Favorite Books of 2001. (Books).

by Kate Clinton

Everybody loves interactive book listmania! Before you read three of my recommendations, see if you can put my reading list in order. Hint: organizing principle--annus horribilis.

A. Dell Golden Deluxe Word Search (Dell)

B. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

C. Preventing Violence, by James Gilligan (Thames & Hudson)

D. Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Harvard University)

E. Political Fictions, by Joan Didion (Knopf)

F. New York. Times Tuesday Crossword Puzzles, ed. Will Shortz (Ivy Books)

G. The Bush Dyslexicon, by Mark Crispin Miller (Norton)

If you said 1.G, 2.D, 3.E, 4.C, 5.B, 6.F, 7.A, you are correct and should take something for anti-anxiety and mourning sickness.

Right after the Bush II Inauguration, I consoled myself with The Bush Dyslexicon. Miller dissects Bush's grammar and syntax and reveals a man illiterate but not ignorant, who could not care less about his shortcomings. Bush gives himself goose bumps. I found Miller's categories--from W's evident-to-himself tautologies to his deflective self-appraisals--helpful tools to becoming a better Bush-watcher. I know to think, for example, that Bush is reading his speeches better now, not because of the crisis, but because they have increased the font size.

I tried to read the much-touted Empire for the deep space of background. What I read I enjoyed, like a boil on my cheek. The two authors, one in an Italian prison (an untold story), who collaborated via e-mail and could have used a ruthless editor, examine the shift from modern political understandings of sovereignty, nation, and people to new networks of communication and control through transnational corporations. But dense.

For ice cold clarifying relief, I cleared my head with Joan Didion's Political Fictions, a collection of eight of her essays from The New York Review of Books. Sure, sure, some of her revelations that politics are inauthentic are obvious, but it's fun to tour the brain from which Maureen Dowd sprang half-formed.

Then there was 9-11. George Bush announced that he believed fighting terrorism was why God had made him President. I thought his brother had done that. What to do? Nothing gives a more hopeful blueprint for the times ahead than James Gilligan's Preventing Violence. It answers clearly that whining media question: "Why do they hate us?" and urges a view toward violence not in moral and juridical terms but as a public health problem.

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is soooo Oprah, but a great way to live through airport security lines, and I'll take that book jacket meaning of O if he doesn't want it. The rest is crossword puzzles and after Tuesdays, Dell word searches.

Kate Clinton is a comedian.

by Ruth Conniff

Naomi Wolf turned me off at first with her rather grim descriptions of pregnancy and childbirth. She presents pregnancy as a time of ambivalence and even self-loathing, which struck me as the worst sort of party-pooping. Having a baby is so fascinating and wonderful. Who cares if you gain a few pounds? But I was glad I stuck with the book. Wolf's insights on childbirth are profound. If the buzz around Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (Doubleday) is anything like that generated by her previous works, it will do a real service for a generation of women of childbearing age.

I felt lucky, reading Wolf's powerful indictment of routine hospital birth in America, that I discovered her sources in my own childbirth classes this year. My midwives gave me Ina May Gaskin's book, Spiritual Midwifery (Book Publishing Company, 1990), when I was pregnant. Gaskin, the godmother of American midwives, still delivers babies naturally on The Farm commune in Tennessee, where Wolf visited her. She extols Gaskin's record of safe, happy, nonsurgical births, which puts modern hospital obstetrics units to shame.

Wolf also cites Henci Goer, whose work I read as part of a Bradley natural childbirth class. Goer compiled many of the crucial facts and statistics Wolf cites to show what a grim mill American maternity wards have become. Until the 1970s, C-sections made up about 6 to 10 percent of all births in the United States. By the 1990s that number had risen to one in four. Healthy, white, middle-class women in their thirties and forties in private hospitals have an astounding 50 percent C-section rate. Wolf exposes the financial and legal pressures that have so distorted birth in this country. If half of unnecessary C-sections were avoided, she reports, hospitals would lose $1.1 billion in revenue each year. She also points out the damage done by one-size-fits-all laborprogress graphs that turn having a baby into a game of beat the clock.

Wolf's own first labor is a vivid illustration of all that's wrong with this approach: slowing labor with an epidural, then forcing painful induction and even surgery on healthy, low-risk women who don't labor fast enough. As one midwife Wolf interviews points out, most doctors are so quick to intervene and operate, they have never witnessed a normal birth. The psychic damage done by this is overwhelmingly sad, because it doesn't have to be that way.

What incredible good fortune I encountered. After learning the alarming news Wolf reports in my Bradley class, and becoming increasingly anxious about trying to stave off this ghastly fate, I was able to find two wonderful home birth midwives in my community. Many anxious questions and meetings with family members later, we took the plunge. Like Wolf, I was afraid to have my baby at home. But unlike her, I found role models, including a couple of nurses in my classes who chose home birth. I was even able to find a doctor willing to back me up and meet me at the hospital should anything go wrong.

I gave birth with the midwives, my husband, and my mother supporting me, in a quiet, respectful setting, using a birthing tub for pain relief and with the powerful reassurance of these strong, professional women. They even made house calls to give me and the baby follow-up care. It was a profoundly challenging, beautiful, ecstatic experience. We had, in short, that impossible, pie-in-the-sky birth that is absolutely normal in the rest of the world.

I have no doubt that the peculiarly American epidemic of depression, alienation, and marital breakdown associated with childbirth that Wolf writes about stems from our carelessness with new mothers and babies, and a lack of social support. My community supports my nurse-midwives, who also work at the local hospital and can do immediate transfers if need be. My employer, The Progressive, paid for my home birth. My husband and I got three months of paid leave. The more typical American way of birth, which Wolf describes, sullies one of the most joyful of all human experiences and does needless damage to families. I am ready to sign up for Wolf's proposed Motherhood Feminism, which would push for a more humane system with generous leave, quality day care, and better birth practices. It's high time we demanded the kind of society our children deserve.

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.

by Anne-Marie Cusac

Tahar Djaout, the Algerian journalist, poet, and novelist, was attacked on May 26, 1993. He spent the brief remainder of his life in a coma, dying on June 2 of that year. At thirty-nine years old, the author of eleven books (one had won the Prix Mediterranee), Djaout was considered one of the most important writers in his country. He served as the editor-in-chief of the French-language newspaper Algerie-Actualite and had helped to found Ruptures, a newspaper critical of Islamic fundamentalism.

One of the assassins claimed that Djaout had been chosen for murder because he "wielded a fearsome pen that could have an effect on the Islamic sectors."

Djaout was one of the first in a long list of assassinated Algerian journalists. The toll from 1993 to 1996 was fifty-seven, according to Reporters Sans Frontiers. The assassinations severely damaged the country's independent press.

Djaout left behind an unedited manuscript of The Last Summer of Reason (Ruminator Books). The foreword is by Nigerian writer and Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka, who calls Djaout's book "a humanistic testament, beamed at the complacent conscience of the world." It's the story of a bookseller, Boualem Yekker, who quietly defies a fundamentalist government by keeping the doors of his shop open until the day officials seize it and lock him out. Boualem's days are tedious, as if the regime has managed to banish color along with the heretics. To make up for that, "Boualem is one of the people suffering from a new malady: an overdeveloped memory." Life, says the author, "has ceased to be inflected in the present."

Recollections now make up much of his world. Most moving is the way Boualem mulls over his conflict with, and continuing love for, his daughter, Kenza. One day, following a public call to worship, prayer mats suddenly appeared, and all of Boualem's family knelt, except for him. His daughter then grabbed her mat and yelled her father down, telling him that he had shamed her. Shortly thereafter, Kenza and the rest of the family abandoned Boualem.

After recalling this, Boualem's mind searches for the daughter who had once loved her father deeply. "His wounded memory ... stops on the image of an alert and mischievous little girl.... Little elf ordering the elements by waving her arm in the air, Kenza struggles against the wind, her inquisitive face forward, her brown curls fighting."

Djaout's book is beautifully crafted in parts. In others, it suggests that this may have been an early draft; the writing falls off, repeats, or throws out metaphor after metaphor, some of which drop with a dunk. But the life of this quiet, rebellious bookseller is fully imagined and extremely moving.

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of The Progressive. Her first book of poems, "The Mean Days," was published in September by Tia Chucha Press.

by Susan J. Douglas

My first pick is Mark Crispin Miller's hilarious and astringent The Bush Dyslexicon (Norton). Right up until 8:40 A.M. on September 11, a minor publishing industry had grown up around ridiculing George W. Bush's mangling of the English language and his deer-caught-in-the headlights mien as he sought to act like he was President. But Miller, while also unsparing and witty on this score, moves from compiling "Bushisms" to analyzing how an infotainment, corporate-friendly media refused to be frank about Bush's performance during the campaign, in part because Bush's simplicity fits so well with the superficial, soundbite culture of television news and commentary.

Miller warns us that we underestimate Bush, and the rightwing propagandists who continue to sell him on TV, at our peril.

Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood (Metropolitan Books) may be one of the most important feminist books of the past few years. We all know that motherhood is revered in pop culture imagery while the actual work that mothers do day-in and day-out is devalued. Crittenden goes beyond this truism to show how the raising of children is not only undervalued, it is also penalized financially.

Finally, those of you who have lost faith in journalism because of the fat salaries, complacency, and corporate-friendly stances of many in the American news media might want to read Words of Fire: Independent Journalists Who Challenge Dictators, Drug Lords, and Other Enemies of a Free Press (New York University), written by former CNN correspondent Anthony Collings. He takes us into the lives and work of journalists who don't have the star power, money, protections, and comforts enjoyed by Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw. Collings interviewed the independent journalists--often self-employed, working under life-threatening circumstances--who take on organized crime, military dictators, and narcoterrorists.

In 1999, thirty-four journalists were assassinated worldwide, and hundreds more were imprisoned, tortured, or held hostage. Collings documents how many of them jeopardize their careers and comfort in their determined refusal to be censored.

Words of Fire is a moving and much-needed expose of the state of press freedom around the world, and of the harrowing circumstances independent journalists often face.

Susan J. Douglas teaches Communication Studies at the University of Michigan.

by Andrea Lewis

Ralph Ellison is best known for is powerful 1952 release Invisible Man, which quickly made the Oklahoma City native both a literary legend and a respected commentator on the black experience. Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings (Modern Library), a new collection edited by Robert G. O'Meally, is a fluid mix of history, literature, and jazz that spotlights another side of Ellison's cultural genius: his deep passion and affinity for music.

Living with Music includes Ellison musings on Charlie Parker (Bird, he says, was "thrice alienated: as Negro, as addict, as exponent of a new and disturbing element in jazz"), Mahalia Jackson ("As the Spirit Moves Mahalia"), and Richard Wright ("Richard Wright's Blues"), among others. Of the blues, Ellison eloquently writes, "they are an art form, and thus a transcendence.... They are not the collective moan of the marginalized victim, but the bittersweet triumph of the survivor."

Ellison's musical insight wasn't expressed just in nonfiction. Living with Music also includes a sizable fiction section where Ellison demonstrates how music influenced both the content and the cadence of creative works like Invisible Man and Juneteenth. "Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible," says the Invisible Man, who adds that invisibility "gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind--and you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis's music."

Reading Living with Music makes this reader wonder just how close we came to listening to the recorded works of Ellison the jazz master, rather than the published works of Ellison the literary genius.

Whether in her design of the controversial and evocative Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., or the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, Maya Lin has always let her art speak for itself, and it does so eloquently. Lin's art and architecture often create a very emotional and personal response. In Boundaries (Simon & Schuster), Lin's first book, she lets words speak about her art, her creative process, and her identity. "I feel I exist on the boundaries," she writes in the book's spacious and visually driven introduction. "Somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private, east and west. I am always trying to find a balance between these opposing forces, finding the place where opposites meet."

Boundaries is a thoughtfully integrated balance of text and images--large and small. This clearly wasn't a case of throw the manuscript at the editor and see how it comes out in the end. Every page, every design decision appears to have Lin's expressive and skilled fingerprints on it.

Andrea Lewis is a San Francisco-based writer and co-host of the "Morning Show" on KPFA Radio in Berkeley California.

by Fred McKissack Jr.

In 1984, while watching the Republican National Convention, I called the entire party a group of fascists in the oh-so-dangerously-angry collegiate sort of way. A friend said not to throw heavy words so lightly. He had higher SAT scores and a better GPA, so I believed him. After reading Umberto Eco's essay "Ur-Fascism" in Five Moral Pieces (Harcourt), I was frightened to find that I may have been right.

Eco, a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, is best known to most Americans as the author of The Name of the Rose. Well, at least people have seen the bastardized movie starring Sean Connery. Anyway, Eco is a serious thinker not known for tossing words like "fascism" around like an angry adolescent. Indeed, having grown up in fascist Italy, Eco has firsthand knowledge of the cultural tenants surrounding the philosophy. It was after his liberation--Milan having been freed by partisans in April 1945--that he senses freedom for the first time. His words, guided by memory, create a wonderfully phrased passage that an Afghan youth would understand.

"In May we heard that the war was over," Eco writes. "Peace gave me a curious feeling. I had been told that permanent war was the normal condition for a young Italian.... I realized what it was we had been liberated from."

The book was first published in 1997, but translated recently, and Eco's construction of Ur-Fascism, or eternal fascism, is chilling given America's steady conditioning to accept what can only be termed a new world order after the events of September 11. Eco lists fourteen characteristics of Ur-Fascism, each flaw flowing into the next to create a beast, beginning with the cult of tradition and the bullshit inherent in syncretic cultures. The ultimate consequence being: "There can be no advancement in learning."

Sound familiar? Don't worry, it only gets worse.

By the time you reach the third characteristic, you're ready to down a bottle of scotch to ease the pain. According to Eco, fascism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.

"Action is beautiful in itself and therefore must be implemented before any form of reflection," he writes. "Thinking is a form of emasculation.... The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly committed to accusing modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia of having abandoned traditional values."

History repeats itself because it has nothing better to do. Or maybe scientists haven't discovered the "fuck up the world" gene, yet.

Five Moral Pieces--five essays ranging from the Gulf War to the influence of media on us and itself--is a hard 128 pages. Eco's reflections are personal, sometimes humorous, and always well conceived and not bombastic in tone. However, essays such as "Ur-Fascism" are cultural grenades that will blow your mind.

Mat Johnson's first novel, Drop (Bloomsbury), is what today's hipster would term "da bomb." I would not have known about the book if a friend hadn't sent it to me. I owe him.

Drop is the story of Chris Jones, a thirty-one-year-old black man with a recently obtained degree from a "third-rate" state school, who realizes, returning to his hometown of Philly, that he lacks the skill and the will to stay on the tough side of town, where the pop-pop sounds of gunfire ring out all night long.

"I was not a thug, I was not a bailer, I was not a mack, I was not paid," Jones tells us. "All I was was clever and creative, and unless you had a ball in your hand or your mouth in front of a microphone, this place had no respect for either one of those things."

Jones wins a student advertising competition, and is hired by a small but highly creative ad agency in London run by a brash, lively black Brit named David Crombie. And it is here in London, no pop-pop to worry about, where Jones feels he's escaped his past and found black peers willing to embrace his intellectual side. Black America is old and dying; long live their African and West Indian brothers and sisters. Rule Blacktannia!

But then Crombie dies, and Jones must return to Philly and the incessant harangue of the pop-pop. Johnson, who is from Philadelphia, spins Jones's time in Philly in both humorous and ugly scenes, with a cast of characters that could have, in lesser hands, devolved into a UPN comedy. But Johnson's deft storytelling is rich, true, vibrant, funny; and chilling. Jones learns to accept, even love black Philadelphia without abandoning his dream of moving on.

Fred McKissack Jr. is Associate Editor of The Progressive.

by John Nichols

The first year of the new millennium required some reflections on how we got here, and Christopher

Hitchens, Marc Cooper, and Adrienne Rich provided the best of these. Hitchens published his usual stack of important books during the course of 2001. Most noted was his case for the prosecution of Henry Kissinger for war crimes. History's least deserving Nobel Peace Prize recipient was forced to respond to Hitchens's proposal, and that alone could have made The Trial of Henry Kissinger the standout Hitchens text of the year. Yet, it is not. The finest book by Hitchens, and possibly the finest book of the year, is a short tome on how to assault contemporary hypocrisies by the man who has taken on every deity from Mother Teresa to Princess Di. Letters to a Young Contrarian (Basic Books) is a rough mix of autobiography and intellectual self-help advice. It is delicious because it showcases Hitchens at his most savage and wise (he reveals a warm spot for the under-appreciated utopian radicalism of William Morris and his circle). Above all, Letters to a Young Contrarian is necessary for its exploration of the role of the dissenter in a time of too much politeness. "Seek out argument and disputation for its own sake," Hitchens urges. "The grave will provide plenty of time for silence."

The necessary grounding for Hitchens's Kissinger--and for any serious examination of U.S. foreign policy misdeeds--can be found in Marc Cooper's Pinochet and Me (Verso). Cooper, who at twenty-two served as a translator for Chilean President Salvador Allende, offers no manifesto. Rather, his reflection on what was lost when Nixon, Kissinger, and Pinochet overturned Chile's elected president in 1973 is a poignant reminder of why Americans should still be fiercely angry at the role their government played in denying democracy, tolerating torture, and condemning a nation to decades of dictatorship. It is, as well, a literary gem, filled with Cooper's most vibrant writing to date.

The mention of vibrant writing brings us to Adrienne Rich's Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (Norton). Every bit as political as Hitchens and Cooper, Rich's poetry here is startling for the grace with which it explores the contemporary. Fox reads as what it is: a diary from the cusp of Century 21. Thick with references to Almodovar films, the Internet, "sex without gender," and "the realtor's swaying name" in front of "the quit house," Rich's poems are shot through with the same mixture of the wise and the romantic that makes the recent writing from Hitchens and Cooper so engaging. Though only Rich could have written the words, surely Hitchens and Cooper would fully understand--and fully appreciate--the line: "I reach to a shelf and there you are ... Pier Paolo speaking to Gramsci's ashes."

John Nichols is the author of "Jews for Buchanan: Did You Hear the One About the Theft of the American Presidency?" (The New Press).

by Adolph L. Reed Jr.

I want to single out five new books that examine particularly important features of American life. Dean Robinson's Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge University) is the most serious and historically grounded study of black nationalism published to date. He avoids simple cheerleading or demonization and analyzes the different ideological and programmatic ships that have flown the nationalist flag--often, as he points out, without their explicit self-identification as part of that fleet.

Robinson's key claim is that expressions of black nationalism have always drawn on strains of political strategy and thinking characteristic to their specific historical eras in American politics, often inadvertently adopting the mindsets and programs responsible for black inequality in the first place. Since the Garvey movement of the 1920s, moreover, he argues that nationalism has often been "an almost willed alternative to radical politics."

Two other books also undermine commonplace notions about significant aspects of American history. Robert J. Steinfeld's Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University) challenges the view that capitalism by its own logic requires and brings about free labor. He shows that free labor as we now understand it--employment terminable at will by the employee--gradually emerged in the United States and Britain from workers' struggles during the nineteenth century.

J. William Harris's Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation (Johns Hopkins University) shows that the states of the Lower South didn't have uniform histories and politics, even as they earned a reputation for the harshest and most aggressively racist regimes during the Jim Crow era. He examines the different economies, social structures, and political dynamics of coastal rice plantation and "upcountry" small farm regions of Georgia and the cotton plantation area of Mississippi between 1876 and 1940 to demonstrate the different patterns of social relations and different political possibilities that characterized what we think of as an indistinguishable domain. He reminds us that the notion "Deep South" itself is only as old as the 1930s.

Michael Zweig's The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret (Cornell University) is a very important contribution to contemporary political analysis. Zweig refutes the myth of the dominance of a vaguely "middle class" identity in the United States and proposes political strategies based on this analysis. He shows that, when given the opportunity, most people (roughly 60 percent) identify themselves as workers, and he demonstrates that this perception--which crosses race, gender, and age--fits reality, particularly if we define the working class as those "who have relatively little control over the pace and content of their work, and aren't anybody's boss."

Finally, Jefferson Cowie's Capital Moves: RCA's 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New Press) in a careful and intelligent way follows RCA/ Motorola's trail of false promises and misery as it has extorted public resources, wrecked communities, and upended workers' lives from New Jersey to Indiana to Tennessee to Mexico since the 1930s.

Adolph L. Reed Jr. is a professor of political science on the graduate faculty at the New School University in New York City and is a member of the interim National Council of the Labor Party.

by Matthew Rothschild

After September 11, I felt an urgent need to educate myself about Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan, and Ahmed Rashid's Taliban (Yale) proved indispensable. An experienced Pakistani journalist who spent more than two decades covering Afghanistan, Rashid brings extraordinary firsthand knowledge to the story.

And he writes with elegance. Describing the young men who made up the Taliban, kids who grew up in refugee camps and knew only war, he says, "These boys were what the war had thrown up like the sea's surrender on the beach of history."

He is unsparing in his indictment of the United States for incubating Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan, nurturing bin Laden, then disengaging after the Soviets were defeated. And he also shows how the U.S. oil company Unocal dominated the Clinton Administration's approach to the Taliban, which was to cozy up to them, regardless of their repressive policies toward women.

This book is a well-cut key to the riddle of September 11.

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (Henry Holt) brings what she calls "the hardworking poor" out of the shadows. Going undercover as a waitress in Florida, a maid and a dietary aide in Maine, and a "Wal-Martian" in Minnesota, she proves how impossible it is for people to make ends meet on anything close to minimum wage. After rent, which is particularly tricky, transportation, and the most meager food, there's nothing left and no time (since many have to work two jobs) or energy to do something with it. And forget about health insurance.

Ehrenreich notes how intentionally degrading the work is. "Even in the tightest labor market ... the person who has precious labor to sell can be made to feel one down, way down, like a supplicant with a hand stretched out." There are the invasive drug tests, the oppressive supervisors at Wal-Mart who lecture about "time theft," or the inherent caste relationship between maids and their employers.

OK, I know I'm biased, since she's a columnist for The Progressive, but this is a great book.

Rooms Are Never Finished, by the Kashmiri American Agha Shahid Ali (Norton), is a collection of moving poems, first about his mother's death, but also about Kashmir, love, and exile. A few of the poems, written before September 11, have an eerie feel now, as when he writes, "who is the terrorist, who the victim?"

Or in the poem "Barcelona Airport," which begins:

   Are you carrying anything that could
   be dangerous for the other passengers?

   O just my heart first terrorist

Or in "Ghazal":

   How the air raged, desperate,
   streaming the earth with flames--
   to help burn down my house, Fire
   sought even the rain.

Writing often in beautiful couplets that drive to the finish, Ali marries worldliness with compassion.

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.