Politics

On the Edge of the New Century is the sequel to Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, a book of serious and challenging historical analysis that became a worldwide bestseller, now in paperback. Hobsbawm’s latest book continues his “magisterial” (The New York Times Book Review) analysis of the twentieth century, and asks crucial questions about our inheritance from a century of conflict and its meaning for our future.

Looking back over the last decade, Hobsbawm finds the distinction between internal and international conflicts and between the state of war and the state of peace disappearing as the crisis of the multiethnic state deepens and nations emerge from colonialism and nuclear terror. He assesses the impact that a popular global culture has had on every aspect of life, from happiness and social hierarchy to nutrition and the environment.

The War on the Poor counters attacks on the poor in the same lively, accessible style that made The New Field Guide to the U.S. Economy a cult classic. Using charts, graphs, and political cartoons, The War on the Poor presents topics including middle-class welfare, “family” values, child support, teen poverty, the minimum wage, the underclass, orphanages, health, hunger, corporate welfare, block grants, private charity, work requirements, and incentives. It includes a comprehensive resource list of addresses and phone numbers of activist groups, lobbying organizations, information sources, and media contacts.

The conservative majority that has dominated the Supreme Court for over a decade was engineered by presidents who claimed to have depoliticized the courts and promoted judicial restraint. Yet the result has been a steady stream of opinions that limit individual rights far more than is commonly understood. In With Liberty and Justice for Some, David Kairys presents a fascinating analysis of the changes brought about by the Reagan-Bush courts, changes that will long outlive those administrations.

Kairys examines thirty-one major Supreme Court decisions—covering rights of expression, participation in the political process, religion, equality, privacy and due process—and argues that the liberal decisions of the 1960s and early 1970s were an aberration in a larger, conservative pattern. Kairys, focusing on the stories of the people involved, highlights the ongoing erosion of principles and rules typically thought to embody American notions of freedom. He criticizes both conservative and liberal rules and reasoning, and explores other alternatives.With Liberty and Justice for Some is a revealing and accessible exposé of the role of law, the state of democracy, and the retrenchment of our individual rights over the last two decades.

“On the news at this time is the question of the hostages,” then vice president George Bush noted in his secret diary on November 5, 1986, two days after a Lebanese newspaper broke the first story of the Reagan administration’s efforts to trade arms for hostages with Iran. “I’m one of the few people that know fully the details,” Bush continued. “This is one operation that has been held very, very tight, and I hope it will not leak.”

But the illicit arms-for-hostages deals did leak, and eventually U.S. citizens discovered that the Reagan administration had been selling munitions to Iran, using funds from those sales for an illicit operation to resupply the Nicaraguan Contras, and systematically deceiving Congress, the press, and the public about these actions. More than six years after the Iran-Contra operations were revealed, we continue to learn more about the scandal that rocked the Reagan White House and haunted George Bush’s presidency, and about its implications for our system of governance.

The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History provides the 101 most important documents on the policy decisions, covert operations, and subsequent cover-up that created the most serious constitutional crisis of modern times. Drawing on up-to-date information such as the recently discovered Bush diaries, this reader features once top secret, code-word White House memoranda, minutes of presidential meetings, pages from Oliver North’s and Caspar Weinberger’s personal notebooks, back-channel cable traffic, and investigative records, among other extraordinary materials. To enhance this documentation, the editors provide contextual overviews of the complex components of the Iran-Contra operations, as well as glossaries of the key players, and a detailed chronology of events.

The result is a unique guide to the inner workings of national security policy making and the shadowy world of clandestine operations—a singular resource for understanding the Iran-Contra affair and the gravity of the governmental crisis it spawned. The documents, writes noted Iran-Contra scholar Theodore Draper in the Foreword, give the reader “an intimate sense of how the president and his men manipulated the system and perverted its constitutional character.” This volume “allows the facts to speak for themselves.”