Top 10 Books Read in 2005

These are not books that came out in 2005, just books I read in the ’05. (Thanks to Poppy for inspiration.) And yes there are 20, but I like top 10s. Bite me. You can find them on Amazon.

Some of the relevant indices in my rankings include, information contained, insight, style, and relevance to issues beyond the topics discussed.

20. Peter Phillips - Project Censored 2006
Every year Project Censored provides a tour de force of what a functioning media would look like in a democratic society.

19. Matt Taibi – Spanking the Donkey
When Bush won the election last year, I was dismayed but not particularly surprised. Taibi tells the story about the election from the campaign trail, and he reveals a lot of what ails our electoral process. Horse race coverage, pack journalism, the inability to formulate the right questions, image over substance, etc. It is valuable because it goes beyond a specific election, these same issues will continue to pop up every election.

18. Scott Ritter – Iraq Confidential
Ritter was an inspector in UNSCOM during the inspection years. Well, not just an inspector: he was the chief inspector for a number of years. This is his personal account of the story and he reaches a stunning conclusion: for all the criticism of Saddam Hussein and his noncompliance with the inspections, the U.S. never wanted them to end and actively worked to make sure they didn’t.

17. Geoffrey Stone - Perilous Times
This is a good companion to Harry Kalven’s A Worthy Tradition. It is a history of the freedom of speech, and how it has come to be what it is. Like any right, it has been fought over and maintained only through popular struggle. The Constitution is only worth what we are willing to fight for.

16. Chalmers Johnson – The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
If you had to read one book on the deleterious effects of America’s militarism, then I don’t know if you should read this one or Bracevich’s (#3 on this list).

15. Norman Daller – One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey 'The Kid' Ungar, the World's Greatest Poker Player
This is the story of a nasty, brutish, and short man who happened to be an absolute genius at cards. At some point in the story I realized there was very little that could be considered redeemable about Stu Ungar, as presented, despite the author's best efforts to humanize him. Absorbing though, as genius always is.

14. Norman Finkelstein – Image and Reality of the Palestine Conflict
If you have any interest in the Israeli-Palestine conflict, read this book. The author gained notoriety when he demolished a previously heralded and critically acclaimed book by Joan Peters.

He re-exposed the same hoax this year when Alan Dershowitz plagiarized much of Peters work and published it as his own, (documented in Beyond Chutzpah.) There are some amusing transcripts floating around of the two confronting each other over the issue. Dershowitz comes off as hysterical and unintentionally comical, always trying to change the subject and contradicting himself. This is the guy that got O.J. off?

13. Jeremy Brecher – Strike!
Brecher documents the tumultuous, and often times violent, history of class struggle in the United States. This is a bottom up view of history where people fight tooth and nail for freedoms and human rights. It is a very inspirational history.

And just as an aside, I saw The Chronicles of Narnia last weekend. I felt uncomfortable watching the movie, bored with a hint of aggravation. I started thinking about it, and realized what bugs me about these types of movies. They give this twisted version of reality that reinforces the deification the upper class. Royalty is treated as the ultimate station in life, and in the case of this story it unwittingly reveals how hollow this human worship is. Four unremarkable kids are elevated to royalty, and the followers worship their office just the same. End rant.

12. Noam Chomsky – The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo
This is Chomsky’s discussion of the Kosovo conflict, and as usual he says things you don’t often hear. Clintonites hold up Kosovo as an example of humanitarian intervention. Chomsky demolishes this claim.

He deals with the motivations for the bombings, and compares the given justifications with the effects.

A number of NATO and American officials are on record discussing the need for this campaign to reestablish the relevancy of NATO in a post cold war world. There were, as always, strategic material and military interests. And on.

The bombing campaign caused much of the destruction it was supposed to avert. It created a death toll that was far greater than the one it prevented; it displaced hundreds of thousands of refugees, etc.

Chomsky notes that there are sometimes no easy answers, but we do not help ourselves by first turning to our guns. In this case there was indeed massacre and atrocity on going, but as he puts it the solution was not necessarily to blow everyone on the scene away, killing victim and oppressor. One may not agree with his analysis, but he raises some questions that seem beyond the realm of most commentators imaginations. As usual he is meticulous with his fact based approach.

11. Peter Kornblugh – The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability
This is the story of Chile’s 9/11. The one that happened in 1973 when general Augusto Pinochet led a coup and murdered the democratically elected Salvadore Allende in the capital building.

Pinochet went on to 17 years of terror and dictatorial rule, running an international terrorist organization to assassinate leftists and Chilean exiles. The most famous such assassination was of Orland Lettelier on the streets of Washington D.C. This is also the story of how the U.S. helped Pinochet every step of the way. Henry Kissinger is still unaccountable for his complicity in these crimes.

10. Frank Kofsky - Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation
After WWII the airline industry had a problem: They couldn’t survive without massive government subsidies. R&D costs were too high to sustain their business model. The public would not continue subsidizing their costs without a war though.

Fortunately they had a lot of friends in the White House who could influence the spigot of public money. They all got together and discussed the problem. The Secretary of the Navy, Stuart Symington, realized the solution: The word to use is not subsidy, but security. In other words if you scare people they would agree to subsidize the airline industry. Immediately they began drumming up a war scare with Russia to get a war time economy in the aeronautics field. Kofsky has uncovered the cables and memorandums that document this story from CEOs, military leaders, and government officials.

Looking back on this story now, one realizes this has been the recipe for the American economy for over 50 years now. The state sector is extremely dynamic and active, directing spending and investment in a variety of ways to overcome the deficiencies of a pure market system. (Note, this is the same type of involvement frequently employed as criticism for inefficient communist economies.) Today the U.S. spends about as much as the rest of the world combined on its military and is by far the largest arms supplier.

9. Doug Stokes – America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia
Stokes documents what has really been going on in Colombia and other instances of foreign interdiction. Invaluable source as a reference to the United States history of military intervention in Latin America. Also a good source for some of the inconsistencies of the War on Drugs.

8. Daniel Ellsburg – Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Ellsburg is a hero, simply put. He risked everything he had and overcame his own belief system to see the criminal folly that was Vietnam. He leaked the Pentagon Papers which provide an invaluable documentary record to counteract the current efforts to rewrite the war as a blundering effort to do good. This is a story of personal awakening and spiritual transformation amidst institutional criminality.

7. David Cay Johnston – Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Wealthy
This is another book that will tell you things you don’t hear often. Johnston documents in detail what is really going on with the American tax code. It doesn’t sound exciting, but he was careful to make sure this reads as a coherent story rather than an IRS pamphlet. This should anger and inform you. So many of our national discussions make no sense, since the assumptions they rest on are mistaken to begin with.

6. Mark Danner – The Massacre at El Mozote
This is the story of the infamous Al Catl battalion that slaughtered several hundred peasants in the El Mozote region of El Salvador. This was their first mission after being trained by the U.S., and the Reaganites tried unsuccessfully to cover up their crimes for years until forensics teams conclusively proved the slaughter really happened. Of course, in the meantime, they had a cover of deniability from the President of Democracy.

5. Mark Danner – Torture and Truth
Danner documents the Abu Ghraib story using primary sources from military and human rights reports. We can believe in fantasies, that this was overblown and nothing more than hazing, or we can look in the mirror and realize some unpleasant truths about our government and our fellow Americans that so flippantly rationalize torture. It will probably be years before we have the full picture, when all the memorandum and documents are released. Danner presents a partial picture to show how far up the chain these policies go. Of course, in the meantime, they have formulated the "few bad apples on the night shift" defense to give plausible deniability to the President of Democracy.

4. Noam Chomsky – Hegemony or Survival:America’s Quest for Global Dominance I first saw Chomsky on Book Notes with Brian Lamb on CSPAN. They were discussing one of his books at the time and he was taking questions from callers. He was soft spoken, articulate, and incredibly knowledgeable about any topic. Off the top of his head he was quoting from an array of sources and giving informed answers. He was also saying some of the most incredible things I had ever heard, things that I had not heard before.

I picked up his books, and later on I read many more. He says incredible things that need to be said. He is “arguably the world’s most important intellectual” with “maddening simple minded views on American foreign policy.” Or to put it another way, he actually looks at American foreign policy from a rational, fact based perspective instead of mythmaking and congratulatory self adulation. His judgment system requires objective standards, meaning that if it is a crime for us then it is a crime for them – and vice versa. Unfortunately many people can’t seem to rise above this basic definition of hypocrisy.

In this book he puts forth the idea that we can have hegemony or survival, but probably not both. With his customary dry wit and withering sarcasm he examines the current political situation and neocon movement. I would recommend it to anyone who knows things are not adding up, but hasn’t thought enough about it to realize what is wrong.

Reading Chomsky has been called an intellectual self defense course, and I tend to agree.

3. Andrew Bacevich – The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War
Bacevich is a lifelong conservative and military man. He writes a thoughtful discussion about the dangerous and frightening tendency for Americans to romanticize war. One side effect is that it changed the way I look at pop culture. We are an extremely violent and brutal society judged by the entertainment we watch and the games we play. (Note: this was my reaction, it was not his main point.)

2. Philippe Sands - Lawless World
A British law professor and Barrister, Sands discusses the system of international law that followed the post WWII period. He then goes on to document the United States government's outright attack and hostility to it. The US politicians resent international law because it might constrain what crimes they can get away with, although they frequently employ nakedly hypocritical policies to bring justice for others.

They favor international law when it is time to prosecute Saddam Hussein or Milosevic, but do not like it when Henry Kissinger is served with a subpoena. (Note: The U.S. has opposed using the ICC to prosecute Milosevic.) Sands uses legal precision to examine dual policies such as these, from the Kyoto protocol to the Iraq war. Anyone who is interested in the fabric of international law, and how American policy is tearing it apart should check out this book.

1. Howard Zinn – Voices of A People’s History of the United States
Zinn published a remarkable companion piece to A People’s History. In this book he let’s the people speak, publishing their testimony and words in original form. Inspirational.