Eric Hammel

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Massachusetts

The Marines in Beirut, August, 1982-February, 1984

Placing particular emphasis on the August through October 1983 period, "The Root," written from the viewpoint of the Marines who fought in Beirut, offers a "detailed account of individual rescue efforts (that) is intensely graphic . . . first-hand and realistic" ("New York Tribune").

The Root

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George Lakoff

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Battle over America's Most Important Idea

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has relentlessly invoked the word "freedom." The United States can strike preemptively because "freedom is on the march." Social security should be privatized in order to protect individual freedoms. In the 2005 presidential inaugural speech, the words "freedom, " "free, " and "liberty" were used forty-nine times. "Freedom" is one of the most contested words in American political discourse, the keystone to the domestic and foreign policy battles that are racking this polarized nation. For many Democrats, it seems that President Bush's use of the word is meaningless and contradictory--deployed opportunistically to justify American military action abroad and the curtailing of civil liberties at home. But in "Whose Freedom?", George Lakoff, an adviser to the Democratic party, shows that in fact the right has effected a devastatingly coherent and ideological redefinition of freedom. The conservative revolution has remade freedom in its own image and deployed it as a central weapon on the front lines of everything from the war on terror to the battles over religion in the classroom and abortion. In a deep and alarming analysis, Lakoff explains the mechanisms behind this hijacking of our most cherished political idea--and shows how progressives have not only failed to counter the right-wing attack on freedom but have failed to recognize itsnature. "Whose Freedom? "argues forcefully what progressives must do to take back ground in this high-stakes war over the most central idea in American life.

Whose Freedom?

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W. Ehrhart

H. Franklin

A Vietnam Veteran in Nixon's America

Between March and September of 1974, as Richard Nixon's presidency unraveled on national television, Bill Ehrhart, a decorated Marine Corps sergeant and antiwar Vietnam veteran, fought to retain his merchant seaman's card after being busted for possession of marijuana. He was also arrested on suspicion of armed robbery in New York City, detained on the Garden State Parkway for looking like a Puerto Rican revolutionary, and thrown out of New Jersey by the Maple Shade police. All of this occurred while the House Judiciary Committee conducted hearings on Nixon's impeachment. Busted shows an acute awareness of the ironies of these juxtapositions, as Ehrhart recounts a surreal cross-country journey in search of justice in a nation that has lost its way, betrayed by its leaders. Picking up the narrative of Vietnam-Perkasie and Passing Time, this third book in Ehrhart's Vietnam War trilogy is an exploration of the contradiction between law and justice in Nixon's America and an examination of why the wounds inflicted on the United States by the war are so slow to heal.

Busted

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W. D. Ehrhart

H. Bruce Franklin

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Memoir of a Vietnam Veteran Against the War

Ehrhart documents his troubled return to American society. The account conveys the Vietnam veterans' anger, alienation and moral confusion and reveals the delayed stress in his stateside life.

Passing Time

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Combat Marine Memoir

In 1982, John Newman, curator of the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Colorado State University, said of W.D. Ehrhart: "As a poet and editor, Bill Ehrhart is clearly one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." This autobiographical account of the war, the author's first extended prose work, demonstrates Ehrhart's abilities as a writer of prose as well. Vietnam?Perkasie is grim, comical, disturbing, and accurate. The presentation is novelistic?truly, a "page-turner"?but the events are all real, the atmosphere intensely evocative.

Vietnam-Perkasie

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Józef Czapski

Eric Karpeles

Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

The first translation of painter and writer J zef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II.

During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier J zef Czapski brought Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust's masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work's originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and -altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust's great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust's world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.

Lost Time

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Rick Perlstein

The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

The New York Times bestselling dazzling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s.

In January of 1973 Richard Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War and prepared for a triumphant second term--until televised Watergate hearings revealed his White House as little better than a mafia den. The next president declared upon Nixon's resignation "our long national nightmare is over"--but then congressional investigators exposed the CIA for assassinating foreign leaders. The collapse of the South Vietnamese government rendered moot the sacrifice of some 58,000 American lives. The economy was in tatters. And as Americans began thinking about their nation in a new way--as one more nation among nations, no more providential than any other--the pundits declared that from now on successful politicians would be the ones who honored this chastened new national mood.

Ronald Reagan never got the message. Which was why, when he announced his intention to challenge President Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination, those same pundits dismissed him--until, amazingly, it started to look like he just might win. He was inventing the new conservative political culture we know now, in which a vision of patriotism rooted in a sense of American limits was derailed in America's Bicentennial year by the rise of the smiling politician from Hollywood. Against a backdrop of melodramas from the Arab oil embargo to Patty Hearst to the near-bankruptcy of America's greatest city, The Invisible Bridge asks the question: what does it mean to believe in America? To wave a flag--or to reject the glibness of the flag wavers?

The Invisible Bridge

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Drew Gilpin Faust

Growing up at Midcentury

A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America. To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions—not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans’ lives. To be a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For young Drew Gilpin Faust, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial privilege proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become “well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was the necessary price of survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Faust forged a path of her own—one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in. Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman’s life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today. Includes black-and-white images

Necessary Trouble

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Craig Whitlock

The Washington The Washington Post

A Secret History of the War

Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives

The Afghanistan Papers

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Jamie Raskin

Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

Congressman Jamie Raskin tells the story of the forty-five days at the start of 2021 that permanently changed his life - and his family's - as he confronted the painful loss of his son to suicide, lived through the violent insurrection in our nation's Capitol, and led the impeachment effort to hold President Trump accountable for inciting the political violence. A moving story of a father coping with his pain and a revealing examination of holding President Trump accountable for the violence he fomented. Print run 75,000.

Unthinkable

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Ben Rhodes

Being American in the World We've Made

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Why is democracy so threatened in America and around the world? And what can we do about it? A former White House aide and close confidant to President Barack Obama—and the author of The World as It Is—travels the globe in a deeply personal, beautifully observed quest for answers. In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was helping Barack Obama begin his next chapter, the legacy they had worked to build for eight years was being taken apart. To understand what was happening in America, Rhodes decided to look outward. Over the next three years, he traveled to dozens of countries, meeting with politicians, activists, and dissidents confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America apart. Along the way, a Russian opposition leader he spoke with was poisoned, the Hong Kong protesters he came to know saw their movement snuffed out, and America itself reached the precipice of losing democracy before giving itself a second chance. Part memoir and part reportage, After the Fall is a hugely ambitious and essential work of discovery. In his travels, Rhodes comes to realize how much America’s fingerprints are on a world we helped to shape, through our post–Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism and our post-9/11 nationalism and militarism; our mania for technology and social media; and the racism that fueled the backlash to America’s first Black president. At the same time, Rhodes learns from the stories of a diverse set of characters—from Barack Obama himself to Cuban rebels to a rising generation of international leaders—that looking squarely at where America has gone wrong makes clear how essential it is to fight for what America is supposed to be, for our own country and the entire world.

After the Fall

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Rachel Maddow

An American Fight Against Fascism

Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis. “A ripping read—well rendered, fast-paced and delivered with the same punch and assurance that she brings to a broadcast. . . . The parallels to the present day are strong, even startling.”—The New York Times Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule. That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection. At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court. None of it went as planned. While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation. That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.

Prequel

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Beryl Lieff Benderly

Stanley I. Greenspan

And the Endangered Origins of Intelligence

The Growth of the Mind

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Physics

The Dancing Wu Li Masters 

Naomi Wolf

A Handbook for American Revolutionaries

In Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, bestselling author Naomi Wolf illustrates the changes that can take place when ordinary citizens engage in the democratic system the way the founders intended and tells how to use that system, right now, to change your life, your community, and ultimately, the nation.

As the practice of democracy becomes a lost art, Americans are increasingly desperate for a restored nation. Many have a general sense that the "system" is in disorder--if not on the road to functional collapse. But though it is easy to identify our political problems, the solutions are not always as clear. In Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, bestselling author Naomi Wolf illustrates the breathtaking changes that can take place when ordinary citizens engage in the democratic system the way the founders intended and tells how to use that system, right now, to change your life, your community, and ultimately, the nation.

Give Me Liberty

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Ord Elliott

Ord Elliott was a Marine Rifle Platoon Commander in Vietnam in 1967. Although the Vietnam War has been over for many years, a sense of something lost lingers within Ord. He digs deep to confront the emotions that underlie his experience of combat, and after each battle deals with his emerging understanding of war and of the warriors that marched with him back then and today

The Warrior's Silence

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Ivan Turgenev

First Love and Other Stories

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J. M. Coetzee

A Novel

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 

In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost--and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy--Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.

The Master of Petersburg

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From author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

Life and Times of Michael K

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From the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. "Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." —The New Yorker At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equallity complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa.

Disgrace

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A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. His latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state. J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency. Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall, Bridge of Spies), Ciro Guerra and producer Michael Fitzgerald are teaming up to to bring J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to the big screen.

Waiting for the Barbarians

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Wallace Stegner

Blending fact with fiction, Wallace Stegner retells the story of Joe Hill--the Wobbly bard who became the stuff of legend when, in 1915, he was executed for the alleged murder of a Salt Lake City businessman. Organizer, agitator, "Labor's Songster"--a rebel from the skin inwards, with an absolute faith in the One Big Union--Joe Hill fought tirelessly in the frequently violent battles between organized labor and industry. But though songs and stories still vaunt him, and his legend continues to inspire those who feel the injustices he fought against, Joe Hill may not have been a saintly crusader and may have been motivated by impulses darker than the search for justice. Joe Hill is a full-bodied portrait of both the man and the myth: from his entrance into the short-lived Industrial Workers of the World union, the most militant organization in the history of American labor, to his trial, imprisonment, and final martyrdom. His famous last words: "Don't waste time mourning. Organize." "A genuinely powerful novel of labor as it once was in the U.S." --San Francisco Chronicle.

Joe Hill

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Philip Caputo

nbsp;In this startling new work of fiction, the acclaimed author of A Rumor of War creates three powerful dramas of dislocation, following his characters places they have no business being and into situations that are vastly--and dangerously--beyond their depth.

In the Connecticut suburbs, a motherless young man suddenly becomes the beneficiary of a wealthy older couple, whose generosity has unsuspected motives and a sinister price.nbsp; On an island in Australia's Torres Strait, an enigmatic castaway throws kinks into the local culture and sexual politics.nbsp; And in the jungles of Vietnam, four American soldiers undertake a mystical search for a man-eating tiger.nbsp; Filled with atmospheric tension, crackling with psychological observation, and evoking masters from Joseph Conrad to Robert Stone, Exiles is a riveting literary experience.

Exiles

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Anna Burns

Winner of the Man Booker Prize “Everything about this novel rings true. . . . Original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique.”—The Guardian In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,” the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him—and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend—rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers. Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day.

Milkman

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Ralph McKenna

Browse by categories

Eric Hammel

The Root

George Lakoff

Whose Freedom?

W. Ehrhart; H. Franklin

Busted

W. Ehrhart; H. Franklin; W. D. Ehrhart; H. Bruce Franklin

Passing Time

W. Ehrhart; H. Franklin; W. D. Ehrhart; H. Bruce Franklin

Vietnam-Perkasie

Józef Czapski; Eric Karpeles

Lost Time

Rick Perlstein

The Invisible Bridge

Drew Gilpin Faust

Necessary Trouble

Craig Whitlock; The Washington The Washington Post

The Afghanistan Papers

Jamie Raskin

Unthinkable

Ben Rhodes

After the Fall

Rachel Maddow

Prequel

Beryl Lieff Benderly; Stanley I. Greenspan

The Growth of the Mind

Gary Zukav

The Dancing Wu Li Masters

Naomi Wolf

Give Me Liberty

Ord Elliott

The Warrior's Silence

Ivan Turgenev

First Love and Other Stories

J. M. Coetzee

The Master of Petersburg

J. M. Coetzee

Life and Times of Michael K

J. M. Coetzee

Disgrace

J. M. Coetzee

Waiting for the Barbarians

Wallace Stegner

Joe Hill

Philip Caputo

Exiles

Anna Burns

Milkman

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