'American Monsters: 44 Rats, Blackhats, and Plutocrats'

[devilgrrl]

Edited by Jack Newfield and Mark Jacobson

I'm reading this at the moment and is it ever a page turner! Check it out!

Here's a good review of the book:

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Such is the kind of project that is American Monsters: 44 Rats, Blackhats, and Plutocrats and, understood as such, it is a fun, conversation-starting book. Editors Jack Newfield and Mark Jacobson have assembled an impressive roster of contributors to write short, diverse essays ranging from turgid to hilarious skewering “forty-four of the worst citizens America has ever produced.”

Divided up into categories such as “Low Creatures in High Office,” “Confederates,” “Unholy Holymen,” “Plutocrats and Despoilers,” and “Culture Criminals” and “The Ninth Circle – The Worst of the Worst,” American Monsters goes after the big ones (Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond, James H. Peabody and Henry Ford), as well as targeting less obvious abominations such as Webster Thayer (the judge who condemned Sacco and Vanzetti to death), Ty Cobb (the notoriously racist baseball legend) and fascist-sympathizer (and Wasteland editor) Ezra Pound.

American Monsters is a collection replete with real treasures. Rocker Steve Earle goes after the unjustly-lionized murderer of countless Native Americans, President Andrew Jackson, provocatively asking the reader to imagine a German Jew paying for movie tickets with bank notes festooned with Hitler’s portrait:

Far-fetched? Maybe in Germany, but not in America. Not if you’re a descendant of one of the once proud Native American nations of what is now the Southeastern United States: the Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole and Cherokee. And not when you consider that the face on the United States twenty dollar bill is that of none other than Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, the seventh president of the United States. (page 3)

more: http://www.sevenoaksmag.com/commentary/44_comm2.html