Words, pages, chapters, thoughts, vitality

It's not like I'm trying to start a book club like some famous female TV personality once did in some covert attempt to sway the middle and upper class women to be told by gentle, yet superliminal peer pressure to read from middle-range sappy fiction by artists who wouldn't have been heard from except for the whims of a mega-huge TV star with a low tolerance for pushing the envelope or respecting her audience's threshold for something beyond the Southern-fried novel or from the "Lifetime" Movie of the Week latitude and longitude.

No, nothing like that at all.

Instead, I just want to pass on a couple great books I read on airplanes between my Thanksgiving and Christmas travels. The planes my wife and I were on didn't have films (well, one did, but our flight was something like 30 minutes too short for "Minority Report" or "Men in Black 2"), so we happily fell back on our in-flight literary stash that we wrestled through airport security (which, to be fair, were extremely competent and friendly despite the busiest travel days of the year).

I mean, it was either that or go to the airport bookstore and buy either:

a) A jingoistic techno-thriller which drones on and on about the mechanics of some supergun or stealth bomber until you wonder if the author was raised by camo-and-caliber fetishists.

b) Low-rent erotica written by men pretending to be women and read my men wishing they were lesbians. Or being tied up and spanked by lesbians.

c) Some legal-eagle thriller about an intern who stumbles onto some massive conspiracy involving the intern's mentor/the president/some important company Daddy works for. Romance is involved, usually with a journalist. Sex scenes are found within the first five chapters and then in the last third of the novel.

c, part two) Major legal case involving a lawyer in way over his or her head. Lots of banter and characters tossed in along the way. Cops hate lawyers. Judges are wise or crooked. Be on the look out for the minor character who helps spell everything out in the last third of the book.

d) Some crap by Stephen King or Michael Crichton. One writes at length about some horror infesting a town and going into great, painful detail about the townspeople, what they ate, their daily flossing schemes, their family pets and painful childhoods. If they are lucky, they die when the writer isn't looking. The other write about a bunch of junk science using wickedly smart genius-level scientists who aren't clever enough to get out of the way of a overblown novel about stuff the guys from Wired wrote about a few months ago. The world, as always, is saved.

e) Serial killer on the loose. This can be true crime or fiction. Both are gory.

Anyway, both of my books are non-fiction and historical in nature. At the very least, you’ll look smart while you nibble on your inflight peanuts.

Book One: "To Afghanistan and Back," by Ted Rall. Rall, an award-winning syndicated cartoonist, columnist, New Yorker and graphic novel artist, journeyed to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks to see that was really going on in regard to the Taliban, the media frenzy, and the U.S. bombing raids. Between his crude, angry pen and his essays, Rall paints the attack on Afghanistan as a dim failure for the West at best and, at worst, a cynical excuse for a land grab for a West-friendly oil pipeline (which, by the way, the West got).

If you want a no-holds-barred view of how clueless the U.S. press acts in its coverage, if you want to see the ineptitude of Bush's foreign policy, if you want to see anarchy up close, get Rall's book. It'll provide a breath of fresh air compared to CNN's or (god forbid) FOX’s coverage.

Book Two: "A Problem from Hell," by Samantha Power. Power, a writer, lecturer and human rights scholar, dissected America's reaction to genocide during the 20th century and concluded the nation did squat was whole peoples faced elimination. Alternatively heartbreaking and rage inducing, Power's book acts as a grim tour guide through the killing fields of Iraq, Rwanda, Cambodia, Germany, Bosnia and other points on the map which found their way to being reduced into mass graves. Meanwhile, the United States either lacked the will to send in forces or go to the bully pulpit to rail against the killing, even taking pains to never utter the "g-word" (genocide) because American officials knew if they did, they would have to do something. A marvelous and disquieting study in inhumanity through butchery, denial and selective diplomacy.

And it's useful to break open and start reading on an airplane when the guy next to you just won't stop talking to you. Nothing stops yammering faster than pictures of mutilated corpses floating down an African river.

In case you are interested, Power also wrote a compelling article examining how the Clinton administration stalled in stopping the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 people in 100 days (!) in Rwanda.

And you thought your boss was evil

The good folks at Multinational Monitor just put out an article detailing (and I mean detailing) the 10 worst corporations in 2002. Enjoy.