Examines America’s unique First Amendment protection of “even the most offensive forms of expression: racial slurs, hateful religious propaganda, and cross burning… from the conflicts over the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and American Nazi groups in the 1930s, to the famous Skokie episode in 1977-78, and the campus culture wars of the 1990s. The author argues that the civil rights movement played a central role in developing this country’s strong free speech tradition.” In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) rose out of the first political and legal clash over free speech/hate speech rights in the ‘20s. GR

Publisher: University of Nebraska
Paperback: 256 pages

The man with the little mustache is profiled by the minutiae of his earthly existence. Chapter titles include “Hitler’s Women,” “Hitler’s Diet,” “Hitler’s Horoscope,” “I Was Hitler’s Dentist,” “Hitler Laughs,” and “Why Didn’t Somebody Kill Him?” There’s still lots to learn about Germany’s Swastika Prince. His real name wasn’t Shickelgruber. He farted quite often in the presence of guests. He popped amphetamine capsules eight times a day. His mother’s portrait hung over his bed. He put seven teaspoons of sugar in his tea. He stayed mostly indoors to avoid “fresh-air poisoning.” He administered his own enemas. He sucked his fingers and chewed his nails. He said the Volkswagen “should look like a beetle. “ He commissioned pornographic films for his private viewing. He gave Henry Ford a medal for being a foreign friend of the Reich. GR

Publisher: Fountain
Paperback: 255 pages
Illustrated

The biggest and best-kept secret of World War II: August 10, 1945, four days after Hiroshima and five days before their surrender, Japan successfully test-fired a “genzai bakudan”—an atomic bomb—on the northern peninsula of occupied Korea. Only America’s use of the B-29 bomber over industrial cities on the mainland prevented the bomb from being used by Japan three months earlier (it had to be moved to safer ground). The weapon was intended for use by kamikaze planes aimed at American battleships in the attack on Japan. The world’s first nuclear war! This fascinating footnote to history was reported in the Atlanta Constitution in 1946, and quietly disappeared for lack of verification—the Russians overran Korea and sent all the Japanese atomic equipment home after the war. The author has traced this astonishing tale with the help of newly declassified American intelligence first gathered during the war and during the occupation of Japan. Includes interviews with the scientists involved in the atomic program, and Spanish spies who stole American atomic secrets for Japan, and the story of a German U-boat desperately trying to reach Japan with a cargo of uranium in the final days before the Third Reich’s collapse. GR

Publisher: Marlowe
Paperback: 268 pages

Rant #1: “The game world-wide mad deadly COMMUNIST GANGSTER COMPUTER GOD that CONTROLS YOU AS A TERRORIZED GANGSTER FRANKENSTEIN EARPHONE RADIO SLAVE, PARROTING PUPPET.” Rant #2: “In effect, man as a race vegetated. Instead of advancing from innocence to virtue, he remained a clod. “ Rant #3: “NO LONGER CAN EAT DRIED BEANS, May 2. 1989.” It’s all part of kook-lit 101, a series of sensitive and amusing folk profiles. Says the author: “I became the recipient of countless home-made flyers handed to me and other passers-by on the streets… these dense tracts were desperate pleas from the victims of mind control, or mad saints who detailed a theory that would solve all the world’s problems, or obsessed litigants who described their legal quandaries with the aid of inexplicable numerical equations. Handwritten or typed, their authors usually covered every inch of space on the paper, no matter its size.” Unites the weirdoes of the world—something they could never do themselves! GR

Publisher: Feral House
Paperback: 300 pages
Illustrated

Story of a humble South African farm that sparked a 19th-century diamond rush, turning the Cape of South Africa into an exotic Klondike of corporate lust, brutality and greed. For more than 100 years, control of the world’s diamonds has been in the hands of one family, the Oppenheimers of South Africa and England—the diamond dons of De Beers. “The Oppenheimers have endured threats to their lives, outlived global depression and two world wars, survived Afrikaaner terror, United Nations denunciations, miner’s strikes, revolutionaries, sanctions, failed lawsuits, black consciousness. They have heard themselves called slavers in modern dress… they have also recieved awards for sharing their wealth with African employees… ‘Governments fall, entire countries come and go, but diamonds—and the cartel that controls them—are forever.’” GR

Publisher: Noonday
Paperback: 409 pages
Illustrated

Extraordinary document of Victorian London, told from the bottom up, by a literary gadfly and one-time editor of Punch, the British humor magazine. “The image of London that emerges from Mayhew’s pages is that of a vast, ingeniously balanced mechanism in which each class subsists on the drippings and droppings of the stratum above, all the way from the rich, whom we scarcely glimpse, down to the deformed and starving, whom we see groping for bits of salvageable bone or decaying vegetables in the markets. Such extreme conditions bred weird extremities of adaption, a remarkably diverse yet cohesive subculture of poverty. Ragged, fantastic armies, each with its distinctive jargon and implements, roamed the streets: ‘pure-finders’ with bucket and glove, picking up dog dung and selling it to tanners; rag-gatherers, themselves dressed in the rotted cloth they salvaged, armed with pointed sticks; bent, slime-soiled ‘mud-larks,’ groping at low tide in the ooze of the Thames for bits of coal, chips of wood, or copper nails dropped from the sheathing of barges… The rapid, wrenching industrialization of England (London’s population trebled between 1800 and 1850) was breeding a new species of humanity, a rootless generation entirely environed by brick, smoke, work and want.” Hundreds of first-person narratives, told in the vernacular of the workers themselves. Puts Dickens to shame. GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 494 pages
Illustrated

“In 1991, a group of tourists found the body of a mountaineer in an Alpine glacier on the Austrian-Italian border… the body of a Neolithic hunter, a man who had died some 5,300 years ago.” This scientific detective story, written by the first scientist on the scene, “details the Iceman’s well-preserved equipment and clothing, and interprets these fascinating clues to the nature of daily life in the Stone Age.” What was he doing miles up in the harsh alpine mountains? What can we learn from the cruciform tattoo on his inner right knee, the birch-bark container found nearby, his grass-cord shoes or his bow-stave, and five crude arrow-shafts? “Finally, how did he die?” This discovery answers many questions about human prehistory. GR

Publisher: Crown
Paperback: 306 pages
Illustrated

Best known in the West as Soviet foreign minister during World War II and the Cold War, V.M. Molotov spent 70 years at the top of the Soviet heap. Right-hand man under Lenin and then Stalin, diplomat to Hitler, insider to the rise and fall of Khrushchev, Molotov was a rubber-stamping yesman who turned out to be a valuable historical source on “the politics and psychology of the most influential movement of the 20th century,” since neither Stalin nor Lenin left any biographical musings. “Eerily fascinating,“ says Woodford McClellan, professor of Russian history. “One does not so much read this book as engage in a one-on-one conversation with a major figure in a gigantic criminal organization. The answers come readily, couched not in anything resembling normal human emotions but rather in the stupefyingly cynical amorality that characterized the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” GR

Publisher: Dee
Hardback: 439 pages

Social-science theory demonstrated by real-life example. “Focuses on how enemies are perceived, or constructed, in the minds of a group or society at large.” The standoff at Ruby Ridge is used as “a study in the mutual construction of enemies,” and the lives of several neo-Nazis are gleaned for their myth-constructing details. “The author discusses three paradoxes—the inseparability of evil from good, the unifying function of enemies, and the dual nature of the enemy (living both ‘out there’ and deep inside ourselves.) The processes by which social groups identify an enemy are discussed with reference to sociological studies as well as religious and mythological works offering insights on war, peace and the role of the scapegoat.” Also shows how an enemy can be “deconstructed” or transcended. GR

Publisher: University of Washington
Hardback: 208 pages
Illustrated

The sign over the gate of Auschwitz read “Arbeit Macht Frei,” (Work Makes One Free) and the Zyklon-B gas canisters for the death camp were shipped in Red Cross trucks. Sick jokes, both. Why did the Nazis use such obvious irony? Such imaginative evil? “The ancient categories of moral philosophy—responsibility, intent, choice, forgiveness, shame, and all the rest-are horrifyingly repositioned when applied to the German mass murder of the Jews in Europe.” The author argues “that the events of the Nazi genocide compel reconsideration of such fundamental moral concepts as individual and group responsibility, the role of knowledge in ethical decisions, and the conditions governing the relation between guilt and forgiveness.” Chapters include: “The Knowledge of Good and Evil,” The Decision Not To Decide,” and “Language of Genocide.” GR

Publisher: University of Chicago
Paperback: 258 pages