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 What is it like to do the back-breaking work of immigrants? To find out, Gabriel Thompson spent a year working alongside Latino immigrants who initially thought he was either crazy or an undercover immigration agent. Combining personal narrative with investigative reporting, Thompson shines a bright light on the underside of the American economy, exposing harsh working conditions, union busting and lax government enforcement—while telling the stories of workers, undocumented immigrants and desperate U.S. citizens alike, forced to live with chronic back pain in the pursuit of $8 an hour.
Read More: See Gabriel Thompson on MSNBC's Morning Joe. Read more about Working in the Shadows. |
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Dread and Redemption in Mexico City
By John Ross
John Ross is currently on a nationwide book tour. Please click here for more information.
John Ross—poet, journalist, and globetrotting troublemaker—has lived in what the Aztec-Mexicas described as "the umbilicus of the universe" since the great Mexico City earthquake of 1985 crushed out as many as 30,000 lives. Over the years, he has watched the city—the Monstruo—pick itself up, bury its dead, and come battling back. But he is filled with unease that the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the Western world, the monster he has grown to know and love, is doomed to be globalized into one more McCity.
"Monstrously entertaining and tenderhearted."
"...a brave, stirring love letter, cautionary tale and travelogue."
—Kirkus Reviews (STARRED REVIEW)
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The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again
By Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols
Journalism, the counterbalance to corporate and political power, the lifeblood of American democracy, is in meltdown. In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney, an academic, and John Nichols, a journalist, who together founded the nation's leading media reform network, Free Press, investigate the crisis. They propose a bold strategy for saving journalism that looks back to how the Founding Fathers ensured free press protection with the First Amendment and provided subsidies to the burgeoning print press of the young nation.
"John Nichols and Bob McChesney are the Thomas Paine and Paul Revere of our time. We ignore them at democracy's peril." —Bill Moyers
Watch McChesney and Nichols on C-SPAN's Book TV on March 14-15. |

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The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland
By Jeff Biggers
For more information on the book tour, please click here.
Set in the ruins of his family's strip-mined homestead in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, award-winning journalist and cultural historian Jeff Biggers delivers a deeply personal portrait of the largely overlooked human and environmental costs of our nation's dirty energy policy, uncovering a century of regulatory negligence and vividly describing the epic mining wars for union recognition and workplace safety and the devastating consequences of industrial strip-mining. Along the way, Biggers exposes the fallacy that lies at the heart of the Obama administration's controversial pursuit of "clean coal." |

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The Birth of a Multipolar World
By Dilip Hiro
After Empire sketches the contours of a complex world system emerging during the late imperial phase of U.S. history and examines the events that prepared the ground for the world to move from the tutelage of the sole superpower, America, to a multipolar, post-imperial global order. Realistic and nuanced in its assessment of global politics, shorn of an ideological bias or soft corner for the United States, After Empire abounds in unsettling and stimulating insights on politics, history, hard and soft power, political economy and democracy. |

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Why England Loses, Why Germany And Brazil Win, And Why The U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey—And Even Iraq—Are Destined To Become The Kings Of The World's Most Popular Sport
By Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski
Why doesn't the United States dominate soccer internationally...and how can it? Which is the best soccer nation on Earth? Why are the people who run soccer clubs so dumb?
These are some of the questions that every soccer fanatic has asked. Soccernomics answers them. Written with an economist's brain and a sports writer's skill, it applies high-powered analytical tools to everyday soccer topics, looking at data in new ways, revealing counterintuitive truths about the world's most loved game.
"If you’re a football fan, I'll save you some time: read this book...compulsive reading...thoroughly convincing."―Daily Telegraph (UK) |

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Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears
By Antonino D'Ambrosio
A Heartbeat and a Guitar tells of the collaboration of two distinct yet connected musicians–iconoclast Johnny Cash and little known folk artist Peter LaFarge–and the album they created, Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. It also tells of the unique personal, political and cultural struggles that informed this album–especially the fight for Native people's rights–one that has influenced scores of musicians and activists. In this inimitable account, A Heartbeat and a Guitar strays out of the recording studio and into the presidential campaigns, government halls, Indian reservations, picket lines, bohemian cafes, university campuses, factory lines, civil rights marches, fish-ins and anti-war protests. |

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Politics Violence War
By Mark Danner
Click here to see Danner's Op-Ed in The New York Times on Haiti.
Stripping Bare the Body is a book of stories telling how politics–and its handmaidens: violence and war–is practiced in the brutal worlds of Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, the "black sites" and Washington, D.C. It shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels. As a newly installed Haitian president told Mark Danner, then on assignment for The New Yorker in riot-torn Port-au-Prince, "Violence strips bare a society's body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin."
"With this vivid and deeply disturbing book, Mark Danner affirms his standing as our preeminent guide to the world's broken places, littered with the detritus of American carelessness and delusions."
–Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
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The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
By Chris Hedges
In Empire of Illusion, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author writes about professional wrestling, the pornographic film industry and America’s rampant militarism and moral decay. He exposes the mechanisms that divert us from confronting the economic and political collapse around us. The worse reality becomes, the more a beleaguered population distracts itself with pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying culture.
Listen to the podcast of Hedges' October 7 talk here. |

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Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party
By Max Blumenthal
Republican Gomorrah is award-winning journalist Max Blumenthal's remarkable, muckraking debut. An "irresistible combination of anthropology and psychopathology," it is at once shocking, edifying and hilarious. Blumenthal describes the people and the beliefs that establishment Republicans—like John McCain and Sarah Palin—have to kowtow to if they have any hope of running for president, and how moderates have been systematically purged from party ranks.
Click here to see details of his book tour. Blumenthal's book is #15 on the New York Times bestseller list. |

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The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
By Jeremy Scahill
On September 16, 2007, Blackwater Worldwide mercenaries opened fire in Baghdad's Nisour Square, killing 17 Iraqi civilians, among them women and children. In this fully revised and updated paperback, award-winning investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill reveals the explosive story of the company that has become the new face of the U.S. war machine.
Jeremy Scahill recently won the prestigious 2007 George Polk Book Award. |
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February 11 - April 13 | Across the United States
Get your copy of El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City signed by Nation Books author John Ross, who is traveling across the United States on a mammoth book tour spanning three months and 20 cities. Click here to see if he's coming to a city near you.
February 11 - May 14
Photo Exhibit by Eugene Richards
(Gage Gallery, Roosevelt University, 18 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL)
Institute Fellow and award-winning photographer Eugene Richards is showing his work, A Procession of Them, at Roosevelt University's Gage Gallery from February 11 through May 14. The exhibit features troubling black-and-white images of mentally ill and mentally disabled patients who are warehoused in deplorable conditions in psychiatric institutions around the world.
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March 14 - 15
Nichols and McChesney on C-SPAN's Book TV
(C-SPAN)
Watch Nation Books authors John Nichols and Robert McChesney as they discuss their latest book, The Death and Life of American Journalism on C-SPAN's Book TV on Saturday, March 14 at 8 a.m. and on Sunday, March 15 at 1 a.m. For more information, please click here.
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March 20 - 21
Gabriel Thompson on C-SPAN's Book TV
(C-SPAN)
Watch Gabriel Thompson, Nation Books author of Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs Most Americans Won't Do on C-SPAN's Book TV on March 20-21.
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