A sharp exposé of the true cost—economic, political, and psychic—of our mania for low price.

From the shuttered factories of the rust belt to the look-alike strip malls of the sun belt—and almost everywhere in between—America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on paying less. This pervasive yet little examined obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time—the engine of globalization, outsourcing, planned obsolescence, and economic instability in an increasingly unsettled world.

Low price is so alluring that we may have forgotten how thoroughly we once distrusted it. Atlantic correspondent Ellen Ruppel Shell traces the birth of the bargain as we know it from the Industrial Revolution to the assembly line and beyond, homing in on a number of colorful characters, such as Gene Verkauf (his name is Yiddish for “to sell”), founder of E. J. Korvette, the discount chain that helped wean customers off traditional notions of value. The rise of the chain store in post-Depression America led to the extolling of convenience over quality, and big-box retailers completed the reeducation of the American consumer by making them prize low price in the way they once prized durability and craftsmanship.

Shell (The Hungry Gene) vividly shows the pernicious effects of this insidious perceptual shift, starting with poor quality and low wages and extending to a blighted landscape, escalating debt (both personal and national), stagnating incomes, fraying communities, and a host of other socioeconomic ills. That’s a long list of charges, and it runs counter to orthodox economics, which argues that low price powers productivity by stimulating a brisk free market. But Shell marshals evidence from a wide range of fields—history, sociology, marketing, psychology, even economics itself—to upend the conventional wisdom. Cheap also unveils the fascinating and unsettling illogic that underpins our bargain-hunting reflex and explains how our deep-rooted need for bargains colors every aspect of our psyches and social lives. In this myth-shattering, closely reasoned, and exhaustively reported investigation, Shell exposes the astronomically high cost of cheap.

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A riveting account of how an election marked a new era in American politics and a historic test at a watershed moment for the nation.

The election of 2008 shattered political barriers, illuminated undercurrents of race, gender, and class, and ignited an extraordinary battle among some of the most formidable political rivals ever to seek the presidency—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. It was an election that played out against a backdrop of wars, a shattered economy, and deep pessimism about the future.

Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson followed this campaign from the candidates’ first forays into Iowa and New Hampshire to the historic night of Obama’s victory celebration. They take listeners on a gripping journey through the epic battles for Iowa, Clinton’s dramatic comeback in New Hampshire, the racially tinged primary in South Carolina, and the stunning endorsement of Obama by Edward M. Kennedy over the Clintons’ objections. They reveal the strategic mistakes of the Clinton campaign and the story behind Obama’s breakthrough organization. They cover McCain’s struggle for survival in the Republican primaries, Sarah Palin, and the economic meltdown that sealed Obama’s victory.

Exclusive interviews with the candidates and their top strategists produce intimate portraits of Obama, Clinton, and McCain under stress throughout the longest and most expensive presidential campaign in American history. Balz and Johnson also move far off the campaign trail to listen to voters in battleground states express their deep anxieties about the darkening economic climate and the challenges facing the United States. The Battle for America 2008 is a riveting account of how this election not only marked a new era in American politics but also offered a test of historic proportions at a crucial moment for our nation.

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The smart, funny, eye-opening tale of one man’s quest to learn why his underpants are so cheap.

When British travel writer Joe Bennett bought a six-pack of underwear in his local supermarket for five dollars, he wondered who on earth could be making any money, let alone profit, from the exchange. How many processes and middlemen are involved? Where and how is the underwear made? And who decides on the absorbent qualities of the gusset?

Bennett embarks on an odyssey to explore the “commercial and industrial processes on which [his] easy existence depends,” a quest that takes him to the new factory of the world, China, to trace his underwear back to their source. Along the way he discovers the extraordinarily balanced and intricate web of contacts and exchanges that makes global trade possible—and is rapidly elevating China to the status of world economic superpower. He also grapples with chopsticks, challenges his own prejudices, and marvels at the contrasts in one of the world’s oldest but fastest changing societies.

Funny, wise, and insightful, Where Underpants Come From is a wonderful and timely picture of the developed world’s dependence on China to make all the bits and pieces of our lives—everything from toothbrushes to overhead projectors and artificial kidneys.

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Captured on July 21st, 2009, from a live stream of Howard Dean at the University of California Washington Center in Washington DC for a discussion centered on the latest health care debate (sponsored by PBC and CampusProgress).

Dean, a six term Governor, physician, chairman of the PBC board, and author of the newly released book Howard Deans Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform, will be there to help separate what is real and factual in the health care debate from what is simply rhetoric. As Dean writes in his book, now is the time to “take back the health care reins.”

Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform is available now at the Progressive Book Club.

A vivid chronicle of a vital but overlooked year that set the world as we know it in motion.

It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill, the space race, and the computer revolution; the rise of Pop art, free jazz, “sick comics,” the New Journalism, and indie films; the emergence of Castro, Malcolm X, and personal superpower diplomacy; the beginnings of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap—all bursting against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first American casualties of the war in Vietnam.

In 1959: The Year Everything Changed, acclaimed Slate columnist Fred Kaplan takes us back to a year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were blurred and taboos trampled, when we crossed into a “new frontier” that offered the twin prospects of infinite possibilities and instant annihilation—a frontier that we continue to explore exactly fifty years later, at an eerily similar turning point.

Drawing on original research, including untapped archives and interviews with major figures of the time, Kaplan pieces together the vast, untold story of a civilization in flux—and paints vivid portraits of the men and women whose creative energies, ideas, and inventions paved the way for the new era. They include:

• Norman Mailer, musing on the hipster and the H-bomb while fusing journalism and literature in wildly new, influential ways
• Lenny Bruce, remaking stand-up comedy by loosening the language and skewering politics and religion
• Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, shattering the structures of jazz
• John Cassavetes, making a new kind of movie, with improvised dialogue, shot in the city streets, outside the Hollywood system
• Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, insinuating black urban music into mainstream pop culture
• Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press, battling the government’s censors and toppling obscenity laws
• Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, advancing new and militant paths to civil rights and racial politics
• Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Allan Kaprow, blurring the boundaries between art and life
• Jack St. Clair Kilby, a self-described “tinkerer,” inventing the microchip, which triggers the digital age
• Margaret Sanger, a radical activist in her eighties, spurring renegade scientists to invent a “magic pill” that lets women control their reproductive processes and unleashes the sexual and feminist revolutions
• John F. Kennedy, the coalescing figure of the era, campaigning for president as a young outsider, keen to grapple with the “unknown opportunities and peril” of the coming “new frontier”—just as Barack Obama, an even unlikelier outsider, confronts the eve of a new decade in our own turbulent time

Illustrated with sixteen photos, 1959 is a lively and original account of a watershed year in American cultural history, full of amusing anecdotes and vivid description, and bringing a kaleidoscopic cultural transformation into high relief.

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A searing and ultimately hopeful exploration of love, psychological trauma, and the boundaries of memory.

Alone in a Helsinki café, Anna, a young journalist, spends a day drinking coffee and reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The novel, a gift from her professor and now lover, an American named Ian, becomes a lens through which Anna can view her own life. Compelling and poignant, the narrative floats in and out of geography and time, exploring psychological trauma and the boundaries of memory. Elina Hirvonen deftly intertwines the childhood of Anna and her mentally ill brother with the troubled past of Ian and his father, a Vietnam vet.

Finnish protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the political ramifications of September 11, 2001, provide the contemporary backdrop. The personal is political in When I Forgot, yet in Hirvonen’s hands despair is countered by insight and, above all, hope. With its surprising beauty and assured voice, it’s hard to believe that When I Forgot is this talented author’s first novel.

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An economic blueprint for the twenty-first century that puts Main Street—not Wall Street—at the center of our economy.

Today’s economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. And yet, as David C. Korten shows, the steps being taken to address it are merely tinkering at the margins and do nothing to deal with the fundamental reality that our economic system has failed.

Korten (When Corporations Rule the World) identifies the deeper sources of the failure: Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating “wealth” without producing anything of real value. Call it phantom wealth.

Our hope lies not with Wall Street, Korten argues (one of the sections of the book is titled “The Case for Eliminating Wall Street”), but with Main Street, which creates real wealth from real resources to meet real needs. He outlines an agenda to create a new “real-wealth” economy—locally based, community oriented, and devoted to creating a better life for all, not simply increasing profits.

Korten’s vision will require changes to how we measure economic success, organize our financial system, even the very way we create money, an agenda Korten summarizes in his version of the economic address to the nation he wishes Barack Obama were able to deliver.

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With penetrating insights for today: a vital, immensely readable history of the world economic collapse of the late 1920s.

It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond the control of any one person or government. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades.

In Lords of Finance, Ahamed—a veteran investment manager who has worked at the World Bank—offers unforgettable portraits of the four men whose personal and professional actions as heads of their respective central banks changed the course of the twentieth century. They are:

• The neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England
• The xenophobic and suspicious Émile Moreau of the Banque de France
• The arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank
• Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose facade of energy and drive masked a deeply wounded and overburdened man

After the First World War, these central bankers attempted to reconstruct the world of international finance. Despite their differences, they were united by a common fear—that the greatest threat to capitalism was inflation—and by a common vision that the solution was to turn back the clock and return the world to the gold standard.

For a brief period in the mid-1920s they appeared to have succeeded. The world’s currencies were stabilized and capital began flowing freely across the globe. But beneath the veneer of boomtown prosperity, cracks started to appear in the financial system. The gold standard that all had believed would provide an umbrella of stability proved to be a straitjacket, and the world economy began that terrible downward spiral known as the Great Depression.

As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, the Great Depression and the year 1929 remain the benchmark for true financial mayhem. Offering a new understanding of the global nature of financial crises, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, of their fallibility, and of the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.

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A clear-eyed look at how fringe ideologies and violent rhetoric have infected mainstream conservatism.

Drawing from his extensive reporting on right-wing groups, David Neiwert argues that the conservative movement’s alliances with far-right extremists have not only pushed the movement’s agenda to the right, but have become a malignant influence that’s increasingly reflected in political discourse.

The result is a pathology Neiwert calls pseudo-fascism—a political style that talks and acts like fascism without its core violence and thuggishness. The only effective response, the author asserts, is a rhetoric of peace and not a surrendering one, but the kind of peace that stands up for human values, civil discourse, and basic decency.

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From one of Capitol Hill’s leading progressives, a fascinating inside account of how Congress really works—and how it should.

For four decades, since he arrived in Washington, D.C., as a member of the “Class of 1974,” the first post-Watergate group of representatives, California congressman Henry Waxman has taken visionary and principled positions on crucial issues and has been a driving force for change. He has compiled an unmatched record of implementing landmark laws, and because of legislation he helped champion, our air is cleaner, our food is safer, and our medical care better. Thanks to his work as a top watchdog in Congress, crucial steps have been taken to curb abuses on Wall Street, halt wasteful spending in Iraq, and ban steroids from Major League Baseball. Few legislators can match his accomplishments or his insights on how good work gets done in Washington.

In The Waxman Report, the congressman offers readers a rare glimpse into how this is achieved: the strategies, the maneuvering, and the behind-the-scenes deals. He shows how the things we take for granted (clear information about tobacco’s harmfulness, accurate nutritional labeling, important drugs that have saved countless lives) started out humbly—derided by big business interests as impossible or even destructive. Sometimes, the most dramatic breakthroughs occur through small twists of fate or the most narrow voting margin. Waxman’s stories are surprising because they illustrate that while government’s progress may seem glacial, much is happening, and small battles waged over years can yield great results.

At a time when some of the most sweeping national initiatives in decades are being debated, and so much has been written about what’s wrong with Congress—gridlock, partisanship, and the influence of interest groups—Waxman offers sophisticated, concrete examples of how government can (and should) work.

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