Michael Joseph Roberto

Condition is really VG (between Good and Excellent) since the only blemish is the bottom edge of the front cover, which has some wrinkling and a bend (visible on photos #1 and #2).  The rest of the book is in excellent condition.  Fast Shipping!

The author outlines the many forms of fascism that emanated from capitalism during the 1920s to 1940s in America with the concentration of economic power by Big Business being a major culprit.  You may or may not agree with his entire thesis but it is informative nonetheless.

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Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

California

The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920 -1940

A primer on the history of American fascism Most people in the United States have been trained to recognize fascism in movements such as Germany’s Third Reich or Italy’s National Fascist Party, where charismatic demagogues manipulate incensed, vengeful masses. We rarely think of fascism as linked to the essence of monopoly-finance capitalism, operating under the guise of American free-enterprise. But, as Michael Joseph Roberto argues, this is exactly where fascism’s embryonic forms began gestating in the United States, during the so-called prosperous 1920s and the Great Depression of the following decade. Drawing from a range of authors who wrote during the 1930s and early 1940s, Roberto examines how the driving force of American fascism comes, not from reactionary movements below, but from the top, namely, Big Business and the power of finance capital. More subtle than its earlier European counterparts, writes Roberto, fascist America’s racist, top-down quashing of individual liberties masqueraded as “real democracy,” “upholding the Constitution,” and the pressure to be “100 Percent American.” The Coming of the American Behemoth is intended as a primer, to forge much-needed discourse on the nature of fascism, and its particular forms within the United States. The book focuses on the role of the capital-labor relationship during the period between the two World Wars, when the United States became the epicenter of the world-capitalist system. Concentrating on specific processes, which he characterizes as terrorist and non-terrorist alike, Roberto argues that the interwar period was a fertile time for the incubation of a protean, more salable form of tyranny – a fascist behemoth in the making, whose emergence has been ignored or dismissed by mainstream historians. This book is a necessity for anyone who fears America tipping ever closer, in this era of Trump, to full-blown fascism.

The Coming of the American Behemoth

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Heather Hendershot

Compelling, in-depth analysis of the media coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, both inside and outside the convention hall.  Loads of detail presented in a highly readable fashion.  Well worth reading especially considering the light it shines on Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s methods of manipulating the news media and its profound effect on how future Presidents like Nixon and Trump would treat the media.

Hardback in mint condition.  Fast shipping.  Check out my shop for other interesting books and stock up for free shipping!




Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America

Introduction Breaking the News, Chicago Style -- The Storm before the Storm -- Day One: "If the Democratic Party can't be democratic, what hope is there for democracy?" -- Day Two: "We filibustered with Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum matters until the American people had gone to bed." -- Day Three: "You do what's right, you don't have to give a worry about the television medium." -- Day Four: "Maybe this is a kiss-and-make-up session, but it's not really intended quite that way, Mayor Daley." -- The Storm after the Storm -- Conclusion From Biased News to Fake News.

When the News Broke

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Gerald Horne

Shocking chronicle of the mis-treatment of Black Jazz artists by the   music industry and organized crime.  Well worth reading if you’re a fan of jazz and its history.

The book is in excellent condition with the only indication of use being the lower corner points of the front and back covers (very minor).

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Racism and the Political Economy of the Music

A galvanizing history of how jazz and jazz musicians flourished despite rampant cultural exploitation The music we call “jazz” arose in late nineteenth century North America—most likely in New Orleans—based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery. Grounded in the music known as the “blues,” which expressed the pain, sufferings, and hopes of Black folk then pulverized by Jim Crow, this new music entered the world via the instruments that had been abandoned by departing military bands after the Civil War. Jazz and Justice examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped this music into a phenomenal US—and Black American—contribution to global arts and culture. Horne assembles a galvanic story depicting what may have been the era’s most virulent economic—and racist—exploitation, as jazz musicians battled organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, and other variously malignant forces dominating the nightclub scene where jazz became known. Horne pays particular attention to women artists, such as pianist Mary Lou Williams and trombonist Melba Liston, and limns the contributions of musicians with Native American roots. This is the story of a beautiful lotus, growing from the filth of the crassest form of human immiseration.

Jazz and Justice

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Joan Sales

Peter Bush

Juan. Goytisolo

Joan Sales’ novel set during the Spanish Civil War and the free bonus, Slightly Foxed hardcover edition of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning about a travel adventure that ends during the same war.  

Two literary classics for the price of one! Both books are in excellent condition.    

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Free Bonus Book!

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF 2017

A classic Catalan work about love, family, and class during the Spanish Civil war.

Spain, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo--a beautiful widow with a shadowy past--puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís's son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city's morale, she leaves to spend the winter with Lluís's brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on "dead" fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini's decision will put her family's fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, an old friend and a traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself.

Joan Sales, a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth, and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoyevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.



Uncertain Glory + As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

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Antonio Di Benedetto

Esther Allen

Almost like-new with very slight signs of handling.  Check out my shop for other classics from NYRB and stock up for free shipping! 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

An NYRB Classics Original First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good. Don Diego’s slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man’s perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

Zama

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Multatuli

Ina Rilke

David McKay

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Read through once but handled with kid gloves.

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Or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company

A fierce indictment of colonialism, Max Havelaar is a masterpiece of Dutch literature based on the author's own experience as an adminstrator in the Dutch East Indies in the 1850s.

The Dutch East Indies, January 1856. The new Assistant Resident, Max Havelaar, arrives in the remote regency of Lebak, preceded by his reputation as a quixotic idealist. Some think him a fool, others a genius, but "one thing is certain- he was an unusual man, and worthy of observation." As Havelaar crusades against corruption, he makes a few unsettling observations of his own. Why don't the financial statements add up? Was the previous Assistant Resident's death really an accident? And why are his superiors obstructing his efforts to learn the truth?

A few years later in Amsterdam, the stolid Dutch coffee broker Batavus Drystubble obtains Havelaar's papers from the threadbare Scarfman, who wanders the streets in search of work. Drystubble pores over the documents in the hopes of lucrative revelations about the coffee trade. But his spirited young son Frits and romantic-souled German assistant Ernest Stern discover something much more astonishing- a scandal that strikes at the heart of the whole Dutch colonial enterprise...

Based on the author's true experiences as an administrator in Java, Max Havelaar is a fiery indictment of colonial misrule and one of the masterpieces of Dutch literature. This is the first new English translation of Multatuli's furious and funny masterpiece in more than fifty years.

Max Havelaar

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Miron Bialoszewski

Madeline G. Levine

The only real blemish is a slight bending of the top left corner of the back cover along with some pages (see photo #4).  There is also a very slight edge bend on the top of the spine (photo #5).  Otherwise than these, it’s in excellent condition.

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On August 1, 1944, Miron Białoszewski, later to gain renown as one of Poland’s most innovative poets, went out to run an errand for his mother and ran into history. With Soviet forces on the outskirts of Warsaw, the Polish capital revolted against five years of Nazi occupation, an uprising that began in a spirit of heroic optimism. Sixty-three days later it came to a tragic end. The Nazis suppressed the insurgents ruthlessly, reducing Warsaw to rubble while slaughtering some 200,000 people, mostly through mass executions. The Red Army simply looked on. Białoszewski’s blow-by-blow account of the uprising brings it alive in all its desperate urgency. Here we are in the shoes of a young man slipping back and forth under German fire, dodging sniper bullets, collapsing with exhaustion, rescuing the wounded, burying the dead. An indispensable and unforgettable act of witness, A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising is also a major work of literature. Białoszewski writes in short, stabbing, splintered, breathless sentences attuned to “the glaring identity of ‘now.’” His pages are full of a white-knuckled poetry that resists the very destruction it records. Madeline G. Levine has extensively revised her 1977 translation, and passages that were unpublishable in Communist Poland have been restored.

A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising

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Brad Evans

Henry Giroux

Russell Brand

The book has not been read and I would have listed it as “New” but there is a fold line on the back cover (see photo #4) so I downgraded it to “Good” since there is no choice for VG condition. 

Life in the Age of Total Violence

Writings from the foremost chronicler of violence in our times, a fundamental issue for the future of the human race, looked at from every angle.

Atrocity Exhibition

69e8fd8f-fb9f-4661-a345-ac32b8b95900-0

Suzanne Boorsch

Douglas Cushing

Alexa A. Greist

Elisabeth Hodermarsky

Sinclaire Marber

John Moore

Heather Nolin

Janet Ross

Brand New/Sealed

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The Arthur Ross Collection of European Prints

Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Meant to Be Shared: Selections from the Arthur Ross Collection of European Prints at the Yale University Art Gallery" held at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, December 18, 2015-April 24, 2016, the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, January 29-May 8, 2017 and at the Syracuse University Art Galleries, New York, August 17-November 19, 2017.

Meant to Be Shared

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Marina Tsvetaeva

Jamey Gambrell

Hasn’t been read but was slightly beat up during shipping.  The top left corner of the back cover shows bending (photo #2) and dark markings are on the edge of some pages (photos #4 and #5).  Price lowered due to these blemishes. 

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Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922

A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution. Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train traveling from the Crimea to Moscow in October 1917, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters (one of whom died of malnutrition in an orphanage), find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life. These autobiographical writings not only give a vivid eyewitness account of Russian history but provide vital insights into the workings of Tsvetaeva’s unique poetics. Includes black and white photographs.

Earthly Signs

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Driss Chraibi

Hugh A. Harter

Adam Shatz

Brand New - has not been read.

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The Simple Past came out in 1954, and both in France and its author’s native Morocco the book caused an explosion of fury. The protagonist, who shares the author’s name, Driss, comes from a Moroccan family of means, his father a self-made tea merchant, the most devout of Muslims, quick to be provoked and ready to lash out verbally or physically, continually bent on subduing his timid wife and many children to his iron and ever-righteous will. He is known, simply, as the Lord, and Driss, who is in high school, is in full revolt against both him and the French colonial authorities, for whom, as much as for his father, he is no one. Driss Chraïbi’s classic coming-of-age story is about colonialism, Islam, the subjection of women, and finding, as his novel does, a voice that is as cutting and coruscating as it is original and free.

The Simple Past

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Extremely Rare - Brand New and Sealed in its Original Shrinkwrap

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Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic 

Christopher Palmer

Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern

Once the sole possession of fans and buffs, the SF author Philip K Dick is now finding a much wider audience, as the success of the films Blade Runner and Minority Report shows. The kind of world he predicted in his funny and frightening novels and stories is coming closer to most of us: shifting realities, unstable relations, uncertain moralities. Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and chal

Philip K Dick

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Roberto M. Dainotto

A Cultural History

What makes Tony Soprano so likeable? Why would we rather leave the cannoli and take the gun? Do we truly want Scarface's Tony Montana to succeed? Is Michael Corleone a misunderstood hero or a despicable villain? Roberto Dainotto traces the complex and fascinating development of the Mafia: its rural beginnings in Western Sicily; its growth into what has been aptly described as a global multinational of crime; and its parallel evolution in music, print and on the big screen. The book probes the tension between the real Mafia - its brutal and often violent reality - and how we imagine it to be: a mythical assembly of codes of honour, family values and chivalric masochism. Rather than dismissing such Mafia stereotypes as untrue, Dainotto sets out to understand what needs and desires, material and psychic longings, are satisfied by our Mafia fantasies. Exploring the rich array of films, books, television, music and even video games portraying and inspired by the Mafia, this book offers not only a social, economic and political history of the Mafia but a new way of understanding our enduring fascination with what lurks behind the sinister omerta of the family business.

The Mafia

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John Marciano

Crime or Commemoration?

On May 25, 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War and the "more than 58,000 patriots" who died there. The fact that 3 million Vietnamese--soldiers, parents, grandparents, children--also died will be largely unknown and entirely un-commemorated. U.S. history barely stops to record the millions of Vietnamese who lived on after being displaced, tortured, maimed, raped, or born with birth defects, the result of devastating chemicals wreaked on the land by the U.S. military. The reason for this disconnect lies in an unremitting public relations campaign waged by top American politicians, military leaders, business people, and scholars who have spent the last sixty years justifying the U.S. presence in Vietnam. The American War in Vietnam challenges all of us to stop the ongoing U.S. war on actual history. Marciano reveals the grandiose flag-waving that stems from the "Noble cause principle," the notion that America is "chosen by God" to bring democracy to the world. The result is critical writing and teaching at its best. This book will provide students everywhere with insights that can prepare them to change the world. --Cover.

The American War in Vietnam

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L. Douglas Keeney

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Untold Story of the Daring Plan That Saved D-Day

Where was the Luftwaffe on D-Day? Historians have debated that question for six decades, but in 2010 a formerly classified World War II D-Day history was restored, and in it were a new set of answers. Pointblank is the result of extensive new research using that newly restored history to create a richly textured portrait of air power and leadership, and perhaps the last untold story of D-Day: Three uniquely talented men and why, on the single most important day to the survival of the Third Reich, the German Air Force was unable to mount a single effective combat mission against the invasion forces. After a year of unremarkable bombing against Germany aircraft industry, and with just five months to go until D-Day, General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces placed his lifelong friend General Carl A. "Tooey" Spaatz in command of the strategic bombing forces in Europe and gave his protégé, General James "Jimmy" Doolittle command of the Eighth Air Force in England. For these fellow aviation pioneers and air war strategists, he had but one set of orders: Sweep the skies clean of the Luftwaffe by June 1944. Spaatz and Doolittle couldn't do that, but they could do what Arnold really wanted: Clear the skies sufficiently to gain air superiority over the D-Day beaches. The plan was called Pointblank. In Pointblank, L. Douglass Keeney carefully reconstructs the events in the air war that led up to D-Day while painting an in-depth portrait of the lives and times of these aviation pioneers.

Jim Diaz

@jim694381

Books Listed

Following

Followers

Michael Joseph Roberto

The Coming of the American Behemoth

Heather Hendershot

When the News Broke

Gerald Horne

Jazz and Justice

Joan Sales; Laurie Lee

Uncertain Glory + As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Antonio Di Benedetto; Esther Allen

Zama

Multatuli; Ina Rilke; David McKay; Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Max Havelaar

Miron Bialoszewski; Madeline G. Levine

A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising

Brad Evans; Henry Giroux; Russell Brand

Atrocity Exhibition

Suzanne Boorsch; Douglas Cushing; Alexa A. Greist; Elisabeth Hodermarsky; Sinclaire Marber; John Moore; Heather Nolin; Janet Ross

Meant to Be Shared

Marina Tsvetaeva; Jamey Gambrell

Earthly Signs

Driss Chraibi; Hugh A. Harter; Adam Shatz

The Simple Past

Ingrid Pfeiffer

Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic

Christopher Palmer

Philip K Dick

Roberto M. Dainotto

The Mafia

John Marciano

The American War in Vietnam

L. Douglas Keeney

The Pointblank Directive

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Browse by categories

Michael Joseph Roberto

The Coming of the American Behemoth

Heather Hendershot

When the News Broke

Gerald Horne

Jazz and Justice

Joan Sales; Laurie Lee

Uncertain Glory + As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Antonio Di Benedetto; Esther Allen

Zama

Multatuli; Ina Rilke; David McKay; Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Max Havelaar

Miron Bialoszewski; Madeline G. Levine

A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising

Brad Evans; Henry Giroux; Russell Brand

Atrocity Exhibition

Suzanne Boorsch; Douglas Cushing; Alexa A. Greist; Elisabeth Hodermarsky; Sinclaire Marber; John Moore; Heather Nolin; Janet Ross

Meant to Be Shared

Marina Tsvetaeva; Jamey Gambrell

Earthly Signs

Driss Chraibi; Hugh A. Harter; Adam Shatz

The Simple Past

Ingrid Pfeiffer

Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic

Christopher Palmer

Philip K Dick

Roberto M. Dainotto

The Mafia

John Marciano

The American War in Vietnam

L. Douglas Keeney

The Pointblank Directive

Get The App