CD's

"Amy Goodman has taken investigative journalism to new heights of exciting, informative, and probing analysis."—Noam Chomsky

"You can learn more of the truth about Washington and the world from one week of Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! than from a month of Sunday morning talk shows. Make that a year of Sunday talk shows. That's because Amy, as you will discover on every page of this book, knows the critical question for journalists is how close they are to the truth, not how close they are to power."—From the Preface by Bill Moyers

Amy Goodman, award-winning host of the daily internationally broadcast radio and television program Democracy Now!, breaks through the corporate media's lies, sound bites, and silence in this wide-ranging new collection of articles. In place of the usual suspects—the "experts" who, in Goodman's words, "know so little about so much, explain the world to us, and get it so wrong"—this accessible, lively collection allows the voices the corporate media exclude and ignore to be heard loud and clear. From community organizers in New Orleans, to the courageous American soldiers who've said "No" to Washington's wars, to the victims of torture and police violence, we are given the extraordinary opportunity to hear ordinary people standing up and speaking out. Written with all of the fierce intelligence and passion for truth that millions have come to expect from Amy Goodman's reportage, Breaking the Sound Barrier proves the power that independent journalism can play in the struggle for a better world, one in which ordinary citizens are the true experts of their own lives and communities.

Amy Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist and syndicated columnist, author and the host/executive producer of Democracy Now! airing on nearly 800 stations worldwide. Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' for "developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.". Goodman is the co-author with her brother, journalist David Goodman, of three New York Times bestsellers: Standing Up to the Madness, Static, and The Exception to the Rulers.

The Americas, both North and South, have been in motion with elections and political shifts that Noam Chomsky explores here with his characteristic independence and insight.

"Popular activism has repeatedly brought about substantial gains in freedom and justice," he writes. "The authentic hope of the Obama campaign is that the 'grass roots army' organized to take instructions from the leader might 'break free' and return to 'old ways of doing politics,' by direct participation in action."

In Latin America, Bolivia and Haiti in particular, Chomsky shows how direct participation in action has put into practice a different model of democracy. We have much to learn from these struggles, which could portend more far-reaching, badly needed changes.

"During the past decade, Latin America has become the most exciting region of the world," he explains. "For the first time in half a millennium, South America is beginning to take its fate into its own hands."

At stake is the question of the very nature of democracy.

"Washington has supported democracy if and only if it contributes to strategic and economic interests, a policy that continues without change through all administrations, to the present," he explains.

Professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Noam Chomsky is widely regarded to be one of the foremost critics of US foreign policy in the world. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. Among his recent books are The New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival and Failed States.

Ranging from colossal Californian supermarkets to wrecked Indian paddy fields and bankrupt African coffee farms, this audio edition of the bestselling book scrutinizes the global food network. With a combination of hard-hitting investigative journalism and personable storytelling, several questions are explored, such as How can starving people also be obese? Why does everything have soy in it? and How do petrochemicals and biofuels control the price of food? Shocking evidence points to an epidemic of farmer suicides in famine-stricken Asia and Africa, yet there is great cause for hope as international resistance movements work to create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system. Going beyond ethical consumerism, the study explains the steps, from seed to store to plate, to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of both farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.

Martín Espada has been called “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors.” Over the course of seven award winning collections, Espada has attracted an enormous cadre of fans who applaud his condemnation of injustice across the Americas, his poetic sensibility, his sharp humor, and his ear for the interplay of English and Spanish. The publication of Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton) was a landmark event in the career of this beloved poet and an American Library Association Notable Book of 2003. Although his commanding reading style often drives audiences to standing ovations, Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo is Espada’s first-ever audio CD, featuring over 70 minutes of the best poems of his 20-year career. The resulting collection is a long-awaited addition to the oeuvre of one of America’s most important poets and a natural accompaniment to his award-winning selected poems.

“Martín Espada wields his poetry like a flint, striking sparks, cutting to the bone. To read this work is to be struck breathless, and, surely, to come away changed.”—Barbara Kingsolver

“[He’s] one of a handful of American poets who are forging a new American language, one that tells the unwritten history of the continent, speaks truth to power, and sings songs of selves we can no longer silence. His ambition and his achievement remind us of Whitman, where it all begins.”—Russell Banks

Martín Espada is the recipient of an American Book Award for Imagine the Angels of Bread, also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors include the PEN/Revson Fellowship and the Paterson Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Nation and The Best American Poetry. A professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Espada averages 40 performances a year across the country.

“A wonderful book, filled with hooks’s love and encouragement.”—Alice Walker

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery was the first nonfiction book to address the emotional needs of black women from a political perspective. With its watershed publication, bell hooks reminded us that those at the frontlines in battles against racism and sexism must take time to suture the wounds caused by oppression even as they continue to struggle. Although self-help and affirmation books have exploded as a genre, fourteen years later Sisters of the Yam remains one of the few books to theorize care of the self as an integral part of the fight for social justice. Purposely engaging the openings made possible through the sharing of personal stories—her own and others’—hooks also critically interrogates many aspects of contemporary black female experience. With a holistic view of recovery that encompasses friendship, employment, parenting, romantic love, physical health, and spirituality, hooks argues that developing strategies for self-care and communities of love and resistance can help us repair the personal and collective damage exacted by oppression.

For those new to this classic as well as those who will be delighted to return to it, this audio edition of Sisters of the Yam makes the work accessible to an even wider audience. An important addition for libraries, activist organizations, book clubs, and personal stereos, Sisters of the Yam remains a vital resource for anyone who seeks to better understand the many dimensions of black women’s struggle for justice.

“Don’t you wonder: why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again?” This is the question posed by Karl Marx in Howard Zinn’s witty and insightful “play on history.” The premise of this one-man performance is that history’s most famous, and oft-misrepresented, radical is resurrected after agitating with the authorities of the afterlife to clear his name. Through a bureaucratic error, however, Marx lands in modern-day Soho, New York, rather than his old stomping ground in London, to make his case.

Here Howard Zinn, nationally known for his best-selling book A People’s History of the United States, introduces us to the Karl Marx we never learned about in school—a most human of revolutionaries, driven by a deep passion for social justice. Along the way we meet Marx’s wife Jenny, his children, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and a host of other characters.

Zinn’s Marx in Soho rescues Marx’s ideas and fighting spirit for a new generation and shows how, far from casting him to the grave, our troubled times need Marx more than ever.

Howard Zinn is the one of the nation’s leading historians and champions of social justice. In addition to A People’s History of the United States, his many books include You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train, which is also the title of a 2004 documentary on Zinn’s life, starring Matt Damon, Alice Walker, and others.

Brian Jones is an African American teacher and activist based in New York City. He has performed Marx in Soho for audiences nationwide since 1999.