Today’s book salon focuses on something that I think should get a lot more attention than it does – our psychological well-being as progressive activists. Hillary Rettig’s book, The Lifelong Activist, seeks to help us build activism sustainably into our lives. In order to do so, we’ll need to take better care of ourselves. She starts with an aspiration and a challenge, offering this vision: “Imagine how different the world would be if there were twice – or ten times! – as many progressive activists as there are now, and if those activists were happy and effective and enjoying long full-time or part time careers. Entire societies and cultures, and quite possibly every society and culture, would be transformed.”

For members of the Firedoglake community, I expect Matthew Kerbel’s Netroots:Online Progressives and the Transformation of American Politics will prove to be equal parts familiar and insightful. The familiarity comes from the rich descriptive account he provides of the netroots community itself. Unlike many of his contemporary academics, Kerbel has clearly done the legwork of getting to know progressive blogging communities like FDL, DailyKos, OpenLeft, and others. In offering a detailed account of the goals, values, and achievements of this community, Kerbel portrays the netroots as it is, rather than perpetuating the easy stereotypes so often provided by defensive political pundits and the like.

T.R. (Tom) Reid, the former Washington Post foreign correspondent whom I came to know and admire in the early 1990s when we were both stationed in Tokyo (I for the Chicago Tribune), is the ultimate medical tourist. Only, instead of looking for cheaper health care, he went looking for cheaper, more effective and universal health care systems.

Marijuana has become mainstream. Breathless stories about it in TIME, Newsweek, and all major media outlets proclaim that it is either a potential savior of the economy, the scourge of teen development, or just a plant that happens to have a bad rap.

Robert D. Auerbach began his career as a cab driver. A chance ride with Abram Lincoln Harris, a leading professor in the economics department at the University of Chicago -- and its only African-American member -- catapulted him into graduate school. (When he went in to register, he still had his changer on his belt.) There he became a student of Milton Friedman, completing a dissertation in 1969. Then it was on to the staff of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank – the beginning of a lifelong no-love-lost affair with the central bank.

Electing Barack Obama has actually been sort of the same thing. For a lot of people, just getting Obama elected president was IT. They’d been fighting (or hiding under the bed, whichever the choice) for so long that this was the be-all and end-all. And then he got elected (with the help of a lot of people and people who actually went and stood in the voting booth and made their choice) and everyone held their breaths and waited for some disaster to hit before the inaugural. And then Aretha Franklin stood up and sang and the Chief Justice screwed up the oath and they did it again. And there’s been all this noise trying to delegitimize the entire thing.

In January 1981, Bruce Bartlett and I took over direction of the staff of the Joint Economic Committee - he on the Republican and I on the Democratic side. Our situation was unique: a bicameral committee, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, no majority either way. This, at the start of the Reagan revolution, which he favored and I opposed.

In a sea of subterfuge, secrecy and flat out dishonesty spanning not only the Administration of George W. Bush, but, sadly, that of Barack Obama as well, one blockbuster voluntary governmental release of foundational documents in the critical war on terror legal areas of the torture and warrantless wiretapping programs stands out. The April 16, 2009 disclosure by the Obama Administration of the never-before-seen secret memos describing, in graphic detail, the brutal interrogation techniques used by the CIA, their contractors and other govenmental and quasi-governmental actors under the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”

Some books are written for their moment. When John Maynard Keynes published his General Theory the world was, in fact, more than ready. Key ideas had already been put forward in papers and letters, and political figures were already looking for a means to implement truths the felt to be correct. Keynes advised, prophesized, synthesized, and proselytized. But to some extent he was a victim of the breath of his ideas and the range of his converts. As with many other epoch making ideas, it was in redaction and reduction that Keynes came to the world.

‘Murder in the name of honour’ is the title of Rana Husseini’s first book, and was also the title of an article, one of her first, that she published in the English language newspaper Jordan Times in 1994, covering the murder of Kifaya, a 16-year-old girl murdered by her brothers after having been a victim of incestuous rape. Other papers in the region covering these kinds of familial murders in an off-hand way, as if they were private matters, refusing to name the phenomenon nor investigate the circumstances to avoid causing further scandal to the family. Rana vowed on that day that Kifaya’s story would not just be another four line story in a newspaper, and to make ‘honour’ killings a national issue in Jordan.