In in interview with Aaron Lake Smith for The Rumpus, Luc Sante calls The Invention of Paris "really fantastic" and characterizes Eric Hazan, the author, as a "kindred spirit." Sante's recent review of The Invention of Paris for the New York Review of Books praised Hazan's book as "one of the greatest books about the city anyone has written in decades." Demand for The Invention of Paris has been so great that Verso has sold through its hardcover printing in less than a year. A lovely paperback edition, with new full-color maps and illustrations, will be available in April 2011.
Visit The Rumpus to read the interview in full.
In a world of statistics and precision, in which "accountability" is now a Washington buzzword, there's one number no American—not even the president or the Pentagon—knows: the number of U.S. military bases currently dotting the globe. In a new piece for Tomdispatch.com, Nick Turse, author of The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, weighs in:
Last January, Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told me that there were nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. He expected that number to increase by 12 or more, he added, over the course of 2010.
In September, I contacted ISAF's Joint Command Public Affairs Office to follow up. To my surprise, I was told that "there are approximately 350 forward operating bases with two major military installations, Bagram and Kandahar airfields." Perplexed by the loss of 50 bases instead of a gain of 12, I contacted Gary Younger, a Public Affairs Officer with the International Security Assistance Force. "There are less than 10 NATO bases in Afghanistan," he wrote in an October 2010 email. "There are over 250 U.S. bases in Afghanistan."
On the first anniversary of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, Verso is publishing a new and updated edition of Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment.
On publication, Damming the Flood was called the "first accurate analysis of recent Haitian history" by Paul Farmer, who has since been appointed by Bill Clinton as the Deputy UN Special Envoy to Haiti. This new edition contains a substantive new afterword covering the international response to the earthquake and the run up to the elections.
Published as a new and updated edition to mark one year since the earthquake that devastated Haiti, Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment should be considered the book on the region. To reiterate why, here is an exclusive excerpt from the book's new Afterword, entitled "From Flood to Earthquake," in which Hallward states,
In these intolerable circumstances, nothing short of popular remobilization on a massive scale, more powerful, more disciplined, more united and more resolute than before—nothing, in other words, short of the renewal of genuinely revolutionary pressure—holds out any real prospect of significant change for the majority of Haiti's people.