Control

Capturing the wear and tear of an idealism thwarted by decades of diplomatic compromise. Image: © Adam Bartos

International Territory: Official Utopia and the United Nations, 1945-1995

Christopher Hitchens and Adam Bartos

“Bartos’ remarkable photographs of the U.N. Building in New York look cold and formal. But only at first. Actually they are full of feeling. This is the haunted house of idealist bureaucracy, filled with the ghosts of promises and suffused with nostalgia for the utopian rigor of high modernism. Nobody has ever put that in a photo before, and Hitchens’ essay expertly peoples the empty spaces of Bartos’ work.”— Robert Hughes

Publisher: Verso
Hardback: 168 pages
Illustrated

Reviews

The Media Monopoly

Ben H. Bagdikian

“This new edition documents the continuing decline in the number of firms dominating production of newspapers, magazines, books, television and movies in the United States… discusses the emerging corporate control of alternative media outlets such as cable television, syndicated programming and videocassettes… shows how the recession, corporate takeovers, and lax antitrust policies affected the news reporting in the 1980s, and describes the promise and perils of new media technologies. A classic critique of corporate media control.”

Publisher: Beacon
Paperback: 336 pages

Merchants of Misery: How Corporate America Profits From Poverty

Edited by Michael Hudson

Essential investigative journalism of the mechanics of poverty—shows how predatory companies keep people poor by offering them Faustian bargains in desperate situations: auto loans, rent-to-own scams, slumlordism, and “fringe banks” quietly owned by the biggest Wall Street companies. AK

Publisher: Common Courage
Paperback: 225 pages

Mind Control in a Free Society: It’s a Bad Match

Edited by Elizabeth Russell-Manning

The redoubtable Russell-Manning gets out her scissors and hits the copy machine once again in order to produce yet another classic work in the great tradition of her earlier, and equally worthwhile, Mass Mind Control of the American People. A fascinating accumulation of material, at first glance seemingly unrelated, continues to retain its deepest secrets (Who pays the Xerox bills?) after a second, or even a third, reading, but the all-encompassing range of her interests is clear. Considerable effort has been channeled by the author into gathering together articles, interviews, clippings and the like pertaining to chemical, electronic, psychotronic and psychological warfare; ELF and VLF beams; Soviet microwaves; “homeosexuality,” mercury-laden dental fillings, potentially fatal carpeting and sewage-eating clams. Russell-Manning slights the reader on occasion—a chapter called “Interview With Lt. ‘Bo’ Gritz” consists of a badly reproduced photo and an address from which a copy of the interview can be ordered, for example. But plainly, a lot of things worry Russell-Manning and she wants her readers to be worried too. She succeeds; after reading this, one can’t help but be concerned. JW

Publisher: Greensward
Paperback: 145 pages
Illustrated

Mind Control in the U. S. Prison System

Edited by Elizabeth Russell-Manning

“The Secret, Illegal and Unconstitutional Torture and Abuse of Prisoners (Through Non-Lethal Weaponry) by U.S. Department of Corrections, in Cooperation With NIJ, Senate and Congress.” A bound and xeroxed compilation of documents, complaints, press releases and articles. FLA

Publisher: Flatland
Paperback: 265 pages

The Minimal Self

Christopher Lasch

“In a time of troubles, everyday life becomes an exercise in survival. People take one day at a time. They seldom look back, lest they succumb to a debilitating ‘nostalgia’; and if they look ahead, it is to see how they can insure themselves against the disasters almost everybody now expects. Under these conditions, selfhood becomes a kind of luxury, out of place in an age of impending austerity. Self-hood implies a personal history, friends, family, a sense of place. Under siege, the self contracts to a defensive core, armed against adversity. Emotional equilibrium demands a minimal self, not the imperial self of yesteryear. Such is the thesis, in its simplest form, advanced in these pages.”

Publisher: Norton
Paperback: 317 pages

The Monkey Wars

Deborah Blum

“A gritty, in-the-trenches report on the battle over primate use in medical research looking at the experiments that the chimps and monkeys endure.”

Publisher: Oxford University
Hardback: 306 pages

Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development

Bruce Rich

“This badly needed analysis exposes the destructive alliance between the bank and national governments that, in the name of progress, has plundered natural resources and impoverished millions.”

Publisher: Beacon
Paperback: 384 pages

Murder by Injection: The Story of the Medical Conspiracy Against America

Eustace Mullins

“Reveals how Mad Scientists control the Medical Schools and funnel billions of tax dollars into their unproductive Research Programs. How the Rockefeller Syndicate perverted American medicine from natural homeopathic cures to drugs and Frankenstein surgical techniques. Why Government agencies are lying to you about AIDS. And much, much more!”

Publisher: National Council for Medical Research
Hardback: 361 pages

My Struggle: The Explosive Views of Russia’s Most Controversial Political Figure

Vladimir Zhirinovsky

For a man who spits and throws rocks at Jewish protesters and threatens to kill his enemies with an “atomic pistol,” it is not surprising, still yet very unoriginal, that he should name his book Mein Kampf, er, My Struggle. The curiosity behind all of Zhirinovsky’s blustering and mad-sounding tirades is that he is half-Jewish—the “bad” half, according to him. This reviewer was unimpressed with his slim autobiography,; it seemed to be “much ado about nothing.” Perhaps I missed something? Like, actions speak louder than words? JB

Publisher: Barricade
Hardback: 144 pages

The New World Order

A. Ralph Epperson

The phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum is found on the bottom of the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States, and is Latin for “The New World Order,” and that’s what we learn on just the first page of this captivating book. Here is a scenario similar to Brave New World: There is one government, one source for food and water, and a new religion. In the NWO, there will be no private property, no inheritance, no starvation or homelessness. Shelters for all, jobs for everyone. One small problem: Don’t fit the mold? Handicapped? You’ll be eliminated. “Thou shalt not kill” a problem? The new religion says killing’s okay, if it fits the NWO. Who’d go along with this program? Who thought up this insanity? The book reveals that plans for the NWO have been set in motion since a secret society, the Thules, reorganized the then-disorganized Masons. The Thules are termed the secret prime movers of Nazism, and are a fragment of a much more important secret society known as the Germanic Order, founded in 1912. Thought-provoking, well-written and disturbing. CF

Publisher: Publius
Paperback: 357 pages