The Condition

Michael Parenti's America Besieged is a wonderful book. It is a political science type book that tells what's really going on in America. Parenti focuses on America and what is really going on behind closed doors. He reminds us of how democracy really works in the USA. This book is organized in five parts. It doesn't go easy to hard stuff, but from how politics work to how things are really run. Parenti dives into how... Read Full Review

Great book!Michael Parenti did it, a great well-organized book which step-by-step examines everything revolving around our life, from the media to the economy, to the politics, and relates it to how all these three strangleholds on society are manipulated and/or owned by capital and corporations. Parenti also confronts capitalism as an "system without a soul or humanity" which reduces every human activity to market profitablity... Read Full Review

A reader can learn more about how the system works from this one book than from a standard four-year course in political science at a respectable university. I know I did. Not that my eyes were opened by Parenti's insights, good as they are. Most have been around for some time. What the author has done instead is present them in highly readable and accessible style that both illuminates and persuades. There is more floodlight... Read Full Review

what many already know or suspect about corporate capitalist control of our economy and therefore, to a great extent, our lives. I think it was George Orwell who once said: "The greatest threat to Democracy is the notion that we have already achieved it." This book (as well as Parenti's others) should blow away once and for all that false idea that we live under a system of government "of, by, and for the people". That... Read Full Review

Every American who is not independently wealthy should read this book. Michael Parenti makes sense out of why the "American Dream" is evaporating for so many of us; what GATT and NAFTA really mean to the average American; in what ways, and why, politicians are so out of touch with the American people; and what we can do about the growing income disparity.