An overview of some of the contents found in this book, a collection of writings from The Nation magazine written in the few months after the 9-11 massacres.

William Greider, Bill Moyers and others address corporate knavery since 9-11.

Katha Pollit asks why we have to fund barbaric dictatorships like the one in Saudi Arabia and oppose progressive forces in the ME. She points to the really unbelievably courageous work of the Revolutionary Women of Afghanistan, operating for years within Afghanistan as fierce opponents of both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. She also staggers humanity by explaining why she would not allow her daughter to fly an American flag out their living room window.

Victor Navasky calls for Ann Coulter to be host of "Politically Incorrect" instead of Bill Maher. Coulter was fired by The National Review Online for saying racist things that not a few readers of that great publication probably believe but don't say so loudly publicly. On the other hand Bill Maher immediately backtracked after his infamous comments after a few advertisers for his show withdrew and he said he didn't mean what he said he loves our military people and so on. At least, he says, Miss Coulter was actually being politically incorrect in contrast to the whimpy centrist liberal Maher.

Chalmers Johnson, the former CIA analyst, has a particularly powerful piece. He quotes the U.S. Space Command's document "Vision for 2020": "the globalization of the world economy will also continue, with a widening between the 'haves' and the have-nots." He quotes the eminent senator from Georgia, the Hon. Zell Miller, as saying on the day after 9/11 that he didn't care if there was "collateral damage," lets bomb the hell out of everybody. He notes that collateral damage is one of those terms that isued to describe our destruction of Iraqi and Serb civillians by our high-flying plains. And that this might have been the term that our ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, might have used while he was helping coordinate the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Central Americans in the 80's while Ambassador to Honduras.

Richard Falk outlines his case for the attack on Afghanistan being a "just war." Numerous letters are printed in response to this including from Howard Zinn. The latter writes about the effects of our bombing: bloody young children staggering accross the Pakistani border, enitre villages and families wiped out, the evil cluster bombs, a red cross warehouse bombed.

Noam Chomsky quotes the New York Times about U.S. pressure on the military oligarchy running Pakistan to close its border to truck convoys carrying food to Afghanistan. He quotes from various aid agencies which condemned the American bombing as exacerbating the humanitarian disaster by blocking the distribution of desperately needed food aid. The 2001 Fall harvest in Afghanistan was 80 percent disrupted. Other contributors point to the sleaziness of the public relations gesture in dropping 37,000 food packets a day on a population where seven million were needing food. He refers to the massive refugee exodus from the American terror bombing of Kandahar and Herat into land-mine infested rural areas. He quotes from Michael Kinsley, Time magazine and other open supporters of the U.S. terrorist war against Nicaragua in the 80's as they openly advocated terrorist methods that would bring "democracy" there i.e. to terrorize the Nicaguan people into voting the Sandanistas out in 1990.

Alexander Cockburn points out that we on the anti-war left support eradicating Bin Ladenism. It's just that the so-called "war on terrorism" is only going to increase it over the long run. He like alot of other of the contributors, argue for non-violent legal means to aprehend the perpetrators of 9-11 such as through the international criminal court, the UN, coordinated international police work and so on.

Robert Fisk has an article from September 1998 about his interviews with Bin Laden. He quotes Bin Laden as calling the Israeli massacre of the refugees at Qana in 1996 "international terrorism" and calling for trials for the perpetrators. "Clinton used almost exactly the same words about bin Laden and his supporters in August [1998]. But the deaf, as usual, were talking to the deaf." Bin Laden lays out in the midst of ranting, in which he curiously accuses the Saudi regime of financing the defunct radical "communist" regime of North Yemen, his view that the slaughter of Iraqis because of the sanctions as a "war against Islam."

Fisk and Michael Massing write about the barbaric Northern Alliance led by the late Ahmad Shah Masood and Abdul Rashid Dostum and how they raped and plundered and bombed Afghanistan 1992-96, making people willing to accept the Taliban takeover.

Christopher Hitchens boldly shows that the Bin Ladenists are not misguided freedom fighters but barbaric terrorists. Of course nobody is actually contesting that notion and...oh why bother. Michael Massing's account of the critique of U.S. foreign policy of Fareed Zakaria and even Falk's deeply flawed arguments are much better ...

This book, inevitably, is becoming a little bit dated as time goes on for none of the articles are after December 2001 but the arguments in it still hold power.

Vanden Heuvel is to the left what Rush Limbaugh is to the right. Objectivity be damned!

However, the authors state their positions passionately and persuasively. Like one of the reviewers stated previously, if you have a conservative bent, the articles will make you really think about your position. If, on the other hand, you are more liberally inclined, these articles won't say anything that you haven't already heard.

I am not your typical Nation reader, not by any means. In fact I am pretty much so a right winger, but I was curious and thought I'd check out this collection. While I can't say it changed my mind any, in fact it might have done the exact opposite, this is a very interesting and well written piece of work. I do not agree with the politics of The Nation, but I must say they have some of the best contributors writing for them, and they do make you think about your own stances. If you actually agree with their politics, you probably already know about this book and have read it. If not, and you want to see what the other side believes, this is a great way to educate yourself.

This book is for those who missed out on the ~500 issues it draws from, or those who're curious about the ultimate tastes of Victor Navasky, publisher, and Katrina Vanden Heuval, editor. How do you filter the best of ten years? Interesting to ponder. These two must have been taking notes the whole time.

TheNation is a magazine it is good to have discovered. I found it when some soul regularly put big piles of free issues on a table in the English building at my college. A subversive act, no? If you consider progress subversive. It was kind of strange to read at first. Who were all these people mentioned? What were these groups? But once you get in synch with the vibe, the magazine becomes truly exciting and audacious. I don't know how some of these writers became so intellectually powerful, so incisive at tearing apart the fabric of the consensus trance and revealing the bloody insides of what a DeLillo character called The Festival of Death. Which world is this? This book will help you know, with respect to whether you can be helped.

Is TheNation provincial? Some say so, but I think not. What about its coverage of Russia? Latin America? Africa? The Middle East? Asia? Europe? America is the focus, of course, but would we want it different? How can we influence lands far away if we don't yet know the secrets of our own land? Isn't the most powerful machine a good one to examine if we'd like to twist the world history vector? And if you want to get into the foreign more than the magazine itself gives you, there are lots of book recommendations to be had--books that will take you wherever you want to go, and what's more, books that will explore the world in ways you may not have even dreamed of.

No relevent aspect of reality goes unnoticed in the textuality of The Nation, the books, the readers. The perceptual net is tight--the neurotic denial of perspectives is fully minimized here. How much is going on? Can you help people? What about armchair radicals? I have nothing against sitting in chairs. I find myself reading this book, and thinking, I'm totally unable to participate in struggle for justice X, yet--in a certain way, reading about it is enough. If we can't save the victims, we can at least know of them. There is infinite Pain going on, and it's hard to influence an infinity, but any decrease in pain is meaningful. Everything is meaningful.