N)
Nickel and Dimed - Author and sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich spent about three months in 1998-2000 in three cities throughout the nation, attempting to "get by" on the salary available to low-paid and unskilled workers. She discovered that her average salary of $7 per hour couldn't even provide the necessities of life (rent, transportation, and food), let alone the luxury of health coverage. Ehrenreich takes on issues and questions posed before and during the experiment, including why these wages are so low, why workers are so accepting of them, and what Washington's refusal to increase the minimum wage to a realistic "living wage" says about both our economy and our culture.

1984 - The Orwell Classic is becoming eerily prescient in this early part of the 21st Century in America, especially under the reign of Bush, Jr.

P)
Thomas Paine and The Promise of America - Founding Father of the American Left. In 1774, this working-class unknown from London, uneducated and a former corset maker, arrived in Philadelphia. Less than two years later he did what every American journalist since then has dreamed of doing: changing the course of history with a piece of writing. His ''Common Sense'' (1776) galvanized popular opinion around the idea that American independence was not impossible, but indeed inevitable.

Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution
H istorian Beeman takes up what the Virginia patriot denounced in 1787: the U.S. Constitution. In a day-by-day narrative, Beeman dramatizes the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, paying particular attention to the characters of the delegates and the moods of their debates.

The Public Life of the Arts in America - Despite the stunning size, quality, and economic impact of the American arts community, few citizens have an appreciation of the many public policies that influence American arts and culture. U.S. policy does and should continue to support the arts, as they serve a broad, not merely an elite, public.

D)
Damned Lies and Statistics - Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists. A very important argument in this book on how not to be snowed by statistics is that statistics actually create social problems. Only after someone measures the extent of a predicament and trumpets the findings does society decide it has a problem. Before you believe a statistic you read somewhere, read this very important book!

Don't Know Much About History : Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned. Finally, someone who tells history like it was, without the old textbook gloss that's put so many students into premature nap time and misinformed the few who stayed awake. The author, Kenneth Davis, corrects the myths and misconceptions from Columbus up through the Clinton administration, and shows that truth is more entertaining than propaganda (from "Book Review").

S)
Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do About It.
In his latest book, Air America host Thom Hartmann shows how the American middle class that was so carefully constructed by our country’s founding fathers has been systematically dismantled over the past quarter-century, and, under the guise of “freeing” the market, replaced by a system designed to line the pockets of the super-rich and corporations.

The Slave Ship - The slave ship was a machine that manufactured modernity. As it moved across the Atlantic, the world changed. It joined Europe, Africa, and the Americas, creating enormous wealth and untold misery, and its hellish voyages continue to cast a shadow over our lives. Marcus Rediker's meticulously researched book uncovers many nuggets of gold in the Slave industry, including the fact that the composer of "Amazing Grace" was once a captain of a slave ship.

The Sorrows of Empire. As of September 2001, the Department of Defense acknowledged that at least 725 military bases exist outside the United States. Actually, there are many more, since some bases exist under informal agreements or disguises of various kinds. In this compelling book, Chalmers Johnson assails both Clinton and "the boy emperor" Bush, and his cronies, with one of the most startling and engrossing accounts of exotic defense capabilities, operations and spending in print.

G)
Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln - "John Stauffer's collective biography of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln stands apart from other biographies by focusing on how each man continually remade himself, with help from women, words, self-education, physical strength, and luck. In the process Stauffer gives us the texture and feel--a "thick description"--of the strange worlds that Douglass and Lincoln inhabited. ~~ Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Great Unraveling - Losing Our Way in the New Century. This book, by New York Times Columnist and Princeton Economist, Paul Krugman, could easily be placed in our "Money Book Picks" section, since much of his analysis of what's gone wrong in our country since the 2000 elections is shown by methodically parsing the data (demonstrating, for example, how the heartland is not, statistically, more committed to family than people on the coasts). Paul Krugman is not afraid to take on the Bush administration.

H)
Hegemony or Survival - With the striking logic that is his trademark, Noam Chomsky (world-renowned M.I.T linguistics professor & political and intellectual activist) dissects America's quest for global supremacy, tracking the U.S. government's aggressive pursuit of policies intended to achieve "full spectrum dominance" at any cost. He lays out vividly how the various strands of policy - the militarization of space, the ballistic-missile defense program, unilateralism, the dismantling of international agreements, and the response to the Iraqi crisis - cohere in a drive for hegemony that ultimately threatens our survival. In our era, he argues, empire is a recipe for an earthly wasteland.

His Excellency: George Washington - "Here is the impetuous young officer whose miraculous survival in combat half-convinced him that he could not be killed. Here is the free-spending landowner whose debts to English merchants instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial power. We see the general who lost more battles than he won and the reluctant president who tried to float above the partisan feuding of his cabinet. His Excellency is a magnificent work, indispensable to an understanding not only of its subject but also of the nation he brought into being."

Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition -
It has been more than 30 years since the Bureau of the Census published an edition of Historical Statistics of the United States. Previous editions were published by the Census Bureau in 1949, 1960, and 1975. The five volumes or parts are arranged by broad topics: Population Work and Welfare, Economic Structure and Performance, Economic Sectors, and Governance and International Relations. At $1,000, it's expensive, but for statistical nerds, how can you live without this?

W)
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. "The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation," writes Chris Hedges, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. Hedges argues not for pacifism but for responsibility and humility on the part of those who wage war. This is a very powerful book, especially in the post-9/11 era in which we find ourselves.

The Working Poor - This, from the author, David Shipler, says it all: “Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back. The term by which they are usually described, ‘working poor,’ should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America.”