Review by Bill Svoboda

This is oral history in the greatest sense of the word. Any or all of the "Winter Soldier" series is highly recommended for anyone who wants to really understand the USA & it's foreign policy. Warning: this is shocking, infuriating and depressing- especially considering that American warmongering & imperialism continues and worsens.

Review by Bill Svoboda

A very readable science book about an extremely relevant topic. There is a good deal of information here, some of which surprised me. Highly recommended-if this was longer and more comprehensive it would be five stars.

Review by Cody Harder

This collection of four novels by Philip K. Dick is an exceptional selection of his work; I have lovingly dubbed it "the Dick Bible" (because of it's remarkably thin pages...nearly 800!). If you love mind-bending, imaginative, and at times wildly paranoid science fiction, you will absolutely gobble this up! I find Dick's style very easy to read, making his stories real page-turners. Couple that with fast-moving plots and unexpected twists around many corners, and they're winners in my book.

Review by Kryssanne Adams

I would've devoured this comic in a day if it weren't for the wait to get the next one. I avoided reading Sandman for years because I thought that surely it couldn't be as amazing as the hype. I was wrong! Number five is where the series really picks up, and Gaiman ties together several characters from past issues that seemed entirely unrelated. So satisfying!

Review by Kryssanne Adams

A quick read with lots between the lines to unpack--this is a story I know I'll be reading at least one more time. Thoughtful, disorienting, and reality-warping, it's got as much entertainment value as it does insight into human nature.

Review by Bill Svoboda

For the longest time I resisted reading anything by someone with the name "Starhawk"-it screamed "New Age" -i.e. fuzzy,sloppy thinking that rejected both politics and science and embraced consumerism. But I was wrong- you don't need to be a Goddess worshipper to appreciate the intelligence/wisdom in this book. I found that a good place to begin reading this book was actually starting near the ending.

Review by Bill Svoboda

Good book (as if I would think anything by Wendell Barry is bad!). Given it's philosophical bent, it has aged well (some of these essays are now over 30 years old). As good an essayist as Barry is, it is as a poet that he truly shines.

Review by Cody Harder

"Stories Of The Apocalypse"? How can you lose (ha ha) with a subtitle like THAT? But aside from the bar getting raised by so much dystopian water under the (ruined) bridge- this just isn't very original or eye opening even by the standards of say, 30 years ago. George Martin , Octavia Butler and Gene Wolfe-to name a few-have all done better-and bleaker-than this.

Review by Cody Harder

I like Mike Davis's writing, but this book is very dated-not in the sense that what's in it is inaccurate, but simply because it is over 30 years old- and is looking backwards from that perspective. It is of most value as "history" rather than contemporary political science`

Review by Kathleen Cross

This book reads like a war memoir, it's told from perspective of a woman telling her life story before and after a terrifying patriarchial takeover of society. Even though the rules of the new society are really strange and bizarre, it feels really lived in and real. It shows you how fast society can collapse and the way women can help eachother or hurt eachother for their own gain under patriarchy.

Review by N8R Witham

A disturbing account of Nazi war crimes from a time before the Holocaust had crystallized into neat narratives. The primary focus of the book is the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the only Nazi to be tried by a Jewish court. Hannah Arendt digs deep into Eichmann's psychology, asking questions that flesh out the cardboard concept we have today of what it was like in Nazi Europe, and the inhuman flaws intrinsic to the functioning of any State. Definitely a read worth pondering in these cyclical times.

Review by Cody Harder

A classic of dystopian sci-fi that is still very relevant today. The oppressive theme and kafkaesque plotline are both compelling and repulsive, a nightmarish, totalitarian society not difficult to imagine. Don't miss the interesting section at the end concerning the grammatical principles of Newspeak (the language of IngSoc).

Review by Kryssanne Adams

This book captured me and put my life on hold until I could finish it. I fell asleep reading it, woke up next to it, rolled over, and read as long as I could before going on with my day (and thinking about the characters all day when I was away from the book). It's full of satisfying synchronicities, and Murakami gets away with all sorts of weirdness by weaving an intricate sort of dream logic throughout the story. If you're looking an engrossing world to fall into to distract you from your life, read 1Q84.

Review by McKenzie Smedley

This book was highly referenced in a course about magic, decolonization, and the feminized body as a terrain for oppression and resistance.

Review by Tuck Tucker

A fictional fascist coup-by-ballot in the USA in the late 1930s. The author's informal subtitle was to be '...the hell it can't!'. There are some scary parallels to Trumpism.

Review by Tuck Tucker

This is the sequel to Sandinista. It takes the story of the Nicaraguan revolution to the end of the Somoza dictatorship and the entry of the revolutionaries into Managua.

Review by Kryssanne Adams

Mega Hex is funny, but also pretty fucked up. It revolves around mean spirited pranks, ridiculous party scenarios, constant weed consumption, and depression. The story revolves I laughed when I saw Daniel Clowes' review on the back, where he says something about being glad he doesn't have to hang out with anyone like Hanselmann's protagonists ever again--I felt the same.

Review by Tuck Tucker

This book follows bourgeois and revolutionary characters during the initial stages of the Sandinista revolt against the Somoza dictatorship. The Alt Lib has a number of nonfiction accounts of the Sandinista period in Nicaragua.

Review by David Czuba

A stylish graphic novel in the post-dystopian vein. Queen Hannah and Cadillac Jack brave the environment, reptiles, the weirdo goon squads, and their disparate world views to converge on the secret weapon. Schultz gives us so much of Hannah's bust, ass and crotch with killer looks between she and Jack - even a well-placed hand by Hannah near Jack's crotch - that you'd expect horny toads to pop out of a panel at any moment. Alas, that only happens with actual humanoid horny toads, and not the heroic characters themselves.

Review by Alexander Chadsey

I don't often read history texts cover-to-cover, but was compelled to completely ford this one. Within the relatively short format of this book (287 pages) J.C. Mohawk lends you his lens for seeing the liminal facets of Western history that have been obscured and 'forgotten' by the dominant culture. The bulk of the text is concerned with dissecting the obsession in Western thought with the 'pursuit of the ideal,' wherein people believe that "all reasonable human beings who have access to an adequate base of information will pursue an identical concept of what is 'ideal' or 'good'" (Mohawk, p.1). Starting with tribal, then Helenistic cultures,working through the eras to the present, Mohawk points out the distinct movements that significantly altered the beliefs of civilizations on a historical scale. He categorizes these movements into two broad categories used throughout the text: utopian ideologies and revitalization movements. Much of the book is a reexamination of familiar historical events seen through these two filters, sifting out the agrandizement and preconceived notions that justified great and terrible things throughout the development of the culture we now occupy. While the biggest limitation to this book is its short length and inability to delve too deeply into any one movement, it succeeds in piqueing the reader's interest in examining these formative events (and one's own place in the dominant culture) with a much more critical eye. [P.s. if you teach an introductory history class, this would be a great text to incorporate into your curriculum :) ]