Bøker utgitt av OR Books

Abolition Labor chronicles the national movement to end forced labor, much of it unpaid, in American prisons. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated persons in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and New York to give a more holistic picture of these work conditions, and it covers the new prisoner rights movement that began with system-wide work strikes involving more than 50,000 people in the 2010s.Incarcerated people work for penny wages (15 cents an hour is not unusual), and, in several states, for nothing at all, as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, garbage cans, athletic equipment, and uniforms. And they harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and labor in meat and poultry processing plants.Abolition Labor provides a wealth of insights into what has become a vast underground economy. It draws connections between the risky trade forced on prisoners who hustle to survive on the inside and the precarious economy on the outside. And it argues that, far from being quarantined off from society, prisons and their forced work regime have a sizable impact on the economic and social lives of millions of American households.

"Set in the author's homeland, Colombia, this is the heartbreaking story of Leonor, former child soldier of the FARC, a rural guerrilla group. Paula Delgado-Kling followed Leonor for nineteen years, from shortly after she was an active member of the FARC forced into sexual slavery by a commander thirty-four years her senior, through her rehabilitation and struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, to more recent days as the mother of two girls. Leonor's physical beauty, together with resourcefulness and imagination in the face of horrendous circumstances, helped her carve a space for herself in a male-dominated world. She never stopped believing that she was a woman of worth and importance. It took her many years of therapy to accept that she was also a victim. Throughout the story of Leonor, Delgado-Kling interweaves the experiences of her own family, involved with Colombian politics since the 19th century and deeply afflicted, too, by the decades of violence there."--Provided by publisher.

Concrete Utopia  conceptualizes the human rights project of the last two and a half centuries as a “backward-looking” endeavor, which, in order to move forward, must return to the utopian roots of its foundational documents. Human rights advance by judging the ills of the present world from a standpoint in the future where they might no longer exist—a fundamentally utopian gesture. This peculiar character of human rights makes them continually ripe for reinvention and for responding to changing world circumstances. Looking at topics such as the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s, public outrage to the Vietnam War, the US civil rights movement and the founding of Amnesty International in 1961, this book surveys the history of human rights and how they have been reconceived at different points in time. It closes by sketching the way they may be re-envisioned for new struggles in the 21st century.At a time when the human rights project has endured criticism for being toothless or even for providing a pretext for military invasions, Kaleck argues that the current global crises, from inequality, to ecological collapse and the “age of pandemics,” can be countered by reinventing human rights work through feminist, decolonial and ecological interventions.

At the start of Mark Jacob's remarkable new novel-his first book in thirteen years-thirty-seven-year-old Smith wins a "stash" of diamonds in a poker game. The only catch: he has to find them.A Louisiana native, Smith is currently employed on an oil platform off the west coast of Africa, while the diamonds are somewhere in the immense, war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Smith's grown tired of the platform and he hates the idea of wasting a full house. One last adventure, he tells himself, and then, diamonds or no diamonds, he's heading home to Louisiana.In Kinshasa, Smith meets a young woman named Béatrice, who hails from a village on the other side of the country. But this village, she tells Smith, is where his diamonds are-a thousand miles away as the crow flies, but significantly longer on the patchwork of guerilla-patrolled roads that traverse the country. If he helps her get home, she'll show him where the stones are.What ensues is a guided tour of hell in which a not-so-innocent American abroad comes face to face with the legacy of European imperialism in the heart of the African continent. Like Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and V.S. Naipaul before him, Jacobs reveals the limits of the western gaze, inverting the tropes of the white-savior novel to give us a story about a man who realizes you don't have to travel to another country to get lost, and you don't have to go home to be found.

"Based on dramatic first-hand evidence, Deadly Betrayal uncovers why and how a cabal of Pentagon Advisors in the George W. Bush Administration created a fabricated justification to attack Iraq. The book provides a detailed insider account of how a Pentagon cabal strategized to manipulate intelligence, pressure the United Nations, force a Congressional authorization for the use of force through political threats, and scare the American people after 9/11 into supporting an attack on Iraq. Authored by a Pentagon insider and senior enlisted leader of nearly three decades standing, Command Chief Master Sergeant, Retired, Dennis Fritz worked directly for and advised some of the most senior General Officers in the Department of Defense. They included General Richard B. Myers, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the height of the Iraq War. After military retirement, Fritz found himself inside Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon working for Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and key architect of the case for war. He was detailed to the Pentagon as a contracted Research Fellow and Analyst on a special project to gather and review all Iraqi Pre-War Planning Documents for declassification. His access to thousands of personal handwritten notes, documents, and Pentagon's internal conversations, has allowed him to tell the real story of why America invaded Iraq."--

A deep dive into one of this century's most potent questions: do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it?This compact new edition of a paradigmatic text packs a big and actionable punch. Updated with a new section on the unique challenges posed by AI, Program or Be Programmed presents a spirited, accessible poetics of new media. On these pages (and screens), Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age.The debate over whether the internet is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: it’s here; it’s everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.” In eleven “commands,” Rushkoff provides cyberenthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate this new universe.

Told through the lives of the American Century’s most talented and stubborn dissidents, Flights is the archetypal hero’s journey of a group of progressives whose struggle for truth, and for freedom from persecution, sent them into exile, both literal and metaphorical.Wanted for a crime she did not commit, Professor Angela Davis went on the run in 1970, describing the struggle against panic in her nightly safehouse transfers: “Living as a fugitive means resisting hysteria, distinguishing between the creations of a frightened imagination and the real signs that the enemy is near.” In her quest “to elude him, outsmart him,” she recalled, “Thousands of my ancestors had waited, as I had…for nightfall to cover their steps…”Davis is just one of a rich array of refugees portrayed here by Joel Whitney, all forced to flee homes and/or friends because of their progressive stance. In these pages are compelling profiles of Seymour Hersh, Lorraine Hansberry, Graham Greene, Paul Robeson, Gabriel García Márquez, George & Mary Oppen, Frances Stonor Saunders, Malcolm X, Octavio Paz, Diego Rivera, Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, N. Scott Momaday, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Guatemalan guerrilla fighter Everado and his American wife Jennifer Harbury, Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchú, deposed Honduran President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya and murdered Lenca environmentalist Berta Cáceres.At once a group portrait of these geniuses of creative escape, Flights is also a prehistory (and indictment) of American mass surveillance, culminating in Edward Snowden’s revelations, of torture, culminating in Abu Ghraib, of censorship, culminating in the incarceration of journalist Julian Assange, of fascism, culminating in January 6, and of political murder, culminating in the Bush-Obama-Trump air assassination program.

Tale of Ahmed is a gripping fictional account of the dangerous journey of a teenage boy, Ahmed, who travels from Afghanistan, across the Middle East and Europe, to seek refuge in England.Author Henry Cockburn lives at one end of a long trail stretching from Afghanistan to the southeast coast of England. His home in Kent is close to where small, frail boats arrive bringing refugees on the last lap of their 6,000-mile journey from Kabul and the Hindu Kush. Meeting and talking with refugees, Henry became aware that even they themselves rarely understand the heroic nature of their odyssey. The journey's never-ending risks have become second nature to them. For most other people, they are simply unknown. Correcting such misperceptions is one of the objectives of this powerful story.Written in the form of an epic poem and richly illustrated by the author, Tale of Ahmed describes how its eponymous hero gets help from fellow travelers and finds unexpected friends along the way. But Ahmed is also exploited for money by crooks and cheats, as well as targeted as a pariah. This unusual and unputdownable fable recounts with great sensitivity the Afghans' sufferings and their courage and resilience in making a grueling passage.

I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader is a timely and essential collection of the many works of Professor Gerald Horne-a historian who has made an indelible impact on the study of US and international history. Horne approaches his study of history as a deeply politically engaged scholar, with an insightful and necessarily partisan stance, critiquing the lasting reverberations of white supremacy and all its bedfellows-imperialism, colonialism, fascism and racism-which continue to wreak havoc in the United States and abroad to this day. Drawing on a career that spans more than four decades, The Gerald Horne Reader will showcase the many highlights of Horne's writings, delving into discussions of the United States and its place on the global stage, the curation of mythology surrounding titans of 20th Century African American history like Malcolm X, and Horne's thoughts on pressing international crises of the 21st Century including the war in Afghanistan during the early 2000s, and the war in Ukraine which erupted in February 2022. As we continue to observe the chaos of our current times, I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader foregrounds a firmly rooted, consistent analysis of what has come to pass-and provides illuminating insight that better informs where we may be headed, and outlines what needs to be done to stem the tide of growing fascism across the Western world.

This reader brings together scholars from different eras, cultures and geographic locations. With this diversity of voices, the book opens a dialogue about the social power of art and how change is envisioned by deliberately juxtaposing radically different conceptions of art and activism.  Among the writers included are: James Baldwin, Lucy Lippard, Herbert Marcuse, Audre Lorde, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rabindranath Tagore, John Dewey, John Berger, Augusto Boal, Franz Fanon, Raymond Williams, Jacque Ranciere, Rosalyn Deutche, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Mikhail Baktin, Octavia Butler, and W. E. B. DuBois. The reader focuses on concepts that scholars have grappled with as to how art and politics can combine to achieve social change. It deliberately does not include case studies or manifestos.  Rather, the texts are organized thematically: Art Unsettles: Social Systems and Critique; Art Reveals: Making the Invisible Visible; Art Resists: Everyday Interventions; Art Acts: Activism as Art; Art (Re)Orders: Making Sense of the World; and Art Imagines: Envisioning New Worlds. This thematic structure allows the reader to engage with different perspectives with the theme for engaged dialogue. Each thematic section opens with a brief essay by the editors framing the central conceptual concerns that follow.

“You walk into Thoughts and Prayers like it’s a familiar pop cultural fun house—then you get drawn into one of the mirrors and find you’re actually deep in someplace very real: fleshy, frightening, full of anguished intelligence and bitter fun.” —Mary GaitskillThoughts and Prayers is a beautiful and startling volume of poetry about our political existence. With both humor and luminosity, it gets at the personal and collective emotional experience of American public life, from the 1970s to the 1990s Democrats, through the collapse of the news industry, to the burlesque Trump era.

In this iconoclastic and sure to be contentious re-casting by a renowned critic, the great American novel Moby Dick is presented as a work that has been widely misread, an error that continues to this day. According to Barry Sanders, Herman Melville's best- known work is not a novel, does not pretend to be a novel, and was not intended by its author to be read as a novel. Moby Dick is this country's first manifesto, a tocsin sounded to warn us about the encroaching end of nature.  The Manifesto of Herman Melville traces the evolution of Moby Dick-from its awful, initial reception, very rapidly passing out of print, to its remarkable revival to become lauded as one of America's great literary classics.  That turnaround happened in the early decades of the 20th century and was, in great part, the result of the new and radical aesthetic movements such as surrealism, dadaism, and cubism that allowed for a radical reading of the book. The novel's new standing as one of the keystones of the American cannon disguises its deeper meaning as an alarm bell, an obscuring which Barry Sanders, in a critical assessment that is as persuasive as it is provocative, seeks to clear away. Sanders argues that Moby Dick needs to be recognized as Melville's manifesto: a bold statement warning of the destruction of the natural world made most evident in the book's central metaphor the relentless pursuit to kill the whale, the first sentient being in Genesis and one of the most startling mammals-possessed of hair and scales, a tail and breasts-and the largest of the creatures on earth, weighing up to 400,000 pounds. Whalers in Melville's day hunted down and killed these extraordinary behemoths of nature, for their oil, sold to people for cooking and to light their homes. Today the pursuit for energy has shifted dramatically, from sea to land,  but the prize remains the same:  energy producing fuel for which entrepreneurs and adventurers are prepared to kill off all of nature.

An explosive exhibition of art by a celebrated cartoonist chronicling America's march toward right-wing authoritarianism. Museum of Degenerates invites you to a delirious display of art by one of contemporary America's most original and incendiary political cartoonists. Eli Valley's extraordinary work is a scathing indictment of the entire American polity, with a particular focus on the issues of Israel and Judaism at a time when these have moved to the center of public debate and action. In these pages, Valley tips a homburg to German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix who featured in "The Exhibition of Degenerate Art," a 1937 Munich show that sought to ridicule the work of artists critical of Hitler's fascist regime. In an aesthetic that is strikingly original, Valley also draws on early twentieth-century American Yiddish cartoons and the work of artists who created the helter-skelter exuberance of MAD comics in the 1950s. Valley's own art, accompanied here by extensive descriptions of its genesis and context, is a howl of protest against the political, cultural and media elites driving America into an authoritarian abyss. Here is anger, pure and hot, expressed in exquisite detail and, often, disturbingly funny.

"Bev Stohl ran the MIT office of the renowned linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky for nearly two and a half decades. This is her account of those years"--Page [4] of cover

Russia's brutal February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has attracted widespread condemnation across the West. Government and media circles present the conflict as a simple dichotomy between an evil empire and an innocent victim. In this concise, accessible and highly informative primer, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies insist the picture is more complicated. Yes, Russia's aggression was reckless and, ultimately, indefensible.But the West's reneging on promises to halt eastward expansion of NATO in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union played a major part in prompting Putin to act. So didtheU.S. involvement in the 2014 Ukraine coup and Ukraine's failure to implement the Minsk peace agreements.The result is a conflict that is increasingly difficult to resolve, one that could conceivably escalate into all-out war between the United States and Russia-the world's two leading nuclear powers.Skillfully bringing together the historical record and current analysis,War In Ukrainelooks at the events leading up to the conflict, surveys the different parties involved, and weighs the risks of escalation and opportunities for peace. For anyone who wants to get beneath the heavily propagandized media coverage to an understanding of a war with consequences that could prove cataclysmic, reading this timely book will be an urgent necessity.

An updated, revised edition of OR's straight-to-consumer's takedown of the "sharing economy"

"This penetrating study asks whether the actual evidence concerning alleged Russian interference in the US elections of 2016 justifies the enormous hue and cry it has elicited ... A highly instructive inquiry into our current malaise." - Noam ChomskyCold War, Hot War upends conventional thinking about the defining story of the Trump era-the supposed threat of Russia to American democracy -and offers revelatory insight about the U.S. political and media culture in which it arose. Drawing on his writing for The Nation, Real Clear Investigations, The Grayzone, and original reporting for this book, journalist Aaron Mate offers a rigorous, and mordantly entertaining account of how and why supposed Russian interference in US elections became what Mother Jones described as "the biggest scandal in American history."Russiagate reporting is a densely populated field. But, unlike other accounts, this book sidesteps the inflammatory speculation shared by Democrat and Republican talking points. Instead, Mate raises two questions that no major work has previously addressed: Do the facts about Russiagate match what we have been led to believe? And, if not, why has it become one of the biggest news stories of recent years? Russiagate, Mate argues, is not a genuine "scandal" based on the merits, but a kind of Privilege Protection Racket: a product of the interests-and entrenched dysfunctions- of those in power. This is not some reverse conspiracy theory of "Deep State" subterfuge.  Cold War, Hot War brilliantly exposes the way the Russiagate phenomenon reflects the common elite interests of both liberals and conservative. In short, Russiagate is a pathology of the privileged.

Ongoing relevance/likely persistence of QAnon in the US, particularly in the 2022 and 2024 election years: new reporting continues to indicate that QAnon supporters are remaining politically active and adapting the core ideology to new aims (see, for example, The Atlantic's latest piece).While the first major book on the topic, The Storm is Upon Us (Melville House, June 2021) functioned as an authoritative explainer of QAnon's communications, activities, and scope, Operation Mindfuck is an irreverent but urgent call to intellectual action, offering mastery in the analysis of the movement's largely-borrowed source material and cult-mentality triggers. Guffey says: "Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the QAnon psyop is not the identity of its architects, but the mere fact that it worked . . . and worked so damn well."Operation Mindfuck contextualizes QAnon not only within existing conspiracy theory formulas and satanic panics, but also traces its bizarre lineage in the American collective unconscious, from Cold War paranoia to the midcentury counterculture?Guffey's particularly effective in highlighting QAnon's exploiting of political performance tactics pioneered by 1960s radical leftists. Untangling this web of influence and pointing to its far-from-supernatural sources, Guffey argues, is key to breaking QAnon's mesmeric spell.The book's uniquely freewheeling style is marked by Guffey's gonzo-journalistic plunges into the subculture himself, including pursuing an email correspondence with a recent QAnon convert, clicking on YouTube links at his own risk, and joining the mailing list of a QAnon talk show, using the pseudonym Edgar Allan Poe.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maximillian Alvarez conducted a series of intimate interviews with workers of various stripes, from all around the United States, about their jobs, their lives, dreams, and struggles, and about their experiences living through a year when the world itself seemed to break apart.--Adapted from back cover summary.

With the invasion of the Ukraine, America's relations with Russia have moved right to the center of global politics. The Russiagate story has engulfed US media and politics since 2016 and Maté one of only a handful of journalists who got it right.Russigate has had massive consequences on US and global politics that continue to play out until this day. Aaron Maté's coverage of Russiagate in the Nation magazine has been honored with an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media, and International Journalism award from the Club de Periodistas de MexicoThis is a returnable Print To Order Hardcover.

The November 2020 US election was arguably the most consequential since the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln—and grassroots leaders and organizers played crucial roles in the contention for the presidency and control of both houses of Congress.Power Concedes Nothing tells the stories behind a victory that won both the White House and the Senate and powered progressive candidates to new levels of influence. It describes the on-the-ground efforts that mobilized a record-breaking turnout by registering new voters and motivating an electorate both old and new. In doing so it charts a viable path to victory for the vital contests upcoming in 2022 and 2024.Contributors include: Cliff Albright, Yong Jung Cho, Larry Cohen, Sendolo Diaminah, Neidi Dominguez, David Duhalde, Alicia Garza, Ryan Greenwood, Arisha Michelle Hatch , Jon Liss, Thenjiwe McHarris, Andrea Cristina Mercado, Maurice Mitchell, Rafael Návar, Deepak Pateriya, Ai-jen Poo, W. Mondale Robinson, Art Reyes III, Nsé Ufot and Mario Yedidia

For those interested in continuing the struggle for decolonization, the word “multiculturalism” can seem like a sad joke. After all, institutionalized multiculturalism today is a muck of buzzwords, branding strategies, and virtue signaling that has nothing to do with real struggles against racism and colonialism. But Decolonize Multiculturalism unearths a buried history.The book focuses on the student and youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by global movements for decolonization and anti-racism, which aimed to fundamentally transform their society, as well as the fierce repression of these movements by the state, corporations, and university administrations. Part of the response has been sheer violence—campus policing, for example, only began in the ’70s, paving the way for the militarized campuses of today—with institutionalized multiculturalism acting like the velvet glove around the iron fist of state violence.And yet today’s multiculturalism also contains residues of the original radical demands of the student and youth movements that it aims to repress: to open up the university, to wrench it from its settler colonial, white supremacist, and patriarchal capitalist origins, and to transform it into a place of radical democratic possibility.

Elegantly written and charmingly illustrated, The Activist Angler shows how lessons learned from angling can guide political activism and vice versa. Patience, preparation and precision are needed to catch fish . . . and to build a movement.Looking for a retreat during the stress of the pandemic, the activist and teacher Steve Duncombe took up fishing, a sport he had abandoned in his youth. After many years away from his rod, he had to re-learn how to fish and approached the practice with what Zen masters call “Beginner’s Mind.” Having no recent experience to fall back on, every fish successfully caught or line hopelessly snarled served as a lesson. Hours spent doing little more than casting and retrieving meant plenty of time to think. One of the things Steve thought a lot about was activism. The art of angling, he discovered, has a lot to teach about the art of activism.The Activist Angler brings together these lessons in an engaging journey from the street to the beach and back. The format is simple: one reflection on fishing followed by another on what might be learned and applied to activism, with each accompanied by an illustration. Topics range from telling fish stories and the trap of activist nostalgia, to the impossibility of thinking like a fish yet the necessity for an organizer to understand their audience, with detours through reflections on self-care, catch-and-release, and taking responsibility for the human cost of one’s political actions.

Corporate Coup looks at the attempted overthrow of the elected government of Venezuela, an intervention which, despite open backing by the United States, failed dismally.In January of 2019, the Trump Administration decided to recognize a previously little known opposition lawmaker named Juan Guaidó as President of Venezuela. The policy was unprecedented — while Washington’s history of coups in Latin America is well documented, never before had the United States taken the step of legally recognizing a new government before an actual change in leadership had taken place. Within months it became clear that the attempt at regime change had fallen flat: all Venezuelan territory, government ministries, and the country’s military remained under the control of President Nicolás Maduro. While US officials, such as Trump Venezuela Envoy Elliott Abrams boasted that roughly 54 countries followed Washington’s lead and recognized Guaidó’s authority, the vast majority of United Nations member states rejected the coup policy and maintained relations with Maduro’s government. Three years on from the coup attempt, Venezuela’s government is firmly in place and Guaidó is virtually nowhere to be seen. So what did this ham-fisted regime change effort truly achieve?Parampil provides a narrative history of the Chavista revolution and offers character sketches of the figures who have come to lead it since Hugo Chávez’s death in 2014. She shows how Guaidó’s shadow regime consisted of individuals with deep connections to transnational corporations which sought to overturn the revolution and exploit Venezuela’s resources, revealing their plot to steal Citgo Petroleum, the country’s most valuable international asset.Corporate Coup exposes the hidden personalities and interests driving US policy on Venezuela, revealing that while the recognition of Guaidó failed at changing reality on the ground in Caracas, it succeeded in providing cover for the unprecedented looting of the country’s internationally-stored wealth. It is based on the extensive investigation and on-the-ground reporting Anya Parampil has conducted since the US coup attempt began, during which she cultivated relationships with top Venezuelan government officials as well as members of the country’s opposition who oppose Guaidó and US sanction policy.This gripping story from Venezuela encapsulates the tenor of a US foreign policy that is happy to trample on democratic norms and illustrates how a new, multipolar world is rising in order to resist it.

Much has been written In English about the experiences and treatment of immigrants from south of the Rio Grande once they have entered the United States. But this account, by the itinerant, effervescent and highly original journalist Beln Fernndez, offers a different and wholly original take.Beln Fernndezshows us what life is like for would-be migrants, not just from the Mexican side of the border but inside Siglo XXI, the notorious migrant detention center in the south of the country.Journalists are prohibited from entering Siglo XXI; Fernndezonly gained access because she herself was detained as a result of faulty paperwork when she attempted to return to the US to renew her passport. Once inside the facility, Fernndezwas able to speak with detained women from Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, Bangladesh, and beyond. Their stories, detailing the hardships that prompted them to leave their homes, and the dangers they have experienced on an often-tortuous journey north, form the core of this unique book. The companionship and support they offer to Fernndez, whose antipathy to returning to the United States, the country they are desperate to enter, is a source of bemusement and perplexity, demonstrates a spirited generosity that is deeply moving.In the end, the Siglo XXI center emerges as a strikingly precise metaphor for a 21st century in which poor people, effectively imprisoned by American political and economic policies, nevertheless display astonishing resilience.

Racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new model every year. Malcolm X (a former auto worker)Written in a lively, accessible fashion and drawing extensively on interviews with people who were formerly incarcerated,Cars and Jailsexamines how the costs of car ownership and use are deeply enmeshed with the U.S. prison system.American consumer lore has long held the automobile to be a freedom machine, consecrating the mobility of a free people. Yet, paradoxically, the car also functions at the cross-roads of two great systems of entrapment and immobility the American debt economy and the carceral state.Cars and Jailsinvestigates this paradox, showing how auto debt, traffic fines, over-policing, and automated surveillance systems work in tandem to entrap and criminalize poor people. The authors describe how racialization and poverty take their toll on populations with no alternative, in a country poorly served by public transport, to taking out loans for cars and exposing themselves to predatory and often racist policing.Looking skeptically at the frothy promises of the mobility revolution, Livingston and Ross close with thought-provoking ideas for a radical overhaul of transportation.

President Biden has announced the battle against cancer, a disease experienced by 50% of the population at some point in their lives, as a priority of his administration.This accessible but fastidiously researched book shows how the priorities of the medical system need to be fundamentally redirected in order for this project to achieve success.It argues that rather than investing enormous sums in treatment of late-stage cancer, widespread and persistent screening, education and early treatment provides far better cost benefit results.