Favorite books of 2003.

Fox News could not have met a better match than comedian Al Franken, author of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. From his chapter "Ann Coulter: Nutcase" to "Bill O'Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully," Franken bear-baits the Right's biggest blowhards. It couldn't happen to a nicer group of people. I laughed out loud at "Hannity and Colmes"--throughout the book, Fox's liberal punching bag, Alan Colmes, appears with his name in minute type. Unlike too many liberals, Franken relishes a fight. His relentless fact-checking and phone calls nearly drove Bill O'Reilly insane with rage (and that's before O'Reilly's failed lawsuit over this book).

Franken's chapters on rightwing sanctimony about the uncivil "tone" of politics are dead-on. He cites the push-poll Bush used against John McCain in South Carolina, asking voters whether, if they knew McCain fathered an illegitimate black child, they would be more or less likely to vote for him. He suggests a counter-poll: "If you knew that, during the five-and-a-half years John McCain was being tortured in Hanoi, George W. Bush snorted five-and-a-half kilograms of cocaine, would you be more likely to vote for Governor Bush or less likely to vote for Governor Bush?"

Joe Conason covers much of the same ground as Franken in Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth but without the humor. In his chapter "Male Cheerleaders and Chickenhawks," Conason, like Franken, takes on conservative draft-dodgers who charge that liberals are unpatriotic and "hate America." But then he spoils his point with his own tone: "Rank and file reactionaries out in the red-state hinterland may believe this tripe, but Republican insiders [who live in 'major cities like New York and Washington'] know better." I prefer Franken's folksy false modesty. Besides that, Conason attacks "a handful of annoying academics and activists" on the left who give credence to rightwing caricatures. It's true that there's bad blood between leftwing activists and free-trading Clintonites. But it's a buzz kill to pick at those wounds in books that are really about catharsis and rallying the troops.

The most serious work in the liars' club is David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Corn has broken big stories for The Nation, especially on the White House leak that blew a CIA agent's cover. Here, he traces Bush's mishandling of terrorism, the President's lies about his tax policy and energy plan, and the selling of the Iraq war.

Corn, Conason, and Franken all blame the pack mentality of the media for giving Bush a free ride. The conventional wisdom that Bush is a well-meaning bumbler has ruled press coverage since the 2000 campaign. But as David Greenberg points out in his thoughtful book Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, nothing galls a jaded reporter like being taken for a sucker. Once the pack starts focusing on a pattern of lying, and if they pick up the scent of blood, treatment of the President can go from fawning to feral overnight. These books may be the first growl.

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.

By Anne-Marie Cusac

The poet, essayist, and translator Kenneth Rexroth cultivated his outsider status, in part for political reasons. A pacifist and an anarchist, he became a conscientious objector during World War II. The U.S. policy of rounding up and imprisoning Japanese Americans during that war had a profound effect on Rexroth. "He declared his 'disaffiliation from the American capitalist state' complete--and for the remaining years of his life, he would act in American letters and history not as a disaffiliated passive bystander recollecting in tranquility or in bitterness, but as an alienated activist-poet, a devoted social commentator and agitator," writes editor Sam Hamill in an introductory essay to The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.

In that role, Rexroth had a profound effect on the direction of American poetry. He hosted the reading that led to the publication of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the subsequent obscenity trial.

Though he is often called the grandfather of the Beats, Rexroth's relation to that movement in poetry was an uneasy one. "An entomologist," he said in response to efforts to designate him a Beat poet, "is not a bug."

This much-needed volume contains poems of erotic love, reverence for nature, ecological dismay, erudition, and political commitment. One of the great pleasures of reading Rexroth poetry is that a single poem may engage many of these subjects. In "Gic to Hat," he writes of picking up the volume of the encyclopedia with those letters on the back. The entry for "Grosbeak" occasions this recollection:

   I remember a sycamore in front
   of a ruined farmhouse,
   And instantly and clearly the revelation
   Of a song of incredible purity
   and joy,
   My first rose-breasted grosbeak,
   Facing the low sun, his body
   Suffused with light.
   I was motionless and cold in the
   hot evening
   Until he flew away, and I went on
   knowing
   In my twelfth year one of the
   great things
   Of my life had happened.
   Thirty factories empty their
   refuse in the creek.
   The farm has given way to an
   impoverished suburb
   On the parched lawn are starlings,
   alien and aggressive.
   And I am on the other side of the
   continent
   Ten years in an unfriendly city.

Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo is an energetic, tender novel about family on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The stories within the big story of the Reyes family are often pleasing in themselves, the voices full, and the writing hilarious. It's easy to get caught up in these things and not realize at first that you are in the middle of a profound passage. Other paragraphs feel more like a window shattering, the impact is so strong: "Everybody needs a lot. The whole world needs a lot. Everyone, the women frying lunch putting warm coins in your hand. The market sellers asking--What else? The taxi drivers racing to make the light. The baby purring on a mother's fat shoulder. Welders, firemen, grandmothers, bank tellers, shoeshine boys, and diplomats. Everybody, every single one needs a lot. The planet swings on its axis, a drunk trying to do a pirouette. Me, me, me! Every fist with an empty glass in the air. The earth throbbing like a field ready to burst into dandelion."

Caramelo is the kind of novel that can make you look closely at life and see even its most embittering moments as part of a grand and satisfying gift.

Each of the stories in All the Men Are Sleeping, by D.R. MacDonald, is linked to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like Mexico, the Canadian Maritime Provinces have suffered decades of economic depression and generations departing for U.S. jobs.

"Oh, Jesus, them hardwood batons," reminisces the character Little Norman, remembering a steel strike from the early 1920s. Decades later, on the morning his fellow striker and longtime friend leaves home for a nursing facility, Little Norman stands at his window and wonders, "Why had so much failed out? Only a handful of farms left now. The coal mine, pulp mills, quarries. Desperate small wages, but work. Something should have stuck here, something they'd toiled over. No, you were left staring at your hands and that was the end of it. No work today, boy. Nothing to cut down or bust up, to shovel or haul or drag."

As is true of the island itself, these stories are populated with Cape Bretoners who left as young people only to return later in life, craving a home that has disappeared.

Like the other books I've selected, this one is delightful precisely because it contains so much: erotic passion, suspense, conflicts between young Americans buying up Cape Breton and the aging inhabitants who are losing their homes and their culture, revelations of expansive inner lives, and again and again, extraordinarily beautiful passages:

"The first crack seemed to shoot backward from the runners as if the sleigh discharged a bolt of lightning, but dark, and the horse snorted and reared, then plunged harder forward as Blair snapped the reins, shouting as she had never heard him before. Isobel turned and saw water, the awful color of it seeping into snow like blood in a cut, into the thin grooves playing out behind them, but she said nothing. She wanted to seize Blair's arm, infuse its tense, solid life with her own, but she didn't. She held on to the seat. She was here, and she would be here as long as this horse kept moving, kept churning snow into the bright morning air."

Anne-Marie Cusac is Investigative Reporter of The Progressive.

By Elizabeth DiNovella

In her beautiful graphic memoir, Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi chronicles coming of age in revolutionary and war-torn Iran. Using black and white ink drawings, Satrapi creates the world of late 1970s and early 1980s Tehran and offers us a glimpse into the lives of people surviving in a time of upheaval.

Few people choose the comic book to explain their life's history, much less their country's. But the surrealism of the comic book lends itself to the surrealism of growing up in the midst of revolution and contradiction. The striking artwork, which often resembles woodcuts, allows the story to unfold in surprising ways.

Satrapi was born in 1969 in Rasht, near the Caspian Sea, the daughter of leftist intellectuals and the great-granddaughter of a former Persian emperor. Satrapi grows up in Tehran, surrounded by books and political conversations. She attends the secular Lycee Franqais, until the Islamic fundamentalists close it down.

The first vignette of the book starts with a self-portrait based on a class photo in 1980. She is wearing a veil, a new obligation imposed by the government.

"We didn't really like to wear the veil, especially since we didn't understand why we had to," she writes and illustrates. Girls play with their strange new costumes. One girl tears off her veil, complaining it is too hot. Another jumps rope with three veils tied together. Still another scares a classmate by pulling the veil over her head, saying, "Ooh, I'm the monster of darkness."

Satrapi's parents attend the protests that lead to the Shah's departure. Satrapi and her pals protest in the safety of their garden. It's this juxtaposition between political realities and child's play that engages the reader.

When the Shah flees, political prisoners and exiles return home, flail of stories. Satrapi hears some of these horrific tales and they become new ideas for children's games: "The one who loses will be tortured," she tells her friends before they start to play.

The revolution turns ugly. Former political prisoners are arrested again, including her beloved Uncle Anoosh. Friends and relatives begin to leave the country. The Satrapis decide to stay, hoping everything will change for the better. But things go from bad to worse.

Satrapi tells the story of men attacking her mother for not wearing a veil.

"They insulted me," her mother says to her family, weeping. "They said that women like me should be pushed up against a wall and fucked. And then thrown in the garbage."

Shortly after this harrowing episode, the veil becomes obligatory. The universities close. And the Iran-Iraq War begins.

As she grows, so, too, does the grip of the government's power over nearly every aspect of daily life. In one chapter, Satrapi's mother puts up curtains to protect the family from the prying eyes of regime loyalists across the street. The Satrapi family's fondness for parties and other forbidden things--alcohol, playing cards, discussing politics--could get them denounced by neighbors.

But this is not a bitter, dark book. Satrapi also portrays the clandestine parries, the homemade wine distilleries, the skipping of class to flirt with boys, the friendships that sustain people.

Like Joe Sacco, Lynda Barry, Los Brothers Hernandez, and Art Spiegelman, Satrapi uses a deceptively simple genre to explore complicated ideas: class consciousness, the loss of faith, the lies of governments during war, the hypocritical righteousness of the newly converted, and the everyday contradictions and confusions of growing up secular under a fundamentalist regime.

The authors of Trust Us, We're Experts! and Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! take on an even bigger target in Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. While Bush's lies unravel daily, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber analyze the Administration's PR strategy, and explain the public relations techniques behind it. Rampton and Stauber point out that the contradiction between rhetoric and reality puts at risk not only American lives but also American democracy.

The book begins in Firdos Square, site of the famous toppling of the Saddam statue. Television news channels broadcast this image over and over again. The scene suggested a simple drama--Saddam was gone, and a massive Iraqi crowd was jubilant. But reality was more complicated. "A Reuters long-shot photo of Firdos Square showed that it was nearly empty, ringed by U.S. tanks and Marines who had moved in to seal off the square before admitting Iraqis," note the authors.

The Bush Administration hired top PR professionals to manage "Brand America." Secretary of State Colin Powell appointed Charlotte Beers, former CEO of two large PR firms, in charge of changing America's image as the Great Satan of the Islamic world. Powell said, "It was an attempt to change from just selling the U.S. to really branding foreign policy."

Rampton and Stauber name other PR flacks and examine their handiwork. John Rendon, former campaign consultant to Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, directs the Rendon Group, a PR firm that has extensive contracts with the CIA. In 1992, the Rendon Group helped to organize the Iraqi National Congress (INC). "According to a February 1998 ABC News report by Peter Jennings, Rendon came up with the name for the INC and channeled $12 million of covert CIA funding to it between 1992 and 1996.... In October 1992, Ahmad Chalabi, a Rendon protdgd, was appointed to head the group."

Shortly after the 2003 war started, Chalabi told NBC that "Iraqis will welcome United States forces liberating them.... I don't know if there are enough flowers to do that now, but I think they will be happy to see the U.S. coming to help them liberate themselves and getting rid of Saddam." Chalabi, a favorite of the neo-conservatives, now sits on the Iraqi Governing Council.

In addition to pointing out the dangers of the neocons believing their own propaganda, Rampton and Stauber delve into the PR moves of the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. They also include a brief history of war propaganda.

Despite Bush's PR offensive in Iraq, Rampton and Stauber argue that it is not enough to counter American military actions abroad. The authors quote Osama Siblani, publisher of Arab American News "They could have the Prophet Muhammad doing public relation and it wouldn't help."

Elizabeth DiNovella is Culture Editor of The Progressive.

By Susan J. Douglas

What a difference a year makes! Now it really is the season to be jolly in the bookstore. Yes, we still will be assaulted by stacks of books by the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter, but we can waltz right by them to the even higher stacks of bestsellers by Al Franken, Paul Krugman, Molly Ivins, and Michael Moore. My advice? Buy multiple copies of all of them and give them to everyone you know.

Franken's scathing and hilarious book is reviewed elsewhere in these pages, so let's move on to the other three, which work beautifully together as a triple-pronged assault on the unprecedented dangers posed by Team Bush. All seek to undo the free ride Bush got from the mainstream media from 9/11 until the summer of 2003, a period during which all manner of unsavory stories about the Administration's motives and policies were seriously underreported. Moore, Krugman, and Ivins insist that news stories buried on page F27 or never even covered are actually the ones that matter most. The authors' lethal weapons here are sarcasm, satire, and outrage, which are especially effective when counter-posed against the sanctimonious and humorless arrogance of Bush et al.

To get your juices flowing--as if they weren't already--start with Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? The cover art, featuring Moore pulling down a statue of Bush to the ground Saddam-style, is worth it alone. In "Home of the Whopper," Moore systematically debunks the lies Team Bush told to justify its invasion of Iraq. "A Liberal Paradise" uses polling data to document that most Americans do not, in fact, want to live in a pro-corporate rightwing theocracy, but actually "agree more with the left than the right." His denunciation of the weenies running the Democratic Party is right on the money: And his "Operation 10-Minute Oil Change," which urges progressives to do something ten minutes a day to help remove Team Bush from office, is an energizing call to arms.

For the economic goods, of course, there's no one like Paul Krugman of The New York Times, a top-flight economist who has relentlessly debunked the cynical voodoo financial shell games of Team Bush. Krugman's special girl is to make economic policy understandable to the lay person, and, in the bargain, to expose, with gusto, how "free market" ideology will screw us and our country (with the possible exception of former and current Halliburton executives). The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century--absolutely must reading--organizes his Hines columns around themes such as "Exploiting September 11," the environment, and corporate corruption, so the book coheres well. Readers will welcome and admire his impassioned critique of the deliberate, dangerous enrichment of the corporate classes at the expense of everyone else.

To see how we got to this sorry pass, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose in Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America review Bush's record in Texas, which, given what they say in this book, should have been front page news during the 2000 campaign. Then they assail Bush's Presidential policies. If you fear deregulation, wait till you read the chapter on the food industry. Another chapter on the food industry. Another chapter, "Warm in the White House," eviscerates Mr. Compassionate Conservative for ensuring that poor people nearly froze in their homes in the winter of 2002. And "God in the White House" reminds us of the war Team Bush is waging against women.

Progressive are energized as never before by the rightwing, fundamentalist hijacking of our government. Ivins and Dubose end their book with "Time to Raise Hell." These three ardently argued books inspire us to do just that.

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

By John Nichols

The two necessary books of 2003 explore opposite ends of the American experiment. Gore Vidal's Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson examines the nation's founding through a lens adjusted by Vidal's remarkable historical insight, his irreverence, and his famously savage wit. With Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, Molly Ivins and co-writer Lou Dubose bring similar qualities to their review of the sorry state of the experiment today.

Unlike great majority of American writer who reflect upon the founding moment, and who do so more as court biographers than as honest heirs of Tom Paine, Vidal as always recognized the warts on the first men and their Constitution. So it is that Inventing a Nation begins by getting to the heart of the matter: home economics.

"In the fall of 1786, the fifty-four-year-old president of the Potomac Company, George Washington, late commander in chief of the American Army (resigned December 23, 1783, after eight years of active duty) was seriously broke," Vidal writes. He proceeds to paint the picture of a lavish-living, thin-skinned, self-promoting character who "reluctantly" connived his way into the Presidency.

Don't feel too badly for Washington; he comes off rather better than Thomas Jefferson, who Vidal explains was a "sometimes self-righteous" figure "with his famous pursuit of happiness for all but slaves and other untidy human beings."

And, of course, John Adams is a, "cryptomonarchist who pretty much struck down the Bill of Rights with his Alien and Sedition Acts.

Vidal does not actually despise the most prominent founders. Where appropriate, he recognizes their genius, and he certainly notes their superiority to the current managers of the experiment. But he does not romanticize these men or the lingering byproducts of their endeavors.

It is a measure of Vidal's genius, and his grace, that he uses Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention to make what may be Inventing a Nation's most salient point. "At eighty-one Franklin was too feeble to address the convention on its handiwork, and so a friend read for him the following words: 'I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well-administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well-administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.' Now, two centuries and sixteen years later, Franklin's blunt dark prophecy has become true: popular corruption has indeed given birth to that Despotic Government which he foresaw as inevitable at our birth."

That's where Ivins and Dubose pick up. The pair wrote the best book on Bush before the 2000 election, Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. It was so good, in fact, that Al Gore would have easily won a landslide victory--rather than the narrow win that brothers George and Jeb Bush and their Supreme Court overturned--if he had simply scrapped his ridiculously inept campaign and mailed a copy of the Ivins-Dubose volume to every voter (or, better yet, the hilarious book-on-tape featuring Ivins's droll rendition).

Unfortunately, Gore failed to recognize that when you take on a King George, you need a Tom Paine. Just as Paine kept penning incendiary pamphlets until he got a revolution going, Ivins and Dubose have returned with a book every bit as powerful as Shrub.

Bushwhacked is thick with humor. (Don't get them started on the Republican party's "laissez-faire-food-safety policy.") But the real strength of this book is its seriousness. Along with the punchlines ("Bush has a chemical-dependency problem, but it's not cocaine. It's Monsanto, Dow, and Union Carbide") come body blows. The chapters on the Administration's assault on the environment and on the intricacies of the Enron scandal are devastatingly effective. And the section on Bush's rampaging imperialism ("Shrub II: The Empire Strikes Back") confirms the worst fears of Benjamin Franklin. The experiment that began by breaking the chains of a corrupt despotic government would be ruled again by a corrupt despot named George.

John Nichols is Washington Correspondent for The Nation and Associate Editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He is co-author of "Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media."

By Amitabh Pal

Now that some commentators are unapologetically--even approvingly--using the phrase "American Empire" to describe the current world situation, it is important to understand its various dimensions.

A nice place to begin is Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. The book can be seen as a companion to the superb Bitter Fruit, which Kinzer co-wrote with Stephen Schlesinger about the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala. In All the Shah's Men, he gives a detailed account of the 1953 U.S.-British coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Kinzer paints a positive picture of Mossadegh, who was ousted for daring to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The author is quite critical of both the short and the long-term effects of a coup that Washington gloated about at the time. Provocatively, he asserts that the coup led, through a chain of events, to the September 11 attacks. "It is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax [the code name for the coup] through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York," he writes.

Iran's neighbor to the west is currently occupied by 130,000-odd American troops and 11,000 British troops in yet another joint U.S.-British operation. Tariq Ali's Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq is a quirky way to obtain a better grasp of the country. The book by the Pakistani-born writer and activist is typically irreverent and idiosyncratic, starting with the cover, which shows a picture of a child appearing to pee on the head of a U.S. soldier. Some of the asides and footnotes are especially acerbic. "[Pakistani dictator Mohammed Zia ul-Haq] was blown up in a military plane together with the U.S. Ambassador and the latter's dog. The dog, a familiar fixture on Islamabad's diplomatic circuit, was genuinely missed," he writes in one footnote. The book ends with an appendix that ridicules the transformation of Christopher Hitchens from anti-imperialist in imperial apologist.

On a more sober, though no less significant, note is Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights, by William Schulz, the executive director of Amnesty International USA. Usefully, he details the damage done to civil liberties and human rights at home and abroad in this new era. He analyzes the Bush Administrations excessive response and reviews the crackdowns by countries all over the world that took their cue from the United States. Schulz provides convincing counterarguments to two trendy claims: that there is a necessary tradeoff between security and liberty, and that sometimes it is necessary to torture a suspect. He concludes by showing how respect for human rights is not only a moral imperative but also a logical strategy in fighting terrorism.

All three books help us better understand the Age of Empire--and thereby oppose it.

Amitabh Pal is Managing Editor of The Progressive.

By Matthew Rothschild

The day before the 7.2 percent growth figures for the third quarter came out, I was reading Robert Pollin's Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity. I found Pollin's chapter on Bush to be especially pertinent. In it, he discusses Bush's policy of military Keynesianism. Pollin recognizes that "the U.S. economy under Bush most certainly needs deficit spending."(It is a peculiar fact of our era that Democrats are now for balanced budgets while Republicans embrace deficits.)

The problem with Bush's deficit is not so much its size, Pollin argues, but what the deficit is financing. Bush's priorities, he correctly notes, are "tax cuts for the rich and increased military spending." He understands that Bush is trying to use "war and occupation of Iraq as government stimulus policy." And he underscores how Bush, by digging a deep deficit, provides an excuse not to spend funds on social needs. If you want to figure out Bush's economic policy, this is a good place to start.

Pollin's critique of Clintonomics is also damning. In fact, he sees some continuity between the neoliberal economic policies of Clinton and those of Bush. Disputing the conventional wisdom that Clinton's balanced budget led to lower interest rates, which led to growth, Pollin argues that "virtually all the economic achievements of the Clinton years were dependent on the historically unprecedented stock market bubble." Despite some gains made across income levels from 1997-2000, the benefits of Clinton's economic policies "were skewed toward the wealthy," Pollin writes. And by saying "the era of big government is over" and by ending welfare, Clinton set the stage for Republican attacks on social spending that have followed, he argues.

This is not an idle critique. As Howard Dean talks about the need for a balanced budget, as Wesley Clark signs up Robert Rubin for economic advice, and as John Kerry says, "If you liked Bill Clinton's economic policies, you'll love John Kerry's," the Democrats are set to prescribe dangerous medicine.

There is a better way, and Pollin sketches what he calls "an egalitarian program for the U.S. economy." This consists of establishing full employment at decent wages, strengthening the labor laws to facilitate unionization, and reregulating the financial markets. Among Democrats, only Dennis Kucinich is striking these chords.

"Stay the course." "Peace with honor." The President meets with local media instead of the networks. The Secretary of Defense doubts the military strategy privately even as he pursues it publicly. Some Democrats call for more troops, while others call for immediate withdrawal.

The news of late carries an eerie echo of Vietnam, and so I devoured a great new book about Vietnam for insight and wisdom: They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967, by David Maraniss. The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and Washington Post associate editor, focuses on just a few momentous days during that war. Half of the book deals with an anti-war protest in Madison, Wisconsin, that turned violent. The other half deals with an ambush of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam that left sixty of them dead.

With great drama, Maraniss sets the scenes for both confrontations. The one in Madison centered on a protest against Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm, which was recruiting students on campus. Most of the protesters, who expected their civil disobedience to be met with at most a few arrests, were shocked when the police, representing working class Madison, came in with clubs swinging. Maraniss profiles the main actors and gives Dick and Lynne Cheney, on campus at the time, an unflattering cameo. Of the current Vice President, Maraniss writes, he "supported the war but did not want to fight it."

Those who fought in the Twenty-eighth Infantry Regiment were led to their slaughter on October 17, the fault of foolish commanding officers and an intelligent, implacable guerrilla foe. Maraniss gives them all three dimensions, and he notes one irony: that the regiment itself was trying to set up an ambush at the very time the Vietnamese forces already had the U.S. soldiers trapped. The insanity of the war comes out as clearly in this account as in any Vietnam War movie ever made. And Maraniss shows how distant and callous the brass and the Administration were about this incident. They issued lies about it not being an ambush, lies about the body count, lies even about the ages of the U.S. soldiers killed.

Maraniss takes the title of his book from "Elegy," a poem by Vietnam vet Bruce Weigl, which starts:

   Into sunlight they marched,
   into dog day, into no saints day,
   and were cut down.
   They marched without knowing.

I turn to poetry for solace and succor. We are in the midst of a great poetic flowering. And one of the most dazzling of our day is Martin Espada. His Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002, is an astonishing collection of political poetry at its finest. (Alabanza means praise, in almost a religious sense, Espada explains.) He sings about tenants, immigrants, farmworkers, day laborers, prisoners, and revolutionaries. Defiance is the melody; redemption the coda.

"This is the year that squatters evict landlords," he writes in the first line of "Imagine the Angels of Bread." And later in the same poem:

   This is the year that those
   who swim the border's undertow
   and shiver in boxcars
   are greeted with trumpets and
   drums
   on the other side;
   this is year that the hands
   pulling tomatoes from the vine
   uproot the deed to the earth that
   sprouts the vine ...

With his soaring lyrics, Espada broadens our appreciation not only of poetry but of resistance itself. (The only flaw in this collection is that several poems appear twice.) Much beauty is here, and sorrow, and power. His September 11 poem, "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100," is about the workers who died in the towers, Here's how it ends:

   Alabanza, When the war began,
   from Manhattan and Kabul

   Two constellations of smoke rose
   and drifted to each other,

   Mingling in icy air, and one said
   with an Afghan tongue:

   Teach me to dance. We have no
   music here.

   And the other said with a Spanish
   tongue:

   I will teach you. Music is all we
   have.

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive