Facebook

“The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” by David Talbott

Reviewed by Jeffrey Hirsch "Fundamentally, the founding fathers of US intelligence were liars." This is a quote from James Jesus Angleton, one of the great eminences of the CIA on his death bed (p. 620). How they told their lies, to whom, and why are the subjects of this great boo, which incidentally reads like a very good novel. The "why" is simple -- to make the world safe for the profits and the increase thereof of the great multinational corporations and their allied financial institutions, in [...]

By |2016-05-07T01:09:36-05:00May 7th, 2016|Book Reviews, Jeffrey Hirsch|0 Comments
Read More

“WHEN WE FIGHT WE WIN!”

Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World by Greg Jobin-Leeds and AgitArte. NY/London, The New Press, 2016. $17.95 Reviewed by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-LA      This inspiring book looks at the growing social movements of resistance and solidarity of the second decade of the 21st Century, grassroots efforts struggling for social change from below, to make the case for its title. Like the movements it reports on and represents, it integrates artistic and cultural work intimately in its design and content, with photographs, [...]

By |2016-05-07T01:08:56-05:00May 7th, 2016|Book Reviews, Michael Novick|0 Comments
Read More

“The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI” by Betty Medsger

Reviewed by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-LA March 8 marks the 44th anniversary of the break-in and burglary at the FBI office in Media PA that eventually exposed COINTELPRO, the FBI's secret illegal program against dissidents, especially the Black Panther Party, which FBI Director  J. Edgar Hoover proclaimed the #1 threat against US internal security. As "The Burglary" makes clear, COINTELPRO was the tip of a much larger body of FBI surveillance, infiltration and blackmail that impacted US society and government for decades. The agency focused on Black [...]

By |2015-03-02T03:56:27-05:00March 2nd, 2015|Book Reviews, Michael Novick|0 Comments
Read More

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Beacon Press/ReVisioning American History, Boston, 2014) Reviewed by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-LA In a short, thorough survey of U.S. history from settlement and conquest to current crises, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz pulls on the thread that unravels the tapestry of lies in most US "histories," whether academic, popular, or progressive. She views that history from the perspective of the indigenous peoples whose land was taken by, and whose resistance impeded and impedes, the "glorious, manifest destiny" and self-aggrandizing "exceptionalism" of the US empire-state. In her recent [...]

By |2014-12-31T14:52:36-05:00December 31st, 2014|Book Reviews, Michael Novick|0 Comments
Read More

The Untold History of the U.S.

by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick Gallery Books, Simon & Schuster,  NY, 2012 Reviewed by Jeffrey Hirsch This is the finest book on recent US history I've ever read. Written by filmmaker Oliver Stone and Prof. Peter Kuznick, of American University in DC, this 800-page book dots the i's, crosses the t's, and amplifies many of the critical events of US history where Howard Zinn's Peoples History of the United States left off. (These books complement each other).  It has material on the Obama presidency and back [...]

By |2016-10-07T01:42:57-05:00December 1st, 2014|Book Reviews, Jeffrey Hirsch|0 Comments
Read More
Go to Top