Mark Crispin Miller – författare

Director of some of the most controversial films of the twentieth century, Stanley Kubrick created a reputation as a Hollywood outsider as well as a cinematic genius. His diverse yet relatively small oeuvre - he directed only thirteen films during a career that spanned more than four decades - covers a broad range of the themes that shaped his century and continues to shape the twenty-first: war and crime, gender relations and class conflict, racism, and the fate of individual agency in a world of increasing social surveillance and control. In ""Depth of Field"", leading screenwriters and scholars analyze Kubrick's films from a variety of perspectives. They examine such groundbreaking classics as ""Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey"" and later films whose critical reputations are still in flux. ""Depth of Field"" ends with three viewpoints on Kubrick's final film, ""Eyes Wide Shut"", placing it in the contexts of film history, the history and theory of psychoanalysis, and the sociology of sex and power. Probing Kubrick's whole body of work, ""Depth of Field"" is the first truly multidisciplinary study of one of the most innovative and controversial filmmakers of the twentieth century.

A look at the career and influence of the iconic American stripteaser, Gypsy Rose Lee. San Francisco Chronicle Editor's Choice"e;A satisfyingly short and smartly analytical study in which cultural commentary and biography are deftly woven together."e; Frances Wilson, Times Literary Supplement (UK)A true icon of America at a turning point in its history, Gypsy Rose Lee was the first and the only stripper to become a household name, write novels, and win the adulation of intellectuals, bankers, socialites, and ordinary Americans. Her outrageous blend of funny-smart sex symbol with the aura of high culture she boasted that she liked to read Great Books and listen to classical music while taking off her clothes on-stage inspired a musical, memoirs, a portrait by Max Ernst, and a species of rose. Gypsy is the first book about Gypsy Rose Lee's life, fame, and place in America not written by a family member, and it reveals her deep impact on the social and cultural transformations taking shape during her life. Rachel Shteir, author of the prize-winning Striptease, gives us Gypsy's story from her arrival in New York in 1931 to her sojourns in Hollywood, her friendships and rivalries with writers and artists, the Sondheim musical, family memoirs that retold her history in divergent ways, and a television biopic currently in the making. With verve, audacity, and native guile, Gypsy Rose Lee moved striptease from the margins of American life to Broadway, Hollywood, and Main Street. Gypsy tells how she did it, and why. "e;The best introductory book on the magnificent Gypsy Rose Lee, a woman whose name has come to connote the importance of the sexual gimmick and the eroticism of the undelivered promise."e; Toni Bentley, author of Sisters and Salome and The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir"e;The best kind of cultural biography and the most serious history to date of the burlesque and striptease tradition."e; Francine du Plessix Gray

Wall Street: no other place on earth is so singularly identified with money and the power of money. And no other American institution has inspired such deep moral, cultural, and political ambivalence. Is the Street an unbreachable bulwark defending commercial order? Or is it a center of mad ambition?This book recounts the colorful history of America's love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Steve Fraser frames his fascinating analysis around the roles of four iconic Wall Street types the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist all recurring figures who yield surprising insights about how the nation has wrestled, and still wrestles, with fundamental questions of wealth and work, democracy and elitism, greed and salvation. Spanning the years from the first Wall Street panic of 1792 to the dot.com bubble-and-bust and Enron scandals of our own time, the book is full of stories and portraits of such larger-than-life figures as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Michael Milken. Fraser considers the conflicting attitudes of ordinary Americans toward the Street and concludes with a brief rumination on the recent notion of Wall Street as a haven for Everyman.

A tough, evenhanded investigation of changing public perceptions of the Alger Hiss case and why it has served as a litmus test of American political loyalties for sixty yearsBooks on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have labored to uncover the facts behind Chambers’s shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948—that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage.In this highly original work, Susan Jacoby turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions. Unfettered by political ax-grinding, the author examines conflicting responses, from scholars and the media on both the left and the right, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present post–Cold War era. With a brisk, engaging style, Jacoby positions the case in the politics of the post–World War II era and then explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Chambers and Hiss to their own ideological uses. An iconic event of the McCarthy era, the case of Alger Hiss fascinates political intellectuals not only because of its historical significance but because of its timeless relevance to equally fierce debates today about the difficult balance between national security and respect for civil liberties.

A revealing portrait of Gypsy Rose Lee, the “Striptease Intellectual” of 1930s burlesque  A true icon of America at a turning point in its history, Gypsy Rose Lee was the first—and the only—stripper to become a household name, write novels, and win the adulation of intellectuals, bankers, socialites, and ordinary Americans. Her outrageous blend of funny-smart sex symbol with the aura of high culture—she boasted that she liked to read Great Books and listen to classical music while taking off her clothes on-stage—inspired a musical, memoirs, a portrait by Max Ernst, and a species of rose. Gypsy is the first book about Gypsy Rose Lee’s life, fame, and place in America not written by a family member, and it reveals her deep impact on the social and cultural transformations taking shape during her life.  Rachel Shteir, author of the prize-winning Striptease, gives us Gypsy’s story from her arrival in New York in 1931 to her sojourns in Hollywood, her friendships and rivalries with writers and artists, the Sondheim musical, family memoirs that retold her history in divergent ways, and a television biopic currently in the making. With verve, audacity, and native guile, Gypsy Rose Lee moved striptease from the margins of American life to Broadway, Hollywood, and Main Street. Gypsy tells how she did it, and why.

This “fascinating, engaging” history of St. Louis’s monument to American expansion reveals a story of greed, discrimination, and community displacement (NextSTL.com).   Rising to a triumphant height of 630 feet, the Gateway Arch is one of the world’s most widely recognized structures and attracts millions of tourists to St. Louis every year. Envisioned in 1947 but not completed until the mid-1960s, its story is one of innovation and greed; civic pride and backroom deals. Weaving together social, political, and cultural perspectives, historian Tracy Campbell uncovers the complicated and troubling history of this iconic symbol.   In this revealing account, Campbell shows that the so-called Gateway to the West was the scheme of shrewd city leaders who were willing to steal an election, destroy historic buildings, and drive out communities in order to make downtown St. Louis more profitable. Campbell also tells the human story of the architect Eero Saarinen, whose prize-winning design brought him acclaim but also charges of plagiarism, and who didn’t live to see the completion of his vision.

The Bush Dyslexicon is a raucously funny ride—whether it's Bush envisioning "a foreign-handed foreign policy" or Miller skewering vociferous cultural conservatives like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney for their silence on Bush's particular "West Texas version of Ebonics." But there is also a strong undercurrent of outrage. Only because our elections have become so dependent on television and its emphatic emptiness, says Miller, could a man of such sublime and complacent ignorance assume the highest office in the land.

Read a newspaper or catch the news on television and you might get the impression that America's current leadership is "mainstream": perhaps a bit more conservative and in its foreign policy more belligerent than its predecessors, but still a federal authority that functions within America's political traditions. But as Mark Crispin Miller argues here with great clarity and effect, we are in fact living in a state that would appall the Founding Fathers: a state that is neither democratic nor republican, and no more "conservative" than it is liberal. He exposes the Bush Republicans' contempt for democratic practice, their bullying religiosity, their reckless militarism, their apocalyptic views of the economy and the planet, and—above all—their emotional dependence on sheer hatefulness. Abraham Lincoln once observed that, if the United States should ever be subverted, "it will be conquered from within." And that is exactly what has happened.

The bestselling author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy offers his most provocative and funniest book yet! Greg Palast has spent the last thirty years getting the goods on corporate con men and political hucksters. Now he and his special guests cut through the TV news babytalk in Armed Madhouse. Armed with more than fifty classified documents and confidential memos, Palast brings you the stories not allowed in The New York Times, including: Before invading, George Bush didn''t have a secret plan to seize Iraq''s oil -- he had two. Palast shows you both. In "Who''s Afraid of Osama Wolf?," Palast reveals the horror and humor of the War on Terror. In "The Network," Palast gives you the skinny on the new global order -- and pushes Thomas Friedman over the edge of his Flat World. It was Palast, for BBC TV, who first uncovered how Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris stole Election 2000. Now he tells you that Kerry won in 2004 -- and that 2008 is already fixed. Who drowned New Orleans? Palast names names -- and adds some suggestions for fighting the new Class War. Greg Palast speaks truth to power the only way you can -- by letting the facts speak for themselves. Get the straight story on what today''s self-appointed Masters of the Universe have in store for you.

Award-winning journalist Gerard Colby takes readers behind the scenes of one of America’s most powerful and enduring corporations; now with a new introduction by the author Their name is everywhere. America’s wealthiest industrial family by far and a vast financial power, the Du Ponts, from their mansions in northern Delaware’s “Chateau Country,” have long been leaders in the relentless drive to turn the United States into a plutocracy. The Du Pont story in this country began in 1800. Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, official keeper of the gunpowder of corrupt King Louis XVI, fled from revolutionary France to America. Two years later he founded the gunpowder company that called itself “America’s armorer”—and that President Wilson’s secretary of war called a “species of outlaws” for war profiteering. Du Pont Dynasty introduces many colorful characters, including “General” Henry du Pont, who profited from the Civil War to build the Gunpowder Trust, one of the first corporate monopolies; Alfred I. du Pont, betrayed by his cousins and pushed out of the organization, landing in social exile as the powerful “Count of Florida”; the three brothers who expanded Du Pont’s control to General Motors, fought autoworkers’ right to unionize, and then launched a family tradition of waging campaigns to destroy FDR’s New Deal regulatory reforms; Governor Pete du Pont, who ran for president and backed Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican Revolution; and Irving S. Shapiro, the architect of Du Pont’s ongoing campaign to undermine effective environmental regulation. From plans to force President Roosevelt from office, to munitions sales to warlords and the rising Nazis, to Freon’s damage to the planet’s life-protecting ozone layer, to the manufacture of deadly gases and the covered-up poisoning of Du Pont workers, to the reputation the company earned for being the worst polluter of America’s air and water, the Du Pont reign has been dappled with scandal for centuries. Culled from years of painstaking research and interviews, this fully documented book unfolds like a novel. Laying bare the bitter feuds, power plays, smokescreens, and careless unaccountability that erupted in murder, Colby pulls back the curtain on a dynasty whose formidable influence continues to this day. Suppressed in myriad ways and the subject of the author’s landmark federal lawsuit, Du Pont Dynasty is an essential history of the United States.

The story of how the richest city in the world became one of the poorest in North America, with a new introduction by Peter Kwong How did New York City come to be a network of steel towers, banks, and nail salons, with chain drugstores on every block—a place where, increasingly, no one can afford to live except the lords of Wall Street and foreign billionaires, and where more and more of the Big Apple’s best-loved businesses have closed their doors? It didn’t start with Michael Bloomberg—or with Robert Moses. As Robert Fitch meticulously demonstrates in this eye-opening book, the planning to assassinate New York began a century ago, as the city’s very richest few—the Morgans, the Mellons, and especially the Rockefellers—looked for ways to maximize the value of their real estate by pushing Gotham’s vibrant and astonishingly varied manufacturing sector out of town, and with it, the city’s working class.The Assassination of New York attacks a Goliath-like enemy: the real-estate developers who maintain a stranglehold on the city’s most valuable commodity. Their efforts to increase land value by replacing low-rent workers and factories with high-rent professionals and office buildings was one of the single most decisive factors in the city’s downturn. In the 1980s the number of real-estate vacancies eclipsed that of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. In September of 1992 there was a staggering twenty-five million square feet of empty office space. Are the city’s problems fixable? How will the future of New York play out through the twenty-first century? Fitch comes up with solutions, from saving jobs to promoting economic diversity to rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure. But it will take vision and hard work to restore New York to what it once was while creating a new and better home for coming generations.

A shocking exposé of widespread corruption and mob influence throughout the National Football League—on the field, in the owners’ boxes, and in the corporate suitesAccording to investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, for decades the National Football League has had a strong and unspoken understanding with a dangerous institution: organized crime. In his classic exposé, Interference, Moldea bares the dark, sordid underbelly of America’s favorite professional team sport, revealing a nest of corruption that the league has largely ignored since its inception.Based on intensive research and in-depth interviews with coaches, players, mobsters, bookies, gamblers, referees, and league officials—including some of the sport’s all-time greats—the author’s shocking allegations suggest that the betting line is firmly in the hands of the mob, who occasionally manipulate the on-field action for maximum profit. Interference chronicles a long-standing history of gambling, drugs, and extortion, of point-shaving and game-fixing, and reveals the eye-opening truth about numerous gridiron contests where the final results were determined even before the kickoff. Moldea exposes the mob connections of many of the team owners and their startling complicity in illegal gambling operations, while showing how NFL internal security has managed to quash nearly every investigation into illegality and corruption within the professional football world before it could get off the ground. Provocative, disturbing, and controversial, Interference is a must-read for football fans and detractors alike, offering indisputable proof that what’s really happening on the field, in the locker room, and behind the scenes is a whole different ball game.

A shocking exposé of widespread corruption and mob influence throughout the National Football League—on the field, in the owners’ boxes, and in the corporate suitesAccording to investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, for decades the National Football League has had a strong and unspoken understanding with a dangerous institution: organized crime. In his classic exposé, Interference, Moldea bares the dark, sordid underbelly of America’s favorite professional team sport, revealing a nest of corruption that the league has largely ignored since its inception.Based on intensive research and in-depth interviews with coaches, players, mobsters, bookies, gamblers, referees, and league officials—including some of the sport’s all-time greats—the author’s shocking allegations suggest that the betting line is firmly in the hands of the mob, who occasionally manipulate the on-field action for maximum profit. Interference chronicles a long-standing history of gambling, drugs, and extortion, of point-shaving and game-fixing, and reveals the eye-opening truth about numerous gridiron contests where the final results were determined even before the kickoff. Moldea exposes the mob connections of many of the team owners and their startling complicity in illegal gambling operations, while showing how NFL internal security has managed to quash nearly every investigation into illegality and corruption within the professional football world before it could get off the ground. Provocative, disturbing, and controversial, Interference is a must-read for football fans and detractors alike, offering indisputable proof that what’s really happening on the field, in the locker room, and behind the scenes is a whole different ball game.

“This shocking expose of the CIA operation aimed at destroying the Vietcong infrastructure thoroughly conveys the hideousness of the Vietnam War” (Publishers Weekly). In the darkest days of the Vietnam War, America’s Central Intelligence Agency secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the “Viet Cong.” The victims of the Phoenix Program were Vietnamese civilians, male and female, suspected of harboring information about the enemy—though many on the blacklist were targeted by corrupt South Vietnamese security personnel looking to extort money or remove a rival. Between 1965 and 1972, more than eighty thousand noncombatants were “neutralized,” as men and women alike were subjected to extended imprisonment without trial, horrific torture, brutal rape, and in many cases execution, all under the watchful eyes of US government agencies. Based on extensive research and in-depth interviews with former participants and observers, Douglas Valentine’s startling exposé blows the lid off of what was possibly the bloodiest and most inhumane covert operation in the CIA’s history. The ebook edition includes “The Phoenix Has Landed,” a new introduction that addresses the “Phoenix-style network” that constitutes America’s internal security apparatus today. Residents on American soil are routinely targeted under the guise of protecting us from terrorism—which is why, more than ever, people need to understand what Phoenix is all about.

This eye-opening look at the abortion process prior to the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 is now more relevant than ever, with a new introduction by the author revisiting history that is still salient half a century laterIn the years before Roe v. Wade, women seeking to end their unwanted pregnancies had limited options—many of them dangerous, even potentially fatal, and nearly all of them illegal. This groundbreaking work by sociologist Nancy Howell Lee, first published in 1969, takes an intimate look at the entire abortion process—from the initial decision to terminate a pregnancy through the procedure itself and the aftermath—providing an incomparable view of what is still one of the most controversial and divisive issues in America. Based on interviews with one hundred fourteen women who had illegal abortions, Howell Lee’s book reveals how the abortions were procured and paid for, and looks at the lasting effects the experience had on the participants. The interviewees were open and honest about what influenced their decisions, how they conducted their search for someone to perform the procedure, and the physical and emotional aftereffects. With many state governments across America currently passing new legislation that restricts and, in many cases, effectively bans abortion, an eventual return to the pre-Roe days threatens the well-being of millions of women, making Nancy Howell Lee’s pioneering study more relevant than ever. It is a must-read for all those interested in reproductive rights issues.

An acclaimed classic detailing the economic history of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and exposing the capitalist giants who changed the worldFrederick Lewis Allen’s insightful financial history of the United States—from the late 1800s through the stock market collapse of 1929—remains a seminal work on what brought on America’s worst economic disaster: the Great Depression. In the decades following the Civil War, America entered an era of unprecedented corporate expansion, with ultimate financial power in the hands of a few wealthy industrialists who exploited the capitalist system for everything it was worth. The Rockefellers, Fords, Morgans, and Vanderbilts were the “lords of creation” who, along with like-minded magnates, controlled the economic destiny of the country, unrestrained by regulations or moral imperatives. Through a combination of foresight, ingenuity, ruthlessness, and greed, America’s giants of industry remolded the US economy in their own preferred image. In so doing, they established their absolute power and authority, ensuring that they—and they alone—would control the means of production, transportation, energy, and commerce—thereby setting the stage for the most devastating global financial collapse in history.As Gretchen Morgenson thoughtfully states in her introduction, “It is not immediately clear why the frequency and severity of financial scandals is increasing in the United States. What is clear is that we need to understand the origins of these disasters, as well as the policies and people that bring them on. . . . While distant actions may seem unrelated to current events, rereading about the past almost always provides surprising insights into the present.”The Lords of Creation, first published in the midst of the Great Depression, when the financial catastrophe was still painfully fresh, is a fascinating story of bankers, railroad tycoons, steel magnates, speculators, scoundrels, and robber barons. It is a tale of innovation and shocking exploitation—and a sobering reminder that history can indeed repeat itself. 

A searing account of a dark “chapter in U.S. Cold War history . . . to help the anti-Soviet aims of American intelligence and national security agencies” (Library Journal). Even before the final shots of World War II were fired, another war began—a cold war that pitted the United States against its former ally, the Soviet Union. As the Soviets consolidated power in Eastern Europe, the CIA scrambled to gain the upper hand against new enemies worldwide. To this end, senior officials at the CIA, National Security Council, and other elements of the emerging US national security state turned to thousands of former Nazis, Waffen Secret Service, and Nazi collaborators for propaganda, psychological warfare, and military operations. Many new recruits were clearly responsible for the deaths of countless innocents as part of Adolph Hitler’s “Final Solution,” yet were whitewashed and claimed to be valuable intelligence assets. Unrepentant mass murderers were secretly accepted into the American fold, their crimes forgotten and forgiven with the willing complicity of the US government.Blowback is the first thorough, scholarly study of the US government’s extensive recruitment of Nazis and fascist collaborators right after the war. Although others have approached the topic since, Simpson’s book remains the essential starting point. The author demonstrates how this secret policy of collaboration only served to intensify the Cold War and has had lasting detrimental effects on the American government and society that endure to this day.

“A great journalist” raises troubling questions about the forgotten war in this courageous, controversial book—with a new introduction by Bruce Cumings (The Baltimore Sun). “Much about the Korean War is still hidden, and much will long remain hidden. I believe I have succeeded in throwing new light on its origins.” —From the author’s preface In 1945 US troops arrived in Korea for what would become America’s longest-lasting conflict. While history books claim without equivocation that the war lasted from 1950 to 1953, those who have actually served there know better. By closely analyzing US intelligence before June 25, 1950 (the war’s official start), and the actions of key players like John Foster Dulles, General Douglas MacArthur, and Chiang Kai-shek, the great investigative reporter I. F. Stone demolishes the official story of America’s “forgotten war” by shedding new light on the tangled sequence of events that led to it. The Hidden History of the Korean War was first published in 1952—during the Korean War—and then republished during the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, documents from the former Soviet archives became available, further illuminating this controversial period in history.

In war-torn Greece, the murder of a young American reporter sent a shock through the West and set the stage for the four-decade Cold War; now with a new introduction by the author Greece in 1948 was a country reeling from two major conflicts. The Nazi occupation and World War II had left it weakened, and the Greek Civil War—already raging for two years—had torn it apart. One of the earliest clashes of the Cold War, Greece’s civil dispute pitted the American-backed royalist government against the Soviet-funded Greek Communist Party. Reporting at the front lines for CBS News, George Polk drew the ire of both sides with his uncompromising and incisive coverage. In mid-May, days after going missing, Polk was found dead, shot execution style with his hands and feet bound. What transpired next was a mad scramble of finger pointing and international outrage. To appease its American backers, the Greek government quickly secured the dubious confession of a Communist journalist—though the bulk of the evidence pointed to the royalists. An influential moment in the early days of the Cold War and a powerful force in the formation of the Truman Doctrine, the Polk conspiracy was emblematic of the ideological conflict that would embroil the globe for the next forty years.

A provocative and eye-opening study of the essential role the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency played in the advancement of communication studies during the Cold War era, now with a new introduction by Robert W. McChesney and a new preface by the author Since the mid-twentieth century, the great advances in our knowledge about the most effective methods of mass communication and persuasion have been visible in a wide range of professional fields, including journalism, marketing, public relations, interrogation, and public opinion studies. However, the birth of the modern science of mass communication had surprising and somewhat troubling midwives: the military and covert intelligence arms of the US government. In this fascinating study, author Christopher Simpson uses long-classified documents from the Pentagon, the CIA, and other national security agencies to demonstrate how this seemingly benign social science grew directly out of secret government-funded research into psychological warfare. It reveals that many of the most respected pioneers in the field of communication science were knowingly complicit in America’s Cold War efforts, regardless of their personal politics or individual moralities, and that their findings on mass communication were eventually employed for the purposes of propaganda, subversion, intimidation, and counterinsurgency. An important, thought-provoking work, Science of Coercion shines a blazing light into a hitherto remote and shadowy corner of Cold War history.

Edgar Award Finalist: The gripping account of an assassination on US soil and the violent foreign conspiracy that stretched from Pinochet’s Chile to the streets of Washington, DC, with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman. On September 10, 1976, exiled Chilean leader Orlando Letelier delivered a blistering rebuke of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal right-wing regime in a speech at Madison Square Garden. Eleven days later, while Letelier was on Embassy Row in Washington, DC, a bomb affixed to the bottom of his car exploded, killing him and his coworker Ronni Moffitt. The slaying, staggering in its own right, exposed an international conspiracy that reached well into US territory. Pinochet had targeted Letelier, a former Chilean foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, and carried out the attack with the help of Operation Condor, the secret alliance of South America’s military dictatorships dedicated to wiping out their most influential opponents. This gripping account tells the story not only of a political plot that ended in murder, but also of the FBI’s inquiry into the affair. Definitive in its examination both of Letelier’s murder and of the subsequent investigations carried out by American intelligence, Assassination on Embassy Row is equal parts keen analysis and true-life spy thriller.

A veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency unmasks its culture of lethal lies in this devastating exposé, now with a new foreword by David MacMichael. Ralph W. McGehee was a patriot, dedicated to the American way of life and the international fight against Communism. Following his graduation with honors from Notre Dame, McGehee was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1952 and quickly became an able and enthusiastic cold warrior. Stationed in Southeast Asia in the mid-1960s, he worked to stem the Communist tide that was sweeping through the region, first in Thailand and later in Vietnam. But despite his notable successes in reversing enemy influence among the local peasants and villagers, McGehee found himself increasingly alienated from a company culture built on deceit and wholesale manipulation of the truth. While his country was being pulled deeper and deeper into the Vietnam quagmire, McGehee awoke to a chilling reality: The CIA was not a gatherer of actual intelligence to be employed in a legitimate war against dangerous enemies, but a tool of the president’s foreign-policy staff designed solely to stifle the truth and fabricate “facts” that supported the agency’s often immoral agenda. With courage and candor, Ralph McGehee illuminates the CIA’s dark catalog of misdeeds in his stunning, no-holds-barred memoir of a life in the service of deception. Startling, eye-opening, and infuriating, Deadly Deceits is an honest and unflinching insider’s look at a toxic government agency that the author cogently argues has no useful purpose and no moral right to exist.

A look at corporate authoritarianism that William Shirer called “the best thing I’ve ever seen on how America might go fascist democratically.” In 1980, US capitalist politics wore a “nice-guy mask,” a troubling disguise to cover up a creeping despotism in which the ultra-rich and corporate overseers were merging with a centralized state power in order to manage the populace. This immanent corporate authoritarianism threatened to subvert constitutional democracy. But unlike the violent and sudden usurpations that led to fascism in the days of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese empire builders, this new “smiling” American breed of fascism was gaining ground through gradual and silent infringements on the freedoms of the American people.   First published over three decades ago, Friendly Fascism is uncannily predictive of the threats and realities of current political and economic power trends. Author Bertram Gross, a presidential adviser during the New Deal era, traces the history and logic of declining democracy in First World countries and pinpoints capitalist transnational growth and inappropriate responses to global crises as the sources of late twentieth-century despotism in America. Gross issues ever-urgent warnings about what happens when big business and big government become bedfellows—chronic inflation, recurring recession, overt and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of the environment—and simultaneously proffers a practical shift of perspective that could help US citizens build a truer democracy. He imagines an America in which heroes are no longer needed and the leadership is a group of non-elitists who “recognize the ignorance of the wise as well as the wisdom of the ignorant.”  

The definitive portrait of the powerful, corruption-ridden Teamsters union and its legendary president, Jimmy Hoffa—organizer, gangster, convict, and conspirator—with a new afterword by the author James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa was one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in twentieth-century America. His remarkable journey from young union organizer to all-powerful head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters is an epic tale worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, jam-packed with intrigue, subterfuge, violence, and corruption. His successes were monumental, his fall truly spectacular, and his bizarre disappearance in the summer of 1975 remains one of the great mysteries in American history. Widely considered to be the definitive volume on the career and crimes of Jimmy Hoffa, The Hoffa Wars, by acclaimed investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, is an eye-opening, extensively researched account of the steady rise and fall of an ingenious, ambitious man who was instrumental in transforming a small union of seventy-five thousand truckers into the most powerful labor brotherhood in world. Shocking disclosures in Moldea’s no-holds-barred account include the devil’s bargain that put Hoffa and his union in the pockets of the Mob, Hoffa’s role in the joint CIA-Mafia plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the deal Hoffa made with US president Richard Nixon that released the disgraced Teamster president from prison eight years early, and the truth behind Hoffa’s eventual disappearance and likely murder. But perhaps the most startling revelation of all concerns the integral part Jimmy Hoffa played, in concert with underworld kingpins Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante, in America’s most terrible twentieth-century crime: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A moving and unforgettable eyewitness account of the courageous exodus of Holocaust survivors from post–World War II Europe to the Promised Land, now expanded with Stone’s frontline reporting on the Arab-Israeli crises of 1948–49 and the Suez War of 1956, and with a new foreword by D. D. Guttenplan In the spring of 1946, American journalist I. F. Stone embarked on an incredible adventure, accompanying Holocaust survivors as they made their historic voyage from Eastern Europe to the biblical Promised Land. Undertaken in secrecy against the strict orders of Palestine’s British colonial governors, this harrowing escape began in the displaced persons camps of Germany and Poland. An illegal convoy of the homeless, proud, and determined, these refugees traveled by train and by foot across the European continent before boarding the ship that would carry them past the British blockade to their ancient, ancestral home. No account of the historic twentieth-century exodus is as poignant, powerful, exhilarating, and dramatic as this acclaimed first-person narrative. Through the words of author I. F. Stone, one of America’s most provocative and revered investigative reporters, these courageous men, women, and children live again. Largely implicit but nevertheless unyielding is Stone’s belief in a binational Arab-Jewish state, a creed unacceptable to the Zionist movement of the time. Included are essays written in the years following Israel’s establishment, reflecting on the state of the newly reborn nation and the volatile situation in the Middle East thirty years beyond the establishment of Mandatory Palestine. Caught between the immediate, innate sense of belonging he felt in Palestine and his own developing critique of Zionism, Stone wrote into each of these works a personal struggle, a question of justice unsolved today. With a new introduction by D. D. Guttenplan, this edition reveals a perspective indispensable to understanding past and present tensions in the Middle East.

A classic work advocating ecological urban planning—from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker. Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to “rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation.” First published in 1938, this radical investigation into the human environment is based on firsthand surveys of North American and European locales, as well as extensive historical and technological research. Mumford takes readers from the compact, worker-friendly streets of medieval hamlets to the symmetrical neoclassical avenues of Renaissance cities. He studies the squalor of nineteenth-century factory towns and speculates on the fate of the booming twentieth-century Megalopolis—whose impossible scale, Mumford believes, can only lead to its collapse into a “Nekropolis,” a monstrosity of living death.   A civic visionary, Mumford is credited with some of the earliest proposals for ecological urban planning and the appropriate use of technology to create balanced living environments. In the final chapters of The Culture of Cities, he outlines possible paths toward utopian future cities that could be free of the stressors of the Megalopolis, in sync with the rhythms of daily life, powered by clean energy, integrated with agricultural regions, and full of honest and comfortable housing for the working class. The principles set forth by these visions, once applied to Nazi-occupied Europe’s razed cities, are still relevant today as technological advances and overpopulation change the nature of urban life.  

A disturbing chronicle of the US government’s mistreatment of American soldiers and veterans throughout history, with a new introduction by Charles Sheehan-Miles Time and time again, the sacrifices made by veterans and their families have been repaid with scorn, discrimination, lack of health services, scant financial compensation, and other indignities. This injustice dates back as far as the American Revolution, when troops came home penniless and without prospects for work, yet had to wait decades before the government paid them the wages they were owed. When soldiers returned from the Cuban campaign after the Spanish-American War, they were riddled with malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, and dysentery—but the government refused to acknowledge their illnesses, and finally dumped them in a makeshift tent city on Long Island, where they were left to starve and die.   Perhaps the most infamous case of disgraceful behavior toward veterans happened after the Vietnam War, when soldiers were forced to battle bureaucrats and lawyers, and suffer media slander, because they asked the government and chemical industry to help them cope with the toxic aftereffects of Agent Orange. In The Wages of War, authors Richard Severo and Lewis Milford not only uncover new information about the controversial use of this defoliant in Vietnam and the subsequent class action suit brought against its manufacturers, but also present fresh information on every war in US history. The result is exhaustive proof that—save for the treatment of soldiers in the aftermath of World War II—the government’s behavior towards American servicemen has been more like that of “a slippery insurance company than a policy rooted in the idea of justice and fair reward.”    

A scathing attack on Wall Street’s illegal ties to Nazi Germany before WWII—and the postwar whitewashing of Nazi business leaders by the US government Prior to World War II, German industry was controlled by an elite group who had used their money and influence to help bring the Nazi Party to power. After the Allies had successfully occupied Germany and removed the Third Reich, the process of reconstructing the devastated nation’s economy began under supervision of the US government. James Stewart Martin, who had assisted the Allied forces in targeting key areas of German industry for aerial bombardment, returned to Germany as the director of the Division for Investigation of Cartels and External Assets in American Military Government, a position he held until 1947. Martin was to break up the industrial machine these cartels controlled and investigate their ties to Wall Street. What he discovered was shocking.   Many American corporations had done business with German corporations who helped fund the Nazi Party, despite knowing what their money was supporting. Effectively, Wall Street’s greed had led them to aid Hitler and hinder the Allied effort. Martin’s efforts at decartelization were unsuccessful though, largely due to hindrance from his superior officer, an investment banker in peacetime. In conclusion, he said, “We had not been stopped in Germany by German business. We had been stopped in Germany by American business.”   This exposé on economic warfare, Wall Street, and America’s military industrial complex includes a new introduction by Christopher Simpson, author of Blowback:America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy, and a new foreword from investigative journalist Hank Albarelli.