Selected testimonies to living history—speeches, letters, poems, songs—offered by the people who make history happen, but are often left out of history books: women, workers, nonwhites. Featuring introductions to the original texts by Howard Zinn. New voices featured in this 10th Anniversary Edition include Chelsea Manning, speaking after her 35-year prison sentence); Naomi Klein, speaking from the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Liberty Square; a member of Dream Defenders, a youth organization that confronts systemic racial inequality; members of the Undocumented Youth movement, who occupied, marched, and demonstrated in support of the DREAM Act; a member of the Day Laborers movement; Chicago Teachers Union strikers; and several critics of the Obama administration, including Glenn Greenwald, on governmental secrecy.
Now available: a special Tenth Anniversary Edition with bonus material to celebrate ten years of continuing reader demand. Look for it here on Amazon. Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary is the tale of one of the early skirmishes of the Secret Cold War told with a pace and a black humor reminiscent of that used by Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H*). It is set against the backdrop of the CIA cross-sector tunnel operation to tap three Russian telecom�munications cables in Berlin in the mid-nineteen-fifties. It is the story of the American soldiers who worked the tunnel, and how they fought for a sense of purpose against boredom and the enemy both within and without. One of them is the target of a Russian "honey-trap," but which one? Kevin, the Russian transcriber, Blackie, the blackmarketeer, or Lt. Sheerluck, the martinet? The other end of the tunnel is the story of the Russians whose telephone calls the Americans are intercepting. Their end of the tale is told in the unnarrated transcripts of their calls. They are the voices under Berlin. * Dr. Wesley Britton, author of Spy Television, Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film, and Onscreen and Undercover: The Ultimate Book of Movie Espionage, calls Voices Under Berlin "a spy novel that breaks all the molds," adding that "in the tradition of Greene and Ambler, 'Voices Under Berlin' contains many literate qualities that make it a work of special consideration, worthy of an audience much broader than that of espionage enthusiasts or those interested in Cold War history. In fact, one indication of the book's quality is that it was among the award winners at the 2008 Hollywood Book Festival, a very rare honor for a spy novel." * Po Wong writing at bookideas.com says "Kevin is a hero in the mold of McMurphy, the rebellious asylum inmate who is the protagonist in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kevin manages to do his job despite the blind obedience to stringent regulations that frequently overrides common sense and intelligence in large military operations, and despite the widespread ineptness around him. ... Voices under Berlin is a coherent, funny, and often sardonic look at real espionage work. The detail is so realistic that you may find yourself wondering, as I did, whether this is a novel or the memoirs of an actual intelligence agent. Of course, if you're looking for James Bond, you won't find him here. What you will find is a fascinating account of what it must have been like to be toiling away at an important but often dreary job underneath the streets of Berlin during the Cold War years. * Midwest Book Review says one of the things that sets this novel apart is "the author's combining a genuine gift for humor with a deft literary astuteness in telling a story that fully engages the reader quite literally from first page to last." Winner of six book awards. Also by this author: Berlin in Early Cold-War Army Booklets The Day Before the Berlin Wall: Could We Have Stopped It? - An Alternate History of Cold War Espionage Berlin in Early Berlin-Wall Era CIA, State Department, and Army Booklets Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin Berlin in D�tente-era Berlin Brigade Booklets
The Cluetrain Manifesto began as a Web site (cluetrain.com) in 1999 when the authors, who have worked variously at IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Linux Journal, and NPR, posted 95 theses about the new reality of the networked marketplace. Ten years after its original publication, their message remains more relevant than ever. For example, thesis no. 2: "Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors"; thesis no. 20: "Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them." The book enlarges on these themes through dozens of stories and observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it all. With a new introduction and chapters by the authors, and commentary by Jake McKee, JP Rangaswami, and Dan Gillmor, this book is essential reading for anybody interested in the Internet and e-commerce, and is especially vital for businesses navigating the topography of the wired marketplace.
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.
No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.
"Noah Keller has a pretty normal life until one wild afternoon when his parents pick him up from school and head straight for the airport, telling him on the ride that his name isn't really Noah and he didn't really just turn eleven in March ... As Noah, now 'Jonah Brown,' and his parents head behind the Iron Curtain into East Berlin, the rules and secrets begin to pile up so quickly that he can hardly keep track of the questions bubbling up inside him: who, exactly, is listening--and why?"
"Containing a wealth of fresh information on the use of propaganda in the Cold War, the administrative structure of the U.S. occupation, Soviet-American conflicts, and Jewish biography, this book will be of interest to scholars of U.S. foreign relations, German history, occupation history, ethnicity, sociology, and culture."--BOOK JACKET.
There are no records of war more valuable than the first-hand accounts of the individuals who were actually there. The vivid honesty of the stories on display here brings into sharp focus the personal fears as well as the sheer exhilaration of flying sorties by day, often through heavy flak, sometimes at hedge-hopping or wave- skimming heights, as the squadrons of Blenheims, Mosquitoes, Mitchells and Venturas swept across the Continent towards their targets.From the outbreak of the Second World War to the eve of VE Day, the medium bomber crews of 2 Group RAF and 2nd Tactical Air Force flew vital operations over Europe. Here their story is told, month by perilous month, often in the words of the airmen themselves, their accounts supported by meticulous research. Their exploits include the first sorties of the war, the famous Operation Oyster to bomb the Philips works at Eindhoven and other low-level pinpoint attacks against key targets in occupied Europe and Scandinavia. While sharing in the triumph of their bombing successes, we are not spared details of the appalling sacrifices and the failed and aborted raids. These details are relayed in a series of poignant personal snapshots, highlighting the extraordinary valour of these ordinary men. Remarkable photographs include aerial views of targets under attack, as well as dramatic portraits of the aircraft involved. This book serves as a moving tribute to the efforts of the pilots involved in some of the most perilous daylight bombing operations of the Second World War.
Philosophising in Mombasa provides an approach to the anthropological study of philosophical discourses in the Swahili context of Mombasa, Kenya. In this historically established Muslim environment, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, philosophy is investigated as social discourse and intellectual practice, situated in everyday life. This is done from the perspective of an 'anthropology of philosophy', a project which is spelled out in the opening chapter. Entry-points and guidelines for the ethnography are provided by discussions of Swahili literary genres, life histories, and social debates. From here, local discourses of knowledge are described and analysed. The social environment and discursive dynamics of the Old Town are portrayed, firstly, by means of following and contextualising informal discussions among neighbours and friends at daily meeting points in the streets; and secondly, by presenting and discussing in-depth case studies of local intellectuals and their contributions to moral and intellectual debates within the community. Taking recurrent internal discussions on social affairs, politics, and appropriate Islamic conduct as a focus, this study sheds light on local practices of critique and reflection. In particular, three local intellectuals (two poets, one Islamic scholar) are portrayed against the background of regional intellectual history, Islamic scholarship, as well as common public debates and private discussions. The three contextual portrayals discuss exemplary issues for the wider field of research on philosophical discourse in Mombasa and the Swahili context on the whole, with reference to the lives and projects of distinct individual thinkers. Ultimately, the study directs attention beyond the regional and the African contexts, towards the anthropological study of knowledge and intellectual practice around the world.
