'Farber [is] a lucid and courageous witness to the power-play behind the first "scamdemic," . . . [Her] work is journalism at its best—solid, lucid, and humane, attacking wrongs that few dare touch, and thereby helping right them.' —Mark Crispin Miller, bestselling author and professor of media studies at NYU On April 23, 1984, in a packed press conference room in Washington, DC, the secretary of health and human services declared, 'The probable cause of AIDS has been found.' By the next day, 'probable' had fallen away, and the novel retrovirus later named HIV became forever lodged in global consciousness as 'the AIDS virus.' Celia Farber, then an intrepid young reporter for SPIN magazine, was the only journalist to question the official narrative and dig into the science of AIDS. She reported on the 'evidence' that was being continually cited and repeated by health officials and the press, the deadliness of AZT, and Dr. Fauci’s trials on children, infants, and pregnant mothers. Throughout, Faber’s reportage was largely ignored. She was maligned, maliciously attacked, and ultimately cancelled. Now, forty years after her original reporting, Farber’s Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS is reissued with a new foreword by Mark Crispin Miller, shining much-needed light on her groundbreaking work once again. More relevant than ever, this book serves as an essential foundation to understanding its catastrophic sequel: COVID-19. Serious Adverse Events makes clear that the tactics employed at the height of HIV/AIDS—the fearmongering, cancel culture, and “woke� takeover of science, medicine, and journalism—persist today. The response to COVID-19 isn’t new: it is a well-trod and dangerous path in the social landscape.  'Groundbreaking work.'—Bob Guccione, Jr., founder of SPIN magazine

Read a newspaper or catch the news on television and you might get the impression that America's current leadership is "mainstream": perhaps a bit more conservative and in its foreign policy more belligerent than its predecessors, but still a federal authority that functions within America's political traditions. But as Mark Crispin Miller argues here with great clarity and effect, we are in fact living in a state that would appall the Founding Fathers: a state that is neither democratic nor republican, and no more "conservative" than it is liberal. He exposes the Bush Republicans' contempt for democratic practice, their bullying religiosity, their reckless militarism, their apocalyptic views of the economy and the planet, and above all their emotional dependence on sheer hatefulness. Abraham Lincoln once observed that, if the United States should ever be subverted, "it will be conquered from within." And that is exactly what has happened."

"A particularly astute analysis of the television coverage of the campaign, the election, and the political aftermath."—Newsday

The Bush Dyslexicon is a raucously funny ride—whether it's Bush envisioning "a foreign-handed foreign policy" or Miller skewering vociferous cultural conservatives like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney for their silence on Bush's particular "West Texas version of Ebonics." But there is also a strong undercurrent of outrage. Only because our elections have become so dependent on television and its emphatic emptiness, says Miller, could a man of such sublime and complacent ignorance assume the highest office in the land.

"Bracing, entertaining...behind the malapropisms, Miller finds a political and media malaise that's more worrisome than just having a President to whom it's all Grecian."—The New Yorker

"A sharp-edged polemic questioning the wisdom of how we elect our leaders."—Publishers Weekly

"This is a work of outrage. Never has the native intelligence of the 'ordinary' American been so assaulted as it's been by the recent presidential 'election,' and Mark Crispin Miller has sounded the tocsin of revolt. Unless we are suffering from a national Alzheimer's disease, this book will give us heart and voice, as well as a laugh or two along the way." —Studs Terkel

"Stinging in almost every line, this perceptive book reveals much about the capabilities of our new president, and about the unfairness of the process that exalted him." —Lawrence E. Walsh, independent counsel, Iran-Contra Investigation

"This is simply the finest, most comprehensive and masterfully annotated collection of Bushisms to date: a clear reminder to never 'misunderestimate' the ignorance, intellectual laziness, and sheer meanness of our first unelected president." —Barbara Ehrenreich

"Fiercely funny and insightful, The Bush Dyslexicon is also a rousing call to arms. It's the book Tom Paine would have written had he penned 'Common Sense' while channel-surfing his satellite dish. A must-read for all who take their citizenship seriously—whether left, right, or just plain disgusted." —Arianna Huffington

"Mark Crispin Miller is the smartest and funniest media critic in the business. He also has the courage to speak truth to power, which he does brilliantly in The Bush Dyslexicon—a witty, incisive, and wide-ranging critique of our unelected president, the interests he represents, and the media's role in promoting them. No one who cares about the future of democracy can afford to ignore this book." —Jackson Lears, Board of Governors Professor of History, Rutgers University

"This is no joke book, but a sobering and enlightening tour de force on the appalling state of our electoral politics. It should be required reading for those crazy souls who—like Mark Crispin Miller—still believe in this country." —Robert W. McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times

"Mark Crispin Miller has written a book not only about our appointed President, but about the ramshackle state of American political conversation. Unlike Bush the younger, The Bush Dyslexicon will make you laugh and, more important, think, worry—and even start to scream for real reform."—Mark Lloyd, Executive Director, Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy

"If, like millions of Americans, you feel that you've been living through a real life version of "The Emperor Has No Clothes," this book is must reading. Miller's critique of how the media accepted—and even abetted—the Republican snow job on Bush's alleged fitness for office is brilliant and devastating." —Susan Douglas, Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Mass Communication at the University of Michigan, author of Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

A “stimulating� account of the capitalists who changed America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, setting the stage for the 1929 crash and Great Depression (Kirkus Reviews). In the decades following the Civil War, America entered an era of unprecedented corporate expansion, with ultimate financial power in the hands of a few wealthy industrialists who exploited the system for everything it was worth. The Rockefellers, Fords, Morgans, and Vanderbilts were the “lords of creation� who, along with like-minded magnates, controlled the economic destiny of the country, unrestrained by regulations or moral imperatives. Through a combination of foresight, ingenuity, ruthlessness, and greed, America’s giants of industry remolded the US economy in their own image. They established their power and authority, ensuring that they—and they alone—would control the means of production, transportation, energy, and commerce—creating the conditions for the stock market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. As modern society continues to be affected by wealth inequality and cycles of boom and bust, it’s as important as ever to understand the origins of financial disaster, and the policies, practices, and people who bring them on. The Lords of Creation, first published when the catastrophe of the 1930s was still painfully fresh, is a fascinating story of bankers, railroad tycoons, steel magnates, speculators, scoundrels, and robber barons. It is a tale of innovation and shocking exploitation—and a sobering reminder that history can indeed repeat itself.  

A “devastating� exposé of the United States’ Latin American policy and the infamous career and assassination of agent Dan Mitrione (Kirkus Reviews). In 1960, former Richmond, Indiana, police chief Dan Mitrione moved to Brazil to begin a new career with the United States Agency for International Development. During his ten years with the USAID, Mitrione trained and oversaw foreign police forces in extreme counterinsurgency tactics—including torture—aimed at stomping out communism across South America. Though he was only a foot soldier in a larger secret campaign, he became a symbol of America’s brutal interventionism when he was kidnapped and executed by Tupamaro rebels in Montevideo, Uruguay.   In Hidden Terrors, former New York Times Saigon bureau chief A. J. Langguth chronicles with chilling detail Mitrione’s work for the USAID on the ground in South America and Washington, DC, where he shared his expertise. Along the way, Langguth provides an authoritative overview of America’s efforts to destabilize communist movements and prop up military dictators in South America, presenting a “powerful indictment of what the United States helped to bring about in this hemisphere� (The New York Times). Even today, the tactics Mitrione helped develop continue to influence operations in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and black sites around the globe.  

Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have labored to uncover the facts behind Chambers's shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948--that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage.

In this highly original work, Susan Jacoby turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions. Unfettered by political ax-grinding, the author examines conflicting responses, from scholars and the media on both the left and the right, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present post-Cold War era. With a brisk, engaging style, Jacoby positions the case in the politics of the post-World War II era and then explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Chambers and Hiss to their own ideological uses. An iconic event of the McCarthy era, the case of Alger Hiss fascinates political intellectuals not only because of its historical significance but because of its timeless relevance to equally fierce debates today about the difficult balance between national security and respect for civil liberties.

A "stinging indictment" of US foreign policy and covert operations in the Middle East from a former military attache and CIA operative (The Christian Science Monitor). After the close of World War II, former army intelligence agent Wilbur Crane Eveland trained as a military attache, specializing in the new focal point of global concern: the Middle East. In the decades that followed, he personally witnessed the evolution and many blunders of American Middle East policy from embassies of Arab states, inside the Pentagon and the White House, and as a principal CIA representative in the region. Finally, as a petroleum-engineering consultant, he lived with the results of America's errors. In Ropes of Sand, Eveland delivers a richly detailed assessment of the mistakes, miscalculations, and outright failures he observed. The governments the United States armed to defend the Middle East against Russia ended in collapse. American support of the Shah of Iran led to disastrous results. Many of the major crises the US faced, from the energy shortage to the border issues of Israel, had been forecast decades earlier. Eveland explains the country's failure to understand these problems and shows why every proposed solution, from the United Nations Partition Resolution for Palestine to the Camp David Accords, only added fuel to the fire. His insider critique is essential for understanding the Arab Spring, the threat of ISIS, and the ongoing conflicts we face in the region today. First released in 1980, this memoir was initially blocked from publication by the CIA for its revealing and critical discussion of numerous covert operations, some of which Eveland engaged in himself.

The definitive portrait of the powerful, corruption-ridden Teamsters union and its legendary president, Jimmy Hoffa-organizer, gangster, convict, and conspirator-with a new afterword by the author James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa was one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in twentieth-century America. His remarkable journey from young union organizer to all-powerful head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters is an epic tale worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, jam-packed with intrigue, subterfuge, violence, and corruption. His successes were monumental, his fall truly spectacular, and his bizarre disappearance in the summer of 1975 remains one of the great mysteries in American history. Widely considered to be the definitive volume on the career and crimes of Jimmy Hoffa, The Hoffa Wars, by acclaimed investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, is an eye-opening, extensively researched account of the steady rise and fall of an ingenious, ambitious man who was instrumental in transforming a small union of seventy-five thousand truckers into the most powerful labor brotherhood in world. Shocking disclosures in Moldea's no-holds-barred account include the devil's bargain that put Hoffa and his union in the pockets of the Mob, Hoffa's role in the joint CIA-Mafia plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the deal Hoffa made with US president Richard Nixon that released the disgraced Teamster president from prison eight years early, and the truth behind Hoffa's eventual disappearance and likely murder. But perhaps the most startling revelation of all concerns the integral part Jimmy Hoffa played, in concert with underworld kingpins Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante, in America's most terrible twentieth-century crime: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Informed, controversial, ranging from a melancholy study of rock and roll's descent into show business to a hilarious look at the spectacle that is the Jerry Lewis Telethon, these twenty essays offer an unusual and (ironically) entertaining study of American media by one of its foremost critics.

Director of some of the most controversial films of the twentieth century, Stanley Kubrick created a reputation as a Hollywood outsider as well as a cinematic genius. His diverse yet relatively small oeuvre--he directed only thirteen films during a career that spanned more than four decades--covers a broad range of the themes that shaped his century and continues to shape the twenty-first: war and crime, gender relations and class conflict, racism, and the fate of individual agency in a world of increasing social surveillance and control.
In "Depth of Field," leading screenwriters and scholars analyze Kubrick's films from a variety of perspectives. They examine such groundbreaking classics as "Dr. Strangelove" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" and later films whose critical reputations are still in flux. "Depth of Field "ends with three viewpoints on Kubrick's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," placing it in the contexts of film history, the history and theory of psychoanalysis, and the sociology of sex and power. Probing Kubrick's whole body of work, "Depth of Field" is the first truly multidisciplinary study of one of the most innovative and controversial filmmakers of the twentieth century.