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Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt. New York. 2005. Penguin Press. 1594200653. With 9 maps and 77 photographs. 878 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Dean Nicastro. Jacket photograph by Werner Bischof/Magnum Photos.

DESCRIPTION - THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF POSTWAR EUROPE FOR OUR TIME. Tony Judt's POSTWAR is cause for celebration. The product of a decade's labor, it is sweeping narrative history in the grand tradition, a deeply learned and absorbing chronicle of Europe since the fall of Berlin, weaving East and West, North and South, into a majestic sixty-year tapestry studded with brilliant new insight. Tony Judt has drawn on forty years of reading and writing about modern Europe to craft this account of the continent's remarkable journey - tumultuous and uneven - out of the devastation of history's most savage war. While his range is vast, and seemingly no country, no vital theme, no crucial individual, no watershed event fails to get its moment in the narrative sun, Postwar is the very opposite of the dutiful plod. Animated and propelled by the celebrated force of its author's point of view, it is never less than brilliant. Witty, opinionated and full of fresh and surprising stories and asides, visually rich and rewarding, with useful and provocative maps, photos and cartoons, Postwar is a rare joy for lovers of history and lovers of Europe alike, a show from which one exits, dazzled, into the present moment, with much mental furniture rearranged, if not smashed into kindling, and all of Europe indelibly in mind. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - TONY JUDT (2 January 1948 - 6 August 2010) was born in London in 1948. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and New York University, where he is currently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and that he founded in 1995. The author or editor of eleven books, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times and many other journals in Europe and the United States.

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Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 by Richard Slotkin. Middletown. 1975. Wesleyan University Press. 0819540552. 670 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - In the intense psychological and social anxieties of the Puritan settlers in the American wilderness, and in their imaginative exorcism of these anxieties, Richard Slotkin isolates the beginnings of a myth of regeneration through violent confrontation with the dark forces of nature and humanity. His central thesis is that an entire set of national attitudes and traditions informing our literature and defining our social responses has evolved from the myth of the hunter-hero struggling in a savage new world to claim the land, to displace the Indian. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries - Thomas Morton's The New English Canaan, various captivity stories, the Boone tales, the historical romances of Cooper, Simms, and R. M. Bird, the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville - Mr. Slotkin carefully, convincingly traces the development of this myth and fully characterizes it. Moreover, the book raises important theoretical questions about the nature of myths, the processes by which they gain social currency, the ways in which they function to shape literary and other cultural phenomena. Mr. Slotkin's study is at once synthetic and seminal. He draws together a large body of materials under new rubrics and uses them as the basis for provocative conclusions about American literature and American history, argued boldly and eloquently, implying the need of a revaluation of the American tradition.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Slotkin (born 1942) is a cultural critic and historian. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and in 2010 was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1995 he received the Mary C. Turpie Award of the American Studies Association for his contributions to teaching and program-building. Slotkin writes novels alongside his historical research, and uses the process of writing the novels to clarify and refine his historical work.

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Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America by Richard Slotkin. New York. 1992. Atheneum. 0689121636. 850 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Kathy Kikkert.  

DESCRIPTION - In Gunfighter nation: the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America (Atheneum, 1992), the concluding volume of his highly acclaimed trilogy, Slotkin draws on a wide range of sources to examine the pervasive influence of Wild West myths on American culture and politics. In the third of a three-volume study in the development of the myth of the frontier in US literary, popular, and political culture from the colonial period to the present, Slotkin covers the expression of the frontier myth in such popular culture phenomena as dime novels, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the formula fiction of 1900-40, and the Hollywood film. Covering historiography, Slotkin also discusses the exploration of the significance of the American frontier experience in Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West and Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Slotkin (born 1942) is a cultural critic and historian. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and in 2010 was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1995 he received the Mary C. Turpie Award of the American Studies Association for his contributions to teaching and program-building. Slotkin writes novels alongside his historical research, and uses the process of writing the novels to clarify and refine his historical work.

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The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 by Richard Slotkin. New York. 1985. Atheneum. 0689114109. 688 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - In The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of America's rise to wealth and power. Using Custer's Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the 'savage' element be permitted to dominate the 'civilized,' Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Slotkin (born 1942) is a cultural critic and historian. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and in 2010 was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1995 he received the Mary C. Turpie Award of the American Studies Association for his contributions to teaching and program-building. Slotkin writes novels alongside his historical research, and uses the process of writing the novels to clarify and refine his historical work.

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Fathers & Children: Andrew Jackson & the Subjugation of the American Indian by Michael Paul Rogin. New York. 1975. Knopf. 0394482042. 373 pages. hardcover. Cover: Asher B. Durand-'Andrew Jackson' & Albrecht Durer-'King Death on Horseback'.

DESCRIPTION -  In a provocative psychological study, Michael Paul Rogin reveals the dark interior of Jackson's life and career - his complex, deep-seated hostility toward the American Indians and his central responsibility for their destruction. Overcoming severe early difficulties - a speech impediment similar to that of Melville's Billy Budd, prolonged childhood illness, the loss of both parents - Jackson rose to become a successful lawyer, politician, land speculator, and slave owner on the Tennessee frontier. The ‘architect of his own fortunes,' a self-made man subservient to no one, he embodied the triumphant aspects of the popular mythology of the post-Revolutionary era, when the patriarchal order in politics and society was crumbling, freeing men to make their own ways, alone and unfettered. Yet, the psychic cost of liberation was extremely high: ‘it intensified loneliness, vengeful disappointment, and separation anxiety.' Thus, Jackson, in freeing himself from his personal burdens and satisfying a compelling, fundamental need for authority, constructed for himself and his contemporaries a new paternal order to both supplant and honor the Founding Fathers' ambiguous legacy of independence, virtue, and opportunity. Its first premise was the removal of the Indian from his tribal lands in the southeastern United States.Rogin argues that Jacksonian Democracy - emphasizing laissez-faire capitalism, liberal egalitarianism, governmental reform, and westward expansion and symbolized by Jackson's war with the Bank of the United States - emerged from this anxious and deadly background to dominate American politics for a generation before the Civil War.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Rogin (Born: June 29, 1937, Mount Kisco, NY - Died: November 25, 2001, Paris, France) was Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include ‘Ronald Reagan,' the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (California, 1987). Rogin was born on June 29, 1937, in Mt. Kisco, New York, and received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in government from Harvard University in 1958. He did graduate work at the University of Chicago, where he gained his master's degree in 1959 and his doctorate in political science, in 1962. Rogin began teaching in the UC Berkeley Political Science Department in 1963 and remained there throughout an uncommonly distinguished career. His eight books and numerous articles and essays earned him a preeminent place in the United States and Europe among scholars of politics who valued the breadth and originality of his work and its interdisciplinary character. ‘He invented ways of thinking about things,' said UC Berkeley law professor Robert Post, who co-authored the 1998 book ‘Race and Representations' with Rogin. ‘He was just so perceptive and so much his own vision. No one can duplicate that.' Rogin's books include ‘The Intellectuals and McCarthy' (1967), which he described as ‘a Gothic horror story disguised as Social Science;' ‘Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian' (1975); ‘Subversive Genealogy: the Politics and Art of Herman Melville' (1983); ‘'Ronald Reagan,' the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology' (1987); ‘Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot' (1996); and ‘Independence Day, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Enola Gay' (1998). Rogin's work appealed to and offended the preconceptions of a wide variety of academics. It inspired numerous conferences, colloquia and controversies and drew countless invitations for him to speak at universities across the United States and Europe. His book on Ronald Reagan attracted the attention of the media (Rogin was interviewed on CBS TV's ‘60 Minutes') and the general public. He served on the editorial committee of UC Press for several decades and wrote numerous articles and reviews for journals, including the London Review of Books, for which he became a frequent contributor. Colleagues and students remember Rogin as a prolific, wide-ranging author and a master teacher and mentor of graduate students and undergraduates alike. In the classroom, Rogin was known for speaking in staccato sentences, firing away questions that prodded students and exposed them to new ways of thinking. When Rogin first came to UC Berkeley he taught American Politics, then branched out to teach broader, more interdisciplinary courses in the humanities and social sciences. This included courses on film, Marxism, race and racism, and feminism.

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Private Government: How Employers Rules Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson. Princeton. 2017. Princeton University Press. 9780691176512. 197 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Chris Ferrante.  

DESCRIPTION - Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments―and why we can't see it. One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number probably would be even higher if we recognized most employers for what they are―private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives, on duty and off. We normally think of government as something only the state does, yet many of us are governed far more―and far more obtrusively―by the private government of the workplace. In this provocative and compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson argues that the failure to see this stems from long-standing confusions. These confusions explain why, despite all evidence to the contrary, we still talk as if free markets make workers free―and why so many employers advocate less government even while they act as dictators in their businesses. In many workplaces, employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners, leaving them with little privacy and few other rights. And employers often extend their authority to workers' off-duty lives. Workers can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. Yet we continue to talk as if early advocates of market society―from John Locke and Adam Smith to Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln―were right when they argued that it would free workers from oppressive authorities. That dream was shattered by the Industrial Revolution, but the myth endures. Private Government offers a better way to talk about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. Based on the prestigious Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, Private Government is edited and introduced by Stephen Macedo and includes commentary by cultural critic David Bromwich, economist Tyler Cowen, historian Ann Hughes, and philosopher Niko Kolodny.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Imperative of Integration (Princeton) and Value in Ethics and Economics. She lives in Ann Arbor.

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Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber. Chicago. 2004. Prickly Paradigm Press. 0972819649. 105 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy - everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence. What if they didn't?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Rolfe Graeber (February 12, 1961 - September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist, anarchist activist, and author known for his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). He was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. As an assistant and later associate professor of anthropology at Yale University from 1998 to 2007, Graeber specialized in theories of value and social theory. Yale's decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy. He went on to become, from 2007 to 2013, reader in social anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His activism included protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and at the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan "We are the 99%". He accepted credit for the description "the 99%" but said that others had expanded it into the slogan.

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Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs & the Press by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. New York. 1998. Verso. 1859848974. 408 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - In the late summer of 1996, a young reporter on a California newspaper electrified the United States with the charge that the CIA had conspired in the smuggling of cocaine into the U.S., subsequently disseminated in the form of crack into black urban neighbourhoods. Within days, black communities erupted in fury. Radio stations in Los Angeles, Washington DC and Detroit broadcast thousands of Gary Webb's series in the ‘San Jose Mercury News'. Black politicians seized on the issue, demanding a thorough investigation. As the furor mounted, with the ‘Mercury News' coming up with fresh disclosures and putting many of the basic documents up on its Internet Web site, the Washington establishment struck back at allegations that challenged the very credentials of the state. First came formal government denials. Then, convoluted and self-contradictory rationales began to appear in the nation's most influential newspapers. This is a survey of the violent storm provoked by Webb's articles. It outlines the charges and dissects the government and media counter-attacks. Webb is by no means the first investigator to explore the CIA's hidden history of drug involvement. The book goes back to the very origins of the Agency, and lays out a saga which shows that the CIA: promoted mind-control drugs in the 1940s and 50s, sponsoring LSD research on unsuspecting citizens - many of them black males, locked up in mental hospitals; was involved in the heroin trade in South-East Asia in the 50s and 60s; backed anti-Castro Cuban drug smugglers in South Florida; struck deals with heroin-trafficking Afghan mujahideen; and organized drug smuggling from Latin America, through Central America, into the US. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexander Claud Cockburn (6 June 1941 - 21 July 2012) was an Irish American political journalist and writer. Cockburn was brought up by British parents in Ireland but had lived and worked in the United States since 1972. Together with Jeffrey St. Clair, he edited the political newsletter CounterPunch. Cockburn also wrote the 'Beat the Devil' column for The Nation as well as one for The Week in London, syndicated by Creators Syndicate. Jeffrey St. Clair (born 1959) is an investigative journalist, writer, and editor. He was the co-editor with Alexander Cockburn (who died in 2012) of the political newsletter CounterPunch; he became editor along with Joshua Frank of CounterPunch after Cockburn's death. St. Clair was a contributing editor to the monthly magazine In These Times. He has also written for The Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner, The Nation, and The Progressive. His reporting focuses on the politics of nature and the military-industrial complex. St Clair was born in Indianapolis, Indiana) and attended the American University in Washington, D.C., majoring in English and history. He has worked as an environmental organizer and writer for Friends of the Earth, Clean Water Action Project, and the Hoosier Environmental Council. In 1990, he moved to Oregon to edit the influential environmental magazine Forest Watch. In 1994, he joined journalists Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein on CounterPunch. He co-edited CounterPunch from 1999 to 2012 with Cockburn. From 2012 to the present, St. Clair is the editor-in-chief. In 1998, he published his first book, with Cockburn, Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, a history of the CIA's ties to drug gangs from World War II to the Mujahideen and Nicaraguan Contras. This was followed by A Field Guide to Environmental Bad Guys (with James Ridgeway), and with Cockburn, Five Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond, and Al Gore: a User's Manual. St. Clair wrote the books, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, Grand Theft Pentagon, and Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth. His book, Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes from a Failed Revolution, was published in late 2016.

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Smoke and Mirrors: The War On Drugs and the Politics of Failure by Dan Baum. Boston. 1996. Little Brown. 0316084468. 396 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - For sheer government absurdity, the War on Drugs is hard to beat. After three decades of increasingly punitive policies, illicit drugs are more easily available, drug potencies are greater, drug killings are more common, and drug barons are richer than ever. The War on Drugs costs Washington more than the Commerce, Interior, and State departments combined - and it's the one budget item whose growth is never questioned. A strangled court system, exploding prisons, and wasted lives push the cost beyond measure. What began as a flourish of campaign rhetoric in 1968 has grown into a monster. And while nobody claims that the War on Drugs is a success, nobody suggests an alternative. Because to do so, as Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders learned, is political suicide. Dan Baum interviewed more than 175 people - from John Ehrlichman to Janet Reno - to tell the story of how Drug War fever has been escalated; who has benefited along the way; and how the mounting price in dollars, lives, and liberties has been willfully ignored. Smoke and Mirrors takes you right into the offices where each new stage was planned and executed, then takes you to the streets where policies have produced bloody warfare. This is a tale of the nation run amok - in a way the American people are not yet ready to confront.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dan Baum has been a staff writer at The New Yorker and a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Nine Lives, a book about Hurricane Katrina, and Gun Guys: A Road Trip.

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Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America by Ioan Grillo. New York. 2016. Bloomsbury Press. 9781620403792. 378 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Patti Ratchford.

  
DESCRIPTION - From the author of El Narco, the shocking story of the men at the heads of cartels throughout Latin America: what drives them, what sustains their power, and how they might be brought down. In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps five hundred body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit-men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southern Mexico, a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies. A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star, unleashing guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments, and taking over much of the world's trade in narcotics, guns, and humans. What they do affects you now--from the gas in your car, to the gold in your jewelry, to the tens of thousands of Latin Americans calling for refugee status in the U.S. Gangster Warlords is the first definitive account of the crime wars now wracking Central and South America and the Caribbean, regions largely abandoned by the U.S. after the Cold War. Author of the critically acclaimed El Narco, Ioan Grillo has covered Latin America since 2001 and gained access to every level of the cartel chain of command in what he calls the new battlefields of the Americas. Moving between militia-controlled ghettos and the halls of top policy-makers, Grillo provides a disturbing new understanding of a war that has spiraled out of control--one that people across the political spectrum need to confront now.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ioan Grillo has reported on Latin America since 2001 for international media including TIME magazine, Reuters, CNN, the Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, the Houston Chronicle, CBC, and the Sunday Telegraph. His first book, El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency, was translated into five languages and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A native of England, Grillo lives in Mexico City.

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Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers by Anabel Hernandez. London/New York. 2013. Verso. 9781781680735. Foreword by Roberto Saviano. Translated from the Spanish by Iain Bruce. 362 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - The product of five years' investigative reporting, the subject of intense national controversy, and the source of death threats that forced the National Human Rights Commission to assign two full-time bodyguards to its author, Anabel Hernández, Narcoland has been a publishing and political sensation in Mexico. The definitive history of the drug cartels, Narcoland takes readers to the front lines of the “war on drugs,” which has so far cost more than 60,000 lives in just six years. Hernández explains in riveting detail how Mexico became a base for the mega-cartels of Latin America and one of the most violent places on the planet. At every turn, Hernández names names - not just the narcos, but also the politicians, functionaries, judges and entrepreneurs who have collaborated with them. In doing so, she reveals the mind-boggling depth of corruption in Mexico's government and business elite. Hernández became a journalist after her father was kidnapped and killed and the police refused to investigate without a bribe. She gained national prominence in 2001 with her exposure of excess and misconduct at the presidential palace, and previous books have focused on criminality at the summit of power, under presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon. In awarding Hernández the 2012 Golden Pen of Freedom, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers noted, “Mexico has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, with violence and impunity remaining major challenges in terms of press freedom. In making this award, we recognize the strong stance Ms. Hernández has taken, at great personal risk, against drug cartels.”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anabel Hernández (born 1971) is a Mexican journalist and author, best known for her investigative journalism of Mexican drug trafficking and alleged collusion of government officials and drug lords. She has also written about slave labor, sexual exploitation, and abuse of power. She won the Golden Pen of Freedom Award 2012, which is presented annually by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. She currently lives in Berkeley, California with her two children and has a fellowship on Investigative Reporting at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Hernández, who was born in 1971, is a mother of two children. As a young child Anabel Hernández wanted to be a lawyer. Then, in 1989, Hernández happened to be in San Francisco when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. Anabel was so impressed by the work that journalists were doing that she realized there was nothing in the world she wanted to do more than be a journalist. When Anabel Hernández shared with her father her desires to be a journalist he said that journalism wasn't a profession, that it was an occupation for bums and that women who dedicated themselves to it were prostitutes. He was furious with Hernández at first as the journalistic profession at that time in Mexico had a reputation of being in the pockets of corrupt government officials. In 1993, at 21, Hernández started at the newspaper Reforma (1993-1996) while still in school. The paper was newly created, and they wanted to start only with students so they could really shape them. The students were given very strict rules meant to break the vices of other papers. Hernández and her colleagues were told that they couldn't accept a single peso from anyone or they would be fired immediately. The only thing they could accept from a government office was a glass of water (not even coffee or soda). Hernández has stated that she is convinced that those rigorous standards formed her as a journalist. Hernández first front-page story at Reforma was about electoral fraud in the city of Mexico. Three years later, Hernández got pregnant with her first child that put on hold her journalistic career. After which time she resumed her work with newspaper Milenio (1999-2002). Hernández eventually left Milenio because she was frozen under orders from the president's office; the paper wouldn't publish anything she wrote. And later, Hernandez had to quit at another paper, El Universal, after one of the managers told her if she wanted to stay at the paper she had to stop writing about President Fox and his administration. On Dec. 5, 2000, Hernández received a call from her mother telling her that her father hadn't come home the night before. Hernández and family members began the search for the family patriarch by calling local hospitals. That afternoon, the family called a radio station to report Mr. Hernández's missing car and see if people could help them find it. Someone called and said they found it, so Anabel's older brother went to the location where the car had been found. Inside the car was one of Mr. Hernández shoes and the car trunk was stained with blood. By that night the Hernández family knew Mr. Hernández was dead. Mr. Hernández's body was found lying on a highway on Tultitlan, a municipality outside of MExico. The police in Mexico City said they would investigate only if they were paid; the family refused. She has now assigned at least two bodyguards to her protection. Hernández is a contributing journalist for the online publication Reporte Indigo and Proceso magazine, but earlier reported for the national newspapers Milenio, Reforma, El Universal and its supplemental magazine La Revista. She started her career as a journalist at Reforma in 1993. Her editorial on the importance of a Free Press in Mexico, called "The Perverse Power of Silence", was included in the WAN-IFRA 2012 World Press Freedom Day publication. In her editorial, she wrote, "If we remain silent we kill freedom, justice and the possibility that a society armed with information may have the power to change the situation that has brought us to this point." Hernández, while working at Milenio, broke the news story about the extravagance with which the winning presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, had decorated his personal accommodation using public funds - while campaigning on a ticket of economic austerity. The newspaper published expense reports of President Vicente Fox's government for the redecoration of presidential cabins. The reports became a symbol of excess and also suggested wrongdoing. Investigation of the expenses led to evidence of overcharges, purchases for which there were no orders, and names and phone numbers of companies who had made charges that no longer existed. In Mexico, the scandal represented the opposite of the image the Fox administration had been conveying and became known as Toallagate. For her reporting, Hernández won the 2002 Mexican National Journalism Award. Anabel Hernández, investigative journalist and book author who covers the Mexican narcotics trade.Anabel Hernandez spent five years investigating and writing her 2010 book Los Señores del Narco (Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and their Godfathers), which was later translated into English. The book has sold over 100,000 copies but Hernández says its popularity is an indication of the absence of information about the drug trade in Mexico. Journalists have been killed every year since the drug war began. According to Hernandez, the complicity of the government, police, military, and business and finance sectors makes the power of the drug cartels and their business possible. She said that under President Fox, the relationship between the cartels and government changed as Fox sided with the Sinaloa cartel by letting Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán escape prison in 2001. Her book details how the Mexican authorities sided with the competition among the drug cartels. She also writes about the relationship between the Mexican government and United States agents, and the impact it has had on the Mexican Drug War, including the beginning of the methamphetamine trade by the Sinaloa. Hernández has received numerous death threats since writing about the drug cartels and is under protection. She told Narco News Bulletin, "A journalist who has to walk with bodyguards is an embarrassment for any nation. I constantly fear for my health and the health of my family, but the fear only drives me and lets me know that I'm on the right path." She also wrote in a WAN-IFRA publication for World Press Freedom Day in 2012: "Silence is killing men, women and children ... and it is killing journalists. But breaking the silence can also be deadly."

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Twilight On the Line: Underworld & Politics at the U. S. - Mexico Border by Sebastian Rotella. New York. 1997. Norton. 0393041131. 224 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - It would seem the stuff of a fevered thriller if it were not all true: Street gang members from San Diego recruited by a drug cartel are embroiled in the murder of a Roman Catholic cardinal at the Guadalajara airport. Border guards struggle to resist the relentless temptation, despair, and lawlessness at the international line, while Mexican federal police ride shotgun for drug lords in Chevy Suburbans stolen in San Diego. A tunnel is dug under the U.S.-Mexico border to a cannery where cocaine is to be hidden in cans of jalapeño peppers. An alliance of Asian and Mexican racketeers smuggle hundreds of Chinese immigrants. A factory worker assassinates the probable next president of Mexico during a campaign rally, and the bosses of his own party are suspected of being the masterminds. And in a surreal penal village, inmates live with their wives and children, entrepreneurs run businesses, and gangsters live in luxury. This is the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1990s, in the age of NAFTA-a microcosm of porous borders everywhere between the worlds of wealth and poverty, legal and illegal business, power and corruption, democracy and authoritarianism, hope and despair. Sebastian Rotella's masterful portrait of the border is one you will not easily forget.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sebastian Rotella is an American foreign correspondent, investigative journalist, and novelist.

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Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World  by Fanny Burney. London/New York. 1925. Macmillan and Company. Introduction by Austin Dodson and Illustrations by Hugh Thomson. 477 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - ‘What will all this come to? - where will it end? and when and how shall I wake from the vision of such splendid success?' Evelina, the first of Burney's novels, was published anonymously and brought her immediate fame. It tells the story of a young girl, fresh from the provinces, whose initiation into the ways of the world is frequently painful, though it leads to self-discovery, moral growth, and, finally, happiness. Hilarious comedy and moral gravity make the novel a fund of entertainment and wisdom. Out of the graceful shifts from the idyllic to the near-tragic and realistic, Evelina emerges as a fully realized character. And out of its treatment of contrasts - the peace of the countryside and the cultured and social excitement of London and Bristol, the crowd of life-like vulgarians and the elegant gentry - the novel reveals, superbly the life and temper of eighteenth-century England, as seen through the curiosity of its young heroine.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frances Burney (13 June 1752 - 6 January 1840), also known as Fanny Burney and after her marriage as Madame d'Arblay, was an English novelist, diarist and playwright. She was born in Lynn Regis, now King's Lynn, England, on 13 June 1752, to musical historian Dr. Charles Burney (1726–1814) and Esther Sleepe Burney (1725–1762). The third of six children, she was self-educated and began writing what she called her "scribblings" at the age of ten. In 1793, aged 42, she married a French exile, General Alexandre D'Arblay. Their only son, Alexander, was born in 1794. After a lengthy writing career, and travels that took her to France for more than ten years, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840.

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Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play by Carlene Hatcher Polite. New York. 1975. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374265216. 145 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Diane and Leo Dillon.  

DESCRIPTION - This is Carlene Polite's first novel since her internationally acclaimed THE FLAGELLANTS. Set in Paris. it is the story of three Afro-American friends - Sister X Arista Prolo, Willis B. Black (Black Will), and Abyssinia. Sister X is dead and the two survivors remember and recount tales of her life and death, interweaving their own experiences as ‘victims of foul play.' Black Will, a ‘Travelin' Man' - from Detroit, Michigan, to a recent stint in Zambia - has seen the inside of a maximum-security cell in Illinois for armed robbery and narcotics. He is also a romantic - aspiring to the perfect woman and an ideal African community - who hates knowing he could have gotten ‘hung up on Cadillacs.' Abyssinia is a seamstress, a former costume designer for Sister X. She has resisted the temptations of wealthy male caretakers, but despairs of the ‘Dead World' requirement that she suffer in order to survive - that living a luxury. Is everything concrete sold as merchandise? Is everything abstract sold as spectacle? Sister X, an exotic dancer, compromised her dreams for a nightclub pay check until resistance led to a freakish death. In her friends' memory she embodies the struggle between life and the dollar, natural law and dominant ideology. The novel is a deeply felt and brilliantly sardonic view of our contemporary value system, which the author sees as an economic game. It is a unique satire mocking both blacks and whites who perpetrate the game, as well as a highly expressive portrait of Black Will, his two Soul Sisters, and their pure friendship.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CARLENE HATCHER POLITE (August 28, 1932 - December 7, 2009) was born in Detroit, Michigan. She studied dance with Martha Graham in New York and was subsequently invited to join the original Alvin Ailey Company. A member of Actors' Equity, she has had experience as an actress and theater manager. In the sixties, Ms. Polite returned to Michigan, served as assistant to Coleman Young, was elected to the Democratic State Central Committee, and did organizational work for the Detroit Council for Human Rights. From 1964 to 1971 she lived in Paris, where her first novel, THE FLAGELLANTS, was published; American, British, Italian, and Dutch editions followed. She was an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the State University of New York, teaching creative writing and Afro-American literature.

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The Walls of Jericho by Rudolph Fisher. New York. 1928. Knopf. 307 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Lawyer Ralph Merritt buys a house in a white neighborhood bordering Harlem. In their reactions to Merritt and to one another, Fishers' characters--including the prejudiced Miss Cramp who ‘takes on causes the way sticky tape picks up lint, ‘ Merritt's housekeeper Linda, and Shine, his piano mover--provide an invaluable view of the social and philosophical milieu of the times.Thematically, Fisher focuses on the idea of black unity and discovery of the self.

Rudolph Fisher (May 9, 1897 - December 26, 1934) was an African-American writer. His first published work, ‘City of Refuge’, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly Press of February 1925. He went on in 1932 to write The Conjure-Man Dies, the first black detective novel. Fisher was also a physician (with a specialty in radiology), dramatist, musician and orator. Fisher was an active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, primarily as a novelist, but also as a musician. Born in Washington, DC in the late nineteenth century, Fisher grew up in Providence, Rhode Island graduating from Classical High School and attending Brown University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Brown in 1919 and received a Master of Arts a year later. He went on to attend Howard University Medical School and graduated in 1924. Fisher married Jane Ryder in 1925, and they had one son, Hugh, who was born in 1926. Fisher died in 1934 at the age of 37.

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We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. New York. 1993. Penguin Books. 0140185852. Translated from the Russian & With An Introduction by Clarence Brown. 226 pages. paperback. Cover art - 'Painting of Futuristic Buildings aand City' by Anton Brzezinski.  

DESCRIPTION - Before Brave New World... Before 1984...There was... WE In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier -- and whatever alien species are to be found there -- will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason. One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery -- or rediscovery -- of inner space, and that disease the ancients called the soul. A page-turning SF adventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, We is the classic dystopian novel. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (January 20 (Julian) / February 1 (Gregorian), 1884 - March 10, 1937) was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the CPSU following the October Revolution. In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to the West for publication. The subsequent outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to Zamyatin's successful request for exile from his homeland. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents.

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Casualties of Peace by Edna O'Brien. New York. 1966. Simon & Schuster. 175 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Casualties of Peace, published in 1966, is Irish writer Edna O'Brien's fifth novel. Set in London it concerns Willa McCord, an artist in glass (who is starting an affair with Auro, a married Jamaican) and her best friend and housekeeper Patsy (who lives with her violent husband Tom) Patsy decides to leave Tom but her plans are thrown into disarray when she finds she is pregnant.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edna O'Brien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. She is considered the 'doyenne' of Irish literature. Philip Roth considers her 'the most gifted woman now writing in English', while former President of Ireland Mary Robinson regards her as 'one of the great creative writers of her generation.' O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole. Her first novel, The Country Girls, is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II. The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit, and O'Brien left Ireland behind. O'Brien now lives in London. She received the Irish PEN Award in 2001. Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for a short story collection. Faber and Faber published her memoir, Country Girl, in 2012.

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The Boarding-House by William Trevor. New York. 1965. Viking Press. 287 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by James and Ruth McCrea.  

DESCRIPTION - MR. BIRD: who plays God to the tenants, and conveniently dies on the first page. NURSE CLOCK: whose district visitations show a penchant for the elderly and the profane. MR. STUDDY: whose pastime is petty larceny and imaginative blackmail, and whose hatred for Nurse Clock is notorious. ROSE CAVE: a middle-aged love-child, who had a mother and can never forget it. MR. ORD: the lovelorn law student from Nigeria, whose seventeen-year frustration by Annabel Tonks makes him a major instrument of fate. MAJOR EELE: once burned, twice shy; a devotee of strip-tease and the bottle, who is given to chat but is not always accurate. Little MISS CLERRICOTT: office worker and spinster, whose decision to yield to temptation - in Leeds - works out so curiously. VENABLES: the oldest boarder, troubled with an uneasy stomach, whose passion is television commercials. SCRIBBIN: who loves only famous railway trains and the sounds they make - as his gramophone testifies daily. MRS. SLAPE: whose domain is the kitchen, which she rules with jolly vigor. CALLELTY: who rang the bell one day when she was ‘taken short' and stayed to become Mrs. Slape's right hand. This group of assorted oddsters, whimsically selected by Mr. Bird, make up the clientele of the boarding-house. In a final ironic gesture, Mr. Bird wills the house to the two candidates, male and female, most likely to disagree. Whether they will reconcile their feud, or whether one will outwit the other, supplies a problem in which the lives - of all the boarders and staff are intricately involved - and the reader with them. But those who read for story alone will miss the greater part of the fun. With wry compassion, the author presents a portrait gallery of singular personalities - a microcosm, if you will, of our disjointed society. Like THE OLD BOYS, Mr. Trevor's brilliant and highly praised earlier novel, THE BOARDING-HOUSE has an Evelyn Waugh-like mordancy and wit. It will carry forward William Trevor's auspiciously launched career as an inventive new novelist and will delight readers who relish intelligence and maturity in their fiction.

William Trevor (24 May 1928 – 20 November 2016) was an Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language. He won the Whitbread Prize three times and was nominated five times for the Booker Prize, the last for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011. His name was also mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2014, Trevor was bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána. Trevor resided in Devon, South West England, from the 1950s until his death at the age of 88.

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Nobody's Girl by Antonya Nelson. New York. 1998. Scribner. 0684839326. 287 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Raul Colon.

  
DESCRIPTION - It's been 19 months since 30-year-old Birdy Stone came to Pinetop. Birdy spends her days trying to get her students to appreciate the beauty of literature and her nights getting high with Jesus, her gay colleague and confidant. Birdy regards Pinetop as merely an escapade. But the desultory quality of her life is interrupted when a middle-aged widow asks Birdy to edit her rambling memoir. Combining superb storytelling with good humor, Antonya Nelson follows Birdy as she helps Mrs. Anthony reconstruct the history surrounding the bizarre and mysterious deaths of Mrs. Anthony's husband and daughter years earlier. As Birdy is drawn deeper into her subject's story, she begins a passionate love affair with Mrs. Anthony's surviving son - a young man who just happens to be one of Birdy's students.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Antonya Nelson (born January 6, 1961) is an American author and teacher of creative writing who writes primarily short stories. Antonya Nelson was born January 6, 1961 in Wichita, Kansas. She received a BA degree from the University of Kansas in 1983 and an MFA degree from the University of Arizona in 1986.She lives in Telluride, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Houston, Texas. Nelson's short stories have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Quarterly West, Redbook, Ploughshares, Harper's, and other magazines. They have been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories.Several of her books have been New York Times Book Review Notable Books: In the Land of Men (1992), Talking in Bed (1996), Nobody's Girl: A Novel (1998), Living to Tell: A Novel (2000), and Female Trouble (2002). For a 1999 issue on The Future of American Fiction, The New Yorker magazine selected Nelson as one of 'the twenty best young fiction writers in America today'. Nelson teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers,as well as in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program.

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Americana by Don Delillo. Boston. 1971. Houghton Mifflin. 0395120942. 388 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Author's first book. At twenty-eight, David Bell is the American Dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a top television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination. And the the dream - and the dream-making--become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture, to impose a pattern on his own, and America's past, present, and future.

Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American essayist, novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. Initially a well-regarded cult writer, the publication in 1985 of White Noise brought him widespread recognition, and is considered to be his breakthrough work. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist for Mao II and Underworld (1992 and 1998, respectively), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992 (receiving a further PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for The Angel Esmeralda in 2012), and was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010. DeLillo has described his fiction as being influenced by ‘[...] the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times’, and in a 2005 interview declared, ‘Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [...] I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.’

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Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. New York. 1970. Farrar Straus Giroux. 214 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer. Her career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Her political writing often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

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Eccentric Neighborhoods by Rosario Ferre. New York. 1998. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374146381. 340 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by John Martinez. Jacket design by Susan Mitchell. Author photograph by Marion Ettlinger.

DESCRIPTION - In ECCENTRIC NEIGHBORHOODS, National Book Award finalist Rosario Ferre tells the story of two families whose lives, loves, and steamy intrigues coincided with the demise of Puerto Rico's plantation society and the rise of the nouveaux riches. Elvira Vernet comes from a male-dominated family of merchants living in the Puerto Rican town of La Concordia. Her father, Santiago Vernet, and his four sons help transform Puerto Rico from a bucolic island where hunger is a part of the landscape into a bustling industrial society with all of its contradictions and attendant ills. Handsome, eloquent, and enormously successful, he can't help but charm his only daughter. Yet, in understanding her obsession with her father, Elvira must first come to terms with her mother, who died many years before, and whose family, the Rivas de Santillanas, had roots in an old plantation culture that could not survive the era of mechanization. ECCENTRIC NEIGHBORHOODS is an attempt to lay bare the psychological conflicts that determine the relationships between mothers and daughters, and it is also the story of Puerto Rico's transformation, from the beginning of the century, into a spearhead of the Caribbean. Lush, vibrant, and disarmingly funny, Eccentric Neighborhoods confirms Rosario Ferre's reputation as one of the most colorful and captivating novelists in the Latin American tradition. Praise for the novel HOUSE ON THE LAGOON by Rosario Ferre - ‘Colorful characters . . . playful, baroque a family saga in the manner of Gabriel Garcia Márquez.' - SUZANNE RUTA. THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. ‘Epic, inspired, absorbing, humorous, ironic . . . a five-generation chronicle with abundant dirty laundry and assorted skeletons. . Rosario Ferre is one of Latin America's most gifted novelists.' - EDWARD RIVERS, THE WASHINGTON POST ROOK WORLD. ‘Maintaining her balance with all the delicate power of a dancer on point, Rosario Ferre here elegantly manipulates a daunting complex of themes into a narrative that is both coherent and provocative . . . stylish and wise.' - JAMES POLK, CHICAGO TRIBUNE. ROSARIO FERRE is the author of THE YOUNGEST DOLL, SWEET DIAMOND DUST, and THE HOUSE ON THE LAGOON (FSG, 1995), among many other works. She is a frequent lecturer in the United States and lives in Puerto Rico.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dr. Rosario Ferre (born September 28, 1938) is a Puerto Rican writer, poet, and essayist. Her father, Luis A. Ferre, was the third elected Governor of Puerto Rico and the founding father of the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico. When her mother, Lorenza Ramírez de Arellano, died in 1970 during her father's term as Governor, Rosario fulfilled the duties of First Lady until 1972. She was the recipient of the ‘Liberatur Prix' award from the Frankfurt Book Fair for ‘Kristallzucker', the German translation of ‘Maldito Amor'.

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Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell. London. 1982. Heinemann. 0435984004. Caribbean Writers Series. 171 pages. paperback. CWS26. Cover photography by Armet Francis.

DESCRIPTION - Set in Belize, BEKA LAMB is the record of a few months in the life of Beka and her family. The story of Beka's victory over her habit of lying, which she conquers after deceiving her father about a disgrace at school, is told in flashback. Her reminiscences begin when she wins an essay prize at her convent school, and they stand in lieu of a wake for her friend Toycie. The politics of the small colony, the influence of the matriarchal society and the dominating presence of the Catholic Church are woven into the fabric of the story to provide a compelling portrait of ordinary life in Belize.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Zee Edgell grew up in Belize in the early 1950s. Her first job was as a reporter on the Daily Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica. From 1966 - 8 she taught at St Catherine Academy in Belize, during which period she was also editor of a small newspaper in Belize City. After travelling widely - apart from Jamaica, Zee Edgell has lived in Britain, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and the USA - she has returned to Belize to teach at St Catherine Academy. She has recently been appointed Director of the Womens' Bureau in Belize.

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Angel by Merle Collins. Seattle. 1988. Seal Press. 0931188644. 295 pages. paperback. Cover: Barbara Thomas-'A Lover's Tutorial', 1986.

  
DESCRIPTION - This vibrant novel from the Caribbean introduces the passionate voice of Black writer Merle Collins. Set on the island of Grenada, the story centers on several generations of women and traces the struggle of the Grenadian people to achieve political autonomy. Angel, daughter of Doodsie, is a young child when the houses of the white landowners in Grenada are burned to the ground, an event that ushers in thirty years of change on the island. Angel grows up headstrong and rebellious, eventually leaving the community to attend university, where her radical ideas deepen. As political unrest in Grenada mounts, Angel returns home and plunges into activity - work that is cut short by the sudden invasion of U.S. troops. An outstanding fiction debut by a gifted writer, ANGEL is a richly evocative and memorable novel. ‘My joy - a first reaction to Merle Collins' novel, ANGEL - stemmed from the nostalgia created by the use of its language, so familiar to me, so dear - captured in all of the lustiness, its great splashes of humor in my native patois. Then came its telling. She draws a portrait so profound of the former British colonial Caribbean family - forever living on this side of happiness. Ms. Collins has emerged as a major writer and storyteller. Bravo, bravo!' - Rosa Guy. ‘Merle Collins has written a richly textured and moving story of the West Indies that exists behind the tourist hype of happy islands in the sun. In Angel McAllister, whose coming of age parallels recent events in Grenada's history, including the U.S. invasion, Collins has created a truly contemporary West Indian heroine. Her mother, Doodsie, is both a triumph of characterization and a testament to the resiliency and strength of Black women the world over. ANGEL ‘sings' with her vivid and authentic voice.'  - Paule Marshall. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Merle Collins (born 29 September 1950 in Aruba) is a distinguished Grenadian poet and short story writer. Collins' parents are from Grenada, where they returned from Aruba shortly after her birth. Her primary education was in St George's, Grenada. She later studied at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, earning degrees in English and Spanish in 1972. She then taught history and Spanish in Grenada for two years and subsequently in St Lucia. In 1980, she graduated from Georgetown University, Washington, DC, with a master's degree in Latin American Studies. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Ph.D. in Government. Collins was deeply involved in the Grenadian Revolution and served as a government coordinator for research on Latin America and the Caribbean. She left Grenada for England in 1983. From 1984 to 1995, Collins taught at the University of North London. She is currently a Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland. Her critical works include "Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today" in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World (ed. Helen Carr, Pandora Press, 1989), and "To be Free is Very Sweet" in Slavery and Abolition (Vol. 15, issue 3, 1994, pp. 96–103). Her first collection of poetry, Because the Dawn Breaks, was published in 1985, at which time she was a member of African Dawn, a performance group combining poetry, mime, and African music. In England, she began her first novel, Angel. In 1987, she published Angel, which follows the lives of Grenadians as they struggled for independence. Specifically, Angel is about a young woman going through the political turbulence in Grenada. Her collection of short stories, Rain Darling, was produced in 1990, and a second collection of poetry, Rotten Pomerack, in 1992. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995. A review of her 2003 poetry collection, Lady in a Boat, states, "Ranging from poems reveling in the nation language of her island to poems that capture the beauty of its flora, Collins presents her island and people going about the business of living. They attempt to come to terms with the past and construct a future emerging out of the crucible of violence. Lady in a Boat is a poignant retelling of a period in history when, for a brief moment, Caribbean ascendancy seemed possible. Merle Collins shows how the death of this moment continues to haunt the Caribbean imagination." Her most recent collection of stories, The Ladies Are Upstairs, was published in 2011.

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Clairvoyant: The Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce by Alison Leslie Gold. New York. 1992. Hyperion. 1562829866. 159 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by John Stuart. Jacket design by Craig DeCamps.

DESCRIPTION - This beautifully written and bold novel recreates the troubled inner life of James Joyce's mentally ill daughter, Lucia. Falling somewhere between the novels of Celine and Jean Rhys, Clairvoyant combines merriment with misery, the real with the unreal, and plunges the reader into a labyrinth of strange yet exhilarating imagination. Although Lucia was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, James Joyce, unlike his wife, refused to believe his daughter was truly mentally ill. Instead, he thought her to be clairvoyant, equipped with gifts that could be understood by few people. Alison Leslie Gold has recreated the tortured imagined life of this forgotten woman. By turns engrossing and compelling, Clairvoyant not only sheds new light on one of world literature's most towering figures, it also lets us into the mind and heart of a woman whose life has been Overshadowed by that brilliant, but far from perfect, literary artist. Drawn from factual details of the Joyce family and their contemporaries which include Carl Jung and Samuel Beckett and through a mixture of memory, dream, and hallucination, Clairvoyant is a stirring tribute to Lucia's ability to survive in the face of a most mysterious and terrible illness. ‘A vividly written book that plays daringly, in the no-man's-land between biography and fiction. Alison Leslie Gold deserves a wide audience.' - Jay Parini, author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year. ‘This is a fascinating and upsetting book, one that compels the reader to rethink his notions of the relation between insanity and genius.' - MacDonald Harris, author of The Balloonist and Hemingway's Suitcase.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alison Leslie Gold was born and grew up in New York City. Co-author of Anne Frank Remembered with Miep Gies (the woman who actually hid Anne Frank), Ms. Gold has often lived abroad. She presently divides her time between California, British Columbia, and Greece.

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