Civil Rights & Liberties Books - Page 4

State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind

Bryant Welch

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Finally, the answer to the many questions that have been preying on the minds of millions of Americans has arrived. Why are Americans so vulnerable to divisive political tactics? Why did Americans get dragged into such an unwise war in Iraq? Why do fundamentalist religious groups, Fox News, and right-wing radio still play such influential roles in America’s political landscape? And why are long-accepted rational scientific ideas like evolution under siege? These questions hold America’s future in the balance. Ultimately, they are questions about the American mind.  Psychologist-attorney Dr. Bryant Welch has the answers.

If America is going to change the mind-set that led us to war in Iraq and left us unable to confront our serious national problems, this book is vitally important. Drawing on his unique experience both as a clinical psychologist and a Washington, D.C., political figure with the American Psychological Association, Dr. Welch shows how the long-term effects of sophisticated new forms of political manipulation have not only led to our debacle in Iraq but are also currently undercutting America’s ability to address its very serious problems. In the 1944 movie Gaslight, a husband drives his wife to the brink of insanity by playing games with her sense of reality. Just as in the movie, America’s most recent political “gaslighters,” such as George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and many religious leaders, have generated and exploited confusion in the minds of countless Americans.

Gaslighters prey on their victim’s vulnerability to paranoia, sexual perplexity, and envy to undermine the mind’s ability to function rationally. Welch examines why millions of Americans, in response to such assaults, subconsciously and dangerously create their own simplistic reality, even if it is completely different from the more complex reality of the world.

Most important, State of Confusion explains how and why Americans must act now to fight back against this harmful manipulation before it’s too late. Dr. Welch’s exploration of the American mind is both fascinating and frightening, and State of Confusion is a must-read for everyone who cares about the future of this great country.

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Giorgio Agamben

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy’s most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.

In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit.

The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign’s status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective “naked life” of all individuals.

Assata: An Autobiography (Lawrence Hill & Co.)

Assata Shakur

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 58 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

If you are into racism, women issues and simple reading, this book if for you! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is by far the best autobiography I have read so far. It was an easy read and extremely expressive. In many ways it is disturbing if you think of what the character goes through. The explicit racism, abuse, pain that Assata had to endure is decribed really well. You get to in fact life in her era, in her life when you read this book. I literally could not put it down and read it in 2 days.

It pretty much gives you and idea of how things were in the 70's, what black people went through especially women, what the black panther party was really all about, the dirty system we call law, explicit racial comments and treatment etc. If you like stuff like that, then you'll love this book.

Eyes opening... 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Wow...When you read this book you feel in another era , in another world but the sad part is that is not, it is our world and what hapened to this woman was real.I recommended to everyone regarding your ethnic gropu, but specially to blacks and whites in this country.

Editorial Review:

This presents the life story of African American revolutionary Shakur, previously known as JoAnne Chesimard.

Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

Thom Hartmann

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Total reviews: 54 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

Was the Boston Tea Party the first WTO-style protest against transnational corporations? Did Supreme Court sell out America's citizens in the nineteenth century, with consequences lasting to this day? Is there a way for American citizens to recover democracy of, by, and for the people?

Thom Hartmann takes on these most difficult questions and tells a startling story that will forever change your understanding of American history. He begins by uncovering an original eyewitness account of the Boston Tea Party and demonstrates that it was provoked not by "taxation without representation" as is commonly suggested but by the specific actions of the East India Company, which represented the commericial interests of the British elite.

Hartmann then describes the history of the Fourteenth Amendment--created at the end of the Civil War to grant basic rights to freed slaves--and how it has been used by lawyers representing corporate interests to extend additional rights to businesses far more frequently than to freed slaves. Prior to 1886, corporations were referred to in U.S. law as "artificial persons." but in 1886, after a series of cases brought by lawyers representing the expanding railroad interests, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were "persons" and entitled to the same rights granted to people under the Bill of Rights. Since this ruling, America has lost the legal structures that allowed for people to control corporate behavior.

As a result, the largest transnational corporations fill a role today that has historically been filled by kings. They control most of the world's wealth and exert power over the lives of most of the world's citizens. Their CEOs are unapproachable and live lives of nearly unimaginable wealth and luxury. They've become the rudder that steers the ship of much human experience, and they're steering it by their prime value--growth and profit and any expense--a value that has become destructive for life on Earth. This new feudalism was not what our Founders--Federalists and Democratic Republicans alike--envisioned for America.

It's time for "we, the people" to take back our lives. Hartmann proposes specific legal remedies that could truly save the world from political, economic, and ecological disaster.

Soul on Ice

Eldridge Cleaver

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

decent writer, bad man... 1 out of 5 stars.
10 of 23 people found this review helpful.

people consider this to be 'in the world of literature' and serious?
cleaver's a misogynistic pig, a racist, and a multiple rapist. that's all you need to know.

He right, even now. 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 7 people found this review helpful.

The themes exhibited in "Soul On Ice" are race, racism, individuality vs. societal standards and traditions, injustice, humanity, religion/faith, inhumanity and activism. Cleaver spends a great deal of time writing on the injustices Black people face in America, and how even though he is what society wants him to be, it is his fault that he allow society to be right. He pledges to take steps towards change and to become a benefit to society.
I know that a lot of people think that they know about the civil rights movement and the effects it had on the Black race, but they don't. This story of a man who, at the time, had been locked up for more than half of his life, is the story of all real Black people. I think that sometimes Black people do things and think that it is their nature, which is how stereotypes brew. Cleaver shows us that it is history and hatred that have made us a collective in an usual individual world. We do think for ourselves, yet a racist society continues to force us to travel down a road that we have not set for ourselves, and that he has fell into racist America's trap. He has become the stereotype: (supposedly) uneducated, a prisoner, and a victim of "The Ogre" (the white woman).

Editorial Review:

The now-classic memoir that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the civil rights movement and the black experience.

By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in American history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this now classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.

The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin

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Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Simply riveting; 1960s and Today: It holds its power 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

My sense is that Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time for anyone who had ears to hear, regardless of color or faith or gender. The emotional intelligence with which he speaks is riveting.

It came true 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The man knew what he was talking about, when he said the U S would burn because of racial discord.

Editorial Review:

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (African American History (Penguin))

Juan Williams

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An Excellent Primer 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 14 people found this review helpful.

By now the number of volumes written on the Civil Rights Movement could fill whole libraries. Yet fifteen years later, this book still stands as one of the best introduction to the early years of the movement. Books such as Taylor Branch's Pillar of Fire and Parting the Waters may cover the same era of 1954 to 1965; this book is a good introduction for those who may be intimidated by Branch's comprehensive volumes. Rather than trying to cover everything, the book takes its cues from the documentary series and examines a select set of pivotal moments of the movement: school desegregation, the Montgomery bus boycott, the march on Washington, the Selma to Montgomery march and others. Each chapter delves into the story of the events, but also fleshes out the areas between these momentous events, both telling the background and hearing the experiences of those there, in their own words. The book is readable, not the dry tone that many associate with history books. But most of all it gives the reader the chance to delve into an important part of American history in the second half of the 20th century. This is an excellent book that should be picked up by anyone wanting to get a sense of where America was moving in these pivotal eleven years.

Editorial Review:

Arguably the most tumultuous time in recent American history, the Civil Rights years inspired the most rational and irrational of human behaviors and set the stage for sweeping reform in the nation's race relations. Juan Williams's moving chronicle of the movement stands as the definitive history of the era.

Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values

Philippe Sands

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

On December 2, 2002 the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed his name at the bottom of a document that listed eighteen techniques of interrogation--techniques that defied international definitions of torture. The Rumsfeld Memo authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how the Rumsfeld Memo set the stage for a divergence from the Geneva Convention and the Torture Convention and holds the individual gatekeepers in the Bush administration accountable for their failure to safeguard international law.

The Torture Team delves deep into the Bush administration to reveal:

 ·        How the policy of abuse originated with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and was promoted by their most senior lawyers

·        Personal accounts, through interview, of those most closely involved in the decisions

  ·        How the Joint Chiefs and normal military decision-making processes were circumvented

·        How Fox TV’s 24 contributed to torture planning

·        How interrogation techniques were approved for use

·        How the new techniques were used on Mohammed Al Qahtani, alleged to be “the 20th highjacker”

 ·        How the senior lawyers who crafted the policy of abuse exposed themselves to the risk of war crimes charges

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

Kevin Boyle

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Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle

In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes.

And so it began-a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times.

Barack Obama: A Biography (Greenwood Biographies)

Joann F. Price

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Editorial Review:

Barack Obama splashed onto the political scene with an inspirational, rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. From that night on, Obamamania was very real. He is bold and audacious; his rhetoric fiery, convincing and very compelling. He encourages cross-over appeal, discourse, affiliation, and has drawn many Americans, including today's youth, into politics. This is the story of a man of mixed race heritage who inspires, listens, compromises, and is often bipartisan. With a charismatic smile and a cadre of "change we can believe in," many believe that he embodies the American dream. Thousands have turned out to hear the dynamic senator from Illinois speak as he campaigns to become the next President of the United States. Barack Obama says that his story could only take place in America, and this revealing biography traces the events of his remarkable life thus far. From his upbringing in humble circumstances in Hawaii and Indonesia to becoming the fifth African American senator in U.S. history, and later, a presidential candidate, this well-researched volume highlights the hardships and successes, the people who most influenced his career, his personal life, and his meteoric rise to pop icon status. Rounded out with photos, a timeline, a bibliography, and an index, this volume is a must-read for high school and undergraduate students of current events and political science.