John Pilger speaks in SF

Please announce and forward widely!

Don't miss award-winning journalist and film-maker John Pilger (http://www.johnpilger.com/) on tour this June. He will be making appearances in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.

John Pilger is one of the world's pre-eminent investigative journalists and documentary film-makers. His best-selling books of reportage have in the words of Noam Chomsky "been a beacon of light in often dark times."

Full details below.

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SAN FRANCISCO

FREEDOM NEXT TIME: AN EVENING WITH JOHN PILGER

Pilger will discuss his new book, Freedom Next Time (Nation Books) and show his film Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror. This film, set in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Washington, looks at President Bush's "war on terror" and the "liberation" of countries where bloodshed and repression continue. Followed by audience dialogue and a book signing.

Wednesday, June 13- 7 PM
Doors open 6:00 PM

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (http://www.ybca.org/)
YBCA Theater
700 Howard St. at Third

$15 general, $5 students

A book signing of Freedom Next Time and other books by John Pilger will follow the event.

Presented by The Center for Economic Research and Social Change, The Nation Institute, and KPFA, with support from the Wallace Global Fund.

For ticket information, call 415-978-2787 or order online at http://www.ybca.org/. In person tickets at YBCA Box office located inside the Galleries and Forum Building, 701 Mission Street at Third. (Hours: Tue, Wed, Fri, Sat & Sun: noon - 5 pm; Thu: noon - 8 pm.)

For media inquiries, contact (212) 209-5407 or ruth [at] thenation.com.

For more information, email pilgersf [at] gmail.com

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About the book:

"This highly informed, thoughtful and passionate work is an important a thread in the world's growing tapestry of political counter-narratives as those of Dee Brown or Howard Zinn."
--Publishers Weekly (STARRED review)

"Pilger draws on meticulous research and interviews to uncover the human cost of the skullduggery of the imperial powers in Diego Garcia as well as Afghanistan, Iraq, South Africa, and Palestine as the U.S. and Britain have heartlessly put their interests ahead of those citizens of weaker nations." --Booklist

"Freedom Next Time allows us to hear the personal testimonies of those challenging power. The array of interviews with the voiceless and abused provides an indispensable corrective to the litany of disinformation we are fed by the media, and for this achievement Pilger is surely the most outstanding journalist in the world today.
--The Guardian (UK)

Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire is award-winning journalist John Pilger's vital examination of five countries' struggle toward freedom. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, elation swept South Africa as its people finally dared to dream that a different world was possible. But as John Pilger movingly describes, true freedom remains a dream deferred.

In Freedom Next Time Pilger examines five counties -- South Africa, India, Palestine, Afghanistan and the forgotten Chagos Islands - to reveal populations for whom the promise of true democracy remains elusive. His vivid eyewitness reporting and incisive interviews expose the lies of our rulers, turning a piercing searchlight onto events that would otherwise be consigned to the shadows by an unrecognized, yet virulent censorship.

With his signature compassion and keen eye for detail, Pilger gives his reader a close study of the realities of these war-torn nations, In one of the most revealing chapters, Pilger offers one of the few journalistic studies of Britain's forced depopulation of the Chagos islands in the 1960s and 1970s. He describes a document drawn up by British planners in 1968, titled "maintaining the fiction," that argued that the islanders were not permanent inhabitants. When Pilger asks Olivier Bancoult, the Chagossians' leader in exile, "What upsets you most?" He replies, "the lie that we didn't exist." Today the island remains a U.S. military base, to which the Chagossians have been unable to return, despite a grant from the High Court.

In Freedom Next Time Pilger gives voice to those who would otherwise remain silent, and in so doing salutes those who refuse to be defined as victims.

For more information, visit: http://www.johnpilger.com.

John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s. He has been a foreign correspondent and a front-line war reporter throughout his career, and currently writes for the New Statesman, The Guardian, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times, among others. He has twice won British journalism's highest award, Journalist of the Year, for his work all over the world, notably in Cambodia and Vietnam. He has been International Reporter of the Year and winner of the United Nations Association Peace Prize and Gold Medal. For his broadcasting, he has won France's Reporter Sans Frontieres, an American television Academy Award, an Emmy, and the Richard Dimbleby Award, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. He has made 57 documentary films, most of them shown on ITV network television in the UK and around the world. In 2003, he received the prestigious Sophie Prize for "thirty years of exposing deception and furthering human rights." He holds numerous honorary degrees from British, Scottish and Irish universities. He is a Frank H.T. Rhodes Visiting Professor at Cornell University, New York. He is the author of many books including The New Rulers of the World.

Freedom Next Time:
Resisting the Empire
by John Pilger
Nation Books / June 5, 2007
ISBN 1-56858-326-5 / 376 pp./ $16.95 / trade paperback


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For more information, visit

http://www.johnpilger.com/

http://www.nationbooks.org/

http://www.cersc.org/