“Bartos’ remarkable photographs of the U.N. Building in New York look cold and formal. But only at first. Actually they are full of feeling. This is the haunted house of idealist bureaucracy, filled with the ghosts of promises and suffused with nostalgia for the utopian rigor of high modernism. Nobody has ever put that in a photo before, and Hitchens’ essay expertly peoples the empty spaces of Bartos’ work.”— Robert Hughes
Publisher: Verso
Hardback: 168 pages
Illustrated
Presents the history, mechanics, law and clinical data on the art of “whispering” to the subconscious. Discusses whether you can be brainwashed by subliminals or not, whether they are as dangerous as some professionals claim, and whether they really work at all. Plus instructions on how to create your own subliminal program. GR
Publisher: Just Another Reality
Paperback: 131 pages
“Polling dictates virtually every aspect of election campaigns, from fund-raising to electoral strategy to news coverage. And, after our representatives are elected, polling profoundly shapes the political context in which they make public policy. Whatever its faults and limitations, and they are many, polling matters.” In this thoughtful overview, David W. Moore traces the rise of polling from the nascent Gallup Poll’s challenge to the famed Literary Digest poll in 1936 to the presidential election of 1994. Moore profiles pollster personages George Gallup and Lou Harris, as well as lesser-known (although probably more influential) figures such as presidential pollsters Pat Caddell and Richard Wirthlin. Media pollsters are also considered, as in the ways in which the wording of questions and presentation may influence outcome. As vice president and managing editor of the Gallup Poll, Moore himself is hardly unbiased, and readers are treated to less than complimentary descriptions of main rival Lou Harris’ personality and techniques. Nevertheless, The Superpollsters will help individuals understand how polling came to its current place of dominance in the American political process. LP
Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows
Paperback: 426 pages
“The TAZ is like an uprising which does not directly engage with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can ‘occupy’ these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps certain small TAZs have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves—because they never intersected with the Spectacle, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of Simulation.” Also contains the full text of Bey’s influential Chaos and the complete communiqués and flyers of the Association for Ontological Anarchy.
Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 141 pages
“A graphic demolition derby through the culture of a factory-farmed and show-shocked society, a society whose sell-by date has long since expired. Using savage image/text cut-and-paste this controversial book explodes all previous media theories and riots through the Global Village, looting the ideological supermarkets of all its products: anti-fascism, Malcolm X, James Bulger, the Gulf War, satanic abuse, Somalia and Eastern Europe. Test Card F joyrides in front of the surveillance cameras, amid the rubble of a junkyard nation, and heaves television’s burnt-out carcass through the plate-glass shop window of ‘independent’ video and ‘community access’ broadcasting. It transcends postmodern and Situationist analysis in its positive refusal of the concept of Truth.” AK
Publisher: AK
Paperback: 80 pages
Illustrated
A basic explanation of the hip new science of memetics, the study of the spread of ideas and beliefs called “memes.” Combining elements of epidemiology, genetics and conventional sociology, Thought Contagion is more of trial balloon to expose memetics to a wider public than a ground-breaking scientific work. SS
Publisher: Basic
Hardback: 192 pages
Leff and Haft collected in-depth interviews from people who weren’t working for various reasons, and presented them in this book with related commentary and statistics. In late-20th-century America, work equals identity. However, the authors, through their research, challenge the very notion of maintaining a work-based identity. Their message is even more compelling now than when Time Without Work was first published, thanks to the current downsizing trend and layoffs in almost every industry. With the very nature of work changing, so are many people’s expectations about work. No longer does one have a single employer or, for that matter, a single career. Consequently, people will have periods of unemployment. How will this new facet of the job market relate to societal ideas about work? The stories given here offer some possibilities. SC
Publisher: South End
Paperback: 403 pages
A comprehensive guide that shows just how seriously the PR industry constrains democracy—from technologies for engineering consent to crisis management, from Bophal to the Exxon Valdez to “grassroots” organizing that propels the Christian Coalition and passed NAFTA to political spin control that influences and instantly interprets electoral politics. A compelling conclusion provides practical guidelines that citizens can use to respond to the growing influence of PR over their lives. AK
Publisher: Common Courage
Paperback: 240 pages
O’Brien, “the only vocal and recovered survivor of the Central Intelligence Agency’s MK-ULTRA Project Monarch mind-control operation,” has a story to tell, and it’s some story—the most mind-blowing conspiratorial account to appear in recent years. Having undergone what must have been innumerable hypnotherapy sessions, O’Brien appears to have recovered the memories of dozens of people, and describes in detail the terror and torture she suffered at the hands of her mother, her father, Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, Bill ‘n’ Hill, Gerald Ford, George Bush, Kris Kristofferson, Larry Flynt, Sparky Anderson and “noted pedophile” Boxcar Willie. Senator Robert Byrd, of Virginia, inflicts unimaginable trauma upon her as he forces her to listen endlessly to his fiddle-playin’; and the favored text of the leaders of the American Empire would appear to be—The Wizard of Oz, although reinterpreted so as to allow for bleeding rectums. As you’d hope, there’s dialogue—lots of dialogue:
“How would you like to see where Uncle Ronnie really solves the world’s problems?” said President Reagan, shortly before poring over his collection of bestiality-themed pornography.
“Hillary had resumed examining my hideous mutilation and performing oral sex on me when Bill Clinton walked in. Hillary lifted her head to ask, ‘How’d it go?’ Clinton appeared totally unaffected by what he walked into, tossed his jacket on a chair and said, ‘It’s official. I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.’” One reads the memoirs of O’Brien in awe, and stands back, equally exhausted.
JW
Publisher: Reality
Paperback: 244 pages
“Rare is the philosopher who commits violence to express his theories. Rarer still is the murderer who justifies his crimes with an extensively researched, footnoted societal agenda.
“The terrorist/philosopher known to the American public as the Unabomber wrote this intriguing, mesmerizing—and in the end, frightening—manifesto to tell the world what lay behind his campaign of carefully orchestrated mayhem. The manifesto’s message is clear: Technology, says the Unabomber, is destroying the human race. And the only solution is a fundamental revolution aimed at abolishing technology itself and the social structures that foster technological development.” Unexpurgated and contains text missing from the version published in various newspapers.
Publisher: Jolly Roger
Paperback: 100 pages