Blackshirts and Reds

Blackshirts and Reds PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
A bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today. Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology. These terms are often bandied about, but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti's trademark. Parenti shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the "free-market" victory on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism, demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and dealing with the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism. Written with lucid and compelling style, this book goes beyond truncated modes of thought, inviting us to entertain iconoclastic views, and to ask why things are as they are. "A penetrating and persuasive writer with an astonishing array of documentation to implement his attacks." —The Catholic Journalist "By portraying the struggle between fascism and Communism in this century as a single conflict, and not a series of discrete encounters, between the insatiable need for new capital on the one hand and the survival of a system under siege on the other, Parenti defines fascism as the weapon of capitalism, not simply an extreme form of it. Fascism is not an aberration, he points out, but a 'rational' and integral component of the system."—Stan Goff, author of Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century Michael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. Author of over 275 published articles and twenty books, his writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

The Perfect Sound

The Perfect Sound PDF Author: Garrett Hongo
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0375425063
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Book Description
A poet’s audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that “ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth” (Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan). Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems. Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawai‘i, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in L.A., about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane’s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel’s piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet. Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice.

Against Empire

Against Empire PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868613
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Richly informed and written in an engaging style, Against Empire exposes the ruthless agenda and hidden costs of the U.S. empire today. Documenting the pretexts and lies used to justify violent intervention and maldevelopment abroad, Parenti shows how the conversion to a global economy is a victory of finance capital over democracy. As much of the world suffers unspeakable misery and the Third-Worldization of the United States accelerates, civil society is impoverished by policies that benefit rich and powerful transnational corporations and the national security state. Hard-won gains made by ordinary people are swept away. “A valuable rebuttal to the drumbeat...from the right.” —New York Times Book Review “Entertainingly written.” —Publishers Weekly “Parenti writes clear, smooth, often provocative prose, has a way of cutting to the heart of complex issues and knows how to tell a story." —Allan Johnson, Author of Human Arrangements Michael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. He is the author of over 275 published articles and twenty books. His writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

Contrary Notions

Contrary Notions PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872864820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
Michael Parenti's most lucid and penetrating writings on power, history, politics and culture.

Inventing Reality

Inventing Reality PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781471731822
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
This study looks at the role of the print and electronic media in defining "respectable" political discourse in the United States. From a critical perpective, Parenti looks at the economics and politics of "presenting" the news and argues that the media systematically distort the news. This manufactured reality deprives the public of necessary information for effective participation in government. This edition has been updated throughout, and there is coverage of the media's treatment of the US invasion of Panama, the war against Iraq and the collapse of communism. Other titles by Michael Parenti include "Democracy for the Few", "Power and the Powerless", "The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race" and "Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment".

Superpatriotism

Superpatriotism PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780872864337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
Explores the true meaning of patriotism by examining how political leaders and the media use fear to win support for military interventions and inflated arms budgets at the expense of projects that serve the real needs of humanity.

History as Mystery

History as Mystery PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
ISBN: 0872867188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
In a lively challenge to mainstream history, Michael Parenti does battle with a number of mass-marketed historical myths. He shows how history's victors distort and suppress the documentary record in order to perpetuate their power and privilege. And he demonstrates how historians are influenced by the professional and class environment in which they work. Pursuing themes ranging from antiquity to modern times, from the Inquisition and Joan of Arc to the anti-labor bias of present-day history books, History as Mystery demonstrates how past and present can inform each other and how history can be a truly exciting and engaging subject. "Michael Parenti, always provocative and eloquent, gives us a lively as well as valuable critique of orthodoxy posing as ‘history.’"—Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States "Deserves to become an instant classic." —Bertell Ollman, author of Dialectical Investigations Those who keep secret the past, and lie about it, condemn us to repeat it. Michael Parenti unveils the history of falsified history, from the early Christian church to the present: a fascinating, darkly revelatory tale." —Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Pentagon Papers "Solid if surely controversial stuff."—Kirkus Michael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leadiing progressive political analysts. He is the author of over 275 published articles and twenty books, including Against Empire, Dirty Truths, and Blackshirts and Reds. His writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

The Assassination of Julius Caesar

The Assassination of Julius Caesar PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1565849426
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Parenti presents a story of popular resistance against entrenched power and wealth. As he carefully weighs the evidence in the murder of Caesar, he sketches in the background to the crime with fascinating detail about Roman society.

Dirty Truths

Dirty Truths PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780872863170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Political essays and poems. In Young People Are Different, he writes: "Hostage in their homes, / kept alive by the telephone / fully animated only when taking flight / in rough formation. / They rebel / so better to submit / to their totalitarian peerage."

Full Spectrum Disorder

Full Spectrum Disorder PDF Author: Stan Goff
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1932360123
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Goff’s career as an NCO in the Special Forces (Delta Force, US Rangers, Special Ops) took him from the invasions of Panama, Grenada and Haiti, to the training grounds of the Colombian Army (ostensibly in drug interdiction), to a semester as a West Point lecturer, to Mogadishu at the time of the operation immortalized in Black Hawk Down. Unlike the typical soldier’s memoir, Goff does not in machismo or heart-searching. He draws lessons from his past, lessons about foreign policy, lessons about the police-actions designed to create stable environments for US corporations in the Western Hemisphere, lessons about how the days of the American Imperium are numbered. The books covers such subjects as: the slow collapse in Armed Forces morale due to the ongoing reductions in health and pension benefits; the continual overestimation of the ability of technology to work in hostile terrain; the moral in the story of Odoacer, the Germanic mercenary who turned against his Roman employers and sacked Rome in AD 476; new American Empire ignorance of the lessons of history; the failure of "intelligence" as a result of racist stereotyping of countries unwilling to submit to US hegemony.