Carl Freedman: The Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · history, liberalism, marxism, politics, psychoanalysis, united states
Applies Marxism and psychoanalysis to the study of American politics. In America, every age is the Age of Nixon.
The fundamental argument of this book is, first, that Richard Nixon, though not generally regarded as a charismatic or emotionally outgoing politician like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, did establish profound psychic connections with the American people, connections that can be detected both in the brilliant electoral success that he enjoyed for most of his career and in his ultimate defeat during the Watergate scandal; and, second and even more important, that these connections are symptomatic of many of the most important currents in American life. The book is not just a work of political history or political biography but a study of cultural power: that is, a study in the ways that culture shapes our politics and frames our sense of possibilities and values. In its application of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and other theoretical tools to the study of American electoral politics, and in a way designed for the general as well as for the academic reader, it is a new kind of book.
Publisher Zero Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2012
ISBN 1846949432, 9781846949432
295 pages
commentary (Steven Shaviro)
PDF (EPUB)
Comment (0)Jeremy Scahill: Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007/2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · afghanistan, iraq, military, politics, united states, war on terror
On September 16, 2007, machine gun fire erupted in Baghdad’s Nisour Square leaving seventeen Iraqi civilians dead, among them women and children. The shooting spree, labeled “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday,” was neither the work of Iraqi insurgents nor U.S. soldiers. The shooters were private forces working for the secretive mercenary company, Blackwater Worldwide.
This is the explosive story of a company that rose a decade ago from Moyock, North Carolina, to become one of the most powerful players in the “War on Terror.” In his gripping bestseller, award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill takes us from the bloodied streets of Iraq to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans to the chambers of power in Washington, to expose Blackwater as the frightening new face of the U.S. war machine.
First published in 2007
Revised and updated edition
Publisher Nation Books, 2008
ISBN 156858394X, 9781568583945
550 pages
interview with the author (WeAreChange.org, 14 November 2012)
interview with the author (Democracy Now!, 2009)
Scahill’s speech at the Miami Book Fair (2008)
interview with the author (PBS, 2007)
interview with the author (Democracy Now!, 2007)
David E. Nye: When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · electricity, fail, light, technology, united states
Where were you when the lights went out? At home during a thunderstorm? Preparing for air attack in World War II? In the Northeast in 1965, when the power failed from Toronto to the East coast? In New York City during a similar but more frightening blackout in 1977? In California when rolling blackouts hit in 2000? In 2003, when a cascading power failure left fifty million people in Canada and in the northeastern United States without electricity? We often remember vividly our time in the dark. In When the Lights Went Out, David Nye views power outages in America from 1935 to the present not simply as technical failures but variously as military tactic, social disruption, crisis in the networked city, outcome of political and economic decisions, sudden encounter with sublimity, and memories enshrined in photographs. Our electrically lit-up life is so natural to us that when the lights go off, the darkness seems abnormal.
Nye looks at America’s development of its electrical grid, which made large-scale power failures possible; military blackouts before and during the Second World War (“The silence was the big surprise of the blackout, the darkness discounted,” wrote Harold Ross in the New Yorker in 1942); New York City’s contrasting 1965 and 1977 blackout experiences (the first characterized by cooperation, the second by looting and disorder); the growth in consumer demand that led to rolling blackouts made worse by energy traders’ market manipulations; blackouts caused by terrorist attacks and sabotage; and, finally, the “greenout” (exemplified by the new tradition of “Earth Hour”), the voluntary reduction organized by environmental organizations.
Blackouts, writes Nye, are breaks in the flow of social time that reveal much about the trajectory of American history. Each time one occurs, Americans confront their essential condition–not as isolated individuals, but as a community that increasingly binds itself together with electrical wires and signals.
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 0262013746, 9780262013741
304 pages