Common Courage Press
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Common Courage Press
"By publishing books for social justice, Common Courage Press helps progressive ideas to find a place in our culture. The press provides a platform to spread these ideas to activists and ordinary citizens alike. It has sold a total of over one million copies since its founding in 1991, and its books have been translated and reprinted in 24 countries...
"And Common Courage works closely with a wide array of activist citizens' groups:
- Global Exchange co-founder Kevin Danaher has written three books for the press on the corporatization of the global economy.
- Prison Legal News has made great use of The Celling of America.
- Physicians for a National Health Plan used Bleeding the Patient to promote the need for universal health care; California consumer rights groups used Making a Killing in their fights against HMOs; and Dying for Growth and Women Poverty and AIDS helped raise awareness for Partners in Health.
- The Center for Public Integrity produced and promoted Citizen Muckracking, as did the Center for Media and Democracy with Toxic Sludge Is Good For You and Mad Cow USA.
- Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting raised money by giving away the four books of Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen as a membership premium, along with Laura Flanders' Real Majority Media Minority.
- When Marla Felcher wrote It's No Accident, about corporations' inadequate testing of baby products, Common Courage gave out free copies to the citizen's group Kids in Danger, so they could hand them out to sympathetic Congresspeople.
- Paul Farmer's and Jean Bertrand Aristide's royalties go to help Haiti; and Jennifer Harbury's royalties from Bridge of Courage: Life Stories of the Guatemalan Companeros and Companeras, to Guatemalan efforts for justice. Harbury's Guatemalan husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, was captured, tortured, and killed by the Guatemalan military. After publishing the book, the Common Courage editors helped publicize Harbury's struggles to find out what happened to her husband, including hunger strikes that triggered a US Congressional investigation and revealed the CIA's high-level involvement with the Guatemalan military.
- Father Javier Giraldo, head of Colombia's Inter-Congregational Commission of Peace and Justice, risked his life to publish Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy. His book has become a core resource for the Colombia Support Network. Shortly after it was published, a woman who'd left Colombia telephoned Common Courage editor Greg Bates to describe how her friends had been rounded up by the Colombian military in a recent operation, and no one expected to hear from them again. She said that press, by publishing Giraldo's book, gave her hope to proceed onward." [1]
