Dear White America - Letter to a New Minority

How one militant union organizer fought the bosses—and national labor leaders.

In 1995, in the first contested election in the history of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney won the presidency of the nation’s largest labor federation, promising renewal and resurgence. Today, less than 7 percent of American private-sector workers belong to a union, the lowest percentage since the beginning of the twentieth century, and public employee collective bargaining has been dealt devastating blows in Wisconsin and elsewhere. What happened?

Jane McAlevey is famous—and notorious—in the American labor movement as the hard-charging organizer who racked up a string of victories at a time when union leaders said winning wasn’t possible. Then she was bounced from the movement, a victim of the high-level internecine warfare that has torn apart organized labor. In this engrossing and funny narrative—that reflects the personality of its charismatic, wisecracking author—McAlevey tells the story of a number of dramatic organizing and contract victories, and the unconventional strategies that helped achieve them.

Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) argues that labor can be revived, but only if the movement acknowledges its mistakes and fully commits to deep organizing, participatory education, militancy, and an approach to workers and their communities that more resembles the campaigns of the 1930s—in short, social movement unionism that involves raising workers’ expectations (while raising hell).

Turning thirty years of medical and cultural wisdom on its head, Sex, Lies, and Menopause challenges both the medical establishment and modern feminists to prove that menopause does not have to be deadly.

In this revolutionary work -- a landmark that signals the true beginning of feminist medicine -- a doctor, a philosopher, and a scientist prove that by postponing marriage and motherhood, women have accelerated the aging process, resulting in earlier menopause and, ultimately for thousands, earlier death.

In Sex, Lies, and Menopause, T. S. Wiley, Julie Taguchi, M.D., and Bent Formby, Ph.D., offer strong evidence that the use of synthetic hormones leads to cancer and advise women to turn to natural hormone-replacement therapy -- derived from plants, not drugs -- to help them elevate their estrogen level for greater energy, libido, and intellectual capacity.

Provocative, empowering, and scientifically sound, Sex, Lies, and Menopause addresses the inherent benefits of natural progesterone, reveals the lies advanced by the medical and drug establishments, and challenges women to demand a medical future where their health comes first. The research presented in Sex, Lies, and Menopause will at last allow women to create their own plan of action to put themselves safely on the path to better health and hormonal balance at any stage of life.

After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Since the triumph of Castro, politicians and historians have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin powerfully challenges these views in this classic work. In doing so, he uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries holding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of equality; and of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the region.

With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin argues that the Latin American Cold War was a struggle not between political liberalism and Soviet communism but two visions of democracy—one vibrant and egalitarian, the other tepid and unequal—and that the conflict’s main effect was to eliminate homegrown notions of social democracy. Updated with a new preface by the author and an interview with Naomi Klein, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest order—a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond.

“This work admirably explains the process in which hopes of democracy were brutally repressed in Guatemala and its people experienced a civil war lasting for half a century.”—International History Review

“A richly detailed, humane, and passionately subversive portrait of inspiring reformers tragically redefined by the Cold War as enemies of the state.”—Journal of American History