The authors of Uninsured in America interviewed 120 uninsured men and women from Texas, Mississippi, Idaho, Illinois allow their subjects to tell their own stories while only interrupting the narratives to bring in a telling stat or trend to illuminate
Read More »

The notion that immigrants can come to the US, work hard and climb the social ladder is deeply woven into American mythology. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants. Yet new immigrants are finding that the American dream is
Read More »

Welcome to Bangkok, where life is cheaper than the phony Rolex watches and Armani suits hawked by cacophonous, perspiring vendors in the public square. Ladies of the night * or even the late afternoon * finance their addiction to narcotics
Read More »

Paul Ortiz’s Emancipation Betrayed is one of those rare books that alters much of what we know about American history. Ortiz’s account of Africa-American political life in Florida from Reconstruction to 1920 uncovers a previously unknown level of successful grassroots
Read More »

Legendary jazz saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter gets an appreciative appraisal in this excellent biography by music journalist Michelle Mercer, who follows this “determinedly eccentric” genius from his early days with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the late 1950s, through
Read More »

On a recent trip to the hot tubs of Calistoga, I came across a hilarious book amid the sulfur steam, Jon Stewart’s “America, (The Book)”. When I returned home, my friends back in D.C. called to tell me about a
Read More »

Ater seeing Howard Zinn on John Stewart’s “The Daily Show” not long ago, I just knew I had to get my hands on the follow up to his “A People’s History of the United States”, the book in which he
Read More »

Towards the end of Jay Cantor’s novel The Death of Che Guevera, Guevera’s friend and would-be biographer Ponco muses, “It doesn’t matter how many times I write ‘The End’; it’s not over.” That reference to Ponco’s incessant inability to finish
Read More »