I'm using everyone's real name.  They can all sue me.  I hope they do.  I could use the excitement."

So begins Ginny Good, Gerard Jones's memoir of his coming of age and experience living as a quasi hippie in the San Francisco Bay area during the 1960s and '70s.  (I say quasi because, although Jones partakes of many free love offerings, he frequently waxes skeptical about what he's accomplishing with all those "chicks".)

Jones's narrative voice is cynical, vulnerable, yet full of bravado, like an aged Holden Caulfield.  But like the beloved narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, Jones is one provocative curmudgeon who makes it clear that he doesn't quite know what he's writing - nor does he care.  By page six, he's said all he wants about the context in which he is telling the story of the two loves of his life: San Francisco, back when it was the city of love, and Virginia Good, the "legally crazy" woman he swears was the "first hippie."  The unemployed Jones lives with his 80-year-old mother in Oregon, having occasional affairs, playing golf, and writing "thinly disguised fictional stories" about real life.  Because he's got time to kill, he decides to write this book he's been "threatening to write for the last 30 years," which is "basically about four people: Elliot Felton, Virginia Good, Melanie, and me - and what we all tried to do with each other back in the summer of 1972."

As anyone who's at all culturally conversant regarding the '70s will surmise, what Jones and company tried to do was the same thing attempted in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, but with even greater irony.  ("Jealousy's an aphrodisiac," Jones declares, but it never gets anyone in Ginny Good anything but more confusion and a bad case of rug burns.) En route to the failed communal love experiment, Jones tries repeatedly to become a writer to please Ginny, meanwhile rescuing her - a bright, beautiful, elusive, addictive, police-taunting, Christmas-fearing, suicidal woman-child - repeatedly from cops, kidnappers, and herself, all against the backdrop of the Vietnam War (which helps destroy Elliot), Gordon Lish writing workshops, and a stunningly detailed chronology of rock concerts, affairs, and acid trips.  Sometimes Jones pulls back from his narrator's voice, startling the reader into realizing that he's not always sure whether he's writing memoir or fiction, but in the end it doesn't matter.  Ginny Good is as fascinating as a historical memoir as it is a compelling testament to the kind of love that hurts, haunts, and ultimately makes a man a writer.

- Susan Piperato

According to Chalmers Johnson's latest book, The Sorrows of Empire, the debacle in Iraq can best be understood by viewing the war as an extension of US imperialism and militarism.  A consensus has been building among foreign policy analysts that acknowledges the existence of a vast American empire.  But no one has documented the evolution of militarism and its consequences for the autocratic undermining of the republic more thoroughly than Johnson, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego.  He writes persuasively with intellectual clarity, factual precision, and passionate conviction.

Johnson defines the American empire as the complex of permanent military bases, espionage listening posts, and strategic enclaves established by the United States since the end of World War II and the Cold War.  This empire is not distinguished by its colonies or territories, but by its global military bases, which are devoid of significant civilian oversight, commanded by the Pentagon, and linked to a developing military-industrial complex.

The statistics are staggering: the US maintains at least 725 military bases in 120 countries; for fiscal year 2004, Congress approved a grand total of $396.1 billion for US military spending, a figure which excludes intelligence budgets, mostly controlled by the Pentagon, money allocated for the second Iraq war, and a $10 billion Pentagon special allocation to combat terrorism.  One would have to add the military budgets of the next 28 highest spenders together to equal that of the US total.

Johnson concludes that the sorrows of empire include the inevitability of US financial ruin and the loss of democracy and constitutional rights.  President George W. Bush's neo-conservative circle supplanted Clintonian globalization, which Johnson views as a disguised and failed strategy of economic exploitation, with a pronounced shift toward militarism and world domination.  We are now on a path toward perpetual war, leading to an increase in terrorism against Americans; a "Pentagonized presidency" that fully eclipses the Congress; an unprecedented degree of official lying, manipulation, and disinformation; and a loss of liberty.  While these trends have become deeply institutionalized in American life, Johnson argues that they will end with either the collapse of empire or the retaking of control of the Congress by the American people.  This courageous and timely book exposes the frightening misuse of US power and constitutes an urgent appeal to defend democratic values from imperial usurpation.

- Harold Jacobs

Margaret B. Schram says in her prologue that the initial seed of this book was sown by a controversy back in the 1980s.  Somebody asserted that Hudson, New York, had been "the premier whaling port of the United States."  Having studied such things, Schram knew it was more like No.  18 on the list of such ports, and she had the audacity to say so.  "The truth is always more interesting than fiction," she states, and as the book unfolds its tale of this upstate port's infancy, one has to agree.  Schram has a way of weaving her tapestry that brings a former era into vibrant perspective.

We meet the Proprietors, a group of mostly Quaker transplants from Nantucket who arrived in Hudson after the Revolution.  By divvying up land and water rights and attempting to adhere to what were then the best practices of land use, they created a thriving shipping post that soon rivaled Albany and New York for bustle and prosperity.  Hudson's whaling may not have been the most prosperous in the country, but along with international shipping, it brought in a steady flow of dollars - and colorful characters.

There are harrowing tales of the high seas aplenty, and quieter but no less intriguing explorations of the birth pangs of banks, newspapers, and other businesses - including the bawdy houses of Diamond Street, a district that apparently reigned notorious until as recently as 1950.  Schram's eye for the quirky and ironic, and her explorations of events like the Anti-Rent Wars and the trial of newspaper editor Harry Croswell for supposed libel of President Thomas Jefferson, give the book a satisfying depth.  One feels as though Schram is pulling aside the curtain of mainstream historical accounts and providing a peek backstage that manages to be both affectionate and unsparing.

Hudson's early growth and equally rapid decline into obscurity make a fascinating tale.  The Hudson River Valley, after all, is history's heartland - events took place here that were felt throughout the young nation, and Schram sets them against a backdrop of ordinary lives with great skill.

Explore an era when Robert Fulton's steamboat was simply called Steamboat, because there was no other; when folks lived in terror of diptheria and smallpox; when the high seas were playgrounds for pirates; and railroads and turnpikes were revolutionary new ideas.  Rich with illustrations and original sources, this book is a lively contribution to local and American history.

- Anne Pyburn

Columbus discovered the New World in 1492, and it wasn't until 1603 that the first successful American colony was established in Jamestown, Virginia.  So what happened in the intervening years?  Curiosity about this sparsely documented gap fueled the writing of Redemption, first-time author Julie Chibbaro's gripping young adult novel.

Against the backdrop of the early 16th century lives 12-year-old Lily, the sole child of English peasants who are followers of Frere Lanther, a Martin Luther-like Protester against the Church of England.  Religious differences with their landlord, "the baron," force Lily's father onto a ship bound for the New World, and eight months later, Lily and her mother follow to find him.  But all is not as it seems - the baron boards their ship as well, and he's darkly obsessed with Lily's mother.  The wretched voyage is saved only by the discovery of an unexpected ally in Ethan, the baron's son.  Unfortunately, the colonists have barely made land when a gruesome discovery leads Lily to think her father has been killed.  When rebellious sailors kidnap her mother, Lily heads desperately into the forest to hunt them down.  Her trek becomes a journey of self in which she encounters new friends, familiar savages, and the beginnings of a quest for her own spiritual truth.

Chibbaro is apparently a research buff, but historical detail informs her storytelling without overwhelming it.  Chibbaro paints this crude, cruel world in full Sensaround; the people are smelly and bug-infested, and they are hurt and killed in gruesome ways.  Her immediate first person narration plunges the reader into this place of dark woods - a bit too realistically, perhaps, for young adult readers on the squeamish side.  But all of this age group's major emotional hot points are present: the struggle toward and away from parents, the first stirrings of love, the rising sense of self-definition.

The Jamestown settlers reportedly came upon bands of fair-haired natives they called "white Indians" - descendants, it's supposed, of colonists who were absorbed by local tribes.  We may never really know what happened back then, but Julie Chibbaro's Redemption offers a stirring and heartfelt imagining.
Julie Chibbaro will read and sign Redemption at Oblong Books & Music in Millerton on July 24 at 2PM.

- Susan Krawitz