Bøger udgivet af COUNTERPUNCH

Stark is an endangered species. He's the last Jewish private detective in the south Bronx and his days may be numbered. It's the summer of 1965: the Yankees are making another pennant run, the war in Vietnam is heating up, hemlines are rising and the old neighborhood is changing. These days it's easier to stumble on a mugging than to find a good bagel. Stark is not a tough guy. In the trade, he's what's known as a peeper. His business is adultery and his weapon is a camera with a long lens not a snub-nose revolver. But Stark's life is beginning to unravel. His wife left him, his secretary hates him, his mother wants to mother him, he can't shake his shrink's voice from his head and he's got a strange pain in his chest. Then things go from bad to worse. He witnesses a shocking murder and suddenly Stark goes from being the hunter to the hunted, as he races through a decaying world of bookies, transvestites, loan sharks, slum lords and thugs for hire. "Stark in the Bronx" is the dazzling first novel by acclaimed historian Saul Landau. A kind of comic noir, Landau's atmospheric novel is both thrilling and hilarious: imagine the "Maltese Falcon" narrated by Woody Allen.Praise for Saul Landau and Stark: "Saul Landau, like the narrator of 'The Great Gatsby, marvels at how the rich so joyously make messes secure in the knowledge that others will clean up. But what if, one day, they don't?" -- Gore Vidal"You'll believe him, laugh with him, weep and get off your ass." -- John Berger, author "Ways of Seeing"

The 1960s are remembered for radical politics, explorations of sexuality, drug experimentation and rock and roll. All of these elements composed the 60s counterculture. Then things changed. Richard Nixon got elected president, and together with Congress, made the war on drugs a cultural and political crusade replete with lots of cops, guns and constituional violations. Youthful protesters were murdered by authorities in Berkeley, Kent State and Jackson State. Divisions over tactics and politics combined with police repression to splinter and dissipate the left political movement. The Vietnam war finally ended and Abbie Hoffman went underground after a cocaine bust. Meanwhile, in one of its most manipulative moments, corporate America was quickly figuring out how to put sex, drugs and rock and roll up for sale. Hippies became freaks; Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Pigpen died untimely deaths, but the rock show went on. The 1970s were the decade the Sixties spirit struggled to survive while becoming a shadow of its dreams. Daydream Sunset is the story Ron Jacobs tells in his colorful history of the 1970s. From the Fillmore East to Oakland Coliseum; from Berkeley's Telegraph Ave to the streets of Europe, this alternative history of this fraught time will make you feel like dancing in your seats and wondering what might have been. One part reminiscence and several parts cultural history, Jacobs has crafted a thrilling and intimate narrative that takes the reader on a trip through a crazy history some people don't remember and others want us to forget.

Barack Obama wasn't the only beneficiary of the calamitous Bush years. Something of an industry punchline since its formation in 1996, MSNBC suddenly gained a comprehensible voice during the era, while pinning its hopes upon the inspiring senator from Illinois. Obama's victory spelled success for the network, which saw a sizable ratings increase and began positioning itself as a viable alternative to the right-wing propaganda of Fox News. However, a close inspection of the station's programming and an analysis of their celebrity hosts generate troubling questions about the state of the American media. MSNBC has shilled for Obama's wars, defended the administration's illegal spying programs and failed to hold our broken political system accountable. Medium Blue serves as a primer to help navigate the ultimate futility of our distinguished liberal media.

Zen Economics addresses the background philosophical issues around economics, science and technology to place them in context and then applies the results to work and labor, income and wealth distribution, environmental crisis and animal rights. Zen enters as absence, as radical humility toward what is knowable and what is known. This view derives from years spent with the base texts of existential philosophy, from correspondence between Martin Heidegger and D.T. Suzuki around the relationship between Heidegger's ontology and Zen and from Buddhism as a practical, non-deistic, philosophy of life. The book ends with a political program that emerges from four decades of political activism.