A number of interesting political books came out this holiday season. Several of them, by some odd alignment of the planets, are written by friends or acquaintances.

I'd hoped to review them here last issue, just in time for holiday gift-giving. Alas, instead I landed in the hospital for a few days - nothing too serious, but precisely at the time we were producing the 12/17/03 issue. So, these reviews didn't happen in time for Christmas. But plenty of you probably got gift certificates to bookstores as presents, since your relatives have no idea what else might interest you. And, others of you just might like to go read. So - as always-- there's still time to read more books. Here are a few to consider...

For the last five years, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair have donated for ETS! use their Anderson Valley Advertiser column, Nature and Politics. Within the duo, Cockburn generally focuses more on the Politics, and St. Clair - one of the country's best environmental reporters - on the Nature. Now, St. Clair has a new book out through Common Courage Press, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature, that essentially collects and arranges, in relentless five-page chapters, years' worth of his 2,000 word stories, reports from the frontlines of the decimation of nature, along with updates and overviews.

After a decade of such reports, often obituaries for what has been slaughtered by Clinton, Bush, and their corporate masters, the effect can be overwhelming. Fortunately, there's no shortage of people waging courageous battle against this frequently irreversible madness - and many of their stories, too, are in here. St. Clair lives outside Portland, and while he is a reporter of national repute and scope, much of his wrath is specific to the Pacific Northwest and its glorious habitats - not just old growth - that are being devoured on a daily basis. Here in Seattle, Ground Zero in a 100-mile-long explosion of asphalt now paving what previous generations cut clear, it's easy to forget what we've lost, and, even more importantly, what's still within a day's drive and in danger. The stories of "Been Brown," the mountains, rivers, reservations, dams, mines, and waters, are a helpful reminder. They also remind us that industrial cities and their automobiles are an environment, too, and that our society's fouling of the planet has its most immediate and brutal consequences on people for those of us - especially poor people - in the places where most of us live. Environmentalism is not just about wilderness.

For all of these issues, our planet's exploiters have names and addresses. For a directory of who's savaging our trees, check out Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests, by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan. Jensen and Draffan are both local treasures. Jensen is author of, among many other works, the seminal "Railroads and Clearcuts," and, most recently, the astonishing "The Culture of Make Believe." Draffan is a guy I've been bumping into for years; he has a national reputation as well, as an extraordinarily talented and resourceful researcher of corporate malfeasance.

Here, together, they trace the fate of our world's forests. This is a local story; beyond the obvious presence in our midst of the predatory Weyerahaueser, the reality is that logging all around the world is being managed as a single resource by the same handful of companies also despoiling our back yard. What's happening here is dreadful - but what's happening in places like Siberia and Chile is even worse. And it's the same story, with the same people.

Jensen and Draffan share a talent for systematic argumentation: laying out all the excuses for predatory policies, one by one dismantling them, and then advocating similarly for more enlightened approaches. Along with invaluable sections on resources and activism, "Strangely" is uniquely helpful for would-be activists wanting to wade into this war - with the ammunition to fight back. Read these two books, and surely there's a patch of our planet somewhere that you'll be resolved to help return to a healthier state.

Seattle City Council member Nick Licata also has a new book that deals with forests and the environment, and it's not what you'd think. It's hard for me to be objective about this labor of love, for two reasons: first, that I'd known Nick for years even before he was elected in 1997, and second, because I don't read all that many fantasy books written for young teens. The ones I have read this year - like Philip Pullman's stunning "Dark Materials" trilogy--are utterly state of the art for the form. (Pullman's trilogy was the best fiction I've read this year - period.) Holding Licata's first-time effort to that standard would be hopelessly unfair. ("Yeah, your garage band is pretty good. But The Beatles were better.")

With that caveat to my unpracticed eye, Licata's book, Princess Bianca and the Vandals, does what I like in good teen fiction - it treats its young protagonists like fully rounded people (but recognizably kids, not pint-sized adults), and treats its readers with respect, too; "Princess Bianca," like Pullman and other great "children's" authors, tackles issues and themes where many adult fiction works fear to tread.

All this, of course, is a byproduct of the more important thing - a road adventure, wherein Bianca and her colorful cohorts deal with bureaucrats, an evil wizard, the Ruby Ring of Tiara, and invading developers in order to revive her poisoned father (the king) and save her city. All allegories to local or global politics are surely pure coincidence, and many would go right over the heads of the book's intended audience - but the adventure and the broader themes won't. It's a quick, entertaining, well-written book.

(One quibble: from "Princess Bianca"'s back cover's promise of "A Post Modern Tale of Two Kingdoms," to the inside pre-publication raves from Patty Murray, activist Jonathan Betz-Zall, and Earth Day founder Denis Hayes, folks considering buying this book shouldn't be put off by its marketing. Licata and his marketers did his book an injustice. This is a fun read, not a heavy-handed Message Book. Sadly, it's hard to tell otherwise before you read it.)

It's no surprise any longer in America that, at any given moment, somebody's watching you, investigating you, keeping tabs on you. For a country whose pioneer mythos is of self-reliance in a (stolen) wilderness, the United States has become a society where nobody, anywhere, escapes surveillance. Privacy is both a myth and a cruel joke. Its loss has been written about fairly often. But the real contribution of Christian Parenti's new The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America is that it shows that national myth to be exactly that - a myth - by methodically tracing the genealogy of modern surveillance, from 18th century methods of slave identification to the Industrial Revolution, Taylorism, snd the steady expansion of the power of the state, the record-keeping made possible by advances in technology, DNA identification, and the newest emphasis, post-9/11, on what can only eventually lead to centralized global computer files containing everything there is to know on all seven (or however many) billion of us.

From then 'til now, people in power have always used whatever tools were at hand to try to monitor and control the rabble. It's just the tools that are now so much more powerful. It's scary stuff - particularly since most of the compilers, editors, and users of this information on us are invisible to our eyes. Parenti's meticulous research and documentation - as in his previous book on prisons, "Lockdown America" - can make for depressing reading. But a culture of surveillance can't be challenged until we know who the enemies are. To find out, read this - and then look back over your shoulder. And wave.

For some reason, I've never been as much of a fan of Project Censored as I should be. Their latest annual report, Censored 2004: Media Democracy in Action by professor Peter Phillips and the students and staff at California's Sonoma State University, is a good primer as to PC's strengths and weaknesses.

Both, I think, start with the name and the premise. Are there endless examples of important stories that are distorted, buried, or utterly unreported in big corporate media (i.e., TV networks, NY Times, Wash. Post, etc.)? Absolutely, and Censored 2004 has a solid list of 25 of this past year's most important, with a chapter on each, additional chapters following up on a dozen such stories from past years, and useful compendiums of sources and alternative news outlets. As a thumbnail resource book for those wanting additional, well-presented information on the depredations of Bush and corporate America, this is a fine effort.

But for me, it's not a book of censored stories. Phillips has, over the past several years, created a progressive political franchise out of what I think is a flawed premise, unstated but implied in the imagination of many: stories such as these were poised to scandalize America, but were yanked off the air and off the printed page by alarmed or frightened editors, CEOs, politicians, and advertisers. In other words, the atories were censored, by unseen little men (and women) with big red pencils, censorship as Orwell taught us all to imagine it.

Even though it's a favorite activist trope, that's not how corporate media works in America. The problem is the word, "censored," to describe a problem that's very different (but in some ways worse): because most major news reporting in America is either directly or indirectly a money-making undertaking, story selection is not--ever - based on whether reporters or editors think a given story is suitably important. Editors and programmers are trying to attract the largest possible audience in a given demographic. That's the god they serve. Gatekeeping that prevents major stories from getting deserved attention rarely comes from CEOs or advertisers; it comes from the editors and reporters themselves, their understanding of the world, and what they think their audiences know and are interested in seeing and hearing. For TV, add in considerations as to whether there's good visuals to the story and whether it's a simple story that can be told quickly. In modern TV news, 30 seconds is an eternity.

Censored 2004's top "censored" story - "The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance," a reference to the long ideological history typified by the Project for a New American Century, is utterly unnewsworthy by most corporate editors' criteria. PNAC spawned position papers over a decade ago - but they were among the thousands churned out by DC think tanks each year. The fact that many of its authors are now in power and putting such planks into practice is no surprise; Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. are merely acting on their well-established ideological beliefs. For the DC press corps, which has been working with most of these guys for 30 years, old position papers are one of the least interesting stories imaginable - and they likely think it'd be even less interesting to their audiences.

Similarly, "Censored 04"'s Top 25 list consists (mostly) of unarguably important developments - but they're frequently long-term trends, not single events; many are complex and involve issues and/or decision-makers usually outside the public eye; and few have obvious visual elements.

They're not the sorts of stories daily corporate newsrooms are set up for. That's not censorship - it's editors exercising the judgment they're paid to exercise. Just because I might not agree with their decision doesn't make it "censored," especially when I'm not using the criteria they've spent a career being paid, and rewarded, for using. It's like saying my hip-hop record is being "censored" because the local country music station won't play it. That's not what they're designed to do. TV network news isn't news; it's entertainment with a news theme. It will never offer comprehensive summaries of current events, and stories that are complex, politics, or make America or its most powerful politicians will always get scant attention. Any news director or editor will claim that that's "media democracy in action" - they're giving the audience what they think the audience wants.

"Censored 2004" is a valuable resource, well worth getting. But corporate media is not a monolith. Those of us who want more anti-authoritarian stories (because the real bias in such outlets is not so much rightward as for whomever's in power, regardless of ideology), and those of us who want more hard news is general, need to start, run, and/or support alternative media (like ETS!). And we also need to keep demanding that important stories be included in the "news" programs seen and heard by most Americans. By definition, Project Censored suggests a centralized effort to ensure that such stories can't or won't happen. Use this book to educate yourself - but don't allow the premise to discourage you. We shouldn't give up that easily.--Geov Parrish