Pamphlets Over Lebanon

Michael Totten's latest report from the Middle East is extraordinarily good. He visits Southern Lebanon, all the time under the watching eyes of the Hizbollah.

It looked – and felt – totalitarian in Bint Jbail. Everyone watched us. If Said was right that the locals weren’t allowed to speak freely (assuming they dissented from Nasrallah’s party line) it must feel totalitarian to people who live there as well.

Totten also has a piece out for The New Pamphleteer. The latter is the brainchild of Adam Bellow (son of Saul Bellow, and famously, author of In Praise of Nepotism) of which he said

My model, the one that I'm hoping to recreate, is an American pamphlet series published in the 1920s, called the "Little Blue Books." They were published by a Jewish, socialist newspaper editor, very eccentric, brilliant guy named Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. He was a very progressive figure and had a little publishing empire going in the Midwest. At some point he decided to put out pamphlets, which he charged a nickel for. It was strictly a mail order business. He sold these things for twenty years. And he managed to sell a hundred million pamphlets in five years. He was very close with the leading polemicists of the day, so some of them had original material. But the pamphlets were also an eclectic mix of history, poetry, proverbs, joke books, sex advice, household tips, occasional pieces of journalism.