The Great Satan | Fourth of July Reading List

Book strip #1

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  The Spoils of War

  by Andrew Cockburn

  Fully updated from the original edition. As the retreat from Kabul shows, America goes to war not to bring democracy, or glory, but in the pursuit of profit. In The Spoils of War, leading Washingto...
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  Empire of Capital

  by Ellen Meiksins Wood

  Capitalism makes possible a new form of domination by purely economic means, argues Ellen Meiksins Wood. So, surely, even the most seasoned White House hawk would prefer to exercise global hegemony...
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  Incoherent Empire

  by Michael Mann

  In this book, noted sociologist Michael Mann argues that the “new American imperialism” is actually a new militarism. Dissecting the economic, political, military and ideological resources availabl...
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  American Imperatives

  by Anders Stephanson

  What was the cold war? Conventional wisdom makes it coextensive with an epoch stretching from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a geopolitical period dominated by...
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  American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

  by Perry Anderson

  Since the birth of the nation, impulses of empire have been close to the heart of the United States. How these urges interact with the way the country understands itself, and the nature of the dive...
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  America's Fatal Leap

  by Paul W. Schroeder

  Introduction by Perry Anderson

  America's Fatal Leap deconstructs US geopolitics after the end of the Cold War, informed by its author's unsurpassed command of modern history. Paul W. Schroeder, an acclaimed historian of internat...
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  Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire

  by Deepa Kumar

  In this incisive account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the “War on Terror.” Importantly, Kumar contends that Isl...
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  The Muslims Are Coming!

  by Arun Kundnani

  The new front in the War on Terror is the “homegrown enemy,” domestic terrorists who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United Stat...
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  Homeland

  by Richard Beck

  For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas, Americans found themselves living in two worl...
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  Combat Trauma

  by Nadia Abu El Haj

  Americans have long been asked to support the troops and care for veterans' psychological wounds. Who, though, does this injunction serve?As acclaimed scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj argues here, in the A...
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  The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

  by Tariq Ali

  The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient.Rarely has there been s...
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  None of Us Were Like This Before

  by Joshua E. S. Phillips

  None of Us Were Like This Before recounts the dark journey of a tank battalion as its focus switched from conventional military duties to guerilla warfare and prisoner detention. Author Joshua E. S...
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  The Rise of Islamic State

  by Patrick Cockburn

  Born of the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, the Islamic State astonished the world in 2014 by creating a powerful new force in the Middle East. By combining religious fanaticism and military prowess...
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  The Apocalypse and the End of History

  by Suzanne Schneider

  In this authoritative, accessible study, historian Suzanne Schneider examines the politics and ideology of the Islamic State (better known as ISIS). Schneider argues that today’s jihad is not the r...
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  The Invention of Terrorism in Europe, Russia, and the United States

  by Carola Dietze

  This book examines key cases of terrorist violence to show that the invention of terrorism was linked to the birth of modernity in Europe, Russia and the United States, rather than to Tsarist despo...
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  Whiteout

  by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

  On March 16, 1998, the CIA’s Inspector General, Fred Hitz, finally let the cat out of the bag in an aside at a Congressional Hearing. Hitz told the US Reps that the CIA had maintained relationships...
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  Quick Fixes

  by Benjamin Yen-Yi Fong

  This is your nation's history on drugsAmericans are stumbling through a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the boar...
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  Agency of Fear

  by Edward Jay Epstein

  President Bush has made the war against drugs the number one issue on the contemporary American political agenda. In this revised edition of his classic book, available for the first time in paperb...
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  The Management of Savagery

  by Max Blumenthal

  Since the 1970s, Washington has been secretly funding some of the worst terrorists in the Middle East. America has supported extremists with money and hardware, including enemies such as Bin Laden...
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  Afflicted Powers

  by Iain A. Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts

  Afflicted Powers is an account of world politics since September 11, 2001. It aims to confront the perplexing doubleness of the presentits lethal mixture of atavism and new-fangledness. The world c...
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  Deport, Deprive, Extradite

  by Nisha Kapoor

  When Minh Pham was extradited from Britain to the US to face terrorism related charges, his appeal against the deprivation of his British citizenship was still pending. Soon after he arrived his ap...
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  Underground America

  by Voice of Witness

  Foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea

  Edited by Peter Orner

  They arrive from around the world for countless reasons. Many come simply to make a living. Others are fleeing persecution in their native countries. Millions of immigrants risk deportation and imp...
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  Empire of Borders

  by Todd Miller

  The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and...
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  All-American Nativism

  by Daniel Denvir

  It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xen...
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  The US Antifascism Reader

  Edited by Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials

  Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of “white nationalism,” the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively i...
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  First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship

  by Richard Lachmann

  The extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the U...
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  Alt-America

  by David Neiwert

  Just as Donald Trump’s victorious campaign for the US presidency shocked liberal Americans, the seemingly sudden national prominence of white supremacists, xenophobes, militia leaders, and mysterio...
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  Behind Enemy Lies

  by Patrick Cockburn

  In this urgent and timely book, Patrick Cockburn writes the first draft of the history of the current crisis in the Middle East.Here he charts the period from the recapture of Mosul in 2017 to Tur...
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  Corruptions of Empire

  by Alexander Cockburn

  “The implied narrative of this collection is the journalist’s background, the imperial myths that helped to shape him, the impulse to exile and his encounter with the Reagan era. The background, th...
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  An Act of State

  by William F. Pepper

  On April 4 1968, Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting a workers' strike. By nightfall, army snipers were in position, military officers were on a nearby roof with cameras, and Lloyd Jowers ...
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  War and Money

  by Maurizio Lazzarato

  Translated by Jason Francis McGimsey

  Maurizio Lazzarato’s War and Money explores the connections between capitalist expansion, international economic conflict, and war, via an analysis of the imperialism of the American dollar. He exa...
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  How to Blow Up a Pipeline

  by Andreas Malm

  The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a...
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  Prisoners of the American Dream

  by Mike Davis

  Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industriall...
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  The Good Die Young

  Introduction by Greg Grandin

  Edited by Rene Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara and Jonah Walters

  If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, Henry Kissinger is the specter haunting its dusty hallways. For half a century, he was an omnipresent figure in war rooms and at pre...
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  The Secret World of Oil

  by Ken Silverstein

  Oil is the lifeblood of modern civilization, and the industry that supplies it has been the subject of intense interest and scrutiny, as well as countless books. And yet, almost no attention has be...
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  American Breakdown

  by David Bromwich

  American Breakdown is the brilliant political diary of one of America’s leading essayists, David Bromwich, whose work has drawn wide appreciation for its incisive portraits and accurate prognosis. ...
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  The Contours of American History

  by William Appleman Williams

  Introduction by Greg Grandin

  William Appleman Williams was one of America’s greatest critics of US imperialism. The Contours of American History, first published in 1961, reached back to seventeenth-century British history to ...
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  No God But Gain

  by Stephen Chambers

  From 1501 to 1867 more than 12.5 million Africans were brought to the Americas in chains, and as many as 100 million Africans died as a result of the slave trade. The U.S. constitution set a 20-yea...
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  The Romance of American Communism

  by Vivian Gornick

  “Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in t...
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  Captives

  by Jarrod Shanahan

  Captives combines a thrilling narrative account of Rikers Island’s descent into infamy with a dramatic retelling of the last seventy years of New York and American politics from the vantage point o...
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  Police

  by David Correia and Tyler Wall

  This book armed activists on the streets—as well as the many who have become concerned about police abuse—with a critical analysis and ultimately a redefinition of the very idea of policing. The b...
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  How Race Survived US History

  by David R. Roediger

  In this absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, David R. Roediger explores how the idea of race was created and recreated from the 1600s to the present day. From the late seventeenth...