Roll over Che Guevara

Description

At the age of twenty, after being expelled from his California university for anti-war activism, Marc Cooper moved to Santiago and worked as translator for Chilean President Salvador Allende. The heat of Allende's socialist revolution forged Cooper's political and reporting skills, indelibly imprinting them with a radical perspective. In 1973, at great personal risk, he began first-hand reporting on the fiery destruction of Allende's government and Chilean democracy as a result of the US-financed coup. Twenty years later, traveling as a radical journalist in a reactionary world, Cooper continues to chronicle, with biting humor and revealing detail, the events that make our headlines. In Roll Over, Che Guevara, he takes us on a breakneck tour of the New World Order, including Pinochet's Chile, Nicaragua in the last hours of the Sandinistas, Soweto under siege, Panama still smoking after the US invasion, Baghdad bracing for the apocalypse, and into the new Moscow mafia. In the title piece, we met up with Che Guevara's grandson and a new generation of Cuban youth still yearning for Che's ever-elusive promise of freedom. The book's second half, set exclusively in the USA, gives us a ground-level view of a society in dizzying decay. We fly in Bill Clinton's private campaign plane from New Hampshire to Georgia while the candidate shifts his image - even his accent - in the quest for votes. We are guided through America's cultural battleground, from Dan Quayle and his confrontation with Hollywood to the Ambassadors from Armageddon who dominated the 1992 Republican convention. And when Cooper's home town, Los Angeles, burns with a thousand fires of rage, he takes us to the very edge of history, describing America's war against itself. This incredible journey culminates in a swirling, careening and highly personal trip to the city that stands as an icon for the marketplace ethos of our times: Las Vegas.

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