Any article that contains the headline "Year's Best Books" is, of course, not telling the absolute truth. The books mentioned here are the best that this particular reader discovered and they offer something important regarding information, history, and/or ideas. But I don't pretend to have covered all the important books that would have interested longtime readers of The Free Press. Approximately 50,000 new titles are published every year.

I am able to read only so many books, because there are only so many hours in each day. Some of the titles mentioned herein were skimmed, not read word for word. I might wish it could have been otherwise, but it's a physical impossibility. Because I write 14 columns a month appearing in eight publications, there's no way that I can see everything that deserves mention. I also am the slave of publishers, who don't honor every reviewer's request."

With all that in mind, here's what I would consider as the best books of a political, social, or historical nature published in the past twelve months. One more caution, many of the publishers of progressive books work out of a sense of duty and battle desperately to keep their heads above water in a crazy publishing world that increasingly aims for the lowest common denominator. Most of the books in this article came from by cash-strapped companies that deserve support of the Free Press audience.

Here we go:

The Invention of the White Race: The Origins of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, by Theodore W. Allen (Verso, $22).

Theodore Allen is an independent scholar (without foundation or commercial cushioning) who has written the second volume of what's been deemed a path-breaking book.

The book explores how the degradation of African bond-laborers into slaves produced, for the first time in Anglo-America, racism based on color difference. Allen draws some sobering and depressing conclusions. He observes that the social gap between the Titans and the common people "is at perhaps a historic maximum, real wages have trended downward for nearly two decades." He sees entitlements and welfare as becoming obscenities in the lexicon of official society.

He writes, "There is less of a 'socialist' movement in the United States today than there was in Turner's day, and anti-capitalist class-consciousness is hesitant to even call its name. . . The country is alive with the sound of one class struggling." But Allen expresses hope that white-skin privileges will be rejected by laboring-class European-Americans "as the incubus that for three centuries has paralyzed their will in defense of their class interests vis-à-vis those of the ruling class."

The Queer Question: Essays on Desire and Democracy, by Scott Tucker (South End Press, $18).

Democratic socialist Scott Tucker has been writing essays since 1982, addressing important questions about society, focusing on the need for democracy that remains true to its radical roots. His interest is in all matters pertaining to queerness, ranging the gamut from gay marriage, the "gay gene," to many questions that others didn't face because they didn't have the necessary understanding of economics, emotions, art, and sex.

As Sarah Schulman points out in her foreword, Tucker asked the right questions, responding to such leftists as John Judis, who wrote that "society does not have the same responsibility toward homosexuals . . . as it has toward the child-bearing family." Tucker says in his preface that The Queer Question "is about identity and solidarity in the United States in the closing quarter of this century."

Tucker believes the tradition of the democratic left "is still a living venture, and much of the best work of radical thinkers and writers is done outside the academy and outside the traditional left. It does not follow that independent writers and queer radicals should be antagonistic to academia, as if on principle, but only that we are all subject to some sad divisions of labor and disparity in rewards.

The AIDS and health care movements have done good things, he says, by integrating homework and hell-raising. "In our worst moments," he writes, "we have reproduced the most dismal features of the dominant culture."

Tucker says it's not a choice between reform and revolution, "but of gaining and keeping reforms without losing revolutionary energy and clarity."

Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, by Stephen Duncombe (Verso, $19).

This book claims to be the first systematic survey of zines, the small publications issued from the remnants of bohemia around the U.S. Author Duncombe, a college professor, poses the question: Is it possible to rebel culturally in a modern consumer society that feeds on rebellious culture?

While Duncombe likes zines, he concludes they promise a dream they can't deliver, a message of nonalienation they can't deliver outside their subcultural confines. "Like Allen Ginsburg's 'angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection,' zinesters are searching for something they can never find -- not within a larger capitalist society, maybe not within any society at all."

The book offers a succinct history of the zine phenomenon, but would have been helped by more illustrations from the pages of the zines themselves.

No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers, edited by Andrew Ross (Verso, $19)

This handsome oversized paperback details the revival of sweatshops in foreign countries, a disturbing trend that garnered national publicity with the news that fashions endorsed by Kathy Lee Gifford, Michael Jordan, The Gap, Nike, Guess and Disney (by no means a complete list) were manufactured by near-slave labor under horrific conditions.

The book contains analyses of the economic system that encourages this deplorable practice, with historical background, and reports from New York, Los Angeles and Europe on campaigns against sweatshops.

For instance, the book shows that part of the hundreds of millions Disney chief Michael Eisner made in 1996 came from profits Disney made in Haiti. Teenagers in that downtrodden country sewed Pocahontas and Hunchback of Notre Dame T-shirts for less than $10 per week. Disney's response: A refusal to comment and a decision to switch production to Southeast Asia.

Guess, a major sports clothing company on the West Coast, illegally used homeworkers at very low rates of pay. When exposed, the company shifted 70 percent of its production to Mexico.

This illuminating book reports American taxpayers paid for promotions to lure American jobs overseas. The actions of money-grubbing companies are discouraging and outrageous. Thankfully, a number of organizations are battling against sweatshops.

Strike! by Jeremy Brecher (South End Press, $22).

This revised and updated edition of Brecher's 1972 book is a welcome addition to the library of labor relations. The book traces the history of labor upheavals from 1877 to this summer's UPS battle against the Teamsters.

Brecher writes, "In the past, working people have periodically responded to unacceptable conditions by adopting collective strategies and asserting themselves to gain more power over their lives and work. Whether or how workers moved from individual to collective strategies depends on millions of personal experiences, social interactions, and decisions. It is possible that, in the era of globalization, this process is just history.

"Don't count on it."

Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women's Work, Women's Poverty, by Randy Albelda and Chris Tilly (South End, $18).

Gender means everything in the wonderful world of work, as this book aptly demonstrates. This book shows how employers marginalize women for the usual reason: greed and disrespect for one half of the human race.

Things are getting worse as the debate on poverty and welfare grows "more irrational, shrill, and mean-spirited." New laws to "reform" welfare in practice punish rather than aid poor families, the authors say. "We argue . . . that the turn toward harsher welfare policies has created negative political and economic spillovers for all women and their families."

The book presents an outline for welfare reform that the authors believe would work to the benefit of poor families. The program includes standardizing and expanding program eligibility, establishing a minimum benefit indexed to inflation, reducing the earnings penalty for welfare recipients who find jobs, expanding health and child services, and improving the child support system.

There are many other good suggestions. "Workplace organizing, conventional politics, protest, and campaigns to influence public opinion form a unified package. None of them will work well without all of the other elements. . . We must overcome the divisions of class, race, and gender that have kept so many of us working at cross-purposes. It can be done."

This book should be studied, then heeded, by everyone concerned about fairness in the workplace.

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