John Grisham's latest thriller, The Appeal, is chilling. Corporate polluters attempt to buy a seat on Mississippi's State Supreme Court in order to overturn a jury verdict that has awarded victims of the company's negligent actions millions of dollars.

The far reaching financial crisis which began in August 2007, Horne contends, encourages the foreign creditors of the U.S. to turn their dollars into “investment funds” to in effect acquire U.S. assets. This in a truly remarkable role reversal leads to U.S. private firms being controlled by foreign governments.

I must say that I looked forward to reading this book. I have met Howard Zinn many times over the years and have had enormous respect for him. I have used his Peoples History of the United States as a basic text in a course on the history of American Radicalism for many years.

Harman believes that there is an essential logic to the apparently bewildering confusion of history. For instance, he answers a question that has always puzzled me.

Marda Dunsky’s book Pens and Swords presents a very strong, well-referenced argument illuminating the bias within American media reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The gripping drama of the skillfully written narrative in The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff reveals a generally untold angle of the civil rights movement: the press that covered it. Roberts is a veteran of the New York Times cadre of civil rights reporters, and Klibanoff is a Southern reporter.

Economists…some so intent on their money, not able to truly release themselves from their fundamental neoliberal values, afraid to admit that many of the policies they are advocating fall squarely into the rubric of "socialism."

The pictures arrive at first in the sad multi-tones of greys, the ever-present grey concrete walls of the narrow alleys of the refugee camp, the shadows and lines on faces, the abstract shadows of wire and fence on concrete, and the loom of the Wall that separates the camp from its outlying fields.

An excellent work, Muqtada ends off right where current events pick up with the recent Iraqi army attacks ordered by Nuri al-Maliki in southern Iraq, Basra in particular.

We waited breathless. Breathing heavily was hazardous under these somewhat exceptional circumstances. The army, my father often advised, was sensitive to the slightest movements or sounds, including a whisper, a cough, or God forbid, a sneeze.

Shortly after Richard Wright's passing in 1960, Julia Wright found hidden in her father's papers the manuscript for A Father's Law, the last unfinished novel by the iconic American novelist.

Isabel Allende's first and most famous novel, The House of the Spirits, is a family saga that also conveys an atmosphere of workers' struggle against the tyranny of the Chilean landowners.

The concept of empire has been discussed quite rigorously by various authors since the advent of the Bush administration, with views ranging from neocon jingoism through more academic apologists to those berating empire for the ills of the world.

Historian and contributing editor of Political Affairs, Gerald Horne has a new book titled Blows Against Empire, a series of nine powerful essays on contemporary crisis of U.S. imperialism as it confronts the world.

Unsurprisingly, author Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA veteran responsible for drafting the notorious US rendition program, frequently quotes Machiavelli in his devastating predictions of the chaotic road to US suicide.

“Ordinary” racism distinguishes several races within the human race, and affirms the superiority of one of them (usually the white race) over the others. This racism has been used to “justify” social inequalities and colonial domination.

Every now and then a "prize" of a book comes along that includes all the elements of good writing. Bad Samaritans is one of them. Using straightforward language that generally avoids using the lexicon of economists, and explains it well when it is used, Ha-Joon Chang writes a strong narrative about the ills of the capitalist world.

I was disappointed that Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for "There Will Be Blood," not because he's not a great actor (he is), but because the movie was such a betrayal of the book on which it was based.

April 29th of this year will mark the 25th anniversary of the inauguration of Harold Washington as Chicago's first African American mayor. That extraordinary moment in the life of Chicago is being celebrated with the beautiful and powerfully written book of photographs titled Harold!: Photographs from the Harold Washington Years

In this wonderfully written work, Jonathan Schell reviews the history of the doomsday weapons that have affected all our lives to a significant degree whether we realize it or not.