Flashpoint Press

Radicals, feminists, environmentalists. Activists for animal rights, human rights, civil rights. There are plenty of rebels and dissidents putting their asses on the line. Conversely, there's never been a shortage of reactionaries seeking to repress such vision and passion. Learning how to fight and/or defend yourself is not the same as promoting belligerent, anti-social behavior. While talk of non-violence is understandable and the struggle for peace has never been more essential, let's face it: The odds are that sooner or later you're going to end up in a confrontation that may escalate into physical violence. So, why not be prepared? Self-Defense for Radicals will get you off and running in the right direction. From eye gouges to groin punches, you'll find a powerful collection of tactics with which we can fight back. Interspersed with words of wisdom and guidance from Emma Goldman, Bruce Lee, Angela Davis, and even Patrick Swayze, this pocket-sized pamphlet will inspire readers to not only speak truth to power but also deliver a sharp elbow to power's jutting jaw. Presented in the street-smart style we've come to expect from Mickey Z., Self-Defense for Radicals dares you to re-examine what we perceive as acceptable behavior-both by the oppressors and the revolutionaries.

As a radical feminist, Antonia has never believed in Band-Aid political solutions. After years of planning, she and her lover-the charismatic and bipolar Josephine-found an independent nation for women on an abandoned oil rig. At first, they thrive. Thirty women transform the barren platform into a lush garden, capable of supplying their every need. An Eden made by Eves. But, the quest for purity supplants radical action, and tears the community apart. Antonia loses the battle to save their vision-and nearly her life. Dr. Katherine North is not a sentimental woman. But, after she reads that an old lover has died, she's driven to make peace with the woman who still haunts her, the deeply religious and conservative Amanda. When Katherine finds her, she discovers that Amanda has rewritten the history of their love affair and renounced her in the name of God. Growing up working-class and Catholic, Kitty Trevelyan never considered abortion when she got pregnant at eighteen. Now, at forty-one, she no longer believes that life begins at conception, but knows that hers certainly ended with it. Still, she loves her kids, and she's finally working on a college degree. She's been happily married twenty-three years. Happily enough. Until her professor, Faye, asks her for coffee and kisses her. Three very different women. All forty-one. With the same birthday. With the same birthmark. As the parallel lines of their lives converge, we realize what connects them: they were all once the same seventeen-year-old girl on an April morning, wondering whether she would be brave.

The prison business in the US is not based on locking up, punishing, or rehabilitating dangerous hoodlums. Follow the money and find how the prison-industrial complex fits into the New World Order of free trade and imprisoned people, the war on drugs, and capital flight.

Peter Linebaugh, in an extraordinary historical and literary tour de force, enlists the anonymous and scorned 19th century loom-breakers of the English midlands into the front ranks of an international, polyglot, many-colored crew of commoners resisting dispossession in the dawn of capitalist modernity.

A scathing indictment of U. S. domestic and foreign policy, this collection of interviews gathers incendiary insights from 10 of today's most experienced and knowledgeable activists. Whether it's Ramsey Clark describing the long history of military invasion, Alfred McCoy detailing the relationship between CIA activities and the increase in the global heroin trade, Stephen Schwartz reporting the obscene costs of nuclear armaments, or Katherine Albrecht tracing the horrors of the modern surveillance state, this investigation of global governance is sure to inform, engage, and incite readers. Full list of Interviewees: • Stephen Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U. S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, is a guest scholar at the Brooking Institute and the director of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project. • Katherine Albrecht is the director of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), and is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on consumer privacy. • Robert McChesney is the author of seven books concerned with the contradiction between a for-profit corporate media and the communications requirements of a democratic society. • J.W. Smith is the author of The World's Wasted Wealth and is the director of The Institute for Cooperative Capitalism. • Juliet Schor is co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream, and has written three books focused on trends in work and leisure, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic justice. • Alfred McCoy is the author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and was winner of the Grant Goodman Prize in 2001. • Christian Parenti is the author of Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, a critique the "incipient American police state." • Kevin Bales is an expert on modern slavery and is the author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. • Ramsey Clark was Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, playing an important role in the history of the Civil Rights movement and continuing on as unstinting critic of US foreign policy. • Anuradha Mittal is an internationally renowned expert on trade, development, human rights, democracy, and agriculture issues, and is the founder of The Oakland Institute, which works to ensure public participation and democratic debate on crucial economic and social policy issues.

The Balkans, in particular the turbulent ex-Yugoslav territory, have been among the most important world regions in Noam Chomsky's political reflections and activism for decades. His articles, public talks, and correspondence have provided a critical voice on political and social issues crucial, not only to the region, but the entire international community, including "humanitarian intervention," the relevance of international law in today's politics, media manipulations, and economic crisis as a means of political control. This volume provides a comprehensive survey of virtually all of Chomsky's texts and public talks that focus on the region of the former Yugoslavia, from the 1970s to the present. With numerous articles and interviews, this collection presents a wealth of materials appearing in book form for the first time along with reflections on events twenty-five years after the official end of communist Yugoslavia and the beginning of the war in Bosnia. The book opens with a personal and wide-ranging preface by Andrej Grubačić that affirms the ongoing importance of Yugoslav history and identity, providing a context for understanding Yugoslavia as an experiment in self-management, antifascism, and multiethnic coexistence.

We've been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But, in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we've been led astray-not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance. The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won't save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil-the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them. Part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto, The Vegetarian Myth will challenge everything you thought you knew about food politics.

The six women of the Knitting Circle meet every week to chat, eat cake, and make fabulous sweaters. Until the night they realize that they've all survived rape-and that not one of their assailants has suffered a single consequence. Enough is enough. The Knitting Circle becomes the Knitting Circle Rapist Annihilation Squad. They declare open season on rapists, with no licenses and no bag limits. With needles as their weapons, the revolution begins. A cop is stabbed through a doughnut hole and into his heart. A country-western singer is found with knitting needles jammed into both ears and his no-means-yes hit song playing. A pedophile priest is killed in the sacristy. As the Circle swells, perpetrators learn to shudder at the sight of business women with knitted briefcases, students with knitted backpacks, roller derby queens with knitted kneepads. They also push back, as organizations of men-from the Chamber of Commerce to the Department of Agriculture to the Autonomous Federated Association of Coalitions of Anarchists for Spontaneous Insurrectionary Sexual Freedom (the AFACASISF, with their unique musical style: deathvomitnoise)-issue statements against the Knitting Circle. More sinister is MAWAR (Men Against Women Against Rape), with their Bible Scrabble and their beefcake Jesus calendar-and a plot to stop the Knitting Circle. Will the Knitting Circle triumph? Or will Officer Flint learn to knit in time to infiltrate it? Will Nick the male ally brave Daisy's Craft Barn to secure more weapons for the women? Will Marilyn put down her teenage attitude and pick up her knitting needles? Will Circle member Jasmine find true love with MAWAR's Zebediah?

At the heart of a city, a river is dying, children have cancer, and people are burning with despair. From the safe distance that wealth buys, a corporation called Vexcorp counts these lives as another expense on a balance sheet. But that distance is about to collapse. Malia is an activist who has fiercely fought the everyday atrocities of environmental racism. After years of watching countless children die, she's lost faith in the possibility of systemic reform. Dennis is a lawyer who still believes that if enough people have the correct information they will do the right thing. Dujuan is a young street thug torn by a chaos of grief and rage at his little sister's death. And, Larry Gordon is Vexcorp's CEO. Their lives converge when Dujuan mugs Malia. Her scornful comparison of Dujuan to Vexcorp triggers a storm inside him. That storm only clears when he identifies the real agent of his pain: Larry Gordon. Injury requires justice, so Dujuan kidnaps Gordon and assembles a rough court to try him for murder. He picks Malia to be the judge because she knows the facts and because, as Dujuan says, "You want this as bad as me." As bystanders become involved and time runs out, Malia is forced to make grueling moral decisions between survival and loyalty, safety and courage, agency and despair. Derrick Jensen has written a novel as compelling as it is necessary: with our planet under serious threat, Malia's decisions face us all.