Wendell Potter, former Vice President of Communications at CIGNA, made national headlines in 2009 when he testified before a Senate panel, disclosing how profit-driven insurance companies engage in practices forcing millions of Americans into under-insured or uninsured status.

Since then he has worked tirelessly as an outspoken critic of corporate PR and the distortion and fear manufactured by the wealthy health insurance industry. It is a PR juggernaut that is bankrolled by millions of dollars, rivaling lobbying budgets and underwriting many “non-partisan” and “grassroots” organizations. His book, Deadly Spin, is not just an expose of health insurers but a stark warning that corporate spin is distorting our democracy.

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Wendell is currently a senior analyst at the The Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan nonprofit that produces original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern; the senior fellow on health care for the Center for Media and Democracy, an independent, non-partisan public interest organization; and speaks out on both the need for a fundamental overhaul of the American health care system and on the dangers to American democracy and society of the decline of the media as watchdog, which has contributed to the growing and increasingly unchecked influence of corporate PR. He also serves as a consumer liaison representative for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

In widely covered testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Technology Committee in June of 2009, Wendell disclosed how insurance companies, as part of their efforts to boost profits, have engaged in practices that have resulted in millions of Americans being forced into the ranks of the uninsured. Wendell also described how the insurance industry has developed and implemented strategic communications plans, based on deceptive public relations, advertising and lobbying efforts, to defeat reform initiatives.

Since then Wendell has testified before two House committees, briefed several members of Congress and their staffs, appeared with members of Congress at several press conferences, spoken at more than 100 public forums, and has been the subject of numerous articles in the U.S. and foreign media.

Noted historian Thaddeus Russell dropped by City Lights Bookstore to read from his new book, A Renegade History of the United States. The book tells a new and surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo and made America the land of the free.

In vivid portraits of renegades and their “respectable” adversaries, Russell shows that the nation’s history has been driven by clashes between those interested in preserving social order and those more interested in pursuing their own desires—insiders versus outsiders, good citizens versus bad. The more these accidental revolutionaries existed, resisted, and persevered, the more receptive society became to change.

Russell brilliantly and vibrantly argues that it was history’s iconoclasts who established many of our most cherished liberties. Russell finds these pioneers of personal freedom in the places that usually go unexamined—saloons and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, and even behind the Iron Curtain. He introduces a fascinating array of antiheroes: drunken workers who created the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women’s liberation, including “Diamond Jessie” Hayman, a madam who owned her own land, used her own guns, provided her employees with clothes on the cutting-edge of fashion, and gave food and shelter to the thousands left homeless by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; there are also the criminals who pioneered racial integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen homosexuals who broke open America’s sexual culture.

Among Russell’s most controversial points is his argument that the enemies of the renegade freedoms we now hold dear are the very heroes of our history books— he not only takes on traditional idols like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, but he also shows that some of the most famous and revered abolitionists, progressive activists, and leaders of the feminist, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the vibrant energies of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the drag queens who founded Gay Liberation.

This is not history that can be found in textbooks— it is a highly original and provocative portrayal of the American past as it has never been written before.

Judith Halberstam stopped by City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, November 3, 2011, to discuss her new book The Queer Art Of Failure (Duke University Press.)

Editor Alia Malek in conversation with Karen Korematsu

On September 20th, 2011, City Lights welcomed Alia Malek and Karen Korematsu to discuss the new book: Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice published by Voices of Witness (a nonprofit division of McSweeney’s Books).

A groundbreaking collection of oral histories, Patriot Acts tells the stories of men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the War on Terror. In their own words, narrators recount personal experiences of the post-9/11 backlash that have deeply altered their lives and communities. The eighth book in the Voice of Witness series, Patriot Acts illuminates these experiences in a compelling collection of eighteen oral histories from men and women who have found themselves subject to a wide range of human and civil rights abuses—from rendition and torture, to workplace discrimination, bullying, FBI surveillance and harassment.

Alia Malek is an author and a civil rights lawyer. Born in Baltimore to Syrian immigrant parents, her reportage has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Salon, The Christian Science Monitor, The Columbia Journalism Review, and WashingtonPost.com. Her first book was A Country Called Amreeka.

Karen Korematsu is the founder of the Fred Korematsu Civil Rights Fund, sponsored by ALC. She is the daughter of Fred Korematsu, who challenged the internment orders during WWII. Mrs. Korematsu-Haigh shares her father’s passion for social justice and continues to help support the new Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education at the Asian Law Caucus in development and outreach.

Clarence Lusane reads from The Black History of the White House

On January 20th, 2011, City Lights welcomed Clarence Lusane reading from and discussing his latest book, The Black History of the White House.

About The Black History of the White House:

Official histories of the United States have ignored the fact that 25 percent of all U.S. presidents were slaveholders, and that black people were held in bondage in the White House itself. And while the nation was born under the banner of “freedom and justice for all,” many colonists risked rebelling against England in order to protect their lucrative slave business from the growing threat of British abolitionism. These historical facts, commonly excluded from schoolbooks and popular versions of American history, have profoundly shaped the course of race relations in the United States.

In this unprecedented work, Lusane presents a comprehensive history of the White House from an African American perspective, illuminating the central role it has played in advancing, thwarting or simply ignoring efforts to achieve equal rights for all. Here are the stories of those who were forced to work on the construction of the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the determined leaders who pressured U.S. presidents to outlaw slavery, White House slaves and servants who went on to write books, Secret Service agents harassed by racist peers, Washington insiders who rose to the highest levels of power, the black artists and intellectuals invited to the White House, community leaders who waged presidential campaigns, and many others. Juxtaposing significant events in White House history with the ongoing struggle for civil rights, Clarence Lusane makes plain that the White House has always been a prism through which to view the social struggles and progress of black Americans.

Clarence Lusane is an Associate Professor of Political Science in the School of International Service at American University where he teaches and researches on international human rights, comparative race relations, social movements and electoral politics.

He is also an author, activist, scholar, lecturer, and journalist. For more than 30 years, he has written about and been active in national and international anti-racism politics, globalization, U.S. foreign policy, human rights and social issues such as education and drug policy. He has spent two years living in London conducting research on racism and human rights in Europe, and working with European institutions and NGOs.

His previous books include, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century,; Hitler’s Black Victims: The Experiences of Afro-Germans, Africans, Afro-Europeans and African Americans During the Nazi Era; Race in the Global Era: African Americans at the Millennium; No Easy Victories: A History of Black Elected Officials; African Americans at the Crossroads: The Restructuring of Black Leadership and the 1992 Elections; The Struggle for Equal Education; and Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs.

John Gibler reads from To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War

In conjunction with Global Exchange, John Gibler visited City Lights Bookstore on June 15th, 2011 to read and talk about his new book, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War.

Combining on the ground reporting and in-depth discussions with people on the front lines of Mexico’s drug war, To Die in Mexico tells behind-the scenes-stories that address the causes and consequences of Mexico’s multi-billion-dollar drug-trafficking business.

Gibler tells the hair raising stories of a Mexican journalist kidnapped, interrogated and threatened with death by the Gulf Cartel before being miraculously released; family members of people killed in the conflict; survivors of assassination attempts and massacres; along with crime-beat photographers, funeral parlor workers, government officials, convicted traffickers, cab drivers and others who find themselves working against, with, or for the drug cartels.

Gibler sees beyond the cops-and-robbers myths that pervade government and media portrayals of the unprecedented wave of violence and looks to the people of Mexico for solutions to the crisis now pushing Mexico to the breaking point.

John Gibler is a writer based in Mexico and California, the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt (City Lights Books, 2009), and a contributor to País de muertos: Crónicas contra la impunidad (Random House Mondadori, 2011). He is a correspondent for KPFA in San Francisco and has published in magazines in the United States and Mexico, including Left Turn, Z Magazine, Earth Island Journal, ColorLines, Race, Poverty, and the Environment, Fifth Estate, New Politics, In These Times, Yes! Magazine, Contralínea, and Milenio Semanal.

More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, edited by Bukowski scholar David Stephen Calonne

David Stephen Calonne stopped by City Lights Bookstore on September 8th to read from the third collection of Charles Bukowski’s writings, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man.

After toiling in obscurity for years, Charles Bukowski found fame in 1967 with his autobiographical newspaper column, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” and a book of that name in 1969. He continued writing this column, from its inception in Open City to its conclusion in High Times, through the mid-1980s.

This new collection gathers many uncollected gems from the column’s 20-year run. These stories and essays haven’t been seen in decades, making More a valuable addition to Bukowski’s oeuvre. Filled with his usual obsessions–sex, booze, gambling–More features Bukowski’s offbeat insights into politics and literature, his tortured relationships with women, and his lurid escapades on the poetry circuit. Highlighting his versatility, the book ranges from thinly veiled autobiography to fictional tales of dysfunctional suburbanites, disgraced politicians, and down-and-out sports promoters, climaxing with a long, hilarious adventure among French filmmakers, “My Friend The Gambler,” based on his experiences making the movie, Barfly. From his days at the post office through his later fame, More follows the entire arc of Bukowski’s career.

Edited by Bukowski scholar David Stephen Calonne, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man features an afterword outlining the history of the column and its effect on the author’s creative development.

Credit: Ellsberg.net

Daniel Ellsberg, legendary whistleblower and the man responsible for releasing the top secret “Pentagon Papers,” discusses Howard Zinn’s recently released “The Bomb,” published by City Lights.

As an active WWII bombardier returning from the end of the war in Europe and preparing for combat in Japan, Howard Zinn read the headline “Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan” and was glad—the war would be over. “Like other Americans,” writes Zinn, “I had no idea what was going on at the higher levels, and had no idea what that ‘atomic bomb’ had done to men, women, children in Hiroshima, any more than I ever really understood what the bombs I dropped on European cities were doing to human flesh and blood.” During the war, Zinn had taken part in the aerial bombing of Royan, France, and in 1966, he went to Hiroshima, where he was invited to a “house of rest” where survivors of the bombing gathered. In this short and powerful book, the backstory of the making and use of the bomb, Zinn offers his deep personal reflections and political analysis of these events, and the profound influence they had in transforming him from an order-taking combat soldier to one of our greatest anti-authoritarian, anti-war historians.

Simultaneous publication this August in the U.S. and Japan commemorates the 65th anniversary of the USA’s two atomic bombings of Japan by calling for the abolition of all nuclear weapons and an end to war as an acceptable solution to human conflict.

Daniel Alarcón

Daniel Alarcón brings together the world’s best contemporary writers—from Michael Chabon and Claire Messud to Jonathan Lethem and Amy Tan—engage in a wide-ranging, insightful, and often surprising roundtable discussion on the art of writing fiction. Drawing back the curtain on the mysterious process of writing novels, The Secret Miracle brings together the foremost practitioners of the craft to discuss how they write. Literary stars like Paul Auster, Roddy Doyle, Allegra Goodman, Aleksandar Hemon, Mario Vargas Llosa, Susan Minot, Rick Moody, Haruki Murakami, George Pelecanos, Gary Shteyngart, and others take us step by step through the alchemy of writing fiction, answering everything from nuts-and bolts queries—”Do you outline?”—to perennial questions posed by writers and readers alike: “What makes a character compelling?”

Daniel Alarcón is the author of Lost City Radio, which was named a 2007 Best Book by the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others. He lives in Oakland, CA.