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Books by Philip Berrigan
Widen the Prison Gates: Writing from Jails /
Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary /
The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence
No More Strangers /
The Eight Beatitudes and Nuclear Resistance /
Disciples and Dissidents
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Who Are the
Real Enemies?
By Philip
Berrigan
Yesterday was my birthday (forty-eight), my third
in jail. People are embarrassingly kind and thoughtful. Frankly,
I would have preferred to forget it.
A rumble begins in my dormitory, where seventy-five men live
in uneasy truce. Overcrowding is such a burden that the enemy is
not the Man, who stays out of sight pretty much, but the guy in
the upper bunk or in the next one. The Man doesn't bug
you--doesn't talk all night, doesn't snore, doesn't scatter his
garbage, doesn't close the window when it's warm outside,
doesn't steal from you, doesn't snitch on you, doesn't betray
your confidence, doesn't curse you out. But in our dorm the
next guy is likely to. Everyone is just too close.
In any event, this is a drug joint, and drugs--hard and
soft--move despite measures to choke off the import. the other
day, when returning from a visit and its customary strip-search,
a guy said to me, "I've been here two years, and I've never
seen them catch drugs by stripping people down. You know what I
saw in the john the other day? Five different guys vomiting up
drugs. They get'em in a condom or a balloon from folks, swallow
them, get back to their dorm, drink warm water, and puke them
up. Then they shoot them, sometimes in broad daylight."
Such being the bare facts of dormitory life, rhubarbs and
rumbles are predictable--indeed, inevitable. Mostly they center
on cards and pools (cigarettes) and drugs (heroin). Now it
appears that a young French-Canadian has gotten drugs from, or
has dealt drugs to, some Puerto Ricans. There was, at any rate,
some complicity, and the Spanish-speaking accuse him of ratting
them out. He denies the charge vehemently, a fight breaks out,
others umpire and quiet it down. But, alas, the Puerto Ricans
return with a task force intent upon retribution, carrying
pipes, two-by-fours, broomstick handles. They work over Frenchie
in a brief, violent encounter, and leave him with his head
split.
He is in the hospital now, not badly hurt. I talk with one of
the whites standing by, suffering over one man going down under
that vengeful little mob of Latins. The only lesson he draws is:
"Them Spics are together, and we ain't!"
He's wrong, poor guy! The Puerto Ricans are not
"together"; neither are the whites nor the blacks.
Those who are together are the Nixons, Mitchells, Rockefellers,
Mellons, Fords who know no other way of life except lordship of
the world, no other relationship to people except domination and
control. What my poor friend does not know is that Big brother
creates "enemies" for the poor to fight--and they are
invariably one another. What's the difference between a prison
dormitory and 116 Street and Third Avenue? They're both ghettos.
And in the ghetto one never resists the right enemies. They're
not around--they're in the boardrooms, in the Bahamas or Nice,
or in Westchester and in Greenwich, Connecticut.
So one turns on the brother, the one who bugs you with petty
irritations. He doesn't overcharge you for squalid, rotten
housing; he doesn't begrudge you the miserable subsistence of
welfare; he doesn't raise and process the drugs overseas, and
sneak them into the country through his craven, greedy slaves;
he doesn't hate you because you're black or Spanish-speaking; he
doesn't steal your sons for war; he doesn't hang a "cheap
labor" label on you for your life's remainder; he hasn't
decided that you are human offal, unworthy of dignity, incapable
of feeling. The ones who do these things are not at hand; they
have no desire to see their handiwork. So one rages against the
brother and loses one's innocence terrorizing the innocent.
Source: Philip Berrigan.
Widen the
Prison Gates: Writings
from Jails April
1970-September 1972 Danbury
Federal Correctional Institute October 1971. Publisher:
Simon and Schuster 1973
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The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
By Daniel Yergin
Renowned energy authority Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Prize, in this gripping account of the quest for the energy the world needs—and the power and riches that come with it. A master story teller as well as one of the world's great experts, Yergin proves that energy is truly the engine of global political and economic change, as well as central to the battle over climate change. From the jammed streets of Beijing, the shores of the Caspian Sea, and the conflicts in the Mideast, to Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley, Yergin takes us inside the decisions and choices that are shaping our future. Without understanding the realities of energy examined in The Quest, we may surrender our place at the helm of history. One of our great narrative writers, Yergin tells the inside stories—of the oil market, the rise of the "petrostate," the race to control the resources of the former Soviet empire, and the massive corporate mergers that transformed the oil landscape. He shows how the drama of oil—the struggle for access to it, the battle for control, the insecurity of supply, the consequences of its use, its impact on the global economy, and the geopolitics that dominate it—will continue to shape our world. He takes on the toughest questions—will we run out of oil, and are China and the United States destined to conflict over oil? Yergin also reveals the surprising and turbulent history of nuclear, coal, electricity, and natural gas. He investigates the "rebirth of renewables" —biofuels and wind, as well as solar energy, which venture capitalists are betting will be "the next big thing" for meeting the needs of a growing world economy. He makes clear why understanding this greening landscape and its future role are crucial. |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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