emily, Author at OR Books

SYRIA BURNING excerpted on Who What Why

Wednesday, July 1st, 2015

In introducing the excerpt, the editor writes:

News coming out of the Middle East is nearly always bad, so bad, it’s like a road accident. You just want to look away, and keep on going. There’s nothing you can do.

How did it all come to this? Keep reading. Below is an excerpt from Syria Burning by Charles Glass, a book that is so beautifully written that reading it is more like seeing. And you will not want to look away.

You will see—better than what any photograph could show—little fragments of history explode before your eyes, as you fly through time and space, now and then swooping down for a close-up of some detail that brings the larger truth into focus.

This book is about much more than Syria or the Middle East. It may be what the poet William Blake meant when he wrote “To see a world in a grain of sand.”

Or a drop of oil.

To read the excerpt, visit Who What Why.

CHAMELEO excerpted on The Logger

Monday, June 29th, 2015

To read the excerpt, visit The Logger.

“SYRIA BURNING reveals a great deal more than the reports that track the minutiae of this battle and that battle” SYRIA BURNING reviewed in Frontline

Wednesday, June 24th, 2015

Old-style journalists, Erlich and Glass know Syria well. They have spent long periods drifting about, making friends, and enjoying the social worlds that they encounter. Neither feel the lash of a corporate media industry, pushing them to file breaking news and ignoring the density of social life and the passions of the people.

…

Khalifa tells Glass, “Stop the war. Stop the blood. The Syrian people are tired now. You can play revolution for some time. But not for a long time.” This is the attitude captured by Erlich and Glass. It reveals a great deal more than the reports that track the minutiae of this battle and that battle.

To read the full review, visit Frontline.

LEAN OUT reviewed in The Hindu

Wednesday, June 24th, 2015

The biggest takeaway of this collection is a direct contradiction of the Sandberg principle: it asks women to ‘lean out’ and be true to themselves instead of trying to ‘lean in’ or fit into a system designed and controlled by men. This could mean speaking out rather than keeping mum, seeking confrontation rather than avoiding one, and striking out on your own rather than trying to be one of the boys.

To read the rest of the review, visit The Hindu.

“An important glimpse into our future” Lobster Magazine reviews CHAMELEO

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015

Whether Dion was an experimental subject or merely one of the first people to experience the full range of the new technology which the US military have in store for dissidents in the near future isn’t clear. Either way this is an important glimpse into our future as ‘democratic’ states gear up for their coming task of defending our ‘freedom’ from threats – some real but mostly imaginary – within.

To read the rest of the review, visit Lobster Magazine.

“The weirdest & funniest book of 2015” CHAMELEO named one of Flavorwire‘s top books of nonfiction in 2015

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015

Guffey’s Chameleo, a paranoiac nonfiction techno-thriller and the story of a friendship, is by many miles the weirdest and funniest book of 2015. It tells the story of an oft-recovering heroin addict named Dion Fuller who is believed by the Department of Homeland Security to have stolen a pair of night vision goggles from a military base. From there it becomes a sui generis exploration of conspiracy as a form of art. — Jonathon Sturgeon

To view the rest of the list, visit Flavorwire.

YASH TANDON joins This is Hell! to discuss TRADE IS WAR

Monday, June 15th, 2015

Author and policy maker Yash Tandon challenges the West’s ideas of both free and fair trade, and explains how colonialism’s newest form is a consolidated, intergovernmental apparatus with the same goals as ever – resource extraction and labor exploitation.

To listen to the interview, visit This is Hell!.

“Western Civilization Has Produced a God” JULIAN ASSANGE speaks about the religious aura of surveillance on The Huffington Post

Monday, June 15th, 2015

In the end it doesn’t matter whether Google is a completely willing participant [with U.S. surveillance efforts], a partly willing participant or a not at all willing participant. All that matters is that it is Google’s business model to collect as much information about the world and people as possible and store it and index it and compile virtual dossiers on everyone and predict their behavior, and sell it to various organizations and advertisers and so on. For any organization that does that and is based in the United States, the U.S. National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies will make sure that they get hold of that information. It’s simply too easy to do so and too attractive. It is very valuable information that gives the U.S. deep state an edge.

To read the rest of the interview, visit The Huffington Post.

Cuba Counterpoints praises CUBA IN SPLINTERS

Monday, June 15th, 2015

Starting with the editor’s preface, these eleven stories constitute a way of being honest, or at least less dishonest. They are irreverent; experimental in ways that seem more rebellious than transcending. And yet, much like Miller’s, these are the sort of stories that create a world of their own and, as George O. once wrote, leave a certain flavor behind them. For the characters in these stories, and I venture say, for the writers, he’s one way of breaking off—albeit like splinters—into the future.

To read the rest of the review, visit Cuba Counterpoints.

“[A] perfectly crafted memoir” Jerry L. Wheeler reviews NIGHTS AT RIZZOLI

Monday, June 15th, 2015

Picano was not the only employee of Rizzoli, though, and his characterizations of his fellow employees–the manager, Mr. M, and head clerk Armando in particular–are wonderful example of the fine detailing he embellishes his people with. They jump out of the book at you, nearly overshadowing the celebrities they all serve. By the end of the book, you know them as well as if you’d worked with them yourself.

Nights at Rizzoli is perfectly crafted memoir, as evocative of the time in which it is set as it is of the celebrities which populate it. Highly recommended.

To read the rest of the review, visit Out in Print.

“We have turned higher education into the cruelest of debt traps.” VICE interviews ANDREW ROSS

Monday, June 15th, 2015

VICE: What kind of political results do you think is actually feasible, if millions of students stop paying their loans?

ANDREW ROSS: A strike of any kind is a tactic. It’s not a solution. It’s a tactic towards a goal, and the goal here ultimately is for the US to join the long list of industrialized countries around the world that make it their business to offer a free public higher education system. None of these other countries are as affluent as the US; there’s no question that this country could afford to do so.

To read the rest of the interview, visit VICE.

“Assange is a world-class muckraker” The Monthly does an in-depth review of WHEN GOOGLE MET WIKILEAKS

Tuesday, June 9th, 2015

Google, a flag-bearer of the new Californian “free market” ideology of digital capitalism, is an accomplice of the American state, Assange insists. He reminds me that early Google search technology was seed-funded by the NSA and CIA “information superiority” programs. Since then, the family integration of Google and the government has tightened. Assange rattles off a string of cases. Each runs well beyond the politics of personal connections, and each connection is damaging to Eric Schmidt’s claim that Google has clean political hands.

To read the rest of the article, visit The Monthly.

“[A] valuable overview” Nomadic Press highlights the usefulness of A NARCO HISTORY

Tuesday, June 9th, 2015

Boullosa and Wallace, by condensing a vast amount of material into a relatively short book, have provided a valuable overview of the way the US and Mexico constructed the War on Drugs.

To read the rest of the review, visit Nomadic Press

“An enjoyable, provocative treatment of a timely topic” WATCHLIST praised in Shelf Awareness

Monday, June 8th, 2015

In this diverse and daring fiction collection, writers of all stripes deal with the act of watching and being watched, subverting and challenging surveillance’s obvious connotations and raising questions about our intricate dance with privacy and transparency.

To read the rest of the review, visit Shelf Awareness

CHARLES GLASS discusses Syria with The Monocle

Sunday, June 7th, 2015

To listen to the interview, visit The Monocle.

The Guardian reviews @HEAVEN

Friday, June 5th, 2015

The era of the cancer memoir began towards the end of the 20th century. Susan Sontag’s incandescent Illness as Metaphor, published in 1978, broke the taboo on discussing the disease, using her own diagnosis as fuel for a furious treatise on how we think about illness and the body. And in 1997, the British journalists Ruth Picardie and John Diamond documented their respective struggles with breast and throat cancer in national newspaper columns. Like these predecessors and descendants, Mandel’s posts chart an intelligent individual’s battle with pain, semi-comprehensible encounters with medics and a rapidly diminishing life expectancy. What makes @heaven unique, though, is that it also documents the responses of a community in some way generated by his illness.

To read the full review, visit The Guardian.

“Ornate in detail yet refreshingly concise” LA Times reviews A NARCO HISTORY

Thursday, June 4th, 2015

The authors do a wonderful job explaining how Mexico’s ordeal grew out of the seven-decade rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, a nationwide Tammany Hall that suffocated the best in the country while exalting the most inert, before Mexicans voted it out of power in 2000. (It has since returned to the presidency but without the political monopoly it once enjoyed.)

Boullosa and Wallace connect the savagery as well to our war on drugs. Their binational tale includes U.S. drug prohibitions, Americans’ appetite for illegal dope and our childlike refusal to do anything serious to limit the flow of arms south, even as those guns and bullets have daily bathed Mexico in blood.

Their overview — a century of history in a few hundred pages — emerges ornate in detail yet refreshingly concise.

To read the full review, visit The Los Angeles Times.

“The World Trade Organization is a war machine.” YASH TANDON interviewed on Arise News

Monday, June 1st, 2015

I discovered that the World Trade Organization provided a set of regulations worked out by the United States, Europe and Japan to their advantage. [Africans] were not party to the making of those regulations. The decision making in the World Trade Organization is by consensus. That means even one state can object, and there is no decision. Yet, [the United States, Europe and Japan] were able to manipulate the entire decision making process, year after year, to bring about decisions that favor the big countries and disadvantage the smaller countries.

To read the rest of the review, visit Arise News.

In The New York Times, OR Books co-publisher JOHN OAKES weighs in on the ethics of publishing in China

Thursday, May 28th, 2015

Censorship, which might be called “editing” in another context, has to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. If small changes need to be made to a book to enable its release to a new audience, it seems to me — unless these alterations change the fundamental tenor of a book — publisher and author are well-advised to make them.

To read the rest of the piece, visit The New York Times.

In Al Jazeera, Belen Fernandez highlights the importance of A NARCO HISTORY

Thursday, May 28th, 2015

In a new book called A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the “Mexican Drug War”, Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa and Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Mike Wallace document NAFTA’s passage as an essential godsend for the drug trade, the lucrativeness of which has greatly exacerbated official corruption.

The aftermath of the agreement, the authors note, saw the number of Mexican farmers living in poverty increase by one-third, with two million of them eventually forced to abandon their land.

To read the rest of the piece, visit Al Jazeera.

“Colonialist rhetoric is still here” YASH TANDON joins RT‘s “Going Underground” to discuss TRADE IS WAR

Tuesday, May 26th, 2015

To watch the segment, visit RT.

In the Evening Standard, CHARLES GLASS explains why Obama’s Syria strategy is unrealistic

Tuesday, May 26th, 2015

The tragedy in Syria and Iraq is that arms are pouring into the hands of rebel jihadists who slaughter or kidnap and enslave non-Sunni Muslims and punish fellow Sunnis who do not share their obscurantist interpretation of Islam. In Syria as in Iraq, neither side has the strength to defeat the other. But the Obama administration believes it can win a war in Iraq while allowing its enemies to win in Syria. And they said the neo-cons were fantasists.

To read the rest of the review, visit the Evening Standard.

Exclusive excerpt of YASH TANDON‘s TRADE IS WAR on TruthDig

Friday, May 22nd, 2015

In an exclusive TruthDig excerpt, Yash Tandon explains how multinational corporations and NGOs use the rhetoric of progress to push a free trade agenda:

It is a battle. The corporations play out their macabre war dance on the soil of Africa. They are aided by state agents and Western donor agencies pushing fertilizers and pesticides on the people to ‘hurry, hurry, hurry’ to some dubious destination called ‘growth,’ and the ordinary people (the more enlightened among them) urge the rest to pause and reflect on what they are doing and where they thought they were going.

To read the rest of the excerpt, visit TruthDig.

CHARLES GLASS interviewed by Mark Colvin on Syria and the future of the Arab Spring

Friday, May 22nd, 2015

To listen to the segment, visit ABC News.

CHARLES GLASS joins VICE to talk about how the Syrian conflict has affected everyday life

Friday, May 22nd, 2015

To view the segment, visit VICE News.

Sonali Kolhatkar explains how YASH TANDON‘s TRADE IS WAR provides an antidote to TPP rhetoric

Friday, May 22nd, 2015

But in fact, the rich have gotten richer, the poor poorer, and the planet has been thrown into peril. And while international trade does not manifest in lethal bombs, its impact on communities is similar to that of war, as detailed in a new book by Yash Tandon titled “Trade Is War: The West’s War on the World.” Tandon, who has decades of experience as a high-level negotiator at the World Trade Organization (WTO), said in an interview on “Uprising” that he agrees with Warren, and that she is “on the right side” on the TPP.

The fact that trade deals are negotiated behind closed doors speaks volumes. The draft of the TPP is so secret that one trade expert, Michael Wessel, who was privy to the details, wrote that “anyone who has read the text of the agreement could be jailed for disclosing its contents.” He does admit, however, that “[w]e should be very concerned about what’s hidden in this trade deal—and particularly how the Obama administration is keeping information secret even from those of us who are supposed to provide advice.”

To read the rest of the article, visit TruthDig.

DAVID ABRAMS celebrates WATCHLIST with daily posts on each story in the collection

Thursday, May 21st, 2015

David Abrams, contributor to Watchlist, has written a post on each of the collection’s 32 stories. Visit his blog to read the full coverage.

“It’s a question of political priorities.” ANDREW ROSS, author of CREDITOCRACY, interviewed by Thom Hartmann

Thursday, May 21st, 2015

There’s a very long list of countries around the world that offer [free higher education]. Either as an investment in their future or as a social right. And none of them are as affluent as the US. So it’s not a question of whether we can afford it. It’s a question of political priorities.

To read the rest of the review, visit Thom Hartmann.

“We are still at war with the West” YASH TANDON interviewed on Uprising Radio

Thursday, May 21st, 2015

To watch a clip of the program, visit Uprising Radio.

CHARLES GLASS appears on Democracy Now! to weigh in on the latest developments in the Syrian conflict

Thursday, May 21st, 2015

To the question of whether an international coalition should help protect the Syrian artifacts threatened by ISIL forces, Glass explains:

It would be demoralizing for Syrian people to see an international military intervention to protect ruins, but not to protect the 50,000 people who live around those ruins. It would be a way of saying to the Syrian people: your lives are not important, but these stones are. That would probably reinforce the Islamic Front’s propaganda that the world doesn’t really care about you but we do.

To watch the full interview, visit Democracy Now!.

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