One of the things Robert Kuttner’s Debtors’ Prison does well is that it ties together many of the individual fights progressives are battling over into a general argument for why our economy is broken 5 years after the Great Recession began. There are those fighting both Republicans and some Democrats on topics ranging from austerity to foreclosure relief and financial sector accountability, while there are fellow activists in Europe fighting against the ECB’s policy of tight money and anti-democratic takeovers of local policy.

Do you think the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established abortion rights? If you’re like the 53% of Americans polled by Gallup recently, chances are good that you don’t. In that case, you will be dismayed to learn, in Crow After Roe: How “Separate but Equal” Has become the New Standard in Women’s Health and How We can Change That, about the many creative ways that anti-abortion activists have undercut the right to abortion in the past forty years.

There are several books worth of material contained in “The Democracy Project.” The first is a concise but highly informative and inspiring retelling of the early days of Occupy Wall Street, which is considerably better than many of the books published in the last year and a half bearing the word “Occupy” in the title.

It is a breath of fresh air to find an account of the Occupy movement that is avowedly radical instead of liberal, optimistic instead of regretful or bitter, and based on a first-hand insider perspective. The origins of Occupy Wall Street have become much contested, and at this point it is a badge of pride for some to say they were there at Zuccotti Park on the first day, September 17, 2011. But Graeber was there long before that, at the first General Assembly in New York following Adbusters’ call – which, as he tells it, was almost hijacked so that it was not a GA at all but rather yet another rally with designated speakers, until he and other anarchist-leaning “horizontals” who were there dragged it back on course.

Bob McChesney and I have written a stack of books and articles together. We have co-founded a national media reform group, Free Press. And we have maintained a multi-decade discourse on politics, economics, society and rock-and-roll. So you should take my assessment of his role as a media critic, watchdog and analyst with that in mind.

But when Bob McChesney raises the alarm about a media issue, I say, pay attention. Even if no one else is sounding the alarm, pay attention. Why? Because no one spends more time than McChesney engaged in the serious endeavor of figuring out how we now communicate, how we will communicate, how powerful media corporations seek to influence that communication and how government agencies can and do fail to protect the public interest in a wide-open and wide-ranging democratic discourse.

It has been four-and-a half years since the largest banks that were largely responsible for causing the global financial crisis were rescued from their own self-inflicted wounds by a government that deemed each one so large and so systemically significant that its failure would bring down the entire system. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, which cost millions their jobs and resulted in trillions of dollars of lost wealth, surely our regulators would have addressed the root causes of the crisis and lived up to their promises to reform our financial system so that never again it would be subject to the dangerous practices of executives at giant banking institutions. Right?

Think again.

Katrina Hazzard-Donald’s Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System is a rich, academic study of Hoodoo, tracing the religion’s root back to the tribes people of Africa who were forcibly brought to America as slaves, relying on their religious belief system, including charms and mojo bags to (successfully) protect them from often cruel masters. She follows Hoodoo through watershed changes in cultural landscape of America which wrought significant changes in African American culture, society, family structure, and religion.

Published in April 2012, Mr. Luce’s book has been widely praised as carefully balanced and filled with evocative analysis and reportage. With a cast of dozens of academic, business and governmental thinkers, it wrestles with America’s relative economic decline, how the global economy is increasingly siphoning away America’s ability to innovate and manufacture, and a wide range of U.S. policy failures from education to healthcare to reinventing government. Too often, Internet-entranced readers like me look for distillations to digest quickly, rather than dwell on the fascinating interviews, anecdotal treasure chest and hard-nosed analyses in Mr. Luce’s detailed yet highly entertaining book.

Richard Wolff’s latest book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, makes provocative observations about our economic woes and proposes thoughtful solutions. His writing is concise and clear so even if you do not agree with his perspective on the world you come away with a clear understanding not only of what he thinks, but why you’re thinking doesn’t align with his.

You will read about such ideas only rarely in the news pages of mainstream magazines and newspapers – and then typically in a tone that is, at best, jaundiced. Wolff gets even less attention from radio, television and cable programs, with the lone exception of Bill Moyers who has been shunted off to a time slot guaranteed to minimize his audience.

There will not be a Book Salon today. Thanks, Bev

As we see the conservative movement embracing and legitimizing some of the country’s most extreme personalities and their rhetoric, And Hell Followed With Her reminds us of the dangerous consequences of mainstreaming radicalism.

David Neiwert has explored far-right extremism in books including The Eliminationists, Over the Cliff, Death on the Fourth of July and In God’s Country. In And Hell Followed With Her, he investigates the vigilante groups “patrolling” the U.S.-Mexico border, the “Patriot” movements of the Pacific Northwest and their enablers in Washington, D.C.