John McMillian: Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (2011)

How did the New Left uprising of the 1960s happen? What caused millions of young people-many of them affluent and college educated-to suddenly decide that American society needed to be completely overhauled?

In Smoking Typewriters, historian John McMillian shows that one answer to these questions can be found in the emergence of a dynamic underground press in the 1960s. Following the lead of papers like the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, and the Berkeley Barb, young people across the country launched hundreds of mimeographed pamphlets and flyers, small press magazines, and underground newspapers. New, cheaper printing technologies democratized the publishing process and by the decade’s end the combined circulation of underground papers stretched into the millions. Though not technically illegal, these papers were often genuinely subversive, and many of those who produced and sold them-on street-corners, at poetry readings, gallery openings, and coffeehouses-became targets of harassment from local and federal authorities. With writers who actively participated in the events they described, underground newspapers captured the zeitgeist of the ’60s, speaking directly to their readers, and reflecting and magnifying the spirit of cultural and political protest. McMillian pays special attention to the ways underground newspapers fostered a sense of community and played a vital role in shaping the New Left’s highly democratic “movement culture.”

Deeply researched and eloquently written, Smoking Typewriters captures all the youthful idealism and vibrant tumult of the 1960s as it delivers a brilliant reappraisal of the origins and development of the New Left rebellion.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0195319923, 9780195319927
304 pages

review (Dan Berger, International Journal of Communication)
review (Kirkus Reviews)
review (Russ Smith, The Wall Street Journal)
interview with the author (video, 48 min)

publisher
google books

Download

Susie Linfield: The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (2010)

In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare.

A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it—and to do that, we must begin to look.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 0226482529, 9780226482521
344 pages

review (Frances Richard, The Nation)
review (Sean O’Hagan, The Guardian)

publisher
google books

Download

Peter F. Drucker: Adventures of a Bystander (1978/1994)

Regarded as the most influential and widely read thinker on modern organizations and their management, Peter Drucker has also established himself as an unorthodox and independent analyst of politics, the economy, and society. Adventures of a Bystander is Drucker’s rich collection of autobiographical stories and vignettes, in which this legendary figure paints a portrait of his remarkable life, and of the larger historical realities of his time.

In a style that is both unique and engaging, Drucker conveys his life story – from his early teen years in Vienna through the interwar years in Europe, the New Deal era, World War II, and the postwar period in America-through intimate profiles of a host of fascinating people he’s known through the years. Their personal histories are, as Drucker tells us, the beads for which his own life serves as the string.

An amazing pageant of characters, both famous and otherwise, springs from these pages, illuminating and defining one of the most tumultuous periods in world history. Along with bankers and courtesans, artists, aristocrats, prophets, and empire-builders, we meet members of Drucker’s own family and close circle of friends, among them such prominent figures as Sigmund Freud, Henry Luce, Alfred Sloan, John Lewis, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan.

A brief encounter with Freud becomes the catalyst for an absorbing, multidimensional description of the economics, politics, and social psychology of pre-World War II Europe. Drucker introduces us to Fritz Kraemer, a brilliant, monocle-wearing eccentric who became an influential mentor to the young Henry Kissinger. His personal memoir of Henry Luce documents the development of modern journalism, while in “The Indian Summer of Innocence,” he rescues and preserves the very heart of the American experience during the last New Deal years before World War II.

Originally published in 1978 by Harper & Row, Publishers
Publisher Transaction Publishers, 1994
ISBN 1412814103, 9781412814102
344 pages

commentary (Michael Hohl)

publisher
google books

Download (EPUB)

Tom Nicholson: Gorila (2012) [Slovak]

Kniha Toma Nicholsona je pokusom o sondu do stavu spoločnosti.

O otázkach, ktoré priniesla Gorila, nediskutovali len zasvätené elity, ale jednotlivé okolnosti spomínané v tomto materiáli rozoberali občania s nástojčivou potrebou dozvedieť sa viac o spise a jeho pozadí. V rámci verejnej diskusie politickí lídri nedokázali presvedčivo komunikovať a odpovedať na najdôležitejšiu otázku zo strany verejnosti. Príslušné orgány dodnes nepredložili dôveryhodné výsledky vyšetrovania. Vlažné reakcie politikov priniesli obrovskú aktivitu médií, ktoré sa kauze venovali. Celý proces sprevádzala neistota na strane novinárov.

Materiál Gorila by mal byť spravodajský spis, o ktorom – zatiaľ nemôžu svedčiť jeho autori a tvorcovia, lebo nie sú zbavení mlčanlivosti. Príbeh, ktorý budete čítať, je podávaný subjektívne, z pohľadu autora. Nie je len o samotnom údajnom spise Gorila, ale aj o tom, ako spis vznikol, ako s ním narábal autor a ako reagovali politici či polícia. Je to príbeh, v ktorom nájdete gaunerov aj pozitívne ohlasy.

Tom Nicholson rieši dilemy a opisuje svoju novinársku cestu za overovaním autenticity tohto materiálu. Robí štandardnú novinársku prácu a je na čitateľovi, aby posúdil, či ju odviedol kvalitne, alebo nie. Táto kniha nevie jednoznačne doložiť autenticitu spisu Gorila a nie je ani jej ambíciou o tomto čitateľa presvedčiť.

Publisher Dixit, s.r.o., 2012
ISBN 9788097103910

spis Gorila, (záloha, TXT)
Od Fica do Fica (filmový dokument Zuzany Piussi, 80 min., 2012), režisérkin komentár

recenzia knihy (Tomáš Němeček, Lidové noviny)

wikipedia (Slovak)
wikipedia (English)
publisher

Download (PDF)
Download (EPUB)
Download (MOBI)

Stephen Harper: Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media (2012)

Attacking the cherished assumptions of liberal media criticism, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.

The ideological distortions of the conservative media, from Fox News to the Daily Mail, are widely acknowledged and often denounced among contemporary critics and commentators. But what if The Guardian newspaper and BBC news, in fact, constitute the most insidious forms of capitalist propaganda? In a wide-ranging and erudite polemic, Beyond the Left analyses capitalist news and current affairs media from a radical perspective. The book rejects the liberal and pluralist paradigms that often underpin critiques of the media, showing how media texts reflect and reinforce the material interests of the ruling class and arguing that the principal ideological menace today is posed not by the right wing, but by the left-liberal media, as it co-opts and obscures radical political positions and reinforces a range of mystifications, from anti-fascism and humanitarian war to green politics. Drawing on the work of radical media critics as well as the writings of revolutionary communist groups and considering the recent reporting of war, industrial action, immigration and the environment, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.

Publisher Zero Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2012
ISBN 1846949769, 9781846949760
114 pages

review (Laura Cooke, Socialist Review)

publisher
google books

Download

Vice Magazine: The Syria Issue (November 2012)

Special issue on Syrian civil war, featuring work of Robert King.

“VICE commissioned renowned war photographer and videographer Robert King to embed with the ragtag troops of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo, smack dab in the heart of a conflict that is ripping Syria apart. He returned with footage that has made us very scared and very sad for the future of the country. We’ve compiled Robert’s footage into a series of raw, largely unedited vignettes that present a snapshot of the ancient city as it crumbles and burns while its citizens are killed indiscriminately.” (Editors)

Vice Magazine, Volume 19, Number 11
Publisher John Martin, November 2012
148 pages

publisher

Download
View online (HTML)
View online (Issuu.com)

Tom Wolfe: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970)

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe’s fourth book of social commentary, consists of two devastatingly funny essays, closely related in theme and substance, dealing with political stances and social styles in a status-minded world. In “Radical Chic,” Wolfe describes an intriguing phenomenon of the late Sixties: the courting of romantic radicals-Black Panthers, striking grapeworkers, Young Lords-by New York’s socially elite. He focuses primarily on one symbolic event: the gathering of the radically chic at Leonard Bernstein’s duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party, to hear them out, and to talk over ways of aiding their cause. Tom Wolfe re-creates the incongruous scene-and its astonishing repercussions-with high fidelity. But he gives us more than just a wry account of life among the Beautiful People; he also provides a historical perspective on that impulse of the upper classes to identify themselves with what they imagine to be the raw, vital lifestyle of the lower orders.

In the companion essay, Wolfe travels west to San Francisco to survey another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment: the newly emerging art of confrontation developed by young blacks, Chicanos, Filipinos, Chinese, Indians, and Samoans in response to the bureaucracy that grew up in and around the poverty program. Wolfe’s account of the performances of such masters as the Mission Rebels, the Youth for the Future, and the New Thang, and the responses of the catchers of the flak, including the Mayor himself, makes for uproarious farce. But the points he makes about racial and ethnic game-playing in America’s class wars are inescapably valid.

Radical Chic article first published in the Jun 8, 1970 issue of New York
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970
ISBN 9780312429133

commentary (Michael Bracewell, Frieze)

wikipedia
author
publisher (reissued by Picador, 2009)

Download (no images, altered paging)
Download (original article, incl. images)
View online (original article, HTML)