Politics

When Tahar Ben Jelloun took his ten-year-old daughter to a street protest against anti-immigration laws in Paris, she asked question after question: “What is racism? What is an immigrant? What is discrimination?”

Out of their frank discussion comes this book, an international bestseller translated into twenty languages. Ben Jelloun has created a unique and compelling dialogue in which he explains difficult concepts from ghettos and genocide to slavery and anti-Semitism in language we can all understand, and adds an all-new chapter for this edition. Also included are personal essays from four prizewinning writers and educators who themselves are parents: Patricia Williams, David Mura, William Ayers, and Lisa D. Delpit.

Elegant and sensitive, and available now for the first time in paperback, Racism Explained to My Daughter is for all parents and educators who have struggled to engage their children in discussions of this complex issue.

Here is the definitive portrait of the ultimate power broker by “the toughest, most in-your-face investigative reporter in the U.S.A.” (Greg Palast). Dick Cheney sets energy policy. He guided the nation into war with Iraq. And, working closely with Karl Rove, he oversees the political infrastructure that allows corporate interests and the religious right to control lawmaking, regulation, the selection of judges, and the development of foreign policy. As John Dean put it, “This page-turner closes the case: Cheney is our de facto president.”

With an emboldened administration that has turned a thin victory into a renewed mandate—rewarding ideologues and purging dissenters—John Nichols’s question is more urgent than ever: can this nation survive four more years of Dick Cheney?

The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney draws on groundbreaking reporting—including exclusive interviews with Cheney’s college professors, Nelson Mandela, Gore Vidal, and political insiders.

From the California recall circus, in which Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt, and Arianna Huffington vied with over one hundred other candidates to replace a supposedly inept governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger emerged triumphant. How did this onetime bodybuilding champion and gay pinup, with no political experience and a string of mediocre action movies to his name, come to take over the world’s fifth-largest economy?

In The Schwarzenegger Syndrome, celebrated journalist and novelist Gary Indiana makes the case that this tale is a product of a mediasoaked culture in which image matters more than substance. The recall process, a parody of direct democracy, gave Schwarzenegger the chance of a lifetime. With so many candidates in the race, he certainly wasn’t the most qualified, the most articulate, or the most credible—but he was the most famous. And for the majority of Californians, that was enough. A witty and biting travelogue through the intersection of celebrity culture with American political life, The Schwarzenegger Syndrome lays bare the dark implications of Schwarzenegger’s rise to power in the Golden State.

In The New American Empire, leading authorities on U.S. foreign policy examine the historical underpinnings of the new American unilateralism. Offering an accessible, critical overview of U.S. policy in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, they assess both the distinct continuities between past and present U.S. policy, as well as what makes the current administration’s policies dramatically different. The essays also reveal how those policies serve the ends of favored groups for whom imperialism pays both ideologically and materially.

Both an essential historical primer on America’s new imperial role and a thorough dissection of the Bush administration’s foreign policy objectives, The New American Empire is sure to become a touchstone for understanding America’s role in the twenty-first-century world.

Contributors include: Michael Adas, John Dower, Lloyd Gardner, Carole Gluck, Gregory Grandin, Thomas McCormick, Mary Nolan, John Prados, Edward Rhodes, and Marilyn Young.

The roster of security measures enacted by the Bush administration in the panic that followed September 11th is by now well known. Common to all of those initiatives from The Homeland Security Presidential Directive 2 to the USA Patriot Actis concern about the link between migration and security.

This new appreciation of how people on the move pose a threat—whether real or imagined—will be a recurring theme of domestic policy and international relations for years to come. But the “securitization of migration” must first confront a perplexing tangle of long borders, large-scale labor migration, and throngs of tourist and student visitors. Policy makers are only beginning to catch up with this complicated reality.

Raising vital questions about government policy, The Maze of Fear explores the many dimensions of the migration–security link, including discussions of civil liberties, transnational organizations, refugee populations, and politically active diasporas.

In October 2002, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made history when he became Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist leader since Salvador Allende. Lula and his Workers Party won comfortably with nearly 62 percent of Brazil’s popular vote. This book tells the story of the Workers Party’s origins and electoral history, outlining the key politicians behind it and the riveting story of their four successive tries for power. It features an exclusive postelection interview with Lula that charts his extraordinary life story, rising from poverty, through decades of struggle in the country’s union movement, to increasing political influence and eventual victory.

With unparalled access to Lula over the first two years of his administration, the authors have updated the book to include an analysis of his early attempts at social reform, his growing leadership on the international stage, and his response to charges of abandoning the Left of his own party and the hopes of his staunchest supporters.

The town needs to get 300 coffins ready. Heads Up! The priest better be ready to work overtime. —flier from Colombian paramilitaries announcing their arrival

In January 2003, U.S. troops were sent to Colombia to train army units engaged in a bloody civil war, deepening a multibillion-dollar American commitment that makes that country the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.

Despite the potential for disaster embodied in the U.S.’s looming entanglement with another jungle war, America’s role in Colombia has received little critical media attention. The interlacing of terror, drugs and oil with endemic political instability makes the country a likely international flashpoint in the near future.

In this stunning account of Colombian violence and disorder, acclaimed anthropologist Michael Taussig recounts two weeks in a village under siege by paramilitaries. Routinely visited by autodefensas brandishing weapons and a laptop containing a list of names, victims are rounded up, tortured, and killed, their bodies left on display as a warning to others. In his diary of the limpieza (the “cleaning”), Taussig offers unusual insight into the nature of Colombia’s present peril and a nuanced account of the human consequences of a disintegrating state.