Z Books
Recent Z Books
Everton: The School Issue
Apr 25, 2011
Issue #2 of The Working Stiff Review. Link to it here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/58058633@N08/sets/72157626581122438/
Cohn: The United States and Torture
Apr 19, 2011
Waterboarding. Sleep deprivation. Sensory manipulation. Stress positions. Over the last several years, these and other methods of torture have become garden variety words for practically anyone who reads about current events in a newspaper or blog.
Myers: African Cities
Apr 14, 2011
Cities in Africa are still either ignored or held up as examples of all that can go wrong with urbanism. This book uses the author's own research, and works by other scholars, to help illuminate what is happening in and across the region's cities.
Thakur: Militias and the Challenges of Post-Conflict Peace
Apr 14, 2011
Bringing together the lessons learned from four intensively-researched case studies the book argues that the overly rigid 'cookie-cutter' approach to demilitaristation is ineffective at meeting the myriad of challenges involving militias.
Authors: Revolt and Crisis in Greece
Apr 13, 2011
How does a revolt come about and what does it leave behind? What impact does it have on those who participate in it and those who simply watch it? Is the Greek revolt of December 2008 confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, or are there lessons we can bring to bear on social action around the globe?
McKibben: Eaarth
Apr 12, 2011
"Read it, please. Straight through to the end. Whatever else you were planning to do next, nothing could be more important." —Barbara Kingsolver Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth. That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend—think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we've managed to damage and degrade. We can't rely on old habits any longer. Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change—fundamental change—is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.
Peterson: The Politics of Genocide
Apr 12, 2011
In this impressive book, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson examine the uses and abuses of the word “genocide.” They argue persuasively that the label is highly politicized and that in the United States it is used by the government, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfere with the imperial interests of U.S. capitalism. Thus the word “genocide” is seldom applied when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is used almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the United States and U.S. business interests. One set of rules applies to cases such as U.S. aggression in Vietnam, Israeli oppression of Palestinians, Indonesian slaughter of so-called communists and the people of East Timor, U.S. bombings in Serbia and Kosovo, the U.S. war of “liberation” in Iraq, and mass murders committed by U.S. allies in Rwanda and the Republic of Congo. Another set applies to cases such as Serbian aggression in Kosovo and Bosnia, killings carried out by U.S. enemies in Rwanda and Darfur, Saddam Hussein, any and all actions by Iran, and a host of others. With its careful and voluminous documentation, close reading of the U.S. media and political and scholarly writing on the subject, and clear and incisive charts, The Politics of Genocide is both a damning condemnation and stunning exposé of a deeply rooted and effective system of propaganda aimed at deceiving the population while promoting the expansion of a cruel and heartless imperial system. “Destined to become a grim classic, The Politics of Genocide is an antidote to the stultifying doublethink of U.S. news media. The authors document a baseline of purposed journalism so subservient to power that it has routinely perpetuated ‘the normalization of anything the U.S. government chose to do in the realm of foreign policy, regardless of its brutality and criminality.’ Concise and devastating, this book turns the media wallpaper inside-out, debunking the most sacred conceits while showing us the intellectual and moral rot of Washington’s political structures. Herman and Peterson will make readers yearn for a political culture that embraces a single standard of human rights instead of selectively wielding such words as ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide.’ In the end, we’re left with an enhanced understanding of what ‘responsibility to protect’ really means—and how far we have to go before the lofty rhetoric of U.S. foreign policy resembles its realities.” —Norman Solomon author, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death “In this brilliant exposé of great power’s lethal industry of lies, Edward Herman and David Peterson defend the right of us all to a truthful historical memory.” —John Pilger journalist and filmmaker
Millet: Debt, the IMF and the World Bank
Apr 12, 2011
Mainstream economists tell us that developing countries will replicate the economic achievements of the rich countries if they implement the correct “free-market” policies. But scholars and activists Toussaint and Millet demonstrate that this is patently false. Drawing on a wealth of detailed evidence, they explain how developed economies have systematically and deliberately exploited the less-developed economies by forcing them into unequal trade and political relationships. Integral to this arrangement are the international economic institutions ostensibly created to safeguard the stability of the global economy—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—and the imposition of massive foreign debt on poor countries. The authors explain in simple language, and ample use of graphics, the multiple contours of this exploitative system, its history, and how it continues to function in the present day. Ultimately, Toussaint and Millet advocate cancellation of all foreign debt for developing countries and provide arguments from a number of perspectives—legal, economic, moral. Presented in an accessible and easily—referenced question and answer format, Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank is an essential tool for the global justice movement. “As this fine study demonstrates, the debt that is strangling the world is largely an ideological fiction, devised in the service of wealth and power, without legitimacy or moral force. The authors unravel the layers of deceit and distortion that conceal the ugly reality with skill and precision, and provide an important tool for liberating the mass of suffering people who are caught in its shackles.” —Noam Chomsky
Kattan: From Coexistence to Conquest
Apr 12, 2011
From Coexistence to Conquest seeks to explain how the Arab-Israeli conflict developed by looking beyond strict legalism to the men behind the policies adopted by the Great Powers at the dawn of the twentieth century. It controversially argues that Zionism was adopted by the British Government in its 1917 Balfour Declaration primarily as an immigration device and that it can be traced back to the 1903 Royal Commission on Alien Immigration and the Alien’s Act 1905. The book contains the most detailed legal analysis of the 1915-6 Hussein-McMahon correspondence, as well as the Balfour Declaration, and takes a closer look at the travaux préparatoires that formed the British Mandate of Palestine. It places the violent reaction of the Palestine Arabs to mass Jewish immigration in the context of Zionism, highlighting the findings of several British commissions of inquiry which recommended that Britain abandon its policy. The book also revisits the controversies over the question of self-determination, and the partition of Palestine. The Chapter on the 1948 conflict seeks to update international lawyers on the scholarship of Israel’s ‘new’ historians and reproduces some of the horrific accounts of the atrocities that took place from newspaper reports, UN documents, and personal accounts, which saw the expulsion and exodus of almost an entire people from their homeland. The penultimate chapter argues that Israel was created through an act of conquest or subjugation. The book concludes with a sobering analysis of the conflict arguing that neither Jews nor Arabs were to blame for starting it.
Schram: Making Political Science Matter
Apr 08, 2011
An Inquiry on American political Science.
Street: The Empire's New Clothes
Apr 05, 2011
"The Empire's New Clothes is a hard-hittin, clear-eyed look at the reality of the Democrats in power and the Barack Obama presidency. Anyone who hoped for genuine change, and is disappointed that it has not come since 2008, should read this book and discuss how to rebuild a genuine social movement that end the occupatitons of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the tyrrany of capital over our lives and the planet" - Anthony Arnove
Marable: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Apr 04, 2011
Years in the making-the definitive biography of the legendary black activist. Of the great figure in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world. Manning Marable's new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties. Reaching into Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents' activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination. Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of the most singular forces for social change, capturing with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
Tokar: Toward Climate Justice
Mar 29, 2011
The call for Climate Justice promises a renewed grassroots response to the climate crisis. Drawing on more than three decades of political engagement with energy and climate issues, Brian Tokar shows how the perspective of social ecology can point the way toward an ecological reconstruction of society.
Milstein: Anarchism and Its Aspirations
Mar 23, 2011
From nineteenth-century newspaper publishers to the participants in the "battle of Seattle" and the recent Greek uprising, anarchists have been inspired by the ideal of a free society of free individuals-a world without hierarchy or domination.
Mackeen: Why You're Being Robbed
Mar 10, 2011
"All a fellow needs to know is he is robbed" - Miner Greely Clack
(Eds): Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta
Mar 10, 2011
This book analyses the causes, dynamics and politics underpinning oil-related violence in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria
