The Jonathan Schell Reader

Jonathan Schell
January 2005     ISBN: 1560254076

The United States' catastrophic adventures in Vietnam and Iraq; constitutional crises in the Watergate years and the George W. Bush era; the fall of the Soviet Empire and the rise of our own; the flowering of nonviolent movements in Eastern Europe and the peaking of violence elsewhere; the undermining of American democracy and the growth of the mass media; and, underlying all the rest, the deepening shadow of nuclear danger--of, that is, our astonishing ability to extinguish ourselves--these are the great themes of Jonathan Schell's writing about our embattled planet.

Correspondent, commentator, and political thinker, Schell has now taken the best of almost four decades of his work, from his bestselling book The Fate of the Earth to his famed reports in The New Yorker, Harper's and Newsday, among many other periodicals and books, and woven it all into a coherent story about our fallen yet incontestably inspiring world.

"If, years from now, Americans are willing to read any books about the war, let them be The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half by Jonathan Schell. They tell everything."

--Gloria Emerson

"The most important book of the decade, perhaps of the century."

--Harrison E. Salisbury on The Fate of the Earth

"The most impressive argument ever made that there exists a viable and desirable alternative to a continued reliance on war and that the failure to seize this opportunity will bring catastrophic results to America and the world."

--Richard Falk on The Unconquerable World

"Jonathan Schell has a special gift for articulating the most urgent concerns of the day."

--New York Times

Jonathan Schell is currently The Nation's peace and disarmament correspondent. He is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute fellow and the author of many books, including The Fate of the Earth, The Unconquerable World and A Hole in the World. Jonathan Schell lives in New York City.