Our favorite books of 2005.

By Kate Clinton 

Perhaps it was finding out that Starbucks will be putting religious messages on its coffee cups or getting a prayer card on my "lunch" tray on Alaska Airlines (the prayer wasn't for a real sandwich) that made reading Sam Harris's The End of Faith almost a sinful pleasure. Critics of his book have said that it is cheeky, smart-alecky and, well, irreverent, it is The Daily Show's "This Week in God" with a doctorate from Stanford. It is an argument to root out religious irrationality and all its works. But it takes a wrong turn at the end when Harris's vigorous atheism, in its argument for just war and just torture, becomes just as irrational as religion.

My culturally induced, adult-onset ADD caused me to abandon most fiction I started this year. Andrea Levy's Small Island was just the Ritalin I needed, and her multiple narratives and flashbacks were perfectly suited to my condition. She tells a story set in Jamaica and England, before and after World War II. It is a narrative of race and class told through impeccable detail, perfectly pitched dialogue, and fully realized characters. Finally, a "couldn't-put-it-down."

I had the pleasure of getting Leslie Feinberg's first novel, Drag King Dreams, in galleys and it wasn't paginated. Even if I'd dropped it, I would have been able to reassemble it since the plot barrels along. It is also an island novel about class and race during wartime. The island is Manhattan, and the conflict is Bush's Iraq War. Feinberg, long a respected transgender activist, adds gender to the mix with a community of characters who are sexual immigrants and refugees. You will be able to pick the book up in February 2006.

Kate Clinton is a humorist and the author of "What the L?"

By Ruth Conniff 

This was a good year for a close examination of bullshit, provided by philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt in his monograph On Bullshit. As the country wakes up to the heavy load that has been dumped on it by the Bush Administration, Frankfurt's parsing of his theme is particularly appropriate.

"The realms of advertising and public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept," Frankfurt writes.

Frankfurt's main concern--separating bullshit from lies--could be the central problem for anyone seeking to understand the Bush White House. "It's impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth," Frankfurt writes. How much does Bush know? Did he really think the mission was accomplished in Iraq? That Brownie was doing a great job? How much of the simplistic hokum he spouts does he himself believe? And how much is a brilliant--though quickly unraveling-concoction of Republican handlers?

Unlike the simple liar, who seeks to disguise a particular truth, the bullshit artist cares nothing for reality. In its place, he constructs a whole edifice of his own, Frankfurt suggests--a towering sculpture of manure.

Think of Karl Rove. Think of the whole structure of loose associations brought together to garner support for this Administration: God, yellow ribbon bumper stickers, family values, the President's alleged "decisiveness" and "compassion," and all that other bullshit.

As I was reading Frankfurt, I was reminded of a radio call-in show I heard recently, in which a Republican caller lambasted the liberal guest for suggesting that the President had lied to get us into the war in Iraq. "In order to know whether he lied you would have to know what was in his heart!" the caller said. She went on to describe what she felt was in the President's heart--honor, integrity, and Christian values.

By thus focusing on the bullshit and leaving aside the facts, Bush's supporters have managed to sustain positive feelings about the President in the face of overwhelming failure and even demonstrably false representations of reality in Iraq and here at home.

Frankfurt explains the prevalence of bullshit in our culture in three ways. First, people are pushed to talk about things they know nothing about (punditry). Second, people feel they ought to have opinions about things without having any information. "The lack of any significant connection between a person's opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it is his responsibility ... to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world." Finally, general skepticism about reliable information (bombardment of TV news and ads) increases the sense that we are drowning in bullshit.

In this atmosphere, the author suggests, people retreat to valuing sincerity rather than the truth. The world may be full of bullshit, but we can value people who are true to themselves, who seem somehow authentic.

This brings me back to the caller to the radio show.

Some voters, apparently, chose Bush in response to this feeling of being overwhelmed by bullshit: "I can't know all the facts, I can't trust the news, but he seems like a good guy. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt."

But there are some situations (hurricanes, quagmires, indictments) you can't bullshit your way out of. Next year may be different.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.

By Anne-Marie Cusac

E. L. Doctorow's The March traces the Civil War experiences of the people who followed William Tecumseh Sherman's scorched earth campaign. We meet emancipated slaves seeking freedom and safety, soldiers, Northern opportunists, Southern white sympathizers and those with few options. In the complexity of Doctorow's vision in this work of historical fiction lies its moral power.

"War is ... all hell," Sherman famously said, and this novel's depiction of plunder for the sake of plunder, and violence for the love of revenge and emotional release, seems to enact that observation. The Civil War may have been the war that ended slavery, but the novel contains little evidence of principled or inspired action. It is clear, for instance, that many Union soldiers shared the racism of their Southern counterparts. Some, while freeing the slaves, found opportunities to profit from their forced labor. One general conscripts a former slave to act as his personal chef. Nor does Doctorow shy away from the appalling face of war.

But Doctorow's novel also suggests that, as Sherman himself believed, the slaveholders would never give up slavery as long as the economic infrastructure of the region permitted it. "There was such wealth to be got from slave labor," notes one soldier, "it was no wonder these people were fighting to the death." The burn, plunder, pillage, destroy policy, which the book enacts in detail and which Sherman used against Native Americans in the years after the Civil War, destroyed the Confederacy. At the same time, in taking the crops and the riches of the South for themselves, Sherman's soldiers stole the very substances that could have sustained the former slaves as they began free lives. "We are burning the darkies' livelihood," thinks one officer as his troops set fire to a plantation house.

The book, which offers no easy answers, is haunted by the promise of righteous violence and its less than ideal results.

I read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and E. L. Doctorow's The March within days of each other, and the effect was disquieting. Gilead, set in 1950s Iowa, is similarly haunted. John Ames, the protagonist, is an elderly Congregationalist minister, the latest in a long line of ministers who have preached on either side of the Kansas-Iowa border. The book is his long letter to his young son, whom he knows he will not live to see grow up.

Ames's grandfather accompanied John Brown on his abolitionist guerrilla warfare in Kansas several years before the failed slave revolt Brown led at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The grandfather, a minister in a town of Kansas Freelanders, preached before his congregation while wearing a gun in his belt, claiming that as long as slavery existed there was no peace. "Peace will come only when the war ends, so the God of peace calls upon us to end it," he said. The religious violence of such messages appalled his son, who ran to worship with the Quakers, in this way creating at least two generations of pacifists.

Pacifism, by the 1950s, has become the Ames family way, but it is an uncomfortable one. The grandfather's fervent insistence on a religion that can lead to righteous violence appears unseemly by the time the protagonist is a child, not decorous enough for a family of ministers. The grandfather embarrasses the family with his ferocious and politicized preaching style. Yet the main character's memories of his grandfather endow him with spiritual power.

The grandfather's moral claims resonate in other ways as well. It is clear, for instance, that in the 1950s, Ames's namesake cannot easily bring his black wife and their child to live in this former abolitionist town. This younger John Ames also recounts the story of meeting his wife's Memphis family, how dismayed they were at the marriage, and yet how they asked with great interest whether he was a descendant of the abolitionist Ames. The past lives on in the novel's conflicted present.

The Civil War raises questions about the claims of absolutist pacifism. These questions are valuable, as are these novels.

Anne-Marie Cusac is the investigative reporter of The Progressive.

By Elizabeth DiNovella

Hip-hop has gotten a bad reputation, and for good reason. The brutality, the misogyny, the crass consumerism--the list can go on and on. But I came of age listening to hip-hop and still love the heavy beats, the lyricism, the outrage against injustice that can be found in it.

I didn't know the history of the music until I read Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. Winner of a 2005 American Book Award, Can't Stop Won't Stop is a wide-ranging tour of music and politics.

Hip-hop was born amid the destruction of the South Bronx. In the 1970s, the area had lost 600,000 manufacturing jobs. "If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work," writes Chang.

The book then detours to Jamaica and eventually returns to the United States. Chang writes about DJ Kool Herc and Africa Bambaataa, Run DMC and Public Enemy, Queen Latifah and MC Lyte, East Coast, West Coast, and styles in between.

Chang traces the history of hip-hop but also discusses the politics of the era, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan's infamous "benign neglect" menlo. "The politics of abandonment tied the Bronx of 1977 to the Los Angeles of 1992," writes Chang.

Can't Stop Won't Stop explores police brutality, along with the beating of Rodney King and the aftermath in Los Angeles; the consolidation of the music industry and its effects on hip-hop; the culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s, and the role of rightwing pundits and think tanks in those battles.

Chang has been covering hip-hop for more than a decade. A founding editor of ColorLines magazine, he has exhaustively researched his topic. And his prose at times pulsates like the music itself.

If Chang's book is a raucous ride through recent history, Rebecca Solnit takes us on a quiet stroll in her latest book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Solnit is one of America's more interesting essayists, and this collection mixes autobiography and art history, punk rock and country ballads, a love of mountains and of deserts.

The author never really tells us how to get lost, but she offers a few of her own maps, recounts what it means to be lost in the present, to be lost in love, to lose one's mind, the "voluptuous pleasure" in sadness and loss, and the spiritual implications.

Solnit argues we often have to lose ourselves in order to find ourselves. "Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery," she writes.

One particularly intriguing chapter tells of captives (white people who were captured by American Indian tribes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Captives embody two distinct ways of being lost: geographically lost and religiously lost. But some captives, especially those caught as children, integrated themselves into the new culture and never returned to white civilization.

"These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were," she writes. "Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment."

I enjoyed the pacing of the book, its tone, and its style. I even enjoyed disagreeing with her. She may be romanticizing some of the captivity stories and industrial, urban decay. But she has a wonderful ability to pull together what seem to be disparate ideas.

Elizabeth DiNovella is the culture editor of The Progressive.

By Susan J. Douglas

Consumer culture is one of the United States most successful and insidious exports. Usually we think about the consequences of this for developing countries or for Muslim cultures, where Victoria's Secret or Desperate Housewives might not be welcomed. But in her dazzling new book, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through 20th-Century Europe, Columbia University historian Victoria de Grazia focuses our attention on American consumer culture's first area of conquest, Europe, and traces how the burrowing of what she calls America's "Market Empire" into the old world's bourgeois hierarchy eventually overthrew, at least partially, its regime of culture based on connections, privilege, and taste. Her purpose is, in part, to show how U.S. military and political imperialism rested crucially on this "nonmilitary dimension of U.S. rule," meaning consumer culture's pseudo-democratic claim that satisfying consumers' every desire was the equivalent of universal justice and fairness. By analyzing and weaving together the export, to Europe, of chain stores, big-brand goods, corporate advertising and PR, the Hollywood star system, the supermarket, and the ideal of the wife as "Mrs. Consumer," de Grazia makes us see the incremental yet sweeping success of consumer culture abroad. This U.S. "Market Empire," she argues, stomped over and pushed aside the notions of European nations that they should control their own public space; it exported American clubs and voluntary organizations (like the Rotarians) as signposts of civic engagement; it insisted that consumerism equaled freedom and democracy; and it presented itself as a peaceable way of life.

The book is a tour de force of cultural history, written in glittering prose, about the revolutionary process--all too frequently understated by the word "Americanization"--that now threatens to McDonaldize the world as we know it.

In a quite different vein, John Harris's The Survivor. Bill Clinton in the White House provides an appraisal of the Clinton Presidency that truly seems to be looking down from a great and distant height. Unlike Clinton's own unanalytical autobiography, The Survivor examines, in smart and arresting prose, the relationship between Clinton's political mindset and managerial style, which relished in contradiction and dissent, and his bungles and successes in the White House.

This is the nonpartisan, politically astute book people have been waiting for to make sense of the demons that beset that Administration (especially its over-paranoid suspicion of the press, whose wariness it brought upon itself) and how Clinton continued to run a successful defense, despite it all.

Finally, I'd like to recommend David Enders's Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation. Enders, barely out of college and filled with equal parts courage, chutzpah, hubris, and recklessness, went to Baghdad in the spring of 2003 to start the first and only English-language newspaper written, printed, and distributed there during the war. Enders operated outside the Green Zone, and provides a plainspoken, on-the-ground, phenomenological account of the danger, terror, destruction--and efforts of iraqis to maintain some kind of "normal" life--resulting from the U.S. invasion. This is not the reporting you saw on the networks, and Enders's special talent is to use everyday sensual experiences--walking on shards of broken glass, having your hands shake at checkpoints--to connect the tragedy and absurdity of war, and to highlight the gaps between official U.S press conferences and what everyday Iraqis were experiencing and feeling on the street, without electricity, water, bouquets for the U.S. military, or, often, hope for a better future.

Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communication at the University of Michigan and co-author of "The Mommy Myth."

By Andrea Lewis

At worst, interactive books are gimmicky, juvenile, and--let's e honest--something most of us wouldn't want to be seen reading. At their best, however, multimedia books can take readers to places where a plain printed volume can't fly.

Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston is an interactive, multimedia book put together by Hurston's niece Lucy Hurston and the Zora Neale Hurston Trust. It is part biography and part gathering place for some little-known (and some previously unpublished) writings and details about the famed Harlem Renaissance writer, anthropologist, playwright, and poet. But Speak takes you behind the words and allows you to virtually sneak into Hurston's private writing room.

Rarely-seen family photos and well-considered, concise text describe Hurston's life and work, while a variety of "artifacts" enhance the story. One page includes a pocket that holds color reproductions of two Christmas cards that Hurston designed for friends. "Wishing you a Merry Olde Christmas and a Happy New Year," she writes inside a card with a hand-drawn yule log burning on the cover.

Readers can examine a reproduction of the Saturday Review of Literature from 1943 featuring an illustration of Hurston on the cover or fondle a program from a 1925 awards ceremony honoring Zora and other writers. (The event was sponsored by Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League.) There are also maps from the era, one of which shows the routes that Hurston frequented on her many trips through Florida to gather work songs and other oral testimony from blacks in the region. (I was especially tickled to see that her travels took her right through the area where my parents now live.) Sure, every piece of included memorabilia is mass-produced, but there's still something special and uniquely experiential about being able to pull out and read several pages of a handwritten draft of a chapter from Their Eyes Are Watching God.

Best of all, Speak includes a remarkable audio CD of archival recordings of Hurston's voice.

We hear Hurston tell stories about her early struggles as a writer and about a large sow who wandered into the house and quickly inspired young Zora to stop crawling and learn to walk. A few tracks later, Hurston begins to sing songs collected during her many travels. Some are songs gathered from black men working on the Southern railroads. Others, like "Mama Don't Want No Peas, No Rice" are folk tunes compiled from places like Nassau, Bahamas. "They're great song makers," Hurston tells us of the Bahamians, "and their tunes are decidedly more African than those made by the Negroes in America." Her bright, edgy voice quickly jumps into an unaccompanied rendition of the song that is--like the entire book project--both instructive and endearing.

Nothing inspires like a little poetic injection, and there are countless healthy doses to be found in the pages of The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. The anthology isn't your standard historical survey beginning with Phyllis Wheatley and closing with Amiri Baraka. Stanford professor, biographer, and editor Arnold Rampersad and associate editor Hilary Herbold have instead grouped poems by themes with utterly enticing headings such as "To Make a Poet Black" and "The Rocking Loom of History." Poems that you expect to see (like Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool") are thankfully included. Others (like W. E. B. DuBois's "A Litany at Atlanta") are wonderful surprises. Whether you just take a quick sip, or drink deeply from the well, these words and this collection satisfy a soul's thirst.

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

The two most inspired books of 2005 were about places that are about as far off Americas radar as can be imagined: Burma and Eritrea. Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma is a stunning amalgam of travelogue, history, literary critique, and philosophy. With Orwell's book about his time as a member of the British Imperial Police, Burmese Days, as a rough guide, Larkin goes in search of evidence of the man in the country that its military dictators have dubbed Myanmar. She finds, instead, that, "in Burma, there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country but three: a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four." So begins an exploration of contemporary totalitarianism so penetrating that Larkin's book admirably holds its own when read beside Orwell's. When she was walking in Mandalay one day, a man said to the author, "Spread our need of democracy to the rest of the world--the people are so tired." Larkin has done that, and much more. It is impossible to read her book and avoid being drawn into the deepest consideration of the meaning of freedom--considerations that are far more complex and morally demanding than the aimless ramblings of American neo-conservatives who seek to justify a foreign policy every bit as imperial as the British endeavor that Orwell decried so many years ago.

If Burma is off the map for most Americans, then it is fair to say that Eritrea never even made the charts. As Michela Wrong notes in the introduction to her brilliant exploration of colonialism, fascism, liberation, and the cruelties of a superpower-driven planet, I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation, "History is written--or, more accurately, written out--by the conquerors. If Eritrea has been lost in the milky haze of amnesia, it surely cannot be unconnected to the fact that so many former masters and intervening powers--from Italy to Britain, the U.S. to the Soviet Union, Israel and the United Nations, not forgetting, of course, Ethiopia, the most formidable occupier of them all--behaved so very badly there. Better to forget than dwell on episodes which reveal the victors at their most racist and small-minded, cold-bloodedly manipulative or simply brutal beyond belief. To act so ruthlessly, yet emerge with so little to show for all the grim opportunism, well, which nation really wants to remember that?"

But Michela Wrong, a former BBC, Reuters, and Financial Times correspondent in Africa, does remember the agonizing details. She points fingers of blame, and she explains why all of this matters. While the perpetrators of colonial oppressions and Cold War intrigues may will misdeeds out of their memory, "the victims," she observes, "don't share the conqueror's lazy capacity for forgetfulness." By exploring in precise and often painful detail the battering that the Eritreans took from successive occupying forces, Wrong compels readers to consider the sources of the blowback that Chalmers Johnson warns of. Recalling the "Why do they hate us so much?" question that was asked by Americans in the wake of September 11, she writes, "Eritrea's story provides part of the answer to that query. It is very easy to be generous with your forgiving and forgetting, when you are the one in need of forgiveness. A sense of wounded righteousness keeps the memory sharp." And the memories of the Eritreans are sharp, indeed, as is Wrong's account of their suffering.

A stack of books about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the rise of the Chinese economic and military behemoth, and the continual crumbling of what was the Soviet Union have come out over the past year--some of them very good. But if you want to understand the world as it exists today, in its fullness and in all of its complexity, Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma and Wrong's I Didn't Do It for You provide the best starting point. From their examinations of forgotten lands come the questions and the answers that our unsettled--and soon to be more un settling--moment demands.

John Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the co-author, along with Robert W. McChesney, of "Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy."

By Adolph L. Reed Jr.

Three recent books come together to chart the political forces that currently constrain us in particularly sharp and practically important ways. David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism presents a superbly cogent account of the origins, substance, rise, and consolidation of the political-economic and ideological regime that has become dominant--domestically and globally--over the last twenty-five years. The conceptual essence of neoliberalism as a theory of political economy is that "human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." This is the regime famously characterized by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's quip that there is "no such thing as society, only individual men and women." (As Harvey notes, she later added families.)

Harvey reconstructs neoliberalism's evolution from the fringe movement of rightwing libertarians associated with Friedrich yon Hayek after World War II to the global juggernaut that it has become. He argues that it has two distinct components, which sometimes conflict. Theoretically, neoliberalism is a free market utopia, an ideal social order to be achieved. Practically, it has been a program for the reassertion of capitalist class power. When the theoretical and practical programs conflict, Harvey demonstrates forcefully, the nod always goes to the latter. One of this book's many strengths is that it grounds neoliberalism as an ideology in concrete historical and institutional forces, showing that its success has been the result of political action. This book also takes careful critical stock of the forms of political resistance that have emerged under the neoliberal regime.

The other books are both by literature professors. Walter Benn Michaels's The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History ruthlessly dissects the impact of the collapse of the Cold War flame of reference. He shows how it displaced an oppositional political language based on class as the key analytical category and in its stead elevated one based on culture. He argues that this shift, which tacitly accepts the neoliberal mantra that there is no alternative to the market as the foundation for human existence, entails a demise of the bases for political solidarity.

The universalizing imperatives of class analysis, according to which political argument presumes a mutually comprehensible experience, makes disagreement possible, Michaels contends. The notion of cultural difference attributes differing perceptions to non-comparable and mutually incomprehensible differences, thus replacing disagreement, which can be resolved or addressed through debate and political action, with difference, which appears natural and beyond intervention. One of the effects of this shift, which appears most crucially in notions of "cultural" or identity politics, is to render impossible the construction of a broad movement capable of challenging the neoliberal reorganization of the world.

Finally, Kenneth W. Warren's So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism takes off from the work and perspectives of novelist and cultural critic Ralph Ellison to explore significant aspects of black American intellectual history, political practice, and ideology. He explores the changing character of race, race relations, and political economy in the postwar and post-Jim Crow eras. Like Harvey and Michaels, he provides a rigorous, materially grounded critique of major strains in black American politics and intellectual activity that have emerged in the aftermath of the victories of the 1960s and the subsequent triumph of neoliberalism.

Adolph L. Reed Jr. is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the interim national council of the Labor Party.

By Matthew Rothschild

Happy Birthday, Ken! John Kenneth Galbraith recently turned ninety-seven. This giant was born within months of The Progressive, he has written for the magazine over the decades, and he remains on our editorial advisory board as a loyal reader and witty private correspondent.

And so it was with great anticipation that I picked up Richard Parker's biography, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. I was not disappointed. This fascinating account describes the man who embodied the best of the liberal ideal in the twentieth century. A Roosevelt Democrat, a disciple of Keynes, an aide to JFK and his ambassador to India, a prescient and outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Galbraith also knows how to write mordantly and talk pithily. Even in the late 1930s, writing for the Harvard Business Review, his style was in evidence. While some economists and business people wanted to lower wages, Galbraith dryly noted that workers were against that: "This means, in a democratic state, that wage reductions as an instrument of economic policy may not exist. In my judgment this is, in fact, no important handicap." There was a time when some of our politicians and some of our leading economists advocated policies designed specifically to raise wages, lift people out of poverty, and, yes, redistribute wealth. How far we've come from that!

Read The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, by Jonathan Kozol. He cites damning statistics of overwhelmingly segregated urban schools. He observes classrooms that are now run by rote, and he shows how Bush's "No Child Left Behind" is a "deadly lie."

I'd also like to recommend Tram Nguyen's We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11. With a foreword by the prizewinning novelist Edwidge Danticat, this book sheds light on some of the gravest abuses of the Bush Administration. Rather than simply discuss policy, Nguyen gives real-life accounts of families torn apart by the Ashcroft Raids. This book is filled with heartbreak and indignation.

And a big shout out to David Zirin, whose What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States is a must for any southpaw sports fan out there. Zirin profiles many of the heroes who have stood up to the bigots in the stands and in the suites, or who have taken on the jingoists. He gives props to Lester Rodney, the former Daily Worker sports editor who championed the integration of baseball. Zirin even has an interview with Rodney. The chapters on Jackie Robinson and Muhammad All go well beyond the obligatory. The one on the 1968 Olympic track stars with the raised fists, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, breaks new ground and includes Zirin's interviews with them, too. Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, and Mia Hamm all get a nod, as do Bill Russell, Rod Carew, and Carl Eller. And Zirin's interview with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who still can't get an NBA coaching job, is not to be missed. Other highlights: his profiles of contemporary athletes who have protested Bush's Iraq War, including Toronto Blue Jays first baseman Carlos Delgado, Etan Thomas of the Washington Wizards, Adonal Foyle of the Golden State Warriors, and Manhattanville College guard Toni Smith. Zirin writes with the abandon of a simile-happy sportswriter. Examples: Maybe Rasheed Wallace is "meaner than Dick Cheney at a solar energy convention." And Maurice Clarett "watched his draft status sink like 'Kerry in 2004' T-shirt sales." A great gift for the sports nut in your family.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive.