Our favorite books 2004.

by Kate Clinton

For a year and a half, I've had the great pleasure of being in a study group which meets the second Thursday of every month. We've slogged through Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Amartya Serfs Development as Freedom, and Mike Hill's After Whiteness. I generally feel as if I should be at the children's table.

When we met at our apartment, aka "The Anti-Bush Book Annex," we discussed Against Love: A Polemic, by Laura Kipnis. Reading this case against marriage and its legalized monogamy as a killjoy control mechanism of the patriarchy made me laugh out loud at its dash, zip, and outrageous endorsement of adultery as if it were a popular uprising against the domestic gulag. The ten pages of coupled interdictions, "the things you can't do," are best read out loud if there ever is a Marriage Slam. The conversation this book provoked was the most personal and blushing of all our discussions.

If I could get my group to veer into fiction, I would recommend The Book of Salt by first-time novelist Monique Truong. The richly imagined story is told from the perspective of Binh, a gay man, who narrates his disgraced flight from his Vietnamese homeland to Paris as personal cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The metaphor of salt stands for "food, sweat, tears, and the sea." The novel explores not only the domestic partnership of Stein and Toklas but also French-colonized Vietnam, emotions lost in translation, and the life of a gay man in the 1930s.

And because sometimes my study group is way too serious, I would recommend to it and to you Jon Stewart's America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction. The book's mock textbook style (with photos, graphs, and pie charts the envy of USA Today) is both silly and satiric. The punditocracy has recently been wringing its hands that young people get their news from Stewart's The Daily Show and not from their blowholes. This book could be the companion to Howard Zinn's A People's History. You will guffaw when you read America, so I recommend that you eat at least an hour before and clear the table.

Kate Clinton is a humorist.

by Ruth Conniff

Since 2004 was, above all, an election year, I spent it contemplating electoral politics. The fight to defeat Bush brought together progressives and Democrats across the left spectrum and threw into sharp relief both the uniting themes and divisive weaknesses in the Democratic Party.

E. J. Dionne Jr.'s book Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge offered an overview of recent liberal political history and a hopeful forecast for a progressive future.

Like virtually everyone I know, Dionne finds the Democratic establishment "flaccid" and lacking in conviction: "afraid of being too liberal, afraid of being weak on defense, afraid of being culturally permissive, afraid of being seen as apologizing for big government. Democrats are obsessed with telling people who they are not. As a result, no one knows who they are."

His critique reminded me of our late editor Erwin Knoll's favorite definition of a liberal: "Someone who leaves the room when the fight starts." But unlike Knoll, Dionne is no radical. A self-described moderate, he praises Joe Lieberman an awful lot for someone searching for a more robust opposition to the Republicans.

"The need to represent both the center and the left is a problem for the Democrats," Dionne writes. It can lead to a kind of fuzzy, muddled politics. But it can also, he says, lead to a winning majority.

Like Ralph Nader, who barely receives a mention in the book, Dionne argues that our current political moment is similar to the one at the dawn of the Progressive Era. Big business is sucking up the wealth of the nation, and the majority of American workers, consumers, and even stockholders need protection from raw corporate greed. Providing that protection could be the job of the Democrats.

Dionne laments the free market fundamentalist takeover of our language. Democrats and the left need to stop sounding like accountants, he suggests. Instead of talking about the need to immunize little children, we now talk about investing in "human capital," he says.

This is a timely example, given the recent shortage of flu vaccine. Because there is no money in protecting the weak and vulnerable, pharmaceutical companies concentrate on peddling cures for erectile dysfunction and hair loss. The profit motive is a terrible driver for our health care system. Government needs to step in.

Another recent example is New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's headline-making lawsuit against the insurance companies--the biggest crackdown on collusion and price-fixing in the history of that industry.

These are the sorts of causes the Democrats should champion. But they are hamstrung, Dionne argues, because they've lost the language of right and wrong. "It is hard to express your own beliefs if you are forced to speak in the tongue of your opponents," he writes.

Meanwhile, Republicans have, in recent years, become ever more emboldened to pursue a far-right politics. Dionne uses the example of Bush's tax cuts. The Democrats' cave-in set the stage for the whole outrageously shameless Bush program. Then came 9/11 and The Wall Street Journal editorial that laid out the Bush strategy: "Americans of all stars and stripes are uniting behind their President," the Journal wrote, and urged Bush to use the moment to push for a capital gains tax cut, drill in the Arctic, and appoint conservative judges. It was the beginning of a bitter, ugly period leading up to the present moment.

Dionne has many conservative friends. He is a believer in left-right coalitions, and even had high hopes for President Bush's faith-based initiatives. All of this makes his perspective different from that of many Bush opponents. When Dionne debunks the "compassionate conservative" project, his critique is interesting because of his willingness to give the President the benefit of the doubt early on.

While I am far less forgiving of Bible-thumping and flag-waving than Dionne, I was interested in his suggestions for a winning progressive message--one that speaks to moderates and lefties alike.

This is a book about tone and language--the kind of political consultant thinking that, while not deeply philosophical, is nonetheless essential if the goal is to win elections.

A lot of us on the left are more willing to think in those terms these days.

My old boss Erwin Knoll prided himself on not voting at all. Ralph Nader seems to have gone down a road that takes us farther and farther from wresting power from the right.

Dionne suggests that we think about what it might mean to govern the nation in the interests of most of the citizens.

Why not?

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.

by Anne-Marie Cusac

Here's a must-read for anyone who wonders how America got stuck in a mire of punishments that don't fit their crimes. Michael Tonry's Thinking About Crime: Sense and Sensibility in American Penal Culture exposes our punishment preoccupation as a series of "moral panics." This results in, Tonry notes, unfair, expensive, and destructive policies. As examples, he cites California's three-strikes law and the federal sentencing guidelines that incarcerate cocaine users for much longer terms than users of powdered cocaine.

Moral panics, not hikes in the crime rate, are key to "the highest imprisonment rates in the Western world by a factor of five," argues Tonry. He slings facts at punishment fictions.

For those who argue that extravagant imprisonment reduces crime, Tonry has a rebuttal. "There are good reasons to doubt that recent punishment policies have had much to do with recent drops in crime," he writes. "The strongest is that crime trends for the past forty years have been broadly similar in every Western country, and in every American state, while punishment policies and practices have varied enormously."

Thinking About Crime notes that disproportionate punishments do "enormous damage to the lives of black Americans." But this is an academic book; it doesn't really say what "damage" means.

A talented journalist, though, can communicate human loss. That's what Jennifer Gonnerman, staff writer for The Village Voice, does in Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett.

Bartlett, a twenty-six-year-old, poor, black mother of four, traveled from New York City to Albany to sell four grams of cocaine in 1983. It was her first drug sale, Gonnerman writes. A man Bartlett thought of as her friend had offered her an easy way to make $2,500. But Bartlett's "friend" turned out to be a snitch. Bartlett got twenty years in prison for her first offense.

Gonnerman recounts Bartlett's life, and those of her mother and her four children, from the day of her arrest. When Bartlett wins clemency, she struggles to fit back into a family that raised itself in her absence. Gonnerman captures both the love and the decades of grief that envelop the entire Bartlett clan.

This powerful book shows in detail what unfair sentences do--to the convicts, but also to their neighborhoods and families.

Just a snippet from Eleanor Wilner's The Girl with Bees in Her Hair. Equally preoccupied with the lessons of myth and the problems of the present, these morally engaged poems treat such subjects as the Iraq War and America's corporate downsizing fad (which she compares to that anxiety-driven game musical chairs).

In "The White-Throated Sparrow Can't Compare," Wilner describes a sparrow beneath a sky filled with bombers, then writes:

   And now the very thought of him
   has flown; the mind can't hold for
   long
   the sparrow and the bombers
   in a single thought. Mad
   to make them share a line, as if
   to balance power so unequal
   on the creaking fulcrum
   of the merest and:

   a pennyworth
   of weight with its live, pensive song
   against a roaring overhead--pure
   dread,
   its leaden tonnage, and its tongue.

These lines, like so much of Wilner's work, are accurate, disturbing, and profound.

Anne-Marie Cusac is Investigative Reporter of The Progressive.

by Elizabeth DiNovella

Between the war and the election, I spent too much of 2004 thinking about the past (Who knew what when?) and the future (President Who?). These two books reminded me to pay attention to my surroundings and to literally keep my eyes open.

One of my favorite parts of the urban landscape is street art. I first fell in love with it during a trip to Berlin in 1984. I didn't expect to see colorful murals, graffiti, and stencils plastered all over the Wall, and the art's immediacy electrified me. This summer, someone stenciled an amusing face on the mailbox outside my apartment building. I smiled every time I saw it (though I did feel a bit sorry for the worker trying to remove it a few weeks later).

Josh MacPhee loves street art, too, evidenced by his book Stencil Pirates: A Global Study of the Street Stencil. MacPhee delivers a short history of this public art form that hasn't received as much attention as murals or graffiti, despite its ubiquity.

"Whether it is a radical political message, an arresting graphic, or simply a stray word painted throughout a neighborhood, stencils claim billboards, walls, and sidewalks as the canvas of artists, activists, or both," he writes.

MacPhee's book is a visual treat, with nearly 1,000 photos of stencils from around the world. Some are beautiful, like the lovely and colorful images of children from a rundown Albany neighborhood stenciled onto abandoned buildings and plywood-covered windows, or the black and white image of Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany's painted on a brick wall. Others are disturbing. A stencil in Cyprus portrays Bush as a butcher, with blood dripping from his cleaver and from his American flag apron.

"When you don't see your beliefs reflected on television, in the newspapers, or on billboards, stencils make it easy to show dissent and rejection and share it with the public," MacPhee writes. A chapter on antiwar stencils amplifies that idea.

The book also contains a how-to section, and a dozen full-page stencil templates wait to be cut with an exacto knife.

Of course, street stenciling is illegal. But MacPhee points out that this is part of its allure. "It is the stencil's illegality that makes it so irresistible," writes MacPhee.

Reading other people's letters can be irresistible, too, and Davy Rothbart invites us to do that in Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World. Rothbart, who started Found magazine in 2001, collects and compiles discarded detritus into collage. The result is an anthropologist's delight.

Rothbart and his cohorts discovered these random notes, funny to-do lists, odd photos, and lost love letters on sidewalks and in bushes, on buses and on cars, in schoolyards and in restaurants. He encourages readers to send in their finds.

These trashed treasures run from the hilarious to the tragic. A break-up letter written on an airplane's barf bag is stumbled upon at LAX. A discovered list of goals includes "1. Go to church. Find God, then find myself through him. Get Baptised. 2. Party a lot." An unsigned, scrawled note reads, "I'm going to 2nd grade. I hope I pass." An e-mail between friends doles out the dish on a recent date (the outfit got a B, but the car, a BMW, got an A).

"Found notes and letters open up the entire range of human experience; they offer a short cut directly into people's minds and hearts," writes Rothbart in the introduction.

Found is a fun read because it is weird; compelling because it is unexpected. These short snippets of daily life become individual tales, scraps turn into sagas. And the abruptness of some pieces left me wanting more.

There is a moment of recognition, Rothbart states, when we read these missives. "It's startling and magical," he writes. "Suddenly, we feel connected to this person we've never felt before and probably never will, and in turn, to all people. The idea that we all share the same universal emotions and experiences--that we're all connected--strikes me as profoundly beautiful."

Elizabeth DiNovella is Culture Editor of The Progressive.

by Andrea Lewis

Three years after the fact, do we really need another tale of a neurotic but brilliant New Yorker frantically searching for his progeny a few blocks away from the World Trade Center? Thank you Art Spiegelman for shuttin' my mouth! In the Shadow of No Towers is unlike any recollection of 9/11 that I could have imagined.

Conceived as a series of weekly comics, the book features ten large-scale pages printed on thick cardboard paper. Each two-page spread is a feast of visual intrigue, neurotic confessions, keen observations, and surprising irony in the face of the shattering fear, confusion, shock, and horror of the events of 9/11. Spiegelman is perhaps best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning creation Maus: A Survivor's Tale, which, in unique fashion, told the tale of his parents, who survived Auschwitz. Now Spiegelman has his own survival tale to creatively obsess over.

Blending a variety of artistic styles and elements, some scenes from In the Shadow of No Towers are laid out as if strewn on Spiegelman's drawing table--images overlap each other leaving you with an almost irresistible desire to move things around on the page. The glowing embers of the Twin Towers and Spiegelman's ever-present cigarettes are recurring images. Other sequences are like moments frozen in time, or branded into Spiegelman's brain. Recalling his frantic search to find his daughter Nadya at her school, Spiegelman shows two boys giving each other high fives. "They hit the Pentagon," says one. "Cool!" says the other. Atop the page is an image of G. W. Bush and Dick Cheney flying on a giant bald eagle. "Let's roll!" shouts Bush, cowboy hat flying off his head. Meanwhile, Cheney is slicing the eagle's throat with a box cutter. 'Nuff said.

Author Terry Tempest Williams's criticism of the Bush Administration in The Open Space of Democracy created more of a controversy than she'd ever imagined it would. In October, she was banned from speaking at a Florida university (one with close ties to the Bush family) for saying, among other things, that the policies of the Administration had made her "sick at heart." Unfortunately, most of those who criticized Williams's words seemed to miss her point entirely. How might we "face the polarity of opinion in our country right now?" she asks. "How might we take opposing views and blend them into some kind of civil dialogue?" How, Williams wonders, do we create an open space for democracy?

Later, we journey with Williams into the open space of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Too often reduced to the alienating acronym of ANWR, the refuge has become a battlefront for policymakers who want to drill for oil in the region. Williams, well known for her naturalist writing in books like Refuge and Red, brings the Arctic to life with words and story that, as she says, pierce the heart and move beyond rhetoric. "I am drinking from the river--this tincture of glaciers, this press of ice warmed by the sun," she writes.

Finally, there is the journey of a life still being lived. Alice Walker: A Life, by Evelyn C. White, will inform, awaken, debunk, and demystify notions about one of the most important figures in American literary history.

White spent ten years researching and writing this biography, with Walker's generous cooperation. A former reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle and editor of The Black Women's Health Book, White unfolds Walker's life story with both skill and ease.

She steers a course directly through the controversies that have marked Walker's life and career, from the criticisms of Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (and the making of the movie) The Color Purple, to Walker's crusade against female genital mutilation in Africa, to her marriage during the civil rights era to Jewish activist Mel Leventhal.

"With regard to the white man with whom she now shared her life," White writes, "Alice later said that she refused to allow the Swahili-obsessed 'revolutionaries' living in Newark and Chicago to denigrate a marriage forged in the menacing face of the Klan."

Whether you revere or revile Walker, this book is fascinating reading.

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

By John Nichols

Tom Paine, whose little books inspired so many revolutions, would be proud. In a year when weblogs, talk radio, and cable TV shout shows were supposed to be driving American politics, books turned out to be the most powerful tools of all. The best books of the year reshaped the dialogue about the Bush Administration and its war. Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill told us more about dark intrigues of the Bush White House than four years of New York Times and Washington Post reporting, while James Mann's brilliant Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet laid bare the ideological underpinnings of the neoconservative clique that ruled while Bush vacationed on the ranch in Texas. Too much attention went to the sorry apologias for the President penned by Bob Woodward and others who traded access for accuracy; Suskind and Mann produced profound insights into the most secretive Administration in American history.

Four other books went beyond the story of one Administration to explain the bigger picture of our moment. Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic is the most important of these, if only because it reintroduced the terms "empire" and "imperialism" into the general discourse. Nomi Prins's Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America and Representative Sherrod Brown's Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has Failed are essential primers on the economic crisis the United States has already entered into. Finally, Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America tells us more than any of us wants to know about why it has proven so difficult to challenge the lies of empire and economics that continue to define our lives.

If most of the books that mattered in 2004 explained the crisis, a few proposed solutions albeit difficult ones.

The first such text is a sad tome with a profoundly significant message: Richard Ben Cramer's How Israel Lost: The Four Questions. Kramer writes beautifully, and with intention. He seeks to force his readers, no matter what their stance might have been when they opened his book, to examine the harsh truths behind U.S. policies in the Middle East. How Israel Lost does not offer any easy solutions; rather, it is a sobering dose of realism for those Americans who still think peace can be achieved with anything short of a clear two-state solution. "Since I've been watching this murderous circus act," explains the journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Middle East reporting, "the Americans have always had a peace plan they're pushing, and special envoys, and fly-in visits by the Spook-in-Chief, and roundtable confabs, and reports to allies on the latest private discussions, and ... they've never done squat to make it happen." Kramer, who writes warmly of his youthful affection for Israel as a Jewish kid growing up in a suburb of Rochester, New York, argues that those who really care about Israel must embrace a simple message: Give back the Occupied Territories to the Palestinians. "I don't mean give back the land except the settlements, or the roads or the military bases. I mean give back the land--the West Bank and Gaza. East Jerusalem (and the Dome of the Rock) for the Arabs. West Jerusalem (and the Western Wall--let that be the triumph) for the Jews," Kramer writes. "After that, they would work out the details--neighborhoods exchanged, water rights, maybe a fence. Would it be a mess? Plenty of mess ... but worse than what they have now?"

The second book of hope is a collection of essays and speeches by Bill Moyers, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times. Moyers sees the problems clearly: "Even now," he writes, "the media elite, with occasional exceptions, remain indifferent to the hypocrisy of Washington's mercenary class as it goes about the dirty work of its paymasters." But Moyers has a confidence in democracy--and in "citizen patriots who are still fighting for democracy"--that is infectious. One election might go wrong, one issue fight might be lost, but, ultimately, he suggests, the people will rise. And he calls them to action with a reflection on the author of the Declaration of Independence: "Thomas Jefferson knew that it would be necessary for each generation not only to cherish and preserve the Declaration's heritage of freedom but to enlarge and extend its reach, until the children of slaves--his own children--became the sons and daughters of liberty. The work goes on. Now it's our turn."

John Nichols is Washington Correspondent for The Nation and Associate Editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the author of "Dick: The Man Who Is President."

By Amitabh Pal

"When it comes to international issues, the focus over the past year has disproportionately been on the Middle East and war and terrorism in that region. However, a number of fine books this year have been about other areas and topics.

The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents, by John Dinges, does deal with terrorism but of a different type and in a different setting: state-sponsored terror in South America. Dinges, a former Latin America correspondent for The Washington Post and Time and a former managing editor of NPR News, relies in part on documents declassified during the Clinton Administration to describe the setting up of Operation Condor, a multinational murder operation instituted by South American dictatorships with the backing of the CIA to kill dissidents abroad. The prime mover behind it was Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Dinges doesn't overreach and spin out conspiracy theories. In fact, he's careful to point out that individual State Department officers did stand up for human rights on a number of occasions. But "the historical question is this: How many of the thousands of murders committed by Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil could have been prevented if the United States had taken a 'strong forward public posture, [or] even a private posture' against the killing, torture, and disappearances its allies in friendly intelligence agencies were carrying out?" Dinges asks. He concludes that "the red lights of opposition to atrocities were always dimmer than the green lights egging the military governments on in their war on terrorism."

An uplifting corrective is The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era, which provides a sweeping overview of the development of human rights. Professor Micheline R. Ishay, director of the human rights program at the University of Denver, has done a prodigious amount of research, going back to ancient texts and holy books. Ishay takes a broad view of human rights that encompasses civil and political as well as economic and social rights. The book touches on unconventional topics for such a work, and has a chapter on the socialist contribution to human rights, as well as one on globalization's impact on the concept. "There are many histories," the book opens. "While some are written from the vantage point of the conquerors and oppressors, this book belongs to another tradition: that which gives voice to the oppressed." By presenting a hopeful, inspiring history of the advance of human rights through the ages, Ishay has succeeded in her goal.

Anne-Christine D'Adesky has done an amazing amount of legwork for Moving Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS. D'Adesky, a journalist, activist, and filmmaker, traveled to Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, India, Morocco, Uganda, South Africa, and Russia to see what's working and what isn't in the fight against the epidemic. The result is a book that wonderfully combines analysis and ground-level reporting. D'Adesky scrutinizes programs in various countries and chronicles the struggles of activist groups to get citizens of developing countries more affordable and accessible treatments. She also details the various hurdles put up by the United States and big pharmaceutical companies. "The gap in [AIDS] treatment is not a historic given; it's been actively maintained," D'Adesky writes. "Not by faceless corporations, but by key individuals within those commercial entities" who give money to "political leaders to promote pro-business policies that may run counter to global health needs."

A good companion to D'Adesky's book is The Invisible People: How The U.S. Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic, the Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe of Our Time. Greg Behrman, who coordinates global AIDS policy for the Council on Foreign Relations, details the U.S. response--or lack of it--since the start of the plague in the early 1980s. The book is filled with interesting characters and activists who have battled the scourge out in the field all over the world, and at home in the corridors of Washington. "Throughout the pandemic's twenty-year flight," Behrman writes, "the United States has shrunk from its strategic imperative and its moral obligation, failing at almost every turn to lead a comprehensive global response."

Arnitabh Pal is Managing Editor of The Progressive.

By Matthew Rothschild

This was the year of Abu Ghraib, and no reporter delved more deeply into it than Seymour M. Hersh, author of Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.

Drawing on his articles from The New Forker, he shows how the Abu Ghraib scandal was not the result of a few low-ranking soldiers "who let America down," as George Bush put it. No, Hersh argues that responsibility rests at the highest levels and that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and George Bush himself let America down.

The Administration's claim that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in Afghanistan set the stage for the Abu Ghraib scandal, Hersh writes. Contributing, as well, was Bush's approval of a program that authorized a clandestine Pentagon team of Special Forces to assassinate Al Qaeda members and hold detainees in secret interrogation centers "in allied countries where harsh treatments were meted out, unconstrained by legal limits or public discourse," he writes.

Rumsfeld comes off especially poorly in these pages. Hersh flails him for his disdain for the CIA and the military brass, for his "secrecy and wishful thinking," and for his unparalleled arrogance. Hersh notes that when Rumsfeld was asked about ill treatment of prisoners in early 2002, he said it amounted to "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation."

Hersh depicts Rice as way over her head, time after time, unable to restrain Rumsfeld or Cheney, much less to coordinate policy.

Cheney lurks in these pages like a crocodile. He pressures the CIA to come up with the intelligence Bush needs to justify the Iraq War. He favors the bypassing of the Geneva Conventions. And when the Abu Ghraib scandal breaks, he telephones Rumsfeld "with a simple message: No resignations," writes Hersh.

This is a family album of arrogance, immorality, and incompetence.

In Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia, Steven Dudley refuses to romanticize the FARC rebels. "I wish there were clear-cut good guys and clear-cut bad guys," he writes. "But Colombia isn't a story of good guys and bad guys."

Dudley, who writes occasionally for The Progressive, charts the rise and fall of the Patriotic Union (UP), the leftist party that was started in 1985. Paramilitaries, working with the Colombian government, wiped out thousands of Patriotic Union members. Dudley sympathizes with its candidates, who knew they were going to get assassinated--hence, they were "walking ghosts." But the Patriotic Union was actually a tool of the FARC, he writes, and when it was wiped out, "the FARC used the destruction of the UP to justify its never-ending war against the government."

Dudley interviews former members of the Patriotic Union, and their testimony is poignant and damning. "Armed struggle here became a dogma," one says. Another, who was once a leading propagandist for the party, concedes: "Agghh. There were so many useless deaths."

The best fiction I read this year was The Dew Breaker, by the gifted Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, whose previous works include Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak! and The Farming of Bones.

In The Dew Breaker, Danticat humanizes the torturer. Her main character is roughly modeled on Emmanuel Constant, the CIA asset who formed the Haitian death squad FRAPH, which was responsible for killing or torturing thousands of Haitians in the early 1990s. Constant now lives in New York, as does Danticat's protagonist.

In Haiti, a torturer is called a dew breaker, Danticat tells us. And a dew breaker is the father of the narrator of the first chapter. That narrator, a substitute art teacher, has made a sculpture of him that she intends to sell to a Haitian American actress. Her father, who destroys the sculpture, says, "I don't deserve a statue." He has always told her that he was a prisoner in Haiti, and he has a scar to prove it, but then he comes clean: "Your father was the hunter, he was not the prey." His daughter, experiencing a quiet revulsion, asks if her mother knows. He says yes.

We meet her mother in two later chapters. She is the stepsister of a radical preacher whom the torturer himself kills. They encounter each other just moments after the murder, when the torturer leaves the prison bleeding from a gash that the preacher had inflicted on him while under interrogation. She takes the torturer in and salves his wound, since he told her he was escaping the prison. The next day they go to New York. We do not know when he tells her the shocking truth. Somehow, "with few others to turn to, it became love. Yes, love," Danticat writes.

These are haunting stories.

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.