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. --Geov Parrish

I've just finished reading one of the most outstanding radical books on contemporary American racial issues and the sins of G.W. Bush that I've ever encountered. It's a book breathtaking in its erudition: scholarly and well-considered and thought-provoking in the extreme.

Of course, it also helps that Aaron McGruder's A Right to be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury is one of funniest damn books you'll ever read. There's no simpler way to put this: McGruder is a genius. His young African-American protagonists, stranded growing up in a very white suburb, manage to capture the essence of racial and political hypocrisies that elude most of the so-called experts and pundits, and he does it in four panels and a few lines and words. Every day.

A Right to be Hostile is a collection of all the Boondocks strips, from its first 1999 (!) syndication to this past year's entries. McGruder has been merciless on Bush, especially post-9-11, but the inclusion of the strip's beginnings shows clearly that McGruder doesn't need Bush in order to be funny--or scathing. And he's every bit as capable of skewering the follies of "our" side, too. This is a book that will sit in your bathroom for months, and everyone in the house is going to be taking a long, long time on the john. Get this book, educate yourself, and laugh yourself silly in the process. --G.P.

Aaron McGruder is just one of the cartoonists featured and interviewed in Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists, edited by Ted Rall. Others include Max Cannon (Red Meat); Keith Knight (The K Chronicles, [th]ink); Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For); David Rees (Get Your War On); Marian Henley (Maxine!); Brian Sendelbach (Smell of Steve, Inc.); and Stephen Notley (Bob the Angry Flower)--21 artists in all. Rall interviews each cartoonist about their craft, providing an interesting inside view of the life of alternative cartooning, and offers a few pages of selected strips by each one. Attitude 2 follows on the success of Rall's first Attitude anthology, which was slightly more focused on political cartooning; the second anthology is slightly more eclectic, but the political content is still strong. Many of these cartoonists are only published in a few alternative city weeklies around the country, so this anthology does a great service by bringing together the cream of contemporary cartooning that most of us never get to see. The large-format book is available for $13.95 from NBM Publishing, http://www.nbmpublishing.com. --Lansing Scott