Skillfully Probing the Attack on Women’s Rights

Opting-out, security moms, desperate housewives, the new baby fever—the trend stories of 2006 leave no doubt that American women are still being barraged by the same backlash messages that Susan Faludi brilliantly exposed in her 1991 bestselling book of revelations.

When it was first published, Backlash made headlines for puncturing such favorite media myths as the infertility epidemic and the man shortage, myths that defied statistical realities. These willfully fictitious media campaigns added up to an antifeminist backlash.

With passion and precision, Faludi shows how the creators of commercial culture distort feminist concepts to sell products while selling women downstream, how the feminist ethic of economic independence is twisted into the consumer ethic of buying power, and how the feminist quest for self-determination is warped into a self-centered quest for self-improvement.

Backlash is a classic of feminism, an alarm bell for women of every generation, reminding us of the dangers that we still face.

Despite the saturation of global media coverage, Osama bin Laden’s own writings have been curiously absent from analysis of the “war on terror.” Over the last ten years, bin Laden has issued a series of carefully tailored public statements, from interviews with Western and Arabic journalists to faxes and video recordings. These texts supply evidence crucial to an understanding of the bizarre mix of Quranic scholarship, CIA training, punctual interventions in Gulf politics and messianic anti-imperialism that has formed the programmatic core of Al Qaeda.

In bringing together the various statements issued under bin Laden’s name since 1994, this volume forms part of a growing discourse that seeks to demythologize the terrorist network. Newly translated from the Arabic, annotated with a critical introduction by Islamic scholar Bruce Lawrence, this collection places the statements in their religious, historical and political context. It shows how bin Laden’s views draw on and differ from other strands of radical Islamic thought; it also demonstrates how his arguments vary in degrees of consistency, and how his evasions concerning the true nature and extent of his own group, and over his own role in terrorist attacks, have contributed to the perpetuation of his personal mythology.