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Busboys and Poets Books
Progressive books to activate your mind and community
Staff Picks
Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement by Scott Ritter, and Ending the War in Iraq by Tom Hayden
Has The Peace/Antiwar Moment Failed? How Close Is It To A Win?
After over 6 years of internecine war, illegal government acts, loss of lives, money, and US reputation, one would think that the grassroots has been getting stronger and stronger with every failure of the Administration. However, the peace/anti-war movement had its high point in February 2003 and has been on a bumpy roller rollercoaster ride ever since. Some say the rollercoaster cars aren’t even linked up, aren’t on the same track, and few cars appear to be moving. Meanwhile the Bush administration and at least three of the leading Democratic candidates (Obama, Edwards, and Clinton) have all made the same threat to Iran: “All options are on the table.” Read into it what you will: “first strike”, “nuclear weapons” or even CIA-style destabilization. On the doorstep of a third, more devastating war, what should the beleaguered peace/anti-war movement do?
Two authors give timely and fascinating advice. Both books cost about $15.00--priced to be read by as many people as possible. They take different approaches and the authors may be in disagreement on a few points. But both are highly useful and can in fact be used together. And not just by the antiwar movement but any movement that must deal with the US political landscape.
Hayden’s “Ending the War in Iraq” is the rosier of the two. He is quite a cheerleader for the movement, seeing many positives in what’s been done so far. Before discussing the current antiwar movement, he has two chapters that cover a lot of pertinent history: Chapter One, the Vietnam Antiwar movement, and Chapter 2, the real situation in Iraq. The third chapter gives the history of the current Anti-War movement (from about 2001 onward). The fourth chapter is the core advice he gives to the movement: Put pressure on seven “pillars” or pressure points of the Administration’s Iraq policy. These are:
- The support of the Iraqi State;
- American public opinion;
- Political support in the U.S.;
- Military capacity;
- Financial resources;
- Our moral reputation; and
- Global alliances.
These pillars and the specific strategies of how to apply pressure will give readers insight, hope and energy. Even if you disagree with some of the targets or some of the strategies, you come away with a new and vital way to start thinking about campaigns. And you have good lessons on how to strategize for yourself, and concrete action plans.
Scott Ritter’s book is thinner and darker. Way darker. Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement is more directly critical of the movement. And by the way some peace activists – in particular Cindy Sheehan, have been critical right back. And Ritter has then replied to her with even more scathing criticism. What is the point of contention? Ritter recommends using lessons and strategies taken from war -- from Sun Tzu to very recent Air Force strategies – to run the peace movement. This is not as crazy as it sounds, though obviously it’s tough for some people to swallow.
Remember, he’s been in the military most of his career and was one of the UN’s top weapons inspectors in Iraq. So he’s got an inside view of the military and dynamics in Iraq. He’s critical of the lack of coherent decision-making in antiwar organizations; he calls non-hierarchical groups “flat line” organizations. And he shows how advances in strategy that came from an Air Force Colonel can be used to outbox Military Recruiters, the Administration, and others opponents of the movement.
Word of caution – the book is slightly more abstract, talks more about the military, and his own history. If you are peace activist wanting to feel good about the last six years you won’t find much in Ritter’s book that will help you reminisce. If you want to think about where exactly movement organizations have stalled, and about new tools to make your operation efficient, pick it up.
Finally, both books are quite useful together. Hayden tells you where to put pressure and breaks it into concrete tasks. Ritter’s book focuses on your organization – making it stronger, faster, and smarter. Both can be used to turn the scattered roller coaster cars of the antiwar movement into a real formation. PS: In the activist section of Busboys and Poets are additional tool books for every aspect of movement building from fundraising to building membership. Years of hard won experience are concentrated into a bunch of books that may save you years of hard won experience.
Reviewed by Mark Cimino
The Republic Of Poetry by Martin Espada
“There is only one danger for you here: poetry.”
So speaks the poet Pablo Neruda, to a group of soldiers who have stormed his house in Martin Espada’s poem,The Soldiers In The Garden, from his critically acclaimed, and newest poetry collection The Republic Of Poetry. This simple line of dialogue couldn’t be more telling of Espada’s eighth offering of poetry, which finds this now legendary poet, activist, and teacher both mourning and celebrating the Chile under the reign of dictator Augusto Pinochet and the democratic republic that followed his arrest and eventual depth.
Using the voices of poets, activists, and factual events, Espada captures intimate moments, where the truth once crushed by the powers that be, still returns to set things right. In the poem Something Escapes The Bonfire, Espada tells the story of Victor and Joan Jara, an artist couple imprisoned under the Pinochet regime. Imprisoned as an enemy of the state, Victor, a singer and composer of banned anthems against the Pinochet government, is executed after daring to lead other prisoners in a song openly defying an infamous executioner known as the Prince. Espada writes:
When the other prisoners realized
There were no wings on their shoulders
To fly them from the firing squad,
Victor sang “Venceremos,” we will win,
And the banned anthem lifted shoulders
As the Prince’s face reddened in a scream.
If his own scream could not quiet the song
Pulsing through the veins in his head,
Reasoned the Prince, then the machine guns would.
This event, which took place in the Chile of 1973, is revisited later in 2004; the very stadium where Victor was assassinated has been renamed in his honor. Espada is there and so is Victor’s widow Joan, a dancer who constantly relives the tragedy of those many years ago and yet feels his spirit present in the midst of the celebration of his life and art.
If only Victor would walk into the room
To finish their argument about why
He moved so slowly in the morning
That he almost always made her late for class
Something escapes the bonfire
Where the generals warm their hands
-how a dancer spins to the music in her head,
alone but for the tingle of fingertips at her elbow.
So much has already been written about the scope and breadth of Espada’s poetry. Though this is a slightly smaller volume than his most recent releases, each poem rings true in accuracy, fierceness, and compassion. There is pain, redemption and truth permeating through the pages. This is not a book to pass up.
Reviewed by Derrick Weston Brown
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
Tracy Kidder writes a magnificent and very readable book about one man’s selfless dedication and perseverance to make this world a better place.
The man is Paul Farmer, a man with an unconventional upbringing, full of family adventures and misadventures. The main focus of his work is the most impoverished area of Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world. Ordinarily a book describing the tragic statistics about disease and lack of healthcare in impoverished parts of the world would be dreary and depressing, but this story-telling is exhilarating as it describes how Farmer is helping to reduce what Haitians call “stupid deaths.”
The book takes the reader from Alabama to Boston and then onto Haiti as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication, rejecting the existing inadequate, bureaucracy-ridden clinics and establishes his own public health system in remote areas. While many idealists fail and return home from such endeavors, Farmer perseveres under staggering odds and succeeds. He walks four hours to do a home visit for one child, because the child is part of a system, a family and home. The system also has to be treated for the child to stay well. “You have to believe that small gestures matter-- that they do add up,” says Farmer. He adds, “The only real nation is humanity.”
The title of the book is based on a Haitian proverb that “beyond mountains there are mountains. “ When you surmount one obstacle you gain a clearer view of the next one. The title is also an apt description of a lot of Haiti where Farmer worked. It is heartening to know that there are people like Paul Farmer in this world and this powerful book will change the way you see this world.
Reviewed by Linda Finkel-Talvadkar
Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad By Frances Moore Lappé
“Why are we as societies creating a world that we as individuals abhor?”
So begins Francis Moore Lappé’s brilliant call to action for those of us who still believe that another world is possible, essential, and inevitable. And not only that, she urges us to believe that the grand, but deeply flawed, experiment that we call Democracy is the vehicle that we can salvage to overhaul the republic and, in turn, the world.
In Getting a Grip, Lappé, the bestselling author of Diet for a Small Planet and 15 other books, has provided us with a user’s guide to democracy. To begin we must change the way that we talk about democracy and more importantly, the way that we think about it. In our times democracy has inadequately and harmfully come to mean nothing more than elections and a so-called free market (Lappé calls this definition a “Thin Democracy.”) Unfortunately, elections have been over-run by corporate money; hence, the free market is a misnomer. Restrictions and guidelines that were in place to create fair markets have been removed and corporations have been able to control the markets and consolidate money and power like no other time in this nation’s history. In his talk at the 2007 Green Festival in Washington DC, Ralph Nader called the corporate money that has inundated US politics the single greatest political challenge of our times.
Lucky for us, Frances Moore Lappé has written a book that teaches us how to regain control of the election process, making it much easier to engage in fair trade, empower the powerless and engage in the “Arts of Democracy.” We must do this by creating what Lappé calls a “Living Democracy.” Essentially, Lappé is calling on us all to become citizen-activists, embracing the positive aspects of democracy and wresting control back from the corporations.
Of the many great things that Lappé provides in the book, the most useful may be her charts full of terms and tools to assist us in the way that we think about problems. For example, “To most Americans, globalization equals great Indian food, cool music from Mali, and cheap jeans from China…but the term globalization focuses attention narrowly on the scope of activity. It diverts us from asking who is in control of that activity and therefore who benefits.” So, rather than using the term “globalization,” she recommends that we use terms like “global corporate power” or “global economic centralization” when we talk about worldwide integration of goods and services. In the same chart she recommends the term “corporation-favoring trade” or “unfair trade” instead of “free trade.”
It is worth noting that this book also includes anecdotal evidence proving that it is possible to run “Clean Elections” in the US. Two states, Arizona and Maine, have created publicly funded elections that have removed corporate money from the process. Once that corporate funding was removed, citizens have found it much easier to engage in a “Living Democracy” with an empowered citizenry seeking sustainable solutions to society’s problems.
The strengths of Lappe’s book are undoubtedly the ideas that will clean up elections and allow the people to regain control of our democracy. However, this book is full of grand concepts that also make it an activist self-help book (in the best possible sense). Dr. Phil and his ilk have filled the chain bookstores with tomes full of pop psychology and bad advice for the self-obsessed. But, Lappe’s book is self-help in the grand Buckminster Fuller style. To paraphrase a Fuller concept, humans are most efficient when trying to help as many people as possible; therefore, the most effective use of a person’s time is to try to help as many people as possible at all times. With this in mind, Lappé spends a significant amount of time in the book encouraging us to use conflict as a powerful learning tool and fear as a motivating force. Her motivational writing on these topics is intended to get us involved in the living democracy process (not to save a relationship or break a personal addiction – like traditional self help books).
Throughout Getting a Grip, there is an underlying concept that is illustrated in the two diagrams that are placed within the front and back covers. We must escape the Spiral of Powerlessness (based on premises that there are lacks of goods and goodness in the world). Instead, we must embrace the Spiral of Empowerment, which is based on a couple of premises. First, nature has provided us with more than enough goods, but we haven’t used a Living Democracy to distribute them equitably. Next, there is plenty of goodness in the world. “Within Human nature are deep needs for fairness, cooperation, effectiveness and meaning.”
Quotations are used liberally to perfectly illustrate many ideas in Getting a Grip; so, to summarize the hope and usefulness in this book, it seems appropriate to quote Lappé herself (From her chapter on Claiming Our Sanity):
The Challenge is to believe that a new, more life-serving world view is – at least possibly – emerging. “Seeing is believing” is a charming aphorism, but maybe it’s also wrong. More accurately, when it comes to human, “ believing is seeing.” We must believe that another way of living is possible in order to see it actually taking shape around us. Maybe though, the only way to see the new is to become part of the new.
Reviewed by Don Allen
Sin Patron by The Lavaca Collective
Imagine that one in every four people you know is jobless. Imagine market-leading companies that are the most recognized in their field, suddenly claiming they cannot pay their employees. You are late to work a few days out of the week because the roads are peppered with flaming tires that have been strategically placed by workers who have been stripped of their livelihoods by the institutionalized avarice of corporate businesses. Try to picture a worker pegging armed police with ceramic balls he made with his own hands, only to defend his democratic workplace. With their backs against the wall and their government financially and morally paralyzed, the Argentine working-class took matters into their own hands. This is the economic, political and social climate Argentina was feeling in the late ‘90s and early into the new millennium.
Class consciousness reached a revolutionary level in 2001, as Argentina glided into a three-year recession and the vast economic corruption became visible during the Carlos Menem administration and continued with the presidency of Fernando de la Rua, The excessive and fraudulent corporate bankruptcies reached a tipping point with the corralito, when the Minister of Economy Domingo Cavallo, froze all bank accounts, giving the first glimpse of social crisis. By 2002, the poverty rate increased to 57% from 36% in 2000.
In the spirit of communally organized work, the Lavaca Collective brings you Sin Patron, ten stories of ordinary people whose trained methods of looking at life are dramatically altered through struggle and solidarity. Lavaca, much like the real-life characters in the book, is a worker based activist-journalist cooperative dedicated to bringing the stories of the 2001 Argentinazo to light. Translated into English for the first time, Sin Patron is a poetic eye-opening compilation of the different battles for worker-run and operated industry. “Occupy, Resist, Produce” is the cry of the thousands of displaced factory workers who were able to maintain production after owners filed for a fabricated bankruptcy. These stories raise many societal questions in relation to authority, monetary interest and human dignity.
As an American reading Sin Patron, it is difficult to not reflect on the Enron scandal that took away the careers of many middle class workers. We hear rumors about the U.S. dollar losing its value, we see the housing market sliding into crisis, and billions of our tax dollars are poured into the war machine. The talking heads that used to glow when mentioning a strong economy now whisper about a looming recession a few years down the line.
This book is more than just an inspiring fight that happened in another country. It is a guide for calculated resistance that can be applied to status quo of many countries. The first page captures the essence of Sin Patron, “This is a story of change. But since, like all sins, it leaves us with a penance instead of a lesson, we’ll avoid prognosis. The limit of all predictions is what people are capable of doing. It is not chance, but courage, that makes the future unpredictable. That is what this story and this change are about.”
Reviewed by Marco Murillo
Another Country by James Baldwin
I have long been a fan of the use of literature to explore the nuances of a society and how people interact with one another. I believe that plots and characters can express the humanity behind many of the great questions on life, race, religion and class in a way that statistics and demographics cannot. Baldwin's Another Country is a prime example of how literature can do these things.
In this novel many of the statements made about class, race, and inter-racial relationships continue to have resonance today. The book centers on an inter-racial group of friends and artists living in New York. Each character attempts to find love through friendship and amorous relationships despite their own personal biases, both acknowledged and unacknowledged. The plot crosses timelines, city neighborhoods, and countries. The fact that the views expressed by the book's characters still have a profound meaning today, some 50 years later, says a lot about how far we have, or haven't, come as a society. A great read for even the most progressive minds that want to explore these questions on a personal and humanistic level.
Reviewed by Gia Jones
The Only Bush I Trust is My Own By Periel Aschenbrand
"But I feel it is important, if not critical, to discuss such things, if for no other reason than to de-stigmatize them. This is my contribution. Think of it as social work.” This simply sums Periel Aschenbrand's debut, The Only Bush I Trust is My Own, and echoes her personal and unique practices of social activism.
Despite her mother’s desperate pleas to stray from writing about all they discuss, Aschenbrand speaks of that which we, as a society, are too afraid or timid to confront, act upon, or think about due to conservative social mores, and the inhibitory effects of social categorizing, labeling, and the implementation of taboos. From religious and racial politics, to deemed unconventional sexual practices, Aschenbrand is conversational and logical—in a rather abrupt and sarcastically entertaining manner—throughout her book, encouraging readers to adopt (or continue to adopt) her very liberal, simple, and graspable rationale.
With the thought that, "We should use our tits to make people think," Aschenbrand shares her story regarding the birth of her t-shirt company, Body as Billboard, furthering the use of the human body as a political instrument, and as a catalyst for enhancing social discourse, responsibility, change, and public education.
Aschenbrand’s precise mix of politics, humor, and bluntness, alleviates some of the major social complications and tensions that are currently looming—but which are all too often disregarded.
Reviewed by Cristy Latagan
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