Bitter Fruit is a comprehensive and insightful account of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. First published in 1982, this book has become a classic, a textbook case of the relationship between the United States and the Third World. The authors make extensive use of U.S. government documents and interviews with former CIA and other officials. It is a warning of what happens when the United States abuses its power.
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Elyn Saks is a success by any measure: she’s an endowed professor at the prestigious University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has managed to achieve this in spite of being diagnosed as schizophrenic and given a "grave" prognosis -- and suffering the effects of her illness throughout her life.
Saks was only eight, and living an otherwise idyllic childhood in sunny 1960s Miami, when her first symptoms appeared in the form of obsessions and night terrors. But it was not until she reached Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar that her first full-blown episode, complete with voices in her head and terrifying suicidal fantasies, forced her into a psychiatric hospital.
Saks would later attend Yale Law School where one night, during her first term, she had a breakdown that left her singing on the roof of the law school library at midnight. She was taken to the emergency room, force-fed antipsychotic medication, and tied hand-and-foot to the cold metal of a hospital bed. She spent the next five months in a psychiatric ward.
So began Saks’s long war with her own internal demons and the equally powerful forces of stigma. Today she is a chaired professor of law who researches and writes about the rights of the mentally ill. She is married to a wonderful man.
In The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks discusses frankly and movingly the paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, and the voices in her head insisting she do terrible things, as well as the many obstacles she overcame to become the woman she is today. It is destined to become a classic in the genre.
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An Interview with bell hooks, author of Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate PoliticsSOUTH END PRESS: Your work on radical black feminism has been an inspiration for many young feminists of color, and you yourself were in your early 20s when you wrote your first book, Ain't I a Woman. What differences do you see in the political and cultural climate that young progressive activists face today, compared to when you were formulating your own politics?
BELL HOOKS: One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness-in communities, in institutions, among friends. For example, when I was coming to feminist consciousness-as one aspect of my political consciousness-at Stanford University, there was a tremendous buzz about feminism throughout the campus. Women were organizing in the dorms, women were resisting biased curriculum, all of those things. So, it really offered a kind of overall support for coming to consciousness, whereas what so frequently happens now in academic settings is that people feel much more that they don't have this kind of collective support.
SEP: What do you think has contributed to that change?
BH: The institutionalization of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, all of these things led to a sense that the struggle was over for a lot of people and that one did not have to continue the personal consciousness-raising and changing of one's viewpoint.
SEP: Could you describe some of the influences on your own politicization? In your writing you have focused very much on your development as a woman, as a writer, and as a critic and political thinker. Could you describe that process?
BH: One of the issues that I continually write about is that the words we use to define political positions-whether we talk about being on the left or being feminist-do not mean that people may not have arrived at positions of resistance that could be clearly described by that language before they come to that language. In my case, I've talked a great deal about how growing up in a very patriarchal household was the setting for my development of resistance. But it was not until the organi
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