Russ Kick (ed.)
New York: the Disinformation Company, 2002, pb, $24.95.
Distributed in the UK by Turnaround ()
£17.99 in the UK
Another massive anthology from the Disinformation people. This is 11″ by 9″ – roughly A4 sized – 345 pages, weighing in at 2 lbs and 11 ounces. Picking it up probably counts as low impact aerobics. The rear cover tells us that in it ‘an amazing group of investigative journalists, researchers, commentators, dissidents and academics peels back consensus reality and shows us what’s really happening.’ Well, there certainly are some interesting stories and viewpoints that are not given much, if any, major media exposure; but ‘what’s really happening’ is a dumb slogan. It is an interesting group: from Robert Sterling and Jonathan Vankin on the conspiracy theory-for-the-hell-of-it wing to Howard Zinn via William Blum, to the famous critic of psychiatry, Thomas Szasz, critics of globalisation Noreena Hertz and Greg Palast – Palast gets the opening essay – and Arianna Huffington attacking the pharmaceutical industry. That Huffington? Yes, the erstwhile Mrs Bernard Levin.
The content ranges from main-stream parapolitics to a section on true crime which includes an essay by a former police chief and author of B-grade policiers, Joseph McNamara. But quite what serial killers and Charles Mason are doing alongside the repertoire of what we might call mainstream American paranoia, Waco, 9/11 and Votescam, I’m not clear. Maybe it is just as editor Kick says in his introduction, that after 9/11 and the birth of the new (even more) repressive America, dissent in any form is needed. Amen to that. The book also contains what I think is a unique disclaimer Such is the political spread of the authors here that Kick feels obliged to tell us that, ‘No contributor necessarily endorses the message of any other contributor’. Who would think otherwise?