Medea Benjamin’s book comes at a time when drones are increasingly in the headlines. The last few months have seen revelations about Obama’s ‘Kill List’, the list of targeted killings signed off directly by the president, as well as a high profile case in the British High Court against the UK government’s role in assisting drone strikes in Pakistan.

The book is a useful collection of key facts, and for anyone who had doubts about the benevolence of drones, the moral arguments are convincing. While arms companies and defence departments laud the technology for its precision, the picture on the ground tells a different story, with each strike almost inevitably causing scores of civilian casualties. The buzz of propellers as ‘predators’ and ‘reapers’ circle overhead has become a ubiquitous source of terror in North West Pakistan, among other places. Moreover, as Benjamin points out, the very notion of drones as an efficient or cost-free mode of warfare only serves to reinforce the brutal instrumentality, and ultimately the moral irresponsibility, of those wielding the technology. At this level the book is effective, but it misses the opportunity to analyse the full political implications.

Read the full review on Counterfire

How else to introduce a new book of oral history than with a long quotation?

“The town is different, especially after that date. It’s quiet. There’s no hum from the factory. There’s no noise from the presses going up and down. I grew up with that. Being three blocks away, at night, hearing the presses forging, forging. Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. Window open, you know, it’s a cool evening; you can hear it. That’s probably one of the things that everybody talked about. There’s no sound. It’s gone. It’s quiet.”

The book is DW Gibson’s “Not Working,” the speaker, Randy Badman of Dewitt, Neb., and together they show how powerful the genre of oral history can be. Like most of Dewitt’s 572 residents, Badman used to work at a local factory making Vise-Grip pliers, and his description of the factory’s departure reveals the familiarity and comfort of a steady job. (Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk.) “Not Working” collects more than 60 such interviews with men and women who lost their jobs between 2007 and 2011. It’s a great idea with some very good moments – but also one that, thanks to a few rather predictable elements, fails to satisfy completely.

Read the full review in The San Francisco Chronicle

Work defines us. Especially in a recession, jobs and the workplace are an integral part of American identity, even as they disappear. DW Gibson’s Not Working (OR Books) is both travelogue and intense human dialog, traversing the United States to collect the stories of Americans who have lost their jobs. Inspired by the great oral historian Studs Terkel’s Working, Gibson’s tome is a touching and all-too-necessary text for 2012. From the East Coast through the middle of our country, and on out West, Gibson, armed with a recorder, van, and tremendous pathos, recorded people whose stories contain both tragedy and humor, a stubborn will to survive despite their desperate circumstances. From sharing food with their dogs to taking long walks to starting new careers they never thought they would fall into, Gibson draws candid stories from these Americans. Interviewer on interviewer, we spoke with Gibson about why work defines us, water coolers, aspiring, what we do when we lose work, and how we can change this loss into something transformative and beautiful.

Read the full interview in Interview magazine

One can become unemployed through no fault of one’s own, due to circumstances beyond one’s control. That’s an exact but twisty sentence designed to avoid all of these words and phrases: laid off, excessed, downsized, surplused, separated, sacked, terminated, reorganized, released, reallocated, managed out, fired, let go, discontinued, displaced, discharged, dissolved, RIF’d, canned, hosed, and blown out. This is the language used by the people who endured it, and none of the verbs fully serve the experience of having your work, identity, livelihood, and dignity swept out from underneath you. As one human resources manager put it, “There is no way to say it so that anyone can hear anything but ‘you don’t want me here anymore.”

Layoff seems to be the most commonly used word despite—or maybe because of—a passivity that cheats the impact of the experience. As recently as 1989, the Oxford English Dictionary defined layoff as “a spell of relaxation; a period during which a workman is temporarily dismissed or allowed to leave his work.” But to my understanding losing work does not contain spells of relaxation, and not one person I talked to characterizes the event as something he or she was allowed to do. It is something new, the layoff, and something ubiquitous; as the writer Louis Uchitelle puts it, it has become “a mass phenomenon of American life.”

Read the full excerpt in The Daily Beast

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK, presents a readable, enlightening and alarming account which spells out the many reasons why drones are such an abomination. She explains the history of drones; the vast sums expended in lobbying by the arms corporations, and returned in lucrative government contracts; the secrecy in which the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conduct the undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; the crucial role of private contractors such as Academi (formerly Xe, and before that Blackwater) in operating the drone wars; and the moral dimension by which Obama and his henchmen flatter themselves with the words of Thomas Aquinas in pursuing what they present as “just war”.

The book returns again and again to the stories of the victims – both the “targets”, denied due process, and the thousands of innocent civilians who are being killed, maimed or their lives shattered under the shadow of the killer drones. People like Malik Gulistan Khan, a member of a local pro-government peace committee in Pakistan, killed, along with four members of his family in the first drone strike of the Obama presidency, on 23 January 2009. Or Roya, a 13-year old Afghan girl who became the family breadwinner after US missiles killed her mother and brothers following the 2001 invasion.

Read the full review on the New Left Project

It has become increasingly common for prominent liberal Jewish Americans to voice anguished disquiet over Israel’s behaviour. The most visible signs of this trend are books, such as Peter Beinart’s “The Crisis of Zionism”, which came out three months ago, and the growing support for the (admittedly patchy) achievements of J Street, an advocacy group that lobbies for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. In his eighth book, “Knowing Too Much”, Norman Finkelstein, an American academic who became a critic of Israel long before it was fashionable, traces the underlying dynamics of the disquiet.

Mr Finkelstein’s central claim is that American Jews’ feelings about Israel were always guided more by self-interest and personal values than by Jewish solidarity. They cared little about the country before the war of 1967, fearing accusations of “dual loyalty”. Israeli concerns, to them, were not American concerns. They rallied round after the war, Mr Finkelstein argues, chiefly because that was when Israel’s fight against the Arabs became geopolitically tied to America’s fight against the Communists.

Read the full article in The Economist

New York, NY (June 4, 2012) – OR Books, the progressive fiction and non-fiction publisher, and On Demand Books, the company behind the Espresso Book Machine® (EBM), have entered into an agreement to make OR Books’ list available from the EBM’s “digital-to-print at retail (DPR)” sales channel. This agreement will enable OR Books to deliver their content to readers all over the world, through On Demand Books’ global network of sixty-eight EBM locations.

“OR Books are known for the high quality of their titles, and for their innovative, forward-thinking approach to publishing,” said Dane Neller, CEO of On Demand Books. “We look forward to working with them to fulfill the potential of the EBM’s digital-to-print-at-retail sales channel to bring their content to book-buyers worldwide.”

“We at OR make a practice of exploring new ways of selling books, and On Demand Books provides a way for us to quickly reach some of the best retail outlets and libraries out there,” said John Oakes, co- founder of OR Books. “Stores can carry our books with no on-hand inventory, consumers get what they want, and authors and publisher benefit. We’re delighted to be a part of the ongoing retail revolution!”

OR Books sells its books worldwide, direct to readers. To avoid the waste of unsold copies, OR produces its books only when they are wanted, either through print-on-demand or as platform-agnostic e-books. This approach jettisons the inefficiencies of conventional publishing to better serve readers, writers and the environment.

The EBM is the only digital-to-print at-retail solution on the market today. With the push of a button, a title can be printed with a full-color cover, bound, and trimmed to any standard size. In a matter of minutes, it emerges from the EBM as a bookstore-quality paperback book, which the customer can pay for and walk out the store with right there and then.

Content from publishers, now including OR Books, is fed to the EBM via EspressNet, On Demand Books’ growing digital network of titles (currently numbering over seven million). Much like an iTunes for books, EspressNet retrieves, encrypts, transmits, and catalogues books from a multitude of English and foreign language content providers, including public domain, in-copyright, and self-published titles. Through the SelfServe software, writers can format, design, edit, and upload their books for printing through the EBM, and for inclusion in EspressNet. SelfServe will soon also be able to convert print files to the ePub format suitable for e-readers.

The EBM provides a new sales channel for publishers, and vastly increases the availability of titles for physical bookstores, significantly reducing loss of sales due to books being out-of-stock. In addition, the EBM technology offers libraries and bricks-and-mortar retailers the opportunity to become community self-publishing centers, providing a new distribution platform for self-published authors. And of course the EBM improves overall efficiency and environmental sustainability by eliminating shipping and the return and pulping of unwanted books.

About On Demand Books

On Demand Books was cofounded in 2003 by Jason Epstein, former Editorial Director of Random House; Dane Neller, former CEO of Dean & DeLuca; and Thor Sigvaldason, former technology consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Espresso Book Machines have been placed in bookstores, libraries, universities, and other locations in the USA, Canada, the UK, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean. In September 2010, On Demand Books and Xerox announced a partnership whereby Xerox will market, sell or lease and service the Espresso Book Machine worldwide. Made in the USA, Espresso Book Machines are environmentally efficient, reducing production, shipping, and waste. For more information, go to www.ondemandbooks.com.

About OR Books

OR Books is a new type of publishing company. It embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business. It was founded in 2010 by two longtime veterans of the book publishing industry, John Oakes and Colin Robinson. Robinson had been a senior editor at Scribner, publisher of The New Press and managing director of Verso; Oakes publisher of Four Walls Eight Windows, vice president of the Avalon Publishing Group, and publisher of such imprints as Thunder’s Mouth Press and Nation Books.

Editor’s note: This week, Reuters Opinion is publishing five excerpts – one each day – from D.W. Gibson’s new book, Not Working, an oral history of the recession. Gibson spent months traveling across America talking to people who had been laid off.

Today’s entry is Jessica Smith’s. Jessica, 32, was born and raised in Alabama. After stints in other states (New York and Virginia) and another country (Sweden), she moved back to Alabama in 2010 with her fiancé, Nick, and this is where they’ve made a home with their newborn.

Jessica has two master’s degrees. She has written for several years, mostly poetry, with some significant publications, but she’s on hiatus these days: “I have a job and a kid, and it’s just not going to happen.” Recently she was hired as a librarian at a nearby private boarding school.

It’s in Buffalo where her story of unemployment – and underemployment – begins. That’s where she and Nick were both working at a high-profile classical music organization. She was also an adjunct professor at the state university.

Read the excerpt in Reuters

Veteran book editor John Oakes was at BookExpo only briefly Monday to be on a panel –but I caught up with him later to find out how his publishing venture has been doing–and to discuss his recent column for Publisher’s Weekly bemoaning the industry’s failure to break free from the consignment model.

Oakes started OR Books in 2009 with Colin Robinson, a former managing director of Verso Books and senior editor at Simon & Schuster.

“I was at Grove Press before starting my own company, Four Walls Eight Windows,” said Oakes. “And then my years at Avalon and Atlas.” *

“Colin and I had never worked together before, because we’ve had parallel experiences in very different, overlapping circles. What we both saw is that conventional publishing just doesn’t work at all. The system of returns, huge discounts, consignment.”

So they started talking and came up with their current venture.

“Editorially we’re progressive, culturally, socially, and that can encompass a lot. Edgy stuff–as well as the usual political analyses. We don’t accept returns and all customers prepay. This should be self-evident in any other industry, but as you know–this is something of a revolutionary development in book publishing. It’s just not done. And that’s not to say we were the first or we are the only–but we are one of the few.”

“And we’ve found it to be a good experience.”

Read the full article in Forbes

For three decades, Norman Finkelstein has been the American Jewish community’s problem-child—denounced as a hysteric, a marginal ideologue, and a self-hating Jew. Selfless and vain, highly emotional—sometimes hysterical—in tone yet relentlessly logical in his arguments, he is now an academic with a doctorate from Princeton whose attacks on “the Holocaust Industry” and public cheerleading for Hezbollah have rendered him so toxic that he can’t obtain even the lowliest adjunct teaching position at any community college in America.

Yet, like it or not, Finkelstein’s influence on public debate is by now undeniable, with his once-radical ideas having been embraced throughout the Jewish community, from his debunking of the idea of Israel as “a land without a people” and his diagnosis of a strain of American Jewish Holocaust obsession to his assertions of the immorality of the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

On the eve of the publication of two new books—Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming to an End and What Gandhi Says About Nonviolence, Resistance, and Courage—I made a pair of unlikely pilgrimages to Finkelstein’s book-lined one-bedroom apartment on Ocean Parkway. Located smack in the middle of the most densely populated Jewish ZIP code in America, the place where Finkelstein spends his days is, as he is quick to point out, quite different from the fancy suburban abodes occupied by critics like Alan Dershowitz, who, he says, claim to love Jews but “live among the goyim.”

Read the interview on Tablet

OR Books has created a vibrant direct sales channel that distinguishes them from most publishers

Hear the interview on Tools of Change

Last summer, writer DW Gibson hit the road for four months, interviewing 200 of the estimated 8 million Americans who have lost their jobs in the Great Recession, in an attempt to gain a granular understanding of unemployment.

The resulting book, Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy, is in the tradition of America’s foremost oral historian Studs Terkel, who chronicled the American experience of employment (Working, 1974) and unemployment (Hard Times, 1970).

In the coming weeks, in readings across the country, Gibson will be accompanied by people featured in the book who will read out their own story. A documentary film is to follow in fall. A website where Americans can contribute their own experiences of unemployment aims to grow into a public archive of the period.

Read the full article on the Guardian

Last month I wrote to Norman Finkelstein offering to debate the chapter dealing with the Israel lobby theory of Walt and Mearsheimer in his new book, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. He wrote back to say that’s just one section, and the book has much larger aims, why not discuss them? I agreed, and our email dialogue of the last two weeks follows. Note that this dialogue preceded Finkelstein’s appearance on Democracy Now! Monday.

Norman Finkelstein: My new book is the fruit of three decades of scholarly reflection on the Israel-Palestine conflict and also of being an active participant in the solidarity movement. (I first got involved on June 6, 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon.) It is also the result of perhaps five years of intensive research, and three comprehensive rewrites of the manuscript. An honest reader would, I think, conclude that my book is the substantive version of the “Beinart thesis,” which, as it happens, I articulated in multiple venues long before Beinart came along. You might recall the conversation we had on the bus in Gaza after the 2008-9 Israeli invasion where I laid out my thesis that liberal American Jews were distancing themselves from Israel, and you expressed deep skepticism.

We are now at a crossroads in the conflict. I truly believe it is possible—not certain, not even probable, but still possible—that we can achieve a reasonable settlement within the two-state framework. But achieving this goal will require a maximum of political clarity and a vastly reduced amount of sloganeering.

Read the full interview on Mondoweiss

After an exhaustive study of Mahatma Gandhi’s works, scholar and activist Norman Finkelstein has written a new book about the principles of nonviolent resistance from the Indian struggle for independence to Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park. He says Gandhi found “nothing more despicable than cowardice,” and argued that nonviolence does not mean running away from danger. In fact, Gandhi argued that fighting a war with weapons takes less courage than nonviolent resistance in which “you’re supposed to march into the line of fire, smilingly and cheerfully, and get yourself blown to bits.” Finkelstein’s new book is titled What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage. Click here to see part 1 and part 2 of this interview.

See the full interview on Democracy Now!

My book was conceived in the mid-2000s and largely completed by 2008. Although its publication was unavoidably delayed, I did manage to lecture widely on its thrust that a tipping point had been reached: large sectors of the significantly liberal American Jewish community now knew too much of the truth about the Israel-Palestine conflict to continue lending Israel blind support. The argument was skeptically received by audiences and experts alike back then, but just a few years later, as these lines are being written, it has practically passed into conventional wisdom.

Although disagreements persist on exactly why American Jews are “distancing” themselves from Israel, it is largely accepted that in recent years a divide has opened up. Indeed, the poll data sampled in this book probably underestimate the depth of this estrangement because of the traditional reticence of Jews to “air dirty laundry in public,” and because of their reluctance to acknowledge that Israel no longer touches them as it once did.

Read the full excerpt on The Huffington Post

At the edge of a different continent, defending – as its apologists aver – its own ethnic and religious heritage from its (racialised) enemy, the analogue of Israel’s “fortress state” is almost unmissable. If this fact has taken a long time to encroach on Western consciousness, it is in part a testament to the efforts of the state’s defenders, as they engage in similar attempts to turn their backs on history.

Yet, as pre-eminent Israel- Palestine scholar Norman Finkelstein points out in Knowing Too Much, encroached it has – and with it, an awareness of Israel’s abysmal human rights record, its history of unrestrained belligerence towards its neighbours, and its increasingly racist and reactionary political culture.

Like the South African Apartheid state it echoes, Israel has been steeped in a culture of racism and denial since its inception. Western Jewish progressives seeking the heralded utopian socialism of the kibbutzim routinely found their eagerness and curiosity dashed on the harsh realities of the early Zionist state. As historian Tony Judt described his experiences as a military translator during the June 1967 war.

Read the full review in the New Left Project

Amazon is the world’s largest bookseller, offering more than 2 million titles. In an effort to lower prices, the company has demanded additional discounts from distributors—which, as Colin Robinson points out, is illegal under anti-trust law that prevents companies from selling a product at different prices to different customers. The company has been accused of having a “monopolistic grip on the publishing industry.”

See the full slide show on The Nation

Well over a year into the Arab Spring, the author and scholar Norman Finkelstein argues that there is a new, albeit quieter awakening happening here in the United States that could provide a major boost to the winds of change in the Middle East. In his new book, “Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End,” Finkelstein contends that American Jewish support for the Israeli government is undergoing a major shift. After decades of staunch backing for Israel that began with the 1967 war through the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, to the repression of two Palestinian intifadas, Finkelstein says that a new generation of American Jews are no longer adopting reflexive support for the state that speaks in their name. With this shift in American Jewish opinion, Finkelstein sees a new opportunity for achieving a just Middle East peace.

Watch the full interview on Democracy Now!