting but frustrating book is that the Civil War veteran in fact suffered “a wide range of psychological and social problems” that generally haven’t been recognized by historians or held in the national memory...

...These two issues prove that officials will tolerate any amount of suffering in the name of “protecting the children!’ You might expect that drug policy reformers would be cynical, and they are...

...After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, &van won election to the new parliament,but suddenly found himself facing charges by the post-Soviet government that he collaborated with the former state security police...

...Hart’s call for an American military peopled hy citizens who will bring democratic ideals to the war machine implies that today’s force consists of mercenaries, those scarred fugitives who filled out the ranks of the Foreign Legion...

...ANN O’HANLOisN a “Metra”r epmter with The Washington Post Brass Reforms by Patrick J. Sloyan ORMER SEN...

...William Guile roamed his house at night wielding a hatchet...

...It’s clear to me that the drug war does more harm than good: locking up addicts without decreasing their number, handing the drug trade to criminals without denting its size, and wasting prison space on users whose crimes have no victims other than themselves...

...Clinton has promised to cut drug use in half by 2007...

...Sprinkled throughout the book are interesting thoughts, quotes, and anecdotes...

...Weschler’s subjects did far more...

...Shay insists: Combat trauma is painful, and all of it is far too genuine for one person’s suffering to be denigrated as somehow less real than another’s...

...For instance, Hart wants more “lift,” to fly troops to distant wars...

...Countless other mothers have learned that, too...

...Enemies seized upon the secret files uncovered by the new government...

...It would be nice to think that we’ve progressed way beyond the beginning of the century when arguments such as, “Cocaine is often the direct incentive in the crime of rape by the Negro” convinced a country to make the substance illegal and similar warnings about the Mexicans and the Chinese led to bans on marijuana and opium...

...I sprinted to a pay phone up the street...

...Kavan marshaled support for their cause among international journalists, including Weschler, a New Yorker writer...

...Lives In Exile by John Martin ESCHYLUS REMARKED 2,400 years ago: “I know how men in exile feed on the dreams of hope...

...Interest groups and activists discover problems, some more real than others (the day-care crisis, the education crisis, the health-care crisis, the drug crisis, the tobacco crisis, etc., etc...

...but does he, or anyone, imagine that the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, one of the fattest of the fat-cat lobbies, is a selfless tribune of the public good...

...The next section is rich with data and social science...

...Still, as a work of reportage, the book succeeds...

...If good day care is what it’s about, why can’t we as a nation create better day care standards and funding...

...Chira opens with an intimate autobiographical prologue, taking us quickly through her lifetime highlights of angst as they relate to work vems relationships...

...Finally he was committed to the Indiana Hospital for the Insane in 1885 and remained there until his death in 1910...

...John Britton suffered chronic insomnia and would sometimes disappear into the woods...

...Hart has joined the top brass in sacrificing people for hardware...

...Shell Shocked by Thomas E. Ricks ATE IN THE CIVIL WAR, SGT...

...Instead, the failures Jhrt repeatedly cites flow from decisions made in the White House and supported by Congress...

...We in the 10th Mountain Division feared being yanked from the warmth of our West German h e m s for war in the desert...

...The problem is not that business dominates...

...Can toddlers who grow up with full-time, quality day care do as well as their peers who had full-time moms...

...When partial records were recovered at police headquarters (others had been destroyed), Kavan appeared to have been an agent of the state...

...Silverstein is alarmed by the American Tort Reform Association, which he condemns as “a business-backed campaign that would shield corporations from product liability lawsuits arising from their sale of dangerous and defective products...

...RICKS is author of Making the Corps, The Washington Monthly’s 1997 “Political Book of the Year” Guilty Mothers by Ann O’Hanlon 0 MOTHERS WHO WORK DO so to the detriment of their children...

...But his celebrity status and family ties forced him to suffer excruciating pressures and temptations to renounce his opposition...

...It will have to stop hunting for villains and see the system whole...

...I hope that the book makes a difference but, because of the very forces described therein, I don’t suspect it will...

...Lastly, there is a chapter about the future and where the author hopes society will take its vision of fatherhood and motherhood...

...And the referenda in Arizona and California, to my mind, aren’t a sign of hope but of gloom: It turns out that the drug czar and Justice Department can override state law by fiat anytime they believe the citizens of that state made a bad decision...

...A clue: Silverstein is co-editor, with Alexander Cockburn, of Counterpunch, described as “an investigative newsletter about power and evil in Washugton.,’) The people need to take back Washington from its smarmy Heeps and brutal Gradgrinds...

...There is official Army nomenclature for this commendation, but for those of us who earned it for our required military service between 1955-57, it was known as the Suez Sweat Medal...

...Shook Over Hell makes a real contribution to our understanding of the Civil War, and that is no small achievement...

...Then she cites a landmark and ongoing study by the National Institute of Child Health, which has hopeful news about children of working mothers...

...As head of the Medellin cartel, Escobar engineered the assassination of 11 Colombian Supreme Court justices and a leading candidate for the presidency, as well as an all-out war that included the dynamiting of nine banks in a single day and the slaughter of the wives of police and army officers as they shopped for groceries...

...Gingrich’s promise: to do the job in four years...

...The trouble is that he writes from an analyucal school that is still imprinted on 1970s populist-pluralism...

...The final reason for pessimism is the most obvious one: The drug war makes great politics...

...it is that no one dominates, so no one can stop the cascade...

...On and on the cycle goes, escalating as everyone counters everyone else’s lobbying with more lobbying...

...Kavan fbr any collaboration with the secret police...

...But the cynicism is always laced with hope, as Mike Grav shows in the conclusion of Drug Crazy...

...Hell, we could yet have another Cambodia on our hands.’’ Czech Jan Kavan fought to displace the Communist regime in Prague from London, where he had gone as a student in the 1960s...

...will address some of these questions in his next work...

...He condemns private utility companies’ legislative “assault on public power,” but fails to mention that public power is a well-heeled and self-serving interest group in its own right...

...Much hinges on quality day care, which is hard to find...

...Although he can’t resist the urge to call military contractors “merchants of death” and anti-regulatory lobbies “the forces of darkness,” he leavens his indignation with a welcome dash of mischievous humor (“Congress: Training Grounds for Real Jobs...

...The message is insistent and without subtlety: Work, and your child suffers...

...Officers were routinely killed - “fragged” - by their troops in Vietnam...

...One calamity of Malayas exile is that despite American military intervention, which filled him with hope, the refusal of the United States and its allies to dislodge Hussein has left his homeland in the grip of a tyrant...

...Iraq may well yet make Lebanon look like a Sunday picnic,” Makiya says...

...But what I finally found most disappointing in Shook Over Hell was the lack of connection to American history...

...Gonna c d the office,” I said, nervously, “tell ’em what’s goin’ on here...

...of your throat: you go...

...Their national security policies are overseen by two men who also ducked the Selective Service: Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott...

...How many gunslingers came out of the Civil War, still socdy numbed and prone to violence...

...And so on, from crippling anxiety and crying spells to social numbing, paralyzing flashbacks, and violent outbursts...

...Raney Johns climbed up on his father’s roof and cried that the Rebels were after him...

...She must be applauded for addressing nearly all issues that touch worlung mothers and day care, but the book also loses a feehg of focus here...

...How was the behavior of the U.S...

...Escobar was eventually killed and the demise of his cartel was considered a major coup in the international drug war...

...Soon, several Panthers were in custody on gun charges and I had missed the birth of the Panthers and their Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, as national symbols of radical black defiance...

...And so, it pains me to say, are those of us who study drug policy and advocate its reform...

...He stood for principle against injustice, for action instead of compliance...

...Beneath the surface, he says, “the two parties stand for virtually the same thing, namely, corporate rule...

...He cites the blessing of medical marijjana use by voters in California and Arizona and the advent of the Internet, which allows for widespread dissemination of modern day versions of the 1972 Shafer report...

...The ordeal nearly broke his spirit by the time of his release in 1982...

...In exile for nine years in Cuba, Algeria, and France (during which he broke with the Panthers), he suffered disorientation and despair...

...by corporate influence peddling is a slightly odd experience, like attending a convention of anthroposophists...

...Each of Weschler’s exiles sips the elixir of intrigue: By stealth, an Iraqi uncovers and publishes damning details of Saddam Hussein’s repression...

...But with a midterm election near, expect to see something close to the package Gingrich is proposing - doubling interdiction budgets, eliminating school loans for convicted drug users and dealers, coaxing states to drug test kids who apply for driver’s licenses, and so on - adopted by the end of the summer...

...But Hart, who sought a student deferment when the draft sought him out in the late 1950s, seems strangely ignorant of the successes of millions of Americans who had their lives squared away by the First Sergeant and their civilian careers launched by the GI Bill of Rights...

...The diplomat secretly recorded Kavan’s observations during occasional meetings over the years...

...Indeed, “when corporations come calling, Washington lawmakers toss the opinion of their constituents - and the public interest - out the windod’ In 1998, to read a new book that is shocked - shocked...

...The error that Gray makes - and I’m sympathetic because I make it often - is in believing the correct position will eventually win the day...

...The left, which cares more than anybody about revitalizing government, should by rights be a fount of hard-headed thinking about the afflictions of American government...

...To sustain this analysis, you need to believe that arrayed against the greedheads of corporate America is The Public Interest, and you also need to believe that it’s obvious whose side The Public Interest is on...

...He was given glimpses of his wife and parents, a prison visit by a brother who commanded an elite South African military unit engaged in secret operations in other African countries...

...Today, the vast lobbying power of corporations and the wealthy has reduced the collective voice of average citizens to a faint din, barely heard in the corridors of power,” he writes...

...In truth, the great bulk of corporate lobbying is defensive, or at least is perceived that way by the people doing it...

...Washington today is like a demented casino whose motto is a twisted variant of that state lottery slogan: “You can’t win if you don’t play - but, boy, can you lose...

...Unsurprisingly, everybody plays...

...JONATHAN RAUCH is national correspondent of National Journal and autbm ofDemosderosis: The Silent Killer of American Government...

...Ellen McKinney took her children away from home every day at dusk, returning only at daylight, for fear of their father’s violence...

...But the drug war has never been primarily rational...

...Writing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, he published the book Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, which appeared in 1989, before Iraq invaded Kuwait...

...There is little evidence of any vision...

...Because the problem is systemic rather than moral, it is no use to condemn corporate lobbies while exculpating the Sierra Club, the teachers’ unions, or the trial lawyers...

...The reserves were filled with draft dodgers with political connections such as Dan Quayle...

...Hey, we were forced to live in WGrzburg for two years, come to grips with Franken wein, and learn enough Deutxch to deal with the fiauleins...

...For example, Chira describes in the heart of the policy section how her colleague Nathaniel Nash, a father of young children, died in a plane crash while she was writing the book...

...Not an easy or a pleasant task, but might we hope that, in his next book, Ken Silverstein will start the project...

...There are plenty of factual clinkers in The Minuteman: Restoring An Amy of the People...

...Reading Ken Silverstein’s new book, I remembered flares, leisure suits, and velour...

...Calamities of Exile is convincing evidence that taking on an oppressive government is infinitely courageous...

...His guards mounted a psychological campaign that was especially cruel: He was permitted to write each day but never allowed to retain the manuscripts, nor were they returned to him during his imprisonment...

...And as in that argument, each side in the working-moms debate appeals to emotions, insisting that the issue is clear and obvious, if only you see it from their side...

...Breytenbach described it as “‘a singing death . . . writing took on its pure shape, since it had no echo, no feedback, no evaluation, and perhaps ultimately, no existence...

...Iraqi architect Kanan Makiya, working in London, documented and indicted the reign of terror under Saddam Hussein...

...Perhaps Eric T. Dean Jr...

...Her reporter’s voice is more nuanced and less riveting, but she uses the combination to tackle a daunting breadth of issues: popular culture, fatherhood, public policy flaws, biased studies, the role of poverty in motherhood and child care issues, the morale of women who stay at home and how that affects their children...

...Despite his criminal past, Cleaver seemed genuinely transformed by the effort to win equality and respect for blacks...

...Looking back on that day in Sacramento, I remember how little courage I showed in the line of fire...

...One of Breytenbach‘s poems, written to his mother (whom he feared would not survive his imprisonment) was withheld until after her death: and now you are old, saturated with love and young forever...

...My bond with my children endures although I am not the good mother of song and story,” she writes...

...They have brainwashed IIart into investing billions in Pentagon hardware...

...How did we get to &IS point and why am I so pessimistic about the chances for change...

...and invent proposals that energize dense swarms of lobbyists, who win no matter who else loses...

...The campaign was proving dauntingly effective,” Weschler writes...

...Well, maybe not quite all of us know...

...Moreover, the Americans’ pressure on Colombia ended up shifting much of the drug trade to Mexico, which is now enduring similar terror...

...It’s t e h g that this is the best Gray can come up with...

...She asserts that day care is under “a stepped-up assault,” but offers four examples, each at least a decade old, as evidence...

...When Chin’s two children are born she delves into the reality of day care...

...Once America got involved,” he says, “it took our country just four years to win the Second World War - the greatest military effort the world has ever seen...

...General Motors was a sovereign economic state, imperious and impervious...

...Ask Bill Gates...

...Nasser had seized the Canal...

...Politicians gin up legislation (tax bills, highway bills, banlang bills, health bills, etc., etc...

...Of course there was a rational impulse too, as people can do themselves real harm with all sorts of mind-altering substances...

...JOSHUA WOLFSH ENK,a cmm’buting editor ofThe Washington Monthly, is a writer living in New York Ciy...

...Gray’s book is an excellent primer on the consequences of the American drug war on countries like Colombia and Mexico...

...Makiya suffered further despair when Iraqi rebels committed atrocities in reprisal for acts of savagery by Saddam’s troops, semng off new cycles of violence...

...George McGovern, which was, in fact, an antiwar, antimilitary crusade...

...Racial animosity was just a stand-in for the real impulse of the drug crackdown, which is fear of the Other...

...If the Greek dramatist could read Lawrence Weschler’s vivid new portrait of three political exiles in this century he might change the sentiment to read: “how exiles starve on dreams of despair...

...It was not uncommon for a man in uniform in his hometown to be jeered or even spat upon...

...How did this traama shape the settlement of the West...

...It was one of the worst times for the military services...

...The charges stemmed from a long-forgotten meeting with a Czech diplomat in London...

...He made secret trips to Czechoslovakia, smuggled documents, equipment, and determination to members of the underground...

...The Suez Sweat Medal is proof Hart is a bit off base when he says the United States never opted for conscription during the Cold War...

...President Nixon gave short shrift to the Pentagon...

...like a fruit tree in the soil: I bear your bones in your and the sing-song sounds oh mother, bless me befre careening blood...

...By night he ate incessantly...

...I was surprised to find no indication in this book that Dean is even aware of Shay’s important work...

...They were exultant, having just carried guns into the legislature to protest their treatment by police in Oakland...

...Nixon promptly buried it...

...This view of Washington’s problems is much like Dickens’ view of industrialization: At bottom, the problem is moral...

...Another colleague, whose own father had died when he was an infant, eulogized Nash, saying his deceased father had lived on in his mind, shaping his ideals and leading him to his career...

...He infiltrates a couple of Washington fund-raisers - good fun - and describes with wicked accuracy the devious machinations of modern ‘‘astroturf’’ lobbying (bogus grass-roots movements concocted by Washington consultants with computers and phone banks...

...Section one focuses on what popular culture tells us about motherhood, from movies like “Mrs...

...Modernizing,” is the Pentagon mantra, despite an excess of rifles, tanks, planes, and ships superior to anything possessed by a potential enemy...

...But I don’t expect it will be long before the Partnership for a Drug Free America has a presence a thousand times more widespread than the Lindesmith Center or the Drug Reform Coordination Network...

...In this book, Hart bills himself as a reformer, just as he did during his campaigns for the presidency...

...After the war Sgt...

...Nowhere does the author step back to try to trace the effects of Civil War trauma on American life after that war...

...True, the Internet is a temfic tool for organizers...

...To become that, however, it will need to give up its comfortable melodrama of rapacious private companies bullymg noble public institutions and stomping on plucky, underfunded citizens’ groups...

...More importantly, its comparisons with the Viemam veteran are tendentious, simplistic, and irritating...

...Yet 90 percent of US...

...Holmes returned home weighing 85 pounds, about half his normal weight, and ill both in body and mind...

...After five years of recrimination by enemies and fading belief by supporters, Kavan was able to clear his name, partly by producing testimony by the diplomat: I did not, at any time try to recruit Mr...

...It is pretty silly to talk about dismantling prohibition when there is such stasis on measures far less bold and so desperately necessary as, say, medical marijuana and needle exchange...

...Based on unsubstantiated revelations, many former allies in the underground, feeling betrayed for real or imagined failures, joined his accusers...

...GARY HART’S new book sent me rummaging through an old trunk for evidence: Just over the left pocket of my shrunken Ike jacket is a faded ribbon...

...To counter this trade, police stalk poor areas like an occupying army...

...She and her husband hire a nanny, who is still with the famdy after seven years...

...She challenges studies that do not probe all factors before linking children of working mothers to lower achievement...

...But Hart’s vision has been distorted by his top-down view of the services...

...I never mentioned to him during our meetings anything about my other [secret police] role in the Embassf In the concluding novella, Weschler profiles Afrikaner poet Breyten Breytenbach, who abandoned Paris in 1975 to join an underground group opposing apartheid...

...In his backyard he constructed a facsimile of the Andersonville prison, with “the stream of water and every hill and stump,” his son-in-law later said...

...we’re moving in the wrong direction...

...I also think that if Americans could look past the distortions of people like Bennett (who use drug-related violence, a creation of prohibition’s black market, as a reason io escalate the war) and could see drug users for what they are (deserving of understanding and help rather than punishment), they’d agree with me...

...So why can’t we refute with more passion and conviction the distortions of the Jeremiahs around us...

...Here Chira takes on a bevy of public policy issues, from custody battles that are progressively tougher on working women, she argues, to welfare reform and family tax relief...

...He was quickly replaced...

...But it isn’t a very good book, for three reasons...

...Each of their experiences becomes, in Weschler’s hands, a novella...

...Susan Chira, an editor with The New York Times and a mother of two, sets out to add an authoritative voice to the worlung-mother side...

...In the Civil War, it took just four years to save the Union and abolish slavery” Both the president and the Speaker, of course, are down Alice’s rabbit hole in believing they can cut drug use so dramatically...

...Wholesale draft dodging meant only the most hopeless and most desperate where being inducted for active duty...

...But what...

...Such was the life of the American exile Eldridge Cleaver, whose death revived an image from my earliest days as a reporter watching the rise of the Black Panthers in California as well as Cleaver’s flight into exile...

...THOMAES...

...On his return, he began a period of repudiation...

...Her arguments are most compelling when she speaks with a mother’s voice, painting an emotional picture framed by popular culture and its images of working motherhood...

...He should have included notes to show where his own reporting leaves off and other people’s begins...

...He helps us understand the quandary in a totalitarian or oppressive society: “[Tlhe decent, if somewhat weak, man [is] faced with the terrible dilemma of whether to risk his livelihood and his family’s well-being, by finally taking a principled stand in opposition to . . . state travesty” Often the stand merely involves signing a petition - or refusing to sign...

...Weschler’s gift as a reporter is to pull out of each episode the doubts and contradictions each exile faced...

...Kavan sought embassy reimbursement for money improperly confiscated by immigration officials as he was leaving Prague to study at Oxford...

...Violent drug gangs are a creation of the black market, specifically of the spectacular profits of the illegal drug trade...

...His entry into armed struggle was an immediate flop: He was arrested and imprisoned by the white South African state...