Category: FAVORITES

THE ANTIWAR CLASSIC BY AMERICA’S MOST DECORATED SOLDIER

BRIGADIER GENERAL SMEDLEY D. BUTLER

“I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high -class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

from War Is A Racket

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Smedley Darlington Butler took his Constitutional vows seriously, repelling threats to America both without and within. Shortly after retiring from a lauded career, the popular Marine brought down a Fascist corporate plot to seize the White House. Concerned for the future of democracy, Butler began to speak out against the venal motives behind many of this country’s military actions.

Written during the Great Depression, War Is A Racket pulls no punches against a corrupt military-industrial complex , eager to murder both foreign and native-born children for the sake of profit. The Feral House edition includes two other anti-intervention screeds written by Butler, in addition to photographs taken from the astonishing 1932 antiwar book, The Horror Of It .

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Adam Parfrey’s introduction reveals names suppressed from a Congressional investigation that verified the right-wing coup plotted against President Franklin D. Roosevelt by corporate bigwigs.

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War Is A Racket, the piss-and-vinegar classic , may be even more relevant today than when it was first published 70 years ago.

From The Cover

SLAVERY, FREEDOM, and DECEPTION in the NEW WORLD

by GREG GRANDIN

The story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates the dark side of the Age of Liberty:

One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans who appeared to be slaves. They weren’t. In fact, they were performing an elaborate ruse, having risen up earlier and slaughtered most of the crew and officers. When Delano, an anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception — that the men and women he thought were humble slaves were actually running the ship — he rallied his crew to respond with savage violence.

Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity is the untold history of this extraordinary event and its bloody aftermath. With the same gripping storytelling that won praise for his Fordlandia, historian Greg Grandin tracks the West Africans through the horrors of the Middle Passage and their forced march from the Argentine pampas to the cold, high Andes, providing a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas. He also follows Delano as he sails the Pacific to kill seals, part of a generation of mariners who were setting up the United States’ first informal island colonies — their slide from benevolence to barbarism an expression of the human exploitation and environmental destruction that marked the early years of American expansion.

Delano’s blindness that day has already inspired one masterpiece — Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. Now Grandin returns to the event to paint an indelible portrait of a world in the throes of revolution, of people — slaves, sailors, and sealers — trying to claim the promise of freedom, law, and reason only to find that the shackles of slavery were not so easily cast off.

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“The Empire of Necessity is scholarship at its best. Greg Grandin’s deft penetration into the marrow of the slave industry is compelling, brilliant and necessary.”

TONI MORRISON

“Rooted in an event known primarily through the genius of Herman Melville’s transcendent Benito Cereno, Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity is a stunning work of research done all over the rims of two oceans, as well as beautiful, withering storytelling. This is a harrowing story of Muslim Africans trekking across South America, and ultimately a unique window onto the nature of the slave trade, the maritime worlds of the early nineteenth century, the lives lived in between slavery and freedom all over the Americas, and even the ocean-inspired imagination of Melville. Grandin is a master of grand history with new insights.”

DAVID W. BLIGHT, author of A SLAVE NO MORE

“In this multifaceted masterpiece, Greg Grandin excavates the relentlessly fascinating history of a slave revolt to mine the enduring dilemmas of politics and identity in a New World where the Age of Freedom was also the Age of Slavery. This is that rare book in which the drama of ideas are equally measured, a work of history and of literary reflection that is as urgent as it is timely.”

PHILIP GOUREVITCH, author of THE BALLAD OF ABU GHRAIB

“Greg Grandin has done it again. Starting with a single dramatic encounter in the South Pacific he has shown us an entire world: of multiple continents, terrible bondage and the dream of freedom. This is also a story of how one episode changed the lives of a sea captain and a great writer from the other end of the earth. An extraordinary tale, beautifully told.”

ADAM HOCHSCHILD, author of KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST

from the jacket

The Execution Of

MARTIN LUTHER KING

by WILLIAM F. PEPPER

“We recommend this important book to everyone who seeks the truth about Dr King’s assassination.”

Coretta Scott King

“Passionate, disturbing, and well-researched.”

Booklist

On April 4 1968,Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting a worker’s strike. By nightfall, army snipers were in position, military officers were on a nearby roof with cameras, and Loyd Jowers had been paid to remove the gun after the fatal shot was fired. When the dust had settled, King had been hit and a clean-up operation was set in motion–James Earl Ray was framed, the crime scene was destroyed, and witnesses were killed. William Pepper, attorney and friend of Dr. King has conducted a thirty- year investigation into his assassination. In 1999, Loyd Jowers and other co-conspirators were brought to trail in a civil action suit on behalf of the King family. Seventy witnesses set out the details of a conspiracy that involved J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Richard Helms and the CIA, the military, Memphis police, and organized crime. The jury took an hour to find for the King family. In An Act Of State, you finally have the truth before you –how the US government shut down a movement for social change by stopping its leader dead in his tracks.

“Within the first chapter, An Act Of State presents enough circumstantial evidence to raise questions about Ray’s involvement as the sole assassin.”

Washington Post

“Pepper has gathered an impressive array of testimony and evidence that, even to determined skeptics, throws a major doubt over the state’s case against James Earl Ray”

Kirkus

“No-one has done more than Dr. William F. Pepper to keep alive the quest for truth concerning the violent death of Martin Luther King.”

Ramsey Clark, US Attorney General, 1967-69

WILLIAM F. PEPPER is an English barrister and an American lawyer. He practices international human rights law from the US and from London, and has convened a seminar on international human rights at Oxford University. He has represented governments and heads of state, and has appeared as an expert on international law issues. He is the author of four other books and numerous articles

From The Cover

WHY HE DIED AND WHY IT MATTERS

JAMES W. DOUGLASS

“A remarkable story that changed the way I view the world.” –JAMES BRADLEY, author of Flags of Our Fathers

from the cover

HE CHOSE PEACE. THEY MARKED HIM FOR DEATH.

“ARGUABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK YET WRITTEN ABOUT A U.S. PRESIDENT….. SHOULD BE REQUIRED READING FOR ALL HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE STUDENTS., AND ANYONE WHO IS A REGISTERED VOTER.

–-JOHN PERKINS, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

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At the height of the Cold War, JFK risked committing the greatest crime in human history: starting a nuclear war. Horrified by the specter of nuclear annihilation, Kennedy gradually turned away from his long-held Cold Warrior beliefs and toward a policy of lasting peace. But to the military and intelligence agencies in the United States, who were committed to winning the Cold War at any cost, Kennedy’s change of heart was a direct threat to their power and influence. Once the dark “Unspeakable” forces recognized that Kennedy’s interests were in direct opposition to their own, they tagged him as a dangerous traitor, plotted his assassination, and orchestrated the subsequent cover-up.

Douglass takes readers into the Oval Office during the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, along on the strange journey of Lee Harvey Oswald and his shadowy handlers, and to the winding road in Dallas where an ambush awaited the President’s motorcade. As Douglass convincingly documents, at every step along the way these forces of the Unspeakable were present, moving people like pawns on a chessboard to promote a dangerous and deadly agenda.

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“THE BEST ACCOUNT I HAVE READ OF THIS TRAGEDY AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE….But don’t take my word for it. Read this extraordinary book and reach your own conclusions.”

–-OLIVER STONE, director

“ONCE IN A GREAT WHILE A BOOK COMES ALONG THAT BOTH RECORDS HISTORY AND MAKES IT…..An exciting work with the drama of a first-rate thriller”

–MARK LANE, author of Rush to Judgment

“AN EXCEPTIONAL ACHIEVEMENT. Douglass has made the strongest case so far in the JFK assassination literature as to the Who and the Why of Dallas.”

–GERALD D. KNIGHT, author of Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why

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All comments from the back of the book

JAMES H. CONE

A landmark in the conversation about race and religion in AMERICA.

“One of the Top 11 Religion Books of the Year,” The Huffington Post

First Place Award in Theology, Catholic Press Association

Gold Medal Winner, Independent Book Publishers Book Awards

Nautilus Book Award (Silver)

“No one has explored the spiritual world of African Americans with the depth or breadth of Cone. Here he turns his attention to two symbols that dominated not only the spiritual world but also the daily life of African Americans in the twentieth century. In their inextricable tie, he finds both the terror and hope that governed life under violent racism as well as potent symbols of the African American past and present in the United States.”

— HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., Harvard University

“Once again James Cone demonstrates why he is indispensable as an interpreter of faith, race, and the American experience.”

–BILL MOYERS, Journalist

“James Cone is a world-historical figure in twentieth-century Christian theology. The Cross and the Lynching Tree is a powerful and painful song for hope in our dance with mortality — a song Cone courageously has led for over forty years!”

–CORNEL WEST, Princeton University

JAMES H. CONE, Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary, NY, is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians in America. His books include A Black Theology of Liberation, The Spirituals & the Blues, and Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (all from Orbis Books).

PAUL ROBESON

preface by Lloyd L. Brown

Here I Stand was first published in 1958 and promptly ignored by the white press. Lloyd L. Brown in his preface to this edition reports that “with one insignificant exception, no white commercial newspaper or magazine in the entire country so much as mentioned Robeson’s book.” The black press of the nation, however, recognized the importance of the work and the authentic, passionate tone of one of the great black Americans of the twentieth century.

“Here I Stand is a program of action for colored Americans. But no American of whatever color can really quarrel with Robeson’s principles and his program. . . . It is a challenge to fulfill the American dream.”—Saunders Redding in the Afro-American

“Love is really the theme of this book. For Paul Robeson deeply loves people. He loves his native land—‘the America of the common people’. . . . It is a book to read and pass on and on.” —Shirley Graham Du Bois in Mainstream

As Paul Robeson writes in his foreword, “I speak as an American Negro whose life is dedicated, first and foremost, to the winning of full freedom—and nothing less than full freedom—for my people in America. In these pages I have discussed what the fight for Negro freedom means in the crisis of today; how it is related to the cause of peace and liberation throughout the world. In presenting my views on this subject, I have sought to explain how I came to my viewpoint and to take the stand I have taken.”

from the back cover of the 1958 Beacon Press edition

Edward Snowden

“As I proceeded down the Tunnel, it struck me: this, in front of me, was my future. I’m not saying that I made any decisions at that instant. The most important decisions in life are never made that way. They’re made subconsciously and only express themselves once fully formed–once you’re finally strong enough to admit to yourself that this is the course your beliefs have decreed. That was my twenty-ninth birthday present to myself: the awareness that I had entered a tunnel that would narrow my life down to a single, still -indistinct act.”

–from Permanent Record

In 2013, twenty-nine year old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it.

Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online–a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the internet’s conscience. Written with wit, passion, and unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.

from the jacket

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EDWARD SNOWDEN was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and grew up in the shadow of Fort Meade, Maryland. A systems engineer by training, he served as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency and worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency. He has received numerous awards for his public service, including the Right Livelihood Award, the German Whistleblower Prize, the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, and the Carl von Ossietzky Medal from the International League for Human Rights. Currently, he is president of the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

from the jacket

Documented Evidence

by David Imhotep Ph.D.

This Book Will Change The Way History Is Written About The Western Hemisphere

Cowboys and Indians Africans? Not hardly. The Cowboys and Indians came on the scene far too late. The first Americans even came before the “Native Americans,” far before any other group at least 56,000 years ago! This particular statement is backed by eight peer-reviewed articles. We will study evidence exposed by a panel of credible scholars, professors and researchers. The evidence is in several different scientific fields. Many pictures, maps, charts, and summation lists are included. Do not forget the Egyptians. They were also here far before the Indians or Columbus. They left structures above and below the waves in far away places in North and South America. From the East to the West coasts; from the valleys to the mountain tops that still carry their names. You will read about remnants of their artifacts, writings, architecture, farming and more. For years this story was hidden and forbidden to be repeated. Researchers who dared to bring out new finds against the accepted history were intimidated, funding terminated, and in some cases their careers put in jeopardy. Dr. Imhotep is now throwing caution to the winds and lifting the veil of secrecy never to be closed again. This is a true history for all to learn and enjoy and there is much more on its way…as the veil of secrecy and concealed information is made available to the public in The Lifting of the Veil Series.

From The Cover

“ Dr. David Imhotep brings us the evidence that shows that Africans peopled the American continents before any other people. There are bound to be many people who will follow the lead of this pioneering scholar, Dr. Imhotep. He puts into context much of the information that has been gathered over the years and makes it accessible to the ordinary reader as well as to the scholarly reader. Imhotep’s intent with this book is to burst onto the scene with a follow-up to the best of works by Diop. Imhotep’s work must be considered in the forefront of our new awareness of the great depth of African contributions to the world of science and art, and human beginnings on this very continent. “

Molefi Asante Ph.D.

author of The History of Africa

“Dr. David Imhotep presents keen insight into the ancient history of America. You will discover the long antiquity of African people in the New World and how they contributed to the rise of civilization in the West: the archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence supports Dr. Imhotep’s thesis of a pre-Columbus African presence in America. It shows that David has opened a new path of scholarship relating to the peopling of the New World that is long overdue. Finally we must conclude that multiple sources of evidence substantiate Dr. Imhotep’s thesis that the first anatomically modern humans in the Americas may have come from Africa.”

Clyde A. Winters Ph.D.

author of Afrocentrism: Myth or Science

“Imhotep’s collection . . . the maps, photos, drawings and reports comparing the construction by Ohio Valley mound builders and New Mexican pueblo cliff-dwellers to the Mandingo of Mali are thought-provoking. So are references drawn from Mexican Olmec legends of dark-skinned people arriving in bark-skin boats out of the sunrise. Imhotep’s collection of evidence is not limited to comparing ruins. He delves into DNA links between peoples of Africa and the Americas, and examines everything from pottery to plants to help prove his theory.

Are these and other points Imhotep makes enough to prove that Africans, and perhaps even Egyptians, explored, settled, and traded back-and-forth across the South Atlantic? Whether he is right or wrong in his interpretation of the evidence is not the issue, he presents a strong enough case to make the reader think . . . it is packed with far too much evidence for the reader to ignore.”

Clarion Review