U.S. Regime Change Playing Cards
Price: $4.95
In April 2003, the Pentagon issued a deck of playing cards featuring the nastiest, most unreconstructable Baathists in the whole of Iraq. One week later, the Yes Men announced their own deck of cards-featuring the nastiest, most unreconstructable criminals in the world! Now, just in time for the start of the 2004 US election cycle, the Yes Men have released a brand-new, information-crammed “52 most wanted” deck. Use these cards to play any card game at all-poker, gin rummy, hearts, etc. Instead of four of a kind or a sequence of four, look for four (or more) cards that refer to each other (e.g. Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein, George Schultz and Riley Bechtel). You must describe these interrelationships as you lay the cards down; using an intermediate (absent) card to relate two cards gets you an extra 1/2 point. You can also use the cards to play the Yes Men’s special new card game called “Try ’em,” for which these cards were designed....
Read more about: U.S. Regime Change Playing Cards »It Didn't Happen Here
Price: $19.95
Two of America’s leading political sociologists explore a phenomenon of American political exceptionalism: the failure of the socialist movement in the United States. Parties calling themselves Socialist, Social-Democratic, Labor, or Communist have been major forces in every democratic country in the world, yet they have played a surprisingly insignificant role in American politics. Why the United States, the most developed capitalist industrial society and hence, ostensibly, fertile ground for socialism, should constitute an exception has been a critical question of American history and political development. In this probing work the authors draw on rich contrasts with other English-speaking countries and extensive comparisons within the United States at the state and city levels, eschewing conventional explanations of socialism’s demise to present a fuller understanding of how multiple factors–political structure, American values, and the split between the Socialist party and mainstream unions–combined to seal socialism’s fate. Further chapters examine the distinctive character of American trade unions, immigration and the fragmentation of the American working class,...
Read more about: It Didn’t Happen Here »Left Book Club Anthology
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“In 1936 British publisher Victor Gollancz founded the Left Book Club to promote socialism and to educate the masses on the growing threat of fascism. A senior editor at the London Review of Books, Laity presents excerpts from influential club selections, including George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, and Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China. He also provides brief introductions to these works, as well as a 22-page introduction outlining the club’s history. At its height, the club boasted nearly 60,000 members. Despite its popularity, however, Gollancz was frequently criticized for his blind acceptance of the Communist Party line and his uncritical support of the Soviet Union. As a result of the party’s opposition to British intervention in World War II, Gollancz, like Arthur Koestler and many other British intellectuals, abandoned communism. Their subsequent embrace of liberalism is generally credited with the rising fortunes of the Labour Party in 1945. Recommended for academic libraries,...
Read more about: Left Book Club Anthology »Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts
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Key texts from leading theorists in postwar French literary criticism. In Literary Debate, the second volume in The New Press’s Postwar French Thought Series, editors Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman present a selection of texts, many available in English for the first time, that together offer an illuminating and provocative overview of the last half-century of French literary criticism. Combining examination of literature as an institution and in historical context with pathbreaking interpretations of writing by such authors as Stephan Mallarmé and Sigmund Freud, Literary Debate presents the seminal work of figures such as Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Paul Sartre. These selections represent one of the most fertile periods the field has known. Including original essays by its editors, this volume brings together the important threads of one of the most influential movements in Western intellectual history.
... Read more about: Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts »Aesthetic Relation
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One of the best-known continental theorists writing today, Grard Genette here explores our aesthetic relation to works of art. Through an analysis of the views of thinkers ranging from David Hume and Immanuel Kant to Monroe C. Beardsley, Arthur Danto, and Nelson Goodman, Genette seeks to identify the place of the aesthetic in a theory of artistic appreciation. His discussion is rich in detailed examples drawn from all of the arts. The Aesthetic Relation is a companion volume to The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence, published by Cornell in 1997. Taken together, the two books offer a comprehensive theory of art which addresses the work of art as at once object and action. Genette maintains that our aesthetic relation to all types of objects presupposes that special attention is paid to their outward aspect (rather than to their usefulness) when appraising them. Such appraisals, while wholly subjective and temporary, are expressed as objective and universal judgments about the items in question....
Read more about: Aesthetic Relation »Nickel and Dimed
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Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty level wages. Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, in order to find out how anyone survives on six to seven dollars an hour. Ehrenreich left home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find and accepted whatever jobs she was offered from cleaning to care work, waitressing to folding clothes at Wal-Mart. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of working America.
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