OR Books
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Red Card
The World Cup is here, but what function does a worldwide tournament play in an increasingly belligerent police state, with Donald Trump at the hel? ublishing on the eve of the soccer World Cup in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, this concise, power-packed philippic provides a critical take on the dark underbelly of the beautiful game at its most storied moment. At the heart of this analysis by acclaimed sportswriter and scholar Jules Boykoff, who himself played soccer professionally, is the concept of sportswashing, where political leaders use sports to stoke nationalism and legitimize themselves on the world stage, deflecting from chronic problems at home. Step forward the recipient of the newly cast FIFA Peace Prize, Donald J. Trump, a titan unrivaled in squeegeeing every drop of personal wealth and prestige from hosting the competition. In this, he is ably assisted by a governing body of global soccer dripping in patronage and corruption. In these pages Boykoff demonstrates that it is possible to simultaneously treasure the skills and athleticism displayed on the pitch while lamenting their exploitation by malevolent powerbrokers for whom love of the game means nothing next to turning a buck or harvesting prestige. And, as Red Card so skillfully shows, this bait and switch is not confined to soccer. Precisely the same legerdemain will be used to distract and enrich when the Olympic Games come to Los Angeles two years from now.
Germany's Jewish Problem
A leading German–Jewish peace activist dissects Germany’s authoritarian crackdown after Gaza. Since October 2023, the Frankfurt-based Jewish composer and activist Wieland Hoban has traveled the globe rallying opposition to the Gaza genocide. Now, in an urgent collection of writings at once blistering and revelatory, Hoban unravels the cultural neuroses and political cynicism that have made Germany an outlier in its support for Israeli crimes. From German gentiles confidently charging Israeli Jewish expats with antisemitism, to the German state’s decades-long project to stifle free speech under the guise of combating “antisemitism,” to German officials mobilising their historical responsibility for one genocide to justify participating in another—Hoban guides us through the grotesqueries of German “memory culture” and shows their lethal consequences. As the chair of a German–Jewish peace group whose bank accounts were repeatedly frozen and whose members have been arrested on Gaza solidarity protests, Hoban is uniquely placed to expose the oddities and outrages of Germany’s authoritarian turn. He also warns that what begins in Germany doesn’t stay there. From sabotaging international support for a Gaza ceasefire, to deporting foreign nationals on political grounds, to spearheading censorship laws across the EU, Hoban’s diagnosis of German pathologies demonstrates where the ideological weaponisation of “antisemitism” can lead.
American Carnage
A gripping narrative of federal workers caught in Trump’s second-term purge, and the devastating consequences for American democracy. American Carnage follows eleven federal workers, in eight government agencies, from the time they were told they were fired in the early weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration through to the summer of 2025. With Trump having empowered the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and his Department of Government Efficiency, to make dramatic cuts to many of the country’s most important agencies, what unfolded in these months was a cascading tragedy of historic proportions. Their stories, which show a country in a profound moment of crisis and dislocation, are America’s stories. What happened to them—the bullying, the intimidation, the deliberate removal of financial stability—also happened to hundreds of thousands of other employees. A fierce reckoning with the intimate and far-reaching effects of these layoffs, both on the individuals who lost their jobs and on the millions of Americans who found their access to basic government services curtailed, American Carnage is the first book-length account of how these cuts dulled and denuded our city on the hill, leaving a morally impoverished landscape in their wake.
The Man Who Gave Me A Biscuit
A coming-of-age memoir of love, rebellion, and political awakening, set amid Argentina’s buried history of Indigenous genocide, military coups, and disappearing women. When setting out to write a memoir about growing up in in the little-known British Community of Buenos Aires, Penny Woolcock anticipated recounting her escape from a sheltered childhood where girls like her were trained for marriage and polite society. But she soon discovered that behind a genteel façade of afternoon tea and games of hockey lay a much darker story, one of mass killings and amnesia. The Man Who Gave Me a Biscuit braids together memories of a tumultuous adolescence, which saw Woolcock join a radical theatre group and fall in love with the most unsuitable man she could find, and reflections on the legacy of violence and authoritarianism that to this day permeates her country of birth. In these pages we learn of the “Conquest of the Desert”, a genocide that took place fifteen years after her great grandparents’ arrival from Europe; a succession of military coups, including the murderous Junta of the 1970’s; the surreal idiosyncrasies of Peronism; and the madness of today’s President Javier Milei, whose key advisor is his dead mastiff, Conan. In turns funny, painful, entertaining and downright terrifying, this story in chiaroscuro superbly contrasts the excitement of a teenager’s world opening up, and the brutality of a society shut down by repression and fear.
The Long War on Iran
The U.S. and Iran have been locked in a decades-long standoff, driven by missteps, misunderstandings, and conflicting ambitions. This collection of essays delves into the complex dynamics behind this ongoing conflict, shedding light on why American policies have repeatedly failed to understand the true nature of Iran’s transformations and its role in the Middle East.Drawing on two decades of political analysis, the essays explore the history of U.S. intervention in the region, focusing on the enduring sanctions imposed on Iran and the persistent perception of the Islamic Republic as a major obstacle to American power. Despite the repressive policies of the state, Iran has remained a vibrant society with active intellectual, cultural, and social justice movements. The book examines these internal changes and shifts in Iranian politics, offering crucial insights into why American policies have often been blind to these developments.By challenging the conventional image of Iran as a totalitarian regime, this collection urges readers to appreciate the country’s diverse society and complex political landscape. It calls for a re-evaluation of how the U.S. engages with Iran, advocating for a more informed, nuanced approach to Middle East diplomacy. At a critical moment when U.S. policy is being reshaped, these essays serve as a timely reminder: without acknowledging Iran’s transformations, both nations will continue to face new events—and the same old questions.
If I Must Die
?If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.?This rich, elegiac compilation of work from the late Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his marvelous poetry and deeply human writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family. The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. ?If I Must Die? is included here, alongside Refaat?s other poetry.Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza, one of which, in 2014, killed another of his brothers; and the generosity of Palestinians to each other, fighting, in the face of it all, to be the one paying at the supermarket checkout.Such pieces, some never before published, have been curated here by one of Refaat?s closest friends and collaborators. This collection forms a fitting testament to a remarkable writer, educator, and activist, one whose voice will not be silenced by death but will continue to assert the power of learning and humanism in the face of barbarity.
Hitler and My Mother-in-Law
Hitler and My Mother-in-Law is a riveting memoir that explores the intersection of truth—both familial and political—through the colorful and complex life of the author''s mother-in-law.
In a time like our own of intense propaganda and manipulation, the only WWII female correspondent who covered both theaters of war, Pat Hartwell identified Hitler from a pile of ashes for the US military, and the troops awarded her with a million-dollar painting from Hitler''s study. Really?
She was the only woman in the CBS news room, assistant to the head of the Office of War Information, VP of one of the largest public relations companies in the world, third in command of UNICEF where she convinced Matisse to provide artwork for free, editor of her own Arizona newspaper where she hustled naïve art on the side, and eventually head of the Hawai’ian arts council, a state of extremely complex political and social stakeholders, where she left a legacy of preventing art fraud. Her story is a fascinating journey through history, art, and deception.
The memoir delves into the art of invention and the shapeshifting of memory and truth, interwoven with humorous yet profound moments. It examines the comical Soviet efforts to conceal Hitler''s death, McCarthy''s investigations, and the author''s own struggle to compete with both her mother and her mother-in-law. Threaded throughout are insights into organizations that malign the word "mother" and, of course, plenty of mother-in-law jokes.
With meticulous research and a unique perspective, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law challenges the boundaries of narrative honesty, offering a powerful exploration of propaganda, identity, and the personal reckoning that defines the art of memoir. It''s a gripping mix of history, family, humor, and a biting reflection on the politics of truth—past and present.
The Fraud
Using a cache of hitherto unseen documents and exclusive insider accounts, this sensational new book tells the story of how a shadowy group, Labour Together, came to the cusp of delivering Sir Keir Starmer to power in Britain. It reveals, for the first time, the way the project sabotaged Corbynism through covert plotting, propelled Starmer to Labour’s leadership and now, having crushed the left in the party, poses an imminent threat to British democracy as a whole.
The Fraud reveals the chilling nature of Labour Together. Established in 2015, the project was created by ‘eight brave MPs’ who engaged in secret planning to wrest control of Labour. They included people who are now among the most senior members of Keir Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet: Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and Steve Reed. Morgan McSweeney, the guiding light behind Labour Together, is today one of the most powerful people in the Party, a key figure in selecting future parliamentary candidates.
Holden describes how Labour Together pursued its objectives with a substantial pot of undeclared funding, which it used to secretly insert itself into the Labour Party’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ at a time when it was publicly maintaining a position of neutrality in the Party’s vicious factional-infighting.
In these pages we see how Labour Together selected Keir Starmer to be its frontman, helping him win Labour’s leadership with the most mendacious campaign in recent political history. The Party under Starmer has since embraced the ugliest forms of racism and Islamophobia, and shared information hacked from journalists critical of its allies. The Labour Together project has subsequently transformed the Party into an authoritarian machine entirely intolerant of dissent, rowing back on an ocean of previous commitments and propagating an agenda of reheated austerity.
Complicit
A Sunday Times BestsellerFrom one of Britain’s most celebrated political journalists, a fearless and forensic indictment of British complicity in the destruction of Gaza. In a gripping narrative informed by original reporting, Peter Oborne tells how Britain’s Conservative and Labour parties converged to back Israel’s criminal assault—in the process occupying disturbing common ground with the far right. Rather than challenge this political cartel, British media colluded in its misrepresentations. The shocking result was that, as British authorities helped Israel set Gaza as well as international law aflame, almost everything the public was told about this momentous conflagration was untrue. When citizens still turned out in their hundreds of thousands to demand a ceasefire, roiling the nation’s politics as they stayed faithful to the ancient British tradition of popular protest in defence of liberty, the political-media machine bared its fangs. The investigative reporting in this book exposes the methods by which peaceful demonstrations were smeared as “hate marches”. Formerly chief political commentator at the Daily Telegraph and Spectator, Oborne knows the British establishment from within. In this book he names names and provides receipts. His demand is accountability—for atrocities, and their accomplices.
We're Coming For You and Your Rotten System
From inside Kshama Sawant''s historic tenure in Seattle City Hall comes a blueprint for 21st-century socialists, a counterpoint to the strategies favored by The Squad and other progressive activists.
Seattle was the first major city to mandate a $15 minimum wage; the first to implement a payroll tax on Amazon to build affordable housing; the first to secure a bevy of renters’ rights laws, making good on the slogan, “Housing is a human right.”
Behind these remarkable breakthroughs in the 2010s stood a small but feisty Marxist movement, Socialist Alternative, and the City Council member they helped to elect, Kshama Sawant. In a municipal government dominated by pro-business Democrats, Sawant and the popular street movements she led against major corporations headquartered in the region—including Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, and Starbucks—won battles that would transform the city’s trajectory for years to come.
We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System tells this extraordinary story from the inside. Rosenblum, who worked in Sawant’s office and alongside community activists throughout this dynamic decade, weaves together intimate story-telling and political analysis to show how and why the movement succeeded where other progressive outsiders—such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have failed. For political activists searching desperately to make sense of the world after the reelection of Donald Trump, the Seattle experience offers a vital framework for fighting our way out of the despairing miasma of 21st-century capitalism.
A Seat at the Table
A Seat at the Table is the story of the founding of Busboys and Poets, a Washington, D.C.–based restaurant that has become a celebrated hub for political activism. Named in honor of Langston Hughes, who worked as a busboy while writing poetry, the restaurant is the creation of Andy Shallal, an Iraqi American restaurateur, artist, and activist.
In this fast-paced, personal, and often humorous story, we follow Andy from his teenage years on, helping out in his family’s pizza business, changing his name, abandoning a career in medicine, working in some of the city’s best restaurants, and eventually opening a restaurant of his own.
A rave review by legendary Washington Post food critic Phyllis Richman puts the new place on the map. Long lines form outside. Andy witnesses the power of food to bring people together. He creates a meeting space and a bookshop upstairs. The idea of a restaurant as a social and political hub begins to take shape.
In these pages we encounter the galaxy of progressive authors and activists who have frequented Andy’s restaurants, everyone from Marion Barry and Jesse Jackson to Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn, Jerry Brown, Alice Walker, and Angela Davis.
Packed with misadventures, unexpected triumphs, and insights on race, business and politics, A Seat at the Table takes us on a “How I Built This” journey that ends with the opening of the first Busboys and Poets, now just one of eight D.C. locations bearing the same name. Along the way, we get to savor the delicious cuisine and unique ethos for which Busboys and Poets has become famous.
Syria
A widely recognized expert on the unfolding crisis in Syria here melds reportage, analysis, and history in an accessible overview of events leading up to the toppling of the Assad regime and the fragile prospects for peace in its wake.How did the Syrian regime fall? Gradually, then all at once.In December 2024, the long and bloody stalemate in Syria broke down. In a transformation breathtaking for its suddenness and speed, President Bashar al-Assad, the beating heart of Arab authoritarianism, fled to Russia, his dungeons emptying as rebels overcame the Syrian army with scarcely a fight.Euphoria at the collapse of a government people never voted for was tempered by fear for the future. The victorious insurgents were supported by outside powers and had a track record of brutality comparable to Assad?s in addition to religious fanaticism. Syrians?whose fragile, cosmopolitan mosaic has been repeatedly shattered by foreign-backed sectarians?faced rule by an avowedly Islamist regime that pledged to break with its past and show tolerance to all religious communities.In this illuminating and concise survey, Charles Glass shows how Assad?s misrule, Sunni fundamentalism, and Western deceit combined to create and prolong the Syrian disaster, which since 2011 has claimed more than two hundred thousand lives and driven more than eight million people from their homes.Glass has reported extensively from the Middle East and travelled frequently in Syria for more than fifty years. Here he melds reportage, analysis, and history to provide an accessible overview of the origins and permutations defining the conflict, situating it clearly in the broader crises of the region.In this new and thoroughly revised edition of his earlier Syria Burning, Glass brings the story to the present, showing how we got here and what a post-Assad settlement might bring.
Museum of Degenerates
An explosive exhibition of art by a celebrated cartoonist chronicling America’s march toward right-wing authoritarianism.Museum of Degenerates invites you to a delirious display of art by one of contemporary America’s most original and incendiary political cartoonists. Eli Valley’s extraordinary work is a scathing indictment of the entire American polity, with a particular focus on the issues of Israel and Judaism at a time when these have moved to the center of public debate and action.
In these pages, Valley tips a homburg to German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix who featured in “The Exhibition of Degenerate Art,” a 1937 Munich show that sought to ridicule the work of artists critical of Hitler’s fascist regime. In an aesthetic that is strikingly original, Valley also draws on early twentieth-century American Yiddish cartoons and the work of artists who created the helter-skelter exuberance of MAD comics in the 1950s.
Valley’s own art, accompanied here by extensive descriptions of its genesis and context, is a howl of protest against the political, cultural and media elites driving America into an authoritarian abyss. Here is anger, pure and hot, expressed in exquisite detail and, often, disturbingly funny.
The Illustrated Guide to American Fascism
This fierce, smart interweaving of punch-packing art and powerful, precise words lays bare the authoritarianism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny that populate the political landscape of the United States today.
Designed especially to inform and activate younger readers, these pages pay particular attention to the threats facing the most basic tenets of American democracy, exemplified by the attempted stealing of elections, violence on the streets of the capital, and the evasion of legal consequences by the most powerful in the land. Beyond the crimes of Trump and his cohort, The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism explores the threads of fascism in U.S. history and shows their baleful influence on today’s foreign policy, especially support for genocide in Gaza, and the brutal treatment of asylum seekers along the U.S./Mexican border.
Perfectly complemented by Stephen Eisenman’s crystalline text, Sue Coe’s art is, in turn, tough, satirical, bracing, sweet, and sober. It secures her place in a pantheon that features the zine illustration of Art Spiegelman, the realism of Philip Pearlstein, the caricatures of Honoré Daumier, the expressionism of Käthe Kollwitz, and the Dadaism of John Heartfield.
The Manifesto of Herman Melville
In this iconoclastic and sure to be contentious re-casting by a renowned critic, the great American novel Moby Dick is presented as a work that has been widely misread, an error that continues to this day. According to Barry Sanders, Herman Melville?s best- known work is not a novel, does not pretend to be a novel, and was not intended by its author to be read as a novel. Moby Dick is this country?s first manifesto, a tocsin sounded to warn us about the encroaching end of nature. The Manifesto of Herman Melville traces the evolution of Moby Dick?from its awful, initial reception, very rapidly passing out of print, to its remarkable revival to become lauded as one of America?s great literary classics. That turnaround happened in the early decades of the 20th century and was, in great part, the result of the new and radical aesthetic movements such as surrealism, dadaism, and cubism that allowed for a radical reading of the book. The novel?s new standing as one of the keystones of the American cannon disguises its deeper meaning as an alarm bell, an obscuring which Barry Sanders, in a critical assessment that is as persuasive as it is provocative, seeks to clear away.Sanders argues that Moby Dick needs to be recognized as Melville''s manifesto: a bold statement warning of the destruction of the natural world made most evident in the book?s central metaphor the relentless pursuit to kill the whale, the first sentient being in Genesis and one of the most startling mammals?possessed of hair and scales, a tail and breasts?and the largest of the creatures on earth, weighing up to 400,000 pounds.Whalers in Melville?s day hunted down and killed these extraordinary behemoths of nature, for their oil, sold to people for cooking and to light their homes. Today the pursuit for energy has shifted dramatically, from sea to land, but the prize remains the same: energy producing fuel for which entrepreneurs and adventurers are prepared to kill off all of nature.
Vypredané
22,99 €