One handy way to keep up on the outpouring of high-quality progressive-themed books is with FDL's weekly Book Salon (coming up today at 5pm ET)

No, that's not Arianna Huffington. It's Tracey Ullman as Arianna, whom she's been lampooning rather mercilessly on her current Showtime series, Tracey Ullman's State of the Union. The real Arianna is the guest on today's Firedoglake Book Salon, on the occasion of the publication of her new book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. That's today at 5pm ET, 2pm PT.

"Politicians, always reading the cultural winds, make their life's work convincing 50 percent plus one of their constituency that they understand their fears and hopes, can honor and redeem them, can make them safe and lead them toward their dreams. Studying the process by which a notably successful politician achieves that task, again and again, across changing cultural conditions, is a deep way into an understanding of those fears and dreams--and especially, how those fears and dreams change.
--from the preface to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland (Scribner)

As you see, I got my copy of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, and also of Cliff Schecter's The Real McCain. Again, not that I'm plugging Amazon, but two days from placing order to receiving books--with hefty discounts and "free super saver shipping"--isn't bad!

At the time I made mention of the remarkable flowering we've seen in recent years of important, exciting books written from an unabashedly progressive standpoint--many of them coming from writers who have established their bona fides in the progressive blogosphere. This is roughly parallel to the outpouring of hard-core right-wing propaganda tomes over the last several decades--with the obvious "but"s. Hardly any of the right-wing propagandists had any interest in truth, knowledge, enlightenment, or understanding, just hammering their ideological psychoses and rallying the faithful to their clarion cry of ignorance and hatred. It was the vanguard of a movement built on storm-trooper-enforced knee-jerk ideology.

And of course the right-wing ideologues had access to a cadre of free-spending-zillionaire sugar daddies, to pay them to write and to publish their damned books. These days the right-wing propagandists, not surprisingly given that their world view is built on delusions and lies, that the progressive movement is funded entirely by George Soros. I don't doubt that Mr. Soros is contributing generously to progressive projects of his choosing, but virtually none of the specific ones the wingnuts go batshit over have any connection to him.

No, in the book world we've experienced a growing willingness of mainstream publishers to go out on a limb--as they seem to see it--with credentialed non-right-wing writers and the emergence of hardy independent publishers committed to the quest for truth--as in the case of Jeffrey Feldman's Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, just published by Ig Publishing.

As I mentioned, my schedule, or perhaps just the state of my brain, makes book-reading an elusive goal, making it hard for me to keep up on the literally dozens of titles I've hoped to get to over the last few years. One resource I meant to mention is Firedoglake's weekly Bo0k Salon, where the author participates in a live online chat with a moderator carefully matched to the book.

If you read this in time and have nothing else to do, coming up today (as noted above) is Arianna Huffington. If you can't or couldn't catch the live chat, of course, it's all still accessible in the Book Salon archive, along with all the other titles that have been covered.

In addition, if you have books you especially want to commend to DWT readers' attention, you can either throw them in a comment (or comments), or drop me an e-mail at KenFromDWT@aol.com.

Happy reading!

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