In his book, Fighting for the Press: The Pentagon Papers & Other Battles, Goodale presents a first-hand account of what happened as lawyers sought to defend the newspaper from the government. He describes how Max Frankel, foreign reporter for the Times, informed him he had “documents related to the Vietnam War.” He did not, at first, see them but was confronted with the issue of whether it was legal for the press to publish classified information.

Dina Hampton does something unique in writing about the history, meaning and legacy of the 1960s in the United States. She gives us intimate portraits of three very different people whose lives were forged in the red hot political cauldron of that era: the Communist Party champion of Black Power, Angela Davis; the New Left firebrand, Tom Hurwitz; and the neo-conservative advocate of unbridled American power, Elliott Abrams. Her three subjects, fascinatingly, all attended at the same time the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School, collectively known as Little Red.

In What Then Must We Do?, political economy professor Gar Alperovitz slowly and deliberately nudges readers off the traditional course of political activism assumed to bring about progressive change – elections, legislative fights, protest actions, firing the twin engines of grassroots Democratic groups and organized labor – arguing that these methods have failed. He finds readers at that moment of despair, when the best efforts we’ve known to create the space for change have failed. Indeed, he doesn’t believe that these efforts can reverse what is now a decades-long march of structural economic, environmental and political decline. “Absent major national shocks,” he writes, “the capacity for fundamental political change is limited in the American context.”

Book Salon Preview

I finished Army of God while standing outside a DC metro station, after exiting for my final stop — it’s a gripping book, one filled with striking images that hammer home the visceral, immersive terror of the Lord’s Resistance Army’s (LRA) raids on Congolese villages. It also raises, for progressives committed to resolving the humanitarian monstrosity that is the ongoing violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), difficult questions about just what kinds of government intervention and non-state activism might make a real difference.

“Environmentalism” and “going green” are so pervasive today it’s hard to imagine a time when those concepts were largely absent from popular discourse. When Rachel Carson released Silent Spring 50 years ago, it changed everything; not just for Carson, whose already-successful career took a dramatic turn, but for the emergence of the modern environmental movement.

William Souder’s insightful portrait of Carson, On a Farther Shore, is an account of her life and work, but it’s also a vital addition to our understanding of the current environmental crisis.

Robert Kuttner’s Debtors’ Prison ties together many of the individual fights progressives are battling over into a general argument for why our economy is broken 5 years after the Great Recession began. There are those fighting both Republicans and some Democrats on topics ranging from austerity to foreclosure relief and financial sector accountability, while there are fellow activists in Europe fighting against the European Central Bank’s policy of tight money and anti-democratic takeovers of local policy.

Do you think the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established abortion rights? If you’re like the 53% of Americans polled by Gallup recently, chances are you don’t. In that case, you will be dismayed to learn in Crow After Roe: How “Separate but Equal” Has become the New Standard in Women’s Health and How We can Change That about the many creative ways that anti-abortion activists have undercut the right to abortion in the past forty years.

If you identify more closely with the 29% of Americans who want to overturn Roe v. Wade, you may applaud the clever anti-abortion strategies detailed here.

It is a breath of fresh air to find an account of the Occupy movement that is avowedly radical instead of liberal, optimistic instead of regretful or bitter, and based on a first-hand insider perspective. The origins of Occupy Wall Street have become much contested, and at this point it is a badge of pride for some to say they were there at Zuccotti Park on the first day, September 17, 2011. But David Graeber was there long before that, at the first General Assembly in New York following Adbusters’ call – which, as he tells it, was almost hijacked so that it was not a GA at all but rather yet another rally with designated speakers, until he and other anarchist-leaning “horizontals” who were there dragged it back on course.

hen Bob McChesney raises the alarm about a media issue, I say pay attention. Even if no one else is sounding the alarm, pay attention. Why? Because no one spends more time than McChesney engaged in the serious endeavor of figuring out how we now communicate, how we will communicate, how powerful media corporations seek to influence that communication, and how government agencies can and do fail to protect the public interest in a wide-open and wide-ranging democratic discourse.

That’s what McChesney has done with Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy.