Download or read book The World According to Tomdispatch written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tomdispatch.com has established itself as the go-to blog for contemporary US politics, and the favored website for leading commentators; its powerful, no-holds-barred essays resonate throughout the global online media. This comprehensive volume offers readers a chance to catch up on some of the finest political analysis of our age, from Afghanistan and Iraq through Guantnamo and extraordinary rendition, Hurricane Katrina, global warming, black gold, and the misbegotten 'clash of civilizations.' Introduced and edited by Tomdispatch's creator Tom Engelhardt, The World According to Tomdispatch is the essential primer for anyone seeking guidance along the highways and byways of our post-9/11 world.
Download or read book The United States of Fear written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2008, when the U.S. National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet's "sole superpower" would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence. In his new book The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts, because the United States is on the path to a major decline at a startling speed. Engelhardt offers a savage anatomy of how successive administrations in Washington took the "Soviet path"--pouring American treasure into the military, war, and national security--and so helped drive their country off the nearest cliff. This is the startling tale of how fear was profitably shot into the national bloodstream, how the country--gripped by terror fantasies--was locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite fiddled (and profited) while America quietly burned. Think of it as the story of how the Cold War really ended, with the triumphalist "sole superpower" of 1991 heading slowly for the same exit through which the Soviet Union left the stage twenty years earlier.
Download or read book The End of Victory Culture written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sets out to trace the vicissitudes of America's self-image since World War ll as they showed up in popular culture: war toys, war comics, war reporting, and war films. It succeeds brilliantly ... Engelhardt's prose is smart and smooth, and his book is social and cultural history of a high order." Boston Globe, from the bookjacket.
Download or read book A Nation Unmade by War written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In his searing new book . . . Engelhardt has composed a requiem for a nation turned upside down by the relentless pursuit of global power” (Karen J. Greenberg, author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State). As veteran author Tom Engelhardt argues, despite having a more massive, technologically advanced, and better-funded military than any other power on the planet, in the last decade and a half of constant war across the greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the United States has won nothing. Its unending wars, in fact, have only contributed to a world growing more chaotic by the second. “The violence, destruction, and suffering resulting from the imperial arrogance of Bush, Cheney, and cohorts have proceeded on their shocking course while most Americans, Tom Engelhardt writes, were ‘only half paying attention.’ Regular readers of his incisive, lucid, and brutally informative columns could not fail to pay attention and to be appalled at what was revealed. Their impact is all the more forceful in this collection, which casts a brilliant and horrifying light on a sordid chapter of history, far from closed.” —Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hopes and Prospects “No one has had a keener eye for American militarism, hypocrisy, and flat-out folly than Tom Engelhardt.” —John W. Dower, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering “The mainstream media call it the ‘Age of Trump.’ Tom Engelhardt knows better: It’s the ‘Era of America Unhinged.’ This new collection of essays gives us Engelhardt at his very best: incisive, impassioned, and funny even, in a time of great darkness.” —Andrew J. Bacevich, New York Times–bestselling author “Tom Engelhardt is a tireless analyst of the miseries of American Empire . . . [an] indispensable book.” —Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan
Download or read book Terminator Planet written by Nick Turse and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first history of drone warfare, written as it happened. From the opening missile salvo in the skies over Afghanistan in 2001 to a secret strike in the Philippines early this year, or a future in which drones dogfight off the coast of Africa, Terminator Planet takes you to the front lines of combat, Washington war rooms, and beyond. Drawing on several years of research -- including official documents, open-source intelligence, and interviews with military officers -- two of the foremost analysts specializing in drone war offer a sobering, factual account of robot warfare combined with critical analyses found nowhere else. Packed with rarely seen Pentagon photos, Terminator Planet provides a rich history of the last decade of drone warfare, a clear-eyed look at its present, and a far-reaching guide to its future. You used to have to watch science fiction movies to imagine where that future was headed, now you can read Terminator Planet -- and know.
Download or read book To Govern the Globe written by Alfred W. McCoy and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a tempestuous narrative that sweeps across five continents and seven centuries, this book explains how a succession of catastrophes—from the devastating Black Death of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050—has produced a relentless succession of rising empires and fading world orders. During the long centuries of Iberian and British imperial rule, the quest for new forms of energy led to the development of the colonial sugar plantation as a uniquely profitable kind of commerce. In a time when issues of race and social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation’s extraordinary profitability relied on a production system that literally worked the slaves to death, creating an insatiable appetite for new captives that made the African slave trade a central feature of modern capitalism for over four centuries. After surveying past centuries roiled by imperial wars, national revolutions, and the struggle for human rights, the closing chapters use those hard-won insights to peer through the present and into the future. By rendering often-opaque environmental science in lucid prose, the book explains how climate change and changing world orders will shape the life opportunities for younger generations, born at the start of this century, during the coming decades that will serve as the signposts of their lives—2030, 2050, 2070, and beyond.
Download or read book Shadow Government written by Tom Engelhardt and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful survey of a militarized America building a surveillance structure unparalleled in history.
Download or read book Splinterlands written by John Feffer and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-11-28 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dystopian trilogy opener, an elderly scientist reminisces, wondering why both the planet and his family fell apart. Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, this striking dystopian novel takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Multiethnic great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America’s global military footprint has virtually disappeared, and the United States remains united in name only. Nationalism has proven the century’s most enduring force as ever-rising global temperatures have supercharged each-against-all competition and conflict among the now three hundred-plus members of an increasingly feeble United Nations. As he navigates the world of 2050, Julian West offers a roadmap for the path we’re already on, a chronicle of impending disaster, and a faint light of hope. He may be humanity’s last best chance to explain how the world unraveled—if he can survive the savage beauty of the Splinterlands. Praise for Splinterlands “In a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning, foreign policy analyst Feffer . . . takes today’s woes of a politically fragmented, warming Earth and amplifies them into future catastrophe . . . . This novel is not for the emotionally squeamish or optimistic; Feffer’s confident recitation of world collapse is terrifyingly plausible, a short but encompassing look at world tragedy.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “Feffer’s book is a wild ride through a bleak future, casting a harsh, thought-provoking light on that future’s modern-day roots.” —Foreword Reviews “A startling portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast becoming a reality today. Fast-paced, yet strangely haunting, Feffer’s latest novel looks back from 2050 on the disintegration of world order told through the story of one broken family—and offers a disturbing vision of what might await us all if we don’t act quickly.” —Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times–bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed and Had I Known, and founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
Download or read book In the Shadows of the American Century written by Alfred W. McCoy and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning historian delivers a “brilliant and deeply informed” analysis of American power from the Spanish-American War to the Trump Administration (New York Journal of Books). In this sweeping and incisive history of US foreign relations, historian Alfred McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power from the 1890s through the Cold War, and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. Since American dominance reached its apex at the close of the Cold War, the nation has met new challenges that it is increasingly unequipped to handle. From the disastrous invasion of Iraq to the failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fracturing military alliances, and the blundering nationalism of Donald Trump, McCoy traces US decline in the face of rising powers such as China. He also offers a critique of America’s attempt to maintain its position through cyberwar, covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.
Download or read book Next Time They ll Come to Count the Dead written by Nick Turse and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-05-14 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] vivid, gripping account of inhuman cruelty, laced with rays of hope and courage and dignity amidst the horrors” (Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hopes and Prospects). A dramatic true story of men and women trapped in the grip of war, Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead is modern crisis reporting at its best. For six weeks in the spring of 2015, award-winning journalist Nick Turse traveled on foot, as well as by car, SUV, and helicopter, around war-torn South Sudan, talking to military officers and child soldiers, United Nations officials and humanitarian workers, civil servants, civil society activists, and internally displaced persons—people whose lives had been blown apart by a ceaseless conflict there. In a fast-paced and emotionally powerful fashion, Turse reveals the harsh reality of modern warfare in the developing world and the ways people manage to survive the unimaginable. Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead isn’t about combat. It’s about the human condition, about ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and about death, life, and the crimes of war in the newest nation on earth. “The average journalist follows the herd of others. A bold one like Nick Turse goes to where the herd isn’t. His searing reporting in this book brings alive the suffering of a country that the United States, midwife to its birth, has largely forgotten.” ―Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Mirror at Midnight
Download or read book Tomas Young s War written by Mark Wilkerson and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-05-14 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tomas Young’s War is the tragic yet life affirming story of a paralyzed Iraq War veteran who spent his last ten years battling heroically with his injuries, while courageously speaking against America's wars. Based on hours of interviews with Young and those close to him, the book puts the reader alongside Young as he struggles with life as a paralyzed veteran, suffering frustration and humiliation as he attempts to reenter society and resume as normal an existence as possible. It shows his fight to balance his precarious health with his drive to speak out for veterans care and against the war, and the impact his catastrophic injuries had on his family and his relationships. This emotional and powerful book sheds light on many crucial but often overlooked issues such as veterans’ care, public attitudes toward the disabled, medical marijuana, and the terminally ill. Tomas Young’s War shares everything, as unflinchingly honest as Tomas himself: the depression, the pain, the love, and laughter . . . the life of this man whose world was turned upside down by an Iraqi bullet more than ten years ago. Throughout, it serves as a powerful testament to the true cost of war.
Download or read book Men Explain Things to Me written by Rebecca Solnit and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2014-04-14 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author delivers a collection of essays that serve as the perfect “antidote to mansplaining” (The Stranger). In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. She ends on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!” This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women. “In this series of personal but unsentimental essays, Solnit gives succinct shorthand to a familiar female experience that before had gone unarticulated, perhaps even unrecognized.” —The New York Times “Essential feminist reading.” —The New Republic “This slim book hums with power and wit.” —Boston Globe “Solnit tackles big themes of gender and power in these accessible essays. Honest and full of wit, this is an integral read that furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Essential.” —Marketplace “Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions.” —Salon
Download or read book Tomorrow s Battlefield written by Nick Turse and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2015-04-27 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You won’t see segments about it on the nightly news or read about it on the front page of America’s newspapers, but the Pentagon is fighting a new shadow war in Africa, helping to destabilize whole countries and preparing the ground for future blowback. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that “Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today." In Tomorrow’s Battlefield, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Nick Turse exposes the shocking true story of the U.S. military’s spreading secret wars in Africa.
Download or read book They Were Soldiers written by Ann Jones and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reporter’s firsthand, close-up-and-personal look at the impact of our recent wars on America’s unlucky soldiers.
Download or read book Washington Rules written by Andrew Bacevich and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of The Limits of Power critically examines the Washington consensus on national security and why it must change For the last half century, as administrations have come and gone, the fundamental assumptions about America's military policy have remained unchanged: American security requires the United States (and us alone) to maintain a permanent armed presence around the globe, to prepare our forces for military operations in far-flung regions, and to be ready to intervene anywhere at any time. In the Obama era, just as in the Bush years, these beliefs remain unquestioned gospel. In Washington Rules, a vivid, incisive analysis, Andrew J. Bacevich succinctly presents the origins of this consensus, forged at a moment when American power was at its height. He exposes the preconceptions, biases, and habits that underlie our pervasive faith in military might, especially the notion that overwhelming superiority will oblige others to accommodate America's needs and desires—whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or cheap consumer goods. And he challenges the usefulness of our militarism as it has become both unaffordable and increasingly dangerous. Though our politicians deny it, American global might is faltering. This is the moment, Bacevich argues, to reconsider the principles which shape American policy in the world—to acknowledge that fixing Afghanistan should not take precedence over fixing Detroit. Replacing this Washington consensus is crucial to America's future, and may yet offer the key to the country's salvation.
Download or read book The American Way of War written by Tom Engelhardt and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tom Engelhardt' creator of the vital website TomDispatch.com' takes a scalpel to the American urge to dominate the globe. Tracing developments from 9/11 to late last night' this is an unforgettable anatomy of a disaster that is yet to end. Since 2001' Tom Engelhardt has written regular reports for his popular site Tom Dispatch that have provided badly - needed insight into U.S. militarism and its effects' both at home and abroad. When others were celebrating the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq' he warned of the enormous dangers of both occupations.
Download or read book The Sorrows of Empire written by Chalmers Johnson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the prophetic national bestseller Blowback, a startling look at militarism, American style, and its consequences abroad and at home In the years after the Soviet Union imploded, the United States was described first as the globe's "lone superpower," then as a "reluctant sheriff," next as the "indispensable nation," and now, in the wake of 9/11, as a "New Rome." Here, Chalmers Johnson thoroughly explores the new militarism that is transforming America and compelling its people to pick up the burden of empire. Reminding us of the classic warnings against militarism—from George Washington's farewell address to Dwight Eisenhower's denunciation of the military-industrial complex—Johnson uncovers its roots deep in our past. Turning to the present, he maps America's expanding empire of military bases and the vast web of services that supports them. He offers a vivid look at the new caste of professional warriors who have infiltrated multiple branches of government, who classify as "secret" everything they do, and for whom the manipulation of the military budget is of vital interest. Among Johnson's provocative conclusions is that American militarism is putting an end to the age of globalization and bankrupting the United States, even as it creates the conditions for a new century of virulent blowback. The Sorrows of Empire suggests that the former American republic has already crossed its Rubicon—with the Pentagon leading the way.
