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Tragic Magic: The Life of Traffic’s Chris Wood by Dan Ropek. Oakamoor. 2016. Oakamoor Publishing. 9781910773192. 236 pages. paperback.

9781910773192 DESCRIPTION - Traffic was the most enigmatic British band of their day. Formed in early 1967 by Chris Wood, Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi and Dave Mason, they rejected the bright lights of London in favor of a run-down, supposedly haunted, cottage in the country - a place to live communally and write music. With Chris especially intent on channeling the vibes of England's landscape into their sound, days would be spent getting high, exploring, playing and working in varying proportions. Against all odds, this eccentric model paid off - songs such as "Dear Mr. Fantasy" and "John Barleycorn Must Die" would lift Traffic into the upper echelons of the rock world. As they brushed shoulders with Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, and the Grateful Dead, and with Dave dropping in and out of the band, Traffic's music evolved from a synthesis of Steve's innate musicality, Jim's atmospheric lyrics and Chris's special brand of congenial mysticism. Record sales boomed and tours carried them back and forth across the Atlantic, everything seemed to be going to plan - a dreamlike fairy tale come true. But for Chris, a toll would be exacted. Amid the clashing egos, wearing road trips, stressful break ups and a complex personal life, he vacillated precariously between bursts of exquisite creativity and torrents of self-destruction; a paradoxical dance which continued until his death in 1983. For a man who found artistic expression everything, and for whom suffering for it was an expectation, Chris would stare fully into the Medusa's face of the music industry, paying a higher price than perhaps any of his contemporaries. Researched and written over a ten-year period, "Tragic Magic" offers the only definitive account of Traffic's story and Chris Wood's quietly extraordinary life.

Ropek Dan AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dan Ropek has previously written for Goldmine, Record Collector, and Crawdaddy! magazines He Also designed the cover and wrote the liner notes for Chris Wood’s Vulcan album (2008). When not teaching at Columbia Gorge Community College, Dan plays music and tends a small patch of forest in nearby Mount Hood, Oregon.

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Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question by Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens (editors). London/New York. 2001. Verso. 1859843409. With contributions by Edward W. Said, Norman G. Finkelstein, Christopher Hitchens, Peretz Kidron, Noam Chomsky, G. W. Bowersock, Ibrahim Abue-Lughod, Rashid Khalidi, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Muhammad Hallaj, and Elia Zureik. 296 pages. paperback. Cover photograph by Jean Mohr.

1859843409 DESCRIPTION - Since the 1948 war which drove them from their heartland, the Palestinian people have consistently been denied the most basic democratic rights. Blaming the Victims shows how the historical fate of the Palestinians has been justified by spurious academic attempts to dismiss their claim to a home within the boundaries of historical Palestine and even to deny their very existence. Beginning with a thorough exposé of the fraudulent assertions of Joan Peters concerning the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine prior to 1948, the book then turns to similar instances in Middle East research where the truth about the Palestinians has been systematically suppressed: from the bogus—though still widely believed—explanations of why so many Palestinians fled their homes in 1948, to today’s distorted propaganda about PLO terrorism. The volume also includes sharp critiques of the wide consensus in the USA which supports Israel and its territorial ambitions while maintaining total silence about the competing reality of the Palestinians.

Said Edward W and Hitchens Christopher AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward W. Said (1935–2003) was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature and of Kings College Cambridge, his celebrated works include Orientalism, The End of the Peace Process, Power, Politics and Culture, and the memoir Out of Place. He is also the editor, with Christopher Hitchens, of Blaming the Victims, published by Verso. New Left Review published an obituary in Nov–Dec 2003. Christopher Hitchens was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and. is a columnist for The Nation, Washington editor for Harper's, and a book reviewer for Newsday. Christopher Hitchens joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in November 1992 and wrote regularly for the magazine until 2011. In May 2011, he won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary for a series of columns on his having cancer. In recent years, Hitchens was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, where he wrote a monthly essay on books, and a regular columnist at Slate. From 1982 to 2002, he wrote a biweekly column for The Nation. Throughout his singular career Christopher Hitchens wrote for The New Statesman, the London Evening Standard, London's Daily Express, Harper's, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. His books include THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER (VERSO, 2001), LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN (BASIC, 2001), GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING (TWELVE, 2007), HITCH-22: A MEMOIR (TWELVE, 2010), and ARGUABLY: ESSAYS BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Twelve, 2011), a collection of his later essays. Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011. Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of American Power and the New Mandarins, Manufacturing Consent (with Ed Herman), Deterring Democracy, Year 501, World Orders Old and New, Powers and Prospects, Profit over People, The New Military Humanism and Rogue States. Norman G. Finkelstein is the author of A Nation on Trial (with Ruth Bettina Birn), named a notable book for 1998 by the New York Times Book Review, and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 17

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi. New York. 2020. Metropolitan Books. 9781627798556. 321 pages. hardcover.

9781627798556 DESCRIPTION - A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history. In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members - mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists - The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

Khalidi Rashid AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rashid Khalidi is the author of Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (Beacon Press, 2013) and six other books about the Middle East--Sowing Crisis, The Iron Cage, Resurrecting Empire, Origins of Arab Nationalism, Under Siege, and the award-winning Palestinian Identity. He is the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University and editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He has written more than eighty articles on Middle Eastern history and politics, including pieces in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and many journals. Professor Khalidi has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Rockefeller Foundation; he was also the recipient of a Fulbright research award. Professor Khalidi has been a regular guest on numerous radio and TV shows, including All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Nightline.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 38

The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands by Jeremy Salt. Berkeley. 2008. University of California Press. 9780520255517. 1 map. 484 pages. hardcover.

9780520255517 DESCRIPTION - Written for those who want to know more about the Middle East than the mainstream media is willing or able to tell, this book begins by examining a question that has been asked by numerous commentators since September 11, 2001: ‘Why do they hate us?' Jeremy Salt offers the background essential for understanding the Middle East today by chronicling the long and bloody history of Western intervention in Arab lands. In lucid detail, he examines the major events that have shaped the region - ranging from the French in Algeria and the British in Egypt in the nineteenth century to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and to the continuing war in Iraq. Linking all of these together, Salt paints a damning picture of a sustained campaign by Western powers to dominate the Middle East by whatever means necessary. Throughout, he emphasizes the human cost of the policies put in place to preserve ‘Western interests' or in the name of bringing civilization, democracy, or freedom to the region. Making use of extensive research in U.S. and British archives that reveals what politicians were deciding behind closed doors, and why, this is a book that will change the way we see the Middle East.

Salt Jeremy

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jeremy Salt teaches in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Ankara and is author of Imperialism, Evangelism, and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878-1896.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 44

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli. New York. 2016. Riverhead Books. 9780399184413. Translated from the Italian by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. 86 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Coralie Bickford-Smith.

9780399184413 DESCRIPTION - This playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics briskly explains Einstein's general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world. Carlo Rovelli, a renowned theoretical physicist, is a delightfully poetic and philosophical scientific guide. He takes us to the frontiers of our knowledge: to the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, back to the origins of the cosmos, and into the workings of our minds. The book celebrates the joy of discovery. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,” Rovelli writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”

Rovelli Carlo

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CARLO ROVELLI received his PhD in physics at the University of Padua. He has conducted research at Imperial College, Yale University, the University of Rome, and the University of Pittsburgh, and currently directs the quantum gravity group of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Aix-Marseille University. He is author of Quantum Gravity and What Is Time? What Is Space?, as well as many scholarly articles. His most recent book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, translated into thirty-four languages, is an international bestseller.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 38

Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by Carlo Rovelli. New York. 2021. Riverhead Books. 9780593328880. Translated from the Italian by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell. 235 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Jason Booher.

9780593328880 DESCRIPTION - One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious. As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness. Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it.

Rovelli Carlo

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An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz. Boston. 2018. Beacon Press. 9780807013106. American Crossroads 16. 276 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Louis Roe.

9780807013106 DESCRIPTION - 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights. Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers - Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth - united in resistance on the first “Day Without Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights.

Ortiz Paul Professor Paul Ortiz (Ph.D. Duke University, 2000) is the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States, which received the 2018 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. His book Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 was awarded the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Book Prize from the Florida Historical Society and the Florida Institute of Technology. He also co-edited and conducted oral history interviews for the book, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South. He teaches undergraduate courses and supervises graduate fields in African American history, Latinx history, comparative ethnic studies, U.S. South, labor, social movement theory, oral history and field work methodologies among other topics. Ortiz is currently working on three books: Settler Colonialism and the ‘War on Terror’: 1492 to the Present, which will be published by Beacon Press. He is co-editing a book with Wesley Hogan of Duke University titled Changing the System Now: People Power, History, and Organizing in the 21st Century, which includes contributions by William Greider, Lane Windham, Ernie Cortes and other activist intellectuals. He is currently finishing a synthesis of the segregated South with William H. Chafe titled: Behind the Veil: African Americans in the Age of Segregation, 1895-1965. Professor Ortiz is the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. Under his leadership, SPOHP has received three national academic awards. The program offers oral history and experiential learning classroom and fieldwork opportunities year-round. The Proctor Program has led 15 field work trips to the Mississippi Delta where students have interviewed veterans of the civil rights movement. Most recently, SPOHP students helped to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Elaine Massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas. The program has also facilitated field work on special topics including global climate change, Latinx studies, African American history, women’s history, LGBT studies and many other areas. He joined the University of Florida Department of History in 2008 after teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Department of Community Studies between 2001-2008.

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Emancipation Betrayed: Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida From Reconstruction To the Bloody Election of 1920 by Paul Ortiz. Berkeley. 2005. University of California Press. 0520239466. American Crossroads 16. 382 pages. hardcover.

0520239466 DESCRIPTION - In this penetrating examination of African American politics and culture, Paul Ortiz throws a powerful light on the struggle of black Floridians to create the first statewide civil rights movement against Jim Crow. Concentrating on the period between the end of slavery and the election of 1920, Emancipation Betrayed vividly demonstrates that the decades leading up to the historic voter registration drive of 1919-20 were marked by intense battles during which African Americans struck for higher wages, took up arms to prevent lynching, forged independent political alliances, boycotted segregated streetcars, and created a democratic historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Contrary to previous claims that African Americans made few strides toward building an effective civil rights movement during this period, Ortiz documents how black Floridians formed mutual aid organizations-secret societies, women’s clubs, labor unions, and churches-to bolster dignity and survival in the harsh climate of Florida, which had the highest lynching rate of any state in the union. African Americans called on these institutions to build a statewide movement to regain the right to vote after World War I. African American women played a decisive role in the campaign as they mobilized in the months leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The 1920 contest culminated in the bloodiest Election Day in modern American history, when white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan violently, and with state sanction, prevented African Americans from voting. Ortiz’s eloquent interpretation of the many ways that black Floridians fought to expand the meaning of freedom beyond formal equality and his broader consideration of how people resist oppression and create new social movements illuminate a strategic era of United States history and reveal how the legacy of legal segregation continues to play itself out to this day.

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The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy by Carlo Rovelli. Yardley. 2011. Westholme Publishing. 9781594161315. 20 halftones, 6 x 9 . 211 pages. hardcover.

9781594161315

DESCRIPTION - Carlo Rovelli, a leading theoretical physicist, uses the figure of Anaximander as the starting point for an examination of scientific thinking itself: its limits, its strengths, its benefits to humankind, and its controversial relationship with religion. Anaximander, the sixth-century BCE Greek philosopher, is often called the ‘first scientist' because he was the first to suggest that order in the world was due to natural forces, not supernatural ones. He is the first person known to understand that the Earth floats in space; to believe that the sun, the moon, and the stars rotate around it - seven centuries before Ptolemy; to argue that all animals came from the sea and evolved; and to posit that universal laws control all change in the world. Anaximander taught Pythagoras, who would build on Anaximander's scientific theories by applying mathematical laws to natural phenomena. In Anaximander, Rovelli restores the Greek philosopher to his place in the history of science by carefully reconstructing his theories from what is known to us and examining them in their historical and philosophical contexts. Rovelli demonstrates that Anaximander's discoveries and theories were decisive influences, putting Western culture on its path toward a scientific revolution. Developing this connection, Rovelli redefines science as a continuous redrawing of our conceptual image of the world. He concludes that scientific thinking - the legacy of Anaximander - is only reliable when it constantly tests the limits of our current knowledge. ‘An interesting, informative, and insightful book . . . highly recommended.' - Choice. Rovelli Carlo

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Cold War on Five Continents:A Global History of Empire and Espionage by Alfred W. McCoy. Chicago. 2025. Haymarket Books. 9798888905029. 591 pages. hardcover.

9798888905029 DESCRIPTION - A provocative analysis of the deadly Cold War conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington. Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable hellscapes, the surrogate wars of the Cold War era left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that have persisted into the present. In this ambitious work, Alfred W. McCoy uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to offer an unexpected new perspective on the longest, most consequential conflict in modern history. McCoy renders an intimate portrait of both embattled covert operatives and committed antiwar protesters, thus humanizing the history of the Cold War—a history that has too often been told in impersonal terms of economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes. As today’s great powers devote humanity’s scarce resources toward ratcheting up a “new cold war” in the face of a worsening climate crisis, McCoy’s history is an important reminder that otherwise- ordinary individuals once helped end a global conflict that threatened nuclear holocaust.

McCoy Alfred W Alfred W. McCoy is professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Educated at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale, he has spent the past twenty years writing about the politics and history of Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books on the Philippines, one of which won the country's National Book Award, and the editor of Southeast Asia Under Japanese Occupation. An internationally recognized expert on drug trafficking and organized crime, he is also the author of DRUG TRAFFIC: NARCOTICS AND ORGANIZED CRIME IN AUSTRALIA.

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