Five days after Labor Day and over from Australia, where she is director of the Sydney Alliance, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Unions NSW, and teaches at the University of Sydney is labor scholar/activist Amanda Tattersall. She is here with the newly published Power in Coalition: Strategies for Strong Unions and Social Change (ILR Press/Cornell University Press). "At last a scholar/activist who understands that coalitions are not merely a way of advancing union goals! Building on three successful coalitions in Australia, Canada, and the United States, Amanda Tattersall identifies three main mechanisms that lead to successful coalition formation between unions and community organizations, identifying common concerns, building organizational relationships, and finding the right scale. She shows how unions can transcend the narrow corporatism of 'business unionism' to return to the social movements they once were in a world that has become more complex and more indifferent to the needs of both workers and communities." - Sidney Tarrow.

"Here I was, doing ninety on the Santa Monica Freeway with a quart of whiskey shoved into my crotch and my dead neighbor in the trunk. It had come time to leave Los Angeles ..." This begins the pre-apocalyptic, cross-country race with death chronicled in Joseph Mattson's debut novel, Empty the Sun (Barnacle Books). The book includes a CD soundtrack by Seattle's Six Organs of Admittance. Empty the Sun is a finalist for a Southern California Independent Booksellers Association award. "Empty the Sun balances its verbal and narrative excesses with emotional substance and a convincing variation on the theme of loss. Mattson makes it clear that this is not just a Thompsonian exercise in self-medicated wild-man alienation ... it's the raw eccentricity of his prose and storytelling that holds you for the ride." - The Boston Phoenix.