The Devil's Highway
by Luis Alberto Urrea

Much has been written about the border in general and the deaths of migrants specifically, but Urrea manages to bring the tragic situation to life in a way few others have.

The W Effect: Bush's War on Women
Laura Flanders, ed.

The W Effect is a damning indictment of the Bush Administration's sometimes furtive, usually shameless, and utterly systematic assault on women's human rights.

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim
by Mahmood Mamdani

In this excellent, well-documented book, Mamdani dispels the notion that terrorism is based in culture (rather than politics), and explains 9/11-and the popularity of terrorism as a tactic-as the direct result of the Cold War.

Subversive Southerner:
Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South
by Catherine Fosl

Adding to the tiny historiography of white women who have committed their lives to the struggle for racial justice in the South, Catherine Fosl's biography of Braden gives readers a complete and previously unavailable look into the life of this notorious activist.

Banana Republicans:
How the Right Wing Is Turning America into a One-Party State
by Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber

Want to know how the right took over this country? Banana Republicans gives a great overview. And contrary to what those on the left like to tell themselves, it has nothing to do with having access to cash or being politically homogeneous.

The Children of NAFTA:
Labor Wars on the US/Mexico Border
by David Bacon

The Children of NAFTA, the first book from labor journalist and photographer David Bacon, provides an important corrective to debates on trade policy mired in economic generalizations. Bacon's book is filled with interviews with workers who articulate the human consequences of treaties like NAFTA.

[Review Essay]
The Veil: Resistance or Repression?

Profiles in Injustice
Why Racial Profiling
Cannot Work
University of Toledo College of Law professor David A. Harris explains how racial profiling has played a key role in a war in which human casualties - particularly Americans whose skin tones range from brown to black - are perfectly acceptable.

Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police Edited by Peter B. Kraska Northeastern University Press, 2001 Inside Organized Racism Women in the Hate Movement by Kathleen M. Blee University of California Press, 2002   The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness Edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica and Matt Wray Duke University Press, 2001

The Battle of Seattle
The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization
Few of the

Terrorism and War
Interviews with Radical Historian, Howard Zinn
In this short, often inspiring collection of interviews, the author of A People's History of the United States masterfully articulates the past, present and possible future relationship between militarism and freedom.

Also:
Silencing Political Dissent:
How the USA Patriot Act Undermines
the Constitution
(Open Media Pamphlet Series)

American Justice on Trial
Who Loses in the Case of Military Tribunals
(Open Media Pamphlet Series)

Harmful to Minors
The Perils of Protecting
Children From Sex
In her new book, Judith Levine
argues that sex, in and of itself,
is not harmful to minors.

Take My Land,
Take My Life
The Story of Congress's
Historic Settlement of
Alaska Native Land Claims,
1960-1971

Honky
Though it is billed as a book about race, Honky, a recent memoir by New York social scientist Dalton Conley, is just as much about personal mythology and narrative. Honky is also a vivid and elucidative account of the chains of anecdotes, subjectively remembered and interpreted, that we use to create our own definition of who we are.

The Price of Dissent:
Testimonies to Political Repression in America
An oral history of U.S. activists who have been persecuted by the government, this important work is not simply a record of injustice, but a remarkable documentation of the scores of Americans who have been willing to risk their lives and livelihoods to change society.

Tarnation
Jonathan Caouette's first feature film is a montage of home movies, answering machine tapes and photos, all compiled to tell the story of his relationship with his mentally ill, oft-hospitalized mother, Renee. In Tarnation, the line between reality and fiction is distorted, and the result is more like a personal diary than a documentary.

The Fog of War
Rarely are moviegoers offered an intimate glimpse into the mind of a war criminal. In Errol Morris' latest film, The Fog of War, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera is given a chance to present an account of his own life, his experiences, and his take on the Vietnam War—and presents a more damning picture of himself than he possibly could have intended.

The Future of Food
What happens when an increasingly small number of corporations control an increasingly large percentage of the global food supply? The future of food, argues a new film by Deborah Koons Garcia, will be determined by how quickly these companies can consolidate and patent the seeds and genetic structure of the most important food crops in the world. Welcome to the Gene Revolution.

Peaceable Kingdom
The documentary Peaceable Kingdom sheds some light on the species-ism that undergirds our acceptance of and appetite for the products of factory farming, in particular, and of animal exploitation, in general.

Girl Trouble
Following the lives of three young female offenders over a course of four years, Girl Trouble is less an indictment of the juvenile justice system than an intimate glimpse of four young women as they try to understand their lives. Directors Lexi Leban and Lidia Szajko stand apart from other ethnologists or social welfare advocates in that they are not afraid to let the girls speak for themselves, unaided by music or voiceover commentary. Thus, Girl Trouble is not a typical morality tale, or even one of stock populism.

The End of Suburbia
Call it a paradigm shift, a wave of crystallization or an epiphany, but The End of Suburbia will profoundly influence not just your understanding of a problem, but the whole framework of ideas propping it up. It's impossible to walk away from this film without a clear understanding of the catastrophic perils of our oil and automobile-based existence.

Control Room
Control Room is a brute but convincing indictment of the US media: Director Jehane Noujaim contrasts the bungled reportage of so-called "embedded" American journalists with the more hard-hitting coverage provided by their Arab counterparts.

Primetime War II
As in the first documentary, Primetime War II, presents a unique lens through which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be viewed. Through this particular lens, the conflict is, in essence, shaped by the cameramen who sometimes provoke (accidentally or intentionally) the kinds of sensationalistic events they are expected to cover.

Blue Vinyl
Blue Vinyl, a stunning new documentary film by co-directors and producers, Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold, is a modern day answer to Rachel Carson's groundbreaking 1962 book about DDT, Silent Spring. It's a refreshingly original, candid, and eye-opening film that is as much an illuminating journey into the toxic world of vinyl as it is a humorous romp through the familial and personal dynamics of Helfand and her family.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
"Everyone's looking for answers."
Several times during his cross-Mississippi odyssey, Ulysses Everett McGill offers this sage observation—and it's a line to take note of in a film whose title asks a question.

The question is first posed (as we've all now been re-minded) in Preston Sturges's 1941 Sullivan's Travels. As that film begins, rich white-boy director John L. Sullivan is convinced that his screwball comedies are wasting both his own gifts and his audience's time. The project he really wants to undertake is 0 Brother, Where Art Thou?, based on a grim-looking novel written by one "Sinclair Beckstein"—a garbling of the names of the two best-known social-realists of the 1930s. But by the end of his tribulations, Sullivan has abandoned his "serious" pretensions, having realized that escapist comedies bring joy and relief to the lives of the suffering masses. To his credit, he's also learned how little his didactic, eggheaded socialist vision—allegorical figures of Labor and Capital wrestling atop a moving train—has to say about the realities of American poverty, prison, oppression, and despair.

Magnolia
The main title sequence begins with a time-lapse bud bursting into bloom, superimposed over a vibrant infrared street map of the San Fernando Valley. This explosion of imagery announces the technique (and the theme) of superimposition that writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson will use a hundred times over in the three hours of the film: superimposing tragedy on comedy, the moral over the commercial, and the marvelous upon the mundane.

Memento
This film exposes the defining pathology of contemporary American elite culture. It's also a carefully elaborated metaphor for the criminal exercise of American global power—a perverse and ultimately absurdist mission of retaliation deliberately masked as a pursuit of justice."

Life & Debt
This new documentary film about Jamaica is the most provocative and personal look at the impact of globalization and free trade economics ever brought to a movie screen.

Lumumba
Raoul Peck's Lumumba explores neocolonialism in the depth it deserves, dealing with real people and real events—in this case, the conspiracy of US intelligence, the Belgian government and local traitors to keep an African people in chains despite the formal independence won in 1960.

This Bike is a Pipe Bomb
Three Way Tie for a Fifth

With their third full-length album, Three Way Tie for a Fifth serves up more of the same lo-fi, catchy, socially-conscious folk punk that has defined This Bike is a Pipe Bomb as a band since 1997. Fusing country music and folk ballads with straightforward three-chord punk rock, TBIAPB has created a style that is truly unique.

From Monument to Masses
The Impossible Leap in One Hundred Simple Steps

The Impossible Leap in One Hundred Simple Steps, the sophomore effort by the San Francisco based trio From Monument to Masses, is forty seven and a half minutes of tricky changes and unorthodox time signatures combined with samples from Arundhati Roy, Noam Chompsky, and other intellectuals in the vanguard of leftist discourse.

Antibalas
Who is this America?

What do you get when you cross the lyricism of Marvin Gaye and the percussion of Brazil's Oludum? You get polyrhythmic poetry from West Africa by way of the Brooklyn Bridge, invoking the spirit that rocked the barrios of Lagos, Nigeria in the 60s and 70s, and steadfastly continues the legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and his interpreters.

Devendra Banhart
Nino Rojo

Devendra Banhart's folk music invokes the magical and the mystical, which has generally been the sole property of the bearded and the cloaked. But Banhart is able to give this sound an energy and a voice that's much more accessible to those who have grown up not knowing about strange folk music. Nino Rojo shows how consistently captivating Banhart's songs are, and how lucky we are that someone is able to make the connection between the bizarre and the beautiful so clearly.

The Roots of Orchis
crooked ceilings

The Roots of Orchis have been around for several years now, and they continue to expand their smart electronic "post-rawk" forays beyond the bounds of "genre-tongue" with their latest release, crooked ceilings.

Eskapo
Eskapo=Kalayaan

Often described as a proper analogue for the east coast straight-edge band, Minor Threat, Eskapo sounds like one long primal, sandpapery growl set to a driving rock beat. Not surprisingly, the band's live show is a thousand times more exciting than its recorded sound, mostly because it's impossible to package the schizoid energy and infectious personality of frontman Rupert Estanislao. Performing live, Rupert bounces off the stage like a five-foot cherub on some kind of crack-related drug, as Loi Fajardo's guitar grinds jagged, feedback-addled riffs over Max Fajardo's machine gun drumming.

Cosmosamatics
Three

In the interest of full disclosure, I should come right out and say that jazz ensembles with no bass player make me nervous. After turning in two great albums with a complete rhythm section (William Parker played bass on the first, Curtis Lundy on the second), the Cosmosamatics' third release, Three, makes good on the promise of its title with a trio of drummer Jay Rosen and multi-reedists Sonny Simmons and Michael Marcus. While I'm not quite sure why they did it, truth is that they do it pretty well.

Various Artists
Kitestringing: The Prison Literature Project Benefit

The Bay Area-based Prison Literature Project sends over 2000 books a month to prisoners all over the country; except for Tribe 8's "Prison Blues" or Sander Hicks' "White Collar Crime," most tracks on this benefit CD are thematically unrelated.

Amps For Christ
The People at Large

Southern California-based luthier Henry Barnes has been performing as Amps for Christ since leaving Man Is the Bastard in 1996. Keeping elements of MITB's apocalyptic imagery, AFC has been an ongoing experiment in acoustic instrumentation and homemade electronics in the spirit of Barnes' vision of "nonjudgmental" Christianity.

Quetzal
Sing the Real

Los Angeles nine-piece combo Quetzal are as motivated by 1990s atrocity (Rodney King riots, Proposition 187, and Zapatista reprisals) as they are inspired and edified by Chicano cultural flowering of the ’60s and ’70s that helped enfranchise subsequent generations. Reaching beyond Chicano-centric folk sources and the limited sloganeering of guerrilla performance, Quetzal instead sound like a generation bred on hip-hop lyricism, pop-soul orchestrations, and a more global sense of connection to musical roots.

Various Artists
Y Tu Mamá Tambien
Notably, the main coup of the new soundtrack is its deft mix of collaborators and track lineup that put Latino favorites on the same stage as such U.S. pop/rock stars as Natalie Imbruglia and Eagle Eye Cherry. This mix ­ culled by Santa Monica College radio (KCRW) jock Liza Richardson ­ is primarily determined by concordance between artists and the movie, helping to take apart the categorization and labeling of Latin rock with integration across cultural contexts that boils down to one thing: good music.

Blackalicious
Blazing Arrow

It's mind-bending how an album like Blackalicious' accomplished 2000 debut Nia could have been so incredibly overlooked while bozos like Jay-Z and Eminem get all the attention. After more than ten years in the underground scene, the duo of Chief Xcel and The Gift of Gab have finally signed to a major label. To the dullards who whine about them selling out, I say, where the hell were you when Nia should have made them as big as De La Soul?

Joe Higgs
Life of Contradiction
This album simply can't be beat for its seamless combination of bittersweet romantic compositions, ghetto-poor survival songs, and profoundly uplifting Jamaican spirituals that are as powerful today as when they were recorded.

The Velvet Underground
Live With Lou Reed in 1969

Modern music begins with the Velvets, Rock critic Lester Bangs wrote, and the implications and influence of what they did seem to go on forever.