This book is a guide to dealing with the demands of terrorists. The author develops the thesis that it is indeed possible to deal with terrorists and bases his opinions on established cases. All the whys, hows, and possibilities are explored in this mini-encyclopedia of hostage negotiating. The author lists personality types of hostage takers, which he divides into basically four groups:
1. paranoid schizophrenics
2. psychotic depressives
3. antisocial personalities
4. inadequate personalities
Probably the most interesting chapter in the book is the “Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla,” which duplicates the standard set of instructions for improvising a terrorist milieu. This chapter is indeed the “meat on the bone,” as the following excerpt will show: “Molotov cocktails, gasoline, homemade contrivances such as catapults and mortars for firing explosives, grenades made of tubes and cans, smoke bombs, mines, conventional explosives such as dynamite and potassium chloride, plastic explosives, gelatine capsules, ammunition of every kind are indispensable to the success of the urban guerilla’s mission.” JB

Publisher: Alpha
Hardback: 248 pages

At the point of convergence between extremes of fame and infamy, the entire fabric of “received ideas” to which our culture clings gets caught up in a tailspin and scattered to the wind in a variety of surprising reconfigurations. Author Solotaroff stakes out a kind of vanguard terrain—at once anomalous and absolutely integral to any social analysis of life in late-20th-century America—and he explores it by way of its complex and conflicted denizens: Charles Manson, James Brown, Andrew “Dice” Clay and certain lesser-known, though no less legendary, figures, such as street corner comic Charlie Barnett, unsigned basketball prodigy Earl Manigault, and Ray and Jay, the kids who took seriously Judas Priest’s “subliminal command” to “do it.” All casualties, in some form or another, of the glare of the spotlight. JT

Publisher: Sheep Meadow
Hardback: 224 pages

Hidden methods of world domination exposed! Pseudo-handbook for budding Armand Hammers, with instructive commentary from David Rockefeller, et al.

Publisher: Loompanics
Paperback: 62 pages

“The Octopus was Casolaro’s name for an intelligence cabal he had documented in his unfinished book. His toe hold was PROMIS, a supersurveillance software misappropriated from a company called Inslaw by Ed Meese’s Justice Department and sold illegally to police agencies around the world. Casolaro’s research looked at bizarre murders among the Cabazon Indians involving administrators of the tribal land; the privatization of CIA dirty tricks through the notorious Wackenhut security firm, the policemen for both the Cabazons and the mysterious Area 51, home of spy planes and rumored UFOs; Vietnam MIAs; manufacturing corruption at Hughes Aircraft; the human-genome project; even the Illuminati secret societies of the 18th century.” Researchers Kenn Thomas (Steamshovel Press) and Jim Keith (Black Helicopters Over America, Secret and Suppressed, etc.) have based their book on Casolaro’s surviving notes as well as interviews, affidavits, court records, congressional documents and ‘non-mainstream’ sources.”

Publisher: Feral House
Hardback: 181 pages
Illustrated

No one really knows what really happened at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, on April 19,1995, besides the fact it got blown up. Whether or not Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols are guilty has become irrelevant. They have been tried in the media and found to be guilty. The author asks some very important and as-yet-unanswered questions about the bombing. SC

Publisher: IllumiNet
Paperback: 237 pages
Illustrated

“In the case of Oklahoma City, federal police are being forced to invent a fantasy. The truck bomb didn’t cause the real damage to the Federal Building. Couldn’t, didn’t. Not ever. That’s the secret. Right there, at the beginning, the whole government story falls apart in your hands. The truth about death in Oklahoma City has been covered up since 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995. And no politician will keep that truth from coming out.”

Publisher: Book Tree
Paperback: 112 pages

Touching on ratings, radiation hazards, TV and nuclear colonialism, brain research, propaganda, television genres and the Manhattan Project, Nelson traces the full range of impacts and the crucial role of corporate control of these two omnipresent, interlocking and seemingly omnipotent technologies. AK

Publisher: New Society
Paperback: 187 pages

Yes, television had a history before Lucy, Jackie and Uncle Miltie, or what author and film director (Bad News Bears, Fletch) Ritchie calls a prehistory. Please Stand By covers the period from television’s invention in 1920 until regularly scheduled programming began in 1948. It is largely a chronicle of “firsts”: the first commercial, the first soap opera, the first newscast. It is also full of anecdotes such as the first professional football broadcast consisting of a single shot of a toy football game board, or the station manager in Washington, D.C., who had a metropolitan map on his office wall marking each of the 48 TV sets in town. On another level, Ritchie outlines the battles between inventors (Philo Farnsworth, Charles Francis Jenkins, Allen DuMont), who were trying to perfect the new medium, and businessmen (Robert Sarnoff, William Paley) and corporations (RCA, Westinghouse), who were trying to wring out a profit from their investments, for control of the airwaves. AP

Publisher: Overlook
Hardback: 247 pages

“Why do people submit to authority or governments? In this classic of political reflection, a 16th-century philosopher laid the groundwork for the concept of civil disobedience.”

Publisher: Black Rose
Hardback: 88 pages

Pure power and the art of warfare, and revolutionary resistance to it. AK

Publisher: Autonomedia
Paperback: 160 pages