Winner of the 2007 Stan
and Tom Wick Poetry Prize
"Djelloul Marbrook, 'a highly
skilled outsider,' bursts into poetry with this splendid first
book, which brings together the energy of a young poet with the
wisdom of long experience."-Edward Hirsch
"Succinct, aphoristic, rich
with the poet's resilient clarity in the face of a knockabout
world, Far from Algiers is a remarkable and distinctive debut."-Cyrus
Cassells
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96 Maine Street #255
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Editor: Sam Smith
© The Progressive Review, 2009 |
Telling
it like it is. . .
For over 40 years
the Review has been a consistent critic of the Reaganesque economy
that led to the 2008 financial collapse.
We reported on NSA
monitoring of U.S. phone calls in 1998, years before it became
a major media story.
In 2003 Sam Smith
wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods
about Iraq by Bush administration officials.
The Review started
a web edition in 1995 when there were only 20,000 web sites worldwide.
Today there are about 70 million active sites. The Review ranks
in the top three percent of all American sites. It began an e-mail
edition in 1994.
The Review became
the first publication to report in depth on what would become
known as the Clinton scandals. Before Clinton's nomination, we
listed more than a score of institutions and individuals - nearly
all of whom would be linked to criminal misdoing before the end
of the Clinton administration
Our 1990 article
on the savings & loan bailout scandal was selected by Utne
Reader as one of the ten most under-covered stories of the past
decade.
In the 1980s, Thomas
S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually
break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized
soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends.
Both happened.
In the 1980s, we
reported on the dangers of computerized voting and suggests possible
solutions including an independent review of software and an
adequate audit trail.
Beginning in the
1970s, we argued that the war on drugs was wrong and would not
work. It hasn't.
We argued for light
rail and other transit alternatives in the 1970s that were later
widely adopted.
In the 1970s we
published a first person account of a then illegal abortion
In 1966 we published
two articles on auto safety by Ralph Nader
Our arguments for
DC statehood in 1970 led to the creation of the DC Statehood
Party, now the DC Statehood Greens.
In 1965 we called
for the end of the draft.
We proposed bikeways
in the 1960s.
We proposed community
policing in the 1960s
We opposed and helped
stop the planned freeway system that would have made DC like
an east coast Los Angeles.
We published first
person reports from the Mississippi pivotal civil rights summer
of 1964.
For many years we
provided alternative coverage of the arts, with writers such
as Tom Shales (now with the Washington Post and a nationally
syndicated TV critic) and Patricia Griffith, later president
of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, was also among the paper's arts
critics.
Our arts section later became the Washington Review of the Arts
that lasted for 25 years and won numerous awards.
We featured the
work of photo editor Roland Freeman, the first photographer to
win a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Freeman
would become a leading photographer of the civil rights movement.
We long published
the only urban planning comic strip in America, drawn by DC architect
John Wiebenson.
Until its author was released from prison, we published what
was then the only column written from behind bars for a non-prison
publication.
In November 1990
we devoted an entire issue to the ecologically-sound city and
how to develop it. The article was republished widely -- from
Utne Reader to the Atlanta Constitution and the San Francisco
Examiner.
Over the years many
interesting writers and cartoonists have graced our pages. Among
them: Eugene McCarthy; We have also featured the work of such
alternative cartoonists as Ron Cobb, Tony Auth, Tom Tomorrow
and Bill Griffith and the columnist Dave Barry long before they
were picked up in the journalistic mainstream.
What
others say. . .
An alternative press icon if ever
there was one -- NY Press
A truly independent journalist with
his feet firmly grounded in the city of neighborhoods and everyday
people. - Patrick Mazza, Progressive Populist
-- A larger than life presence in
the nation's capital . . .A truly original voice in American
journalism: humorous and plain spoken and filled with common
sense -- Jay Waljasper, Utne Reader
Inimitable -- Mother Jones Magazine
Sam's a cynical cat -- Marion
Barry
The Progressive Review has been
a luxuriant jungle of old-school reporting and frenetic information
exchange since before blogs were blogs, and before the Internet
was the Internet. - Jason Zannon, Democracy in Action
Sam Smith has been a lonely populist
voice in Washington, a journalist who's chronicled the waste,
the misdeeds, the scandals, and spending that make Washington
Washington. Smith is a natural-born iconoclast who refuses to
give up being a barnstormer - Jacki Lyden, NPR
One of the nation's leading visionaries.
-- Charlie Spencer, Charlie Spencer Show
Notorious journalist -- Seattle
Weekly
Washington has but a very few observers
of the caliber, honesty and overall orneriness at the right times
and places as Sam Smith -- Stephen Goode, Insight Magazine
Sam's one of the few independent
voices left. -- Eugene McCarthy,
He has a wonderful combination of
being absolutely realistic about the vagaries of people in political
life while still being an idealist. -- Peter Edelman
A reputation for wit, intelligence
and anger. -- Claude Lewis, Chicago Tribune
Smith is an island of reason and
information in a sea of narcissistic blather. -- City Paper,
Washington
Sam Smith is an antidote to mindless
speed reading. He makes you pause between paragraphs in order
to mull over the captivating morsels he is placing in your imagination.
- Ralph Nader
There are butts that need kicking
in this country . . . Sam Smith is handing out the boots. --
Alex Steffen, The Stranger, Seattle
Smith offers [a] community based,
participatory politics that's neither left nor right wing but
the whole bird. . . . His work is not different from what quality
journalism ought to be: truth-seeking, independent, fair-minded
and debunking. -- Colman McCarthy, Washington Post
His saucy judgments remind one of
the way H. L. Mencken handled presidential campaigns." --
Robert Sherrill, The Texas Observer.
The Tom Paine of the Nineties --
Chuck Stone
Lucid . . . Keep going, Sam -- Mario
Cuomo
The Review:
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The online
Progressive Review is the latest version of one of America's
longest lasting alternative journals, begun by Sam Smith in 1964
as The Idler when there were just a handful of such publications
in the U.S. It morphed into the DC Gazette and then became the
Progressive Review.
Sam Smith
had the longest running act on the off-Broadway of Washington
journalism, editing alternative journals longer than almost anyone
in the country. He covered the capital during all or part of
ten presidencies.
He started
in 1957 as a 19 year old radio reporter covering everything from
fires and murders to the White House and Capitol Hill. He has
also written four books - - three of them at the request of editors
- and helped to start six organizations including two political
parties (the national Green Party and DC Statehood Party).
He has
appeared on nearly 700 radio and TV talk shows ranging from NPR
and Pacifica to the Bill O'Reilly Show. He has been an elected
neighborhood commissioner, school parents' association president,
Coast Guard officer, semi-professional musician, and plaintiff
in seven public interest law suits, three of them successful
and one of them reaching the Supreme Court.
In 2009
the Review moved its headquarters to Freeport, Maine
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Your editor has been a
musician for many decades. He started the first band his Quaker
school ever had and played drums with bands up until 1980 when
he switched to stride piano. He had his own band until the mid-1990s
and has played with the New Sunshine Jazz Band, Hill City Jazz
Band, Not So Modern Jazz Band and the Phoenix Jazz Band.
NOTES
ON THE MUSIC
Here are a few tracks:
SAM SMITH'S DECOLAND BAND
'SHINE'
JELLY ROLL
PHOENIX JAZZ BAND
APEX BLUES Sam
playing with the Phoenix Jazz Band at the Central Ohio Jazz festival
in 1990. Joining the band is George James on sax. James, then
84, had been a member of the Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller
orchestras and hadappeared on some 60 records. More
notes on James
WISER MAN Sam
piano & vocal
OH MAMA Sam piano & vocal |
Material not independently
copyrighted may be republished provided your normal reprint fee
(if any) is paid and TPR is given proper credit.
Complete or
partial collections of back issues of the Idler, Gazette, and
Review can be found in libraries at Brown, Connecticut, Delaware,
George Washington, Georgetown, Maryland, Michigan, Northwestern,
Tulane, and Virginia Commonwealth universities. Also at the Buffalo-Erie,
Washington DC, and New York public libraries as well as the collection
of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. The early DC Gazette
is available on microfilm through University Microfilm. The papers
of Sam Smith are in the Washingtoniana division of the Martin
Luther King Jr. Library, Washington DC.
SAM SMITH'S
BOOKS & OTHER INFORMATION
WHY
BOTHER?
Getting a life in a locked-down land |
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Introduction
to Why Bother
Why Bother,
in a wonderfully engaging and erudite manner, addresses the great
question confronting democracy, community and justice -- and
that is civic motivation. Prepare to be motivated. Sam Smith
is an antidote to mindless speed reading. He makes you pause
between paragraphs in order to mull over the captivating morsels
he is placing in your imagination. - RALPH NADER
Sam Smith
puts it to us straight in these essays about finding meaning
and hope - JAY WALJASPER, UTNE READER
An American
original. . . He's got a big old cussed independent streak that
keeps you guessing and hence keeps you reading. - CRISPIN
SARTWELL
The alienated young, the
over-worked 30-something, the free-thinking 40 year-old, the
downsized 55-year-old worker, the senior who society has put
out to pasture are all part of an America that finds itself a
fugitive from the law of averages -- the tens of millions who
don't fit the media-driven stereotype of a booming, contented
country. Living in a culture that has reduced their role to that
of compliance and consumption, these Americans increasingly react
with anger, anxiety or apathy.
In this highly readable
short book, journalist and social critic Sam Smith takes on this
crisis not as a political issue but as a personal one: how does
the individual survive in such a place? Drawing from a wealth
of sources and experience ranging from philosophy and anthropology
to the Internet and rock zines, from Kierkegaard and Camus to
Humphrey Bogart and Rage Against the Machine, Smith confronts
directly despair and survival, approaches to personal rebellion,
speaking truth to power, suicide and false faith, the loss of
democracy, and what to do when nobody cares whether you do it
or not.
SAM SMITH'S
GREAT AMERICAN
POLITICAL REPAIR MANUAL |
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REVIEW.
"Lucid
. . . Keep going, Sam" -- Mario Cuomo
"Desperately
needed" -- Roger Morris, author of Partners in Power
"Smith's
book is a toolbox for hacking a corrupt system. It is also funny
as hell . . . There are butts that need kicking in this country.
. . Sam Smith is handing out the boots." -- Alex Steffen,
The Stranger, Seattle weekly
"Must
read. . . combines laughter and trenchant critique to a degree
seldom seen" -- John Rensenbrink, Green Horizons
"The
Tom Paine of the Nineties" -- Chuck Stone
"Truly
independent journalist" -- Patrick Mazza, Cascadia Times
"Phenomenally
interesting. . . recommend it highly" -- Michelle Laxalt,
co-host of Newsmakers
"You'll
be enlightened, challenged, even entertained" -- Chuck Harder
on the Talk America Network.
Featured
in Utne Reader and on Weekend All Things Considered.
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SHADOWS OF HOPE
Published by Indiana University
Press in 1994, this was the first book to raise serious questions
about the character and politics of Bill Clinton. Said one
reviewer, "I had to be forcibly restrained from quoting
yards of it." Order direct from THE
REVIEW
CAPTIVE CAPITAL
Published 30 years ago,
Captive Capital is still considered a must read for people wishing
to learn the history, culture and politics of Washington DC.
Covers the period from before the riots to the granting of a
locally elected government. Also chapters on local history, neighborhoods,
ethnicity and statehood.
Captive Capital could
be an excellent gift for any friend just moving to town. Or any
friend who has managed to live here for some time without learning
anything about Washington . . . One of the few efforts I have
seen that manages to deal with black people and white people
without insulting either, and without appearing to be written
for one or the other. -- Bill Raspberry, Washington Post
Smith's analysis of the
class dimensions in the community challenges the clichés
and generalizations that most white writers stumble over. . .
Altogether, the book presents a fascinating story of history-in-the-making.
It is absolutely 'must' reading for all who are interested in
this city's history, its political or private life, or the contributions
and personal assets of both the black masses and the black leaders.
-- James Tinney, Afro-American
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