Alexander Cockburn
Born and raised in Ireland, Alexander Cockburn has lived and worked in America since 1973. He has established a reputation as one of the foremost reporters and commentators of the left by writing newspaper and magazine columns for the past decade. Cockburn's areas of interest include the American political scene, economics, the environment, labor issues and international policy.
Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the twice-monthly muckraking newsletter CounterPunch, whose Web site, www.counterpunch.org, now has a world audience in the millions.
The author of a bi-weekly column for The Nation called Beat the Devil, Cockburn also writes a syndicated newspaper column that is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate and has appeared regularly in such papers as The Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Francisco Examiner, Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Detroit Free Press. In 1987, Cockburn authored a highly successful collection of essays, some autobiographical, entitled Corruptions of Empire, for which he was called "the most gifted polemicist now writing in English" by the Times Literary Supplement. His diary of the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Golden Age Is In Us, drew enthusiastic reviews from many sources, such as The New York Times, which wrote "A warrior freethinker, armed with courage and gifted prose to cut down the hypocrisies of tyrants."
Another reader of Cockburn's columns, the late Rep. Henry Gonzalez of Texas, referred to Cockburn as "one of the most perceptive and one of the most brilliant minds we have in America." Cockburn also co-authored the acclaimed The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon. More recently he has coauthored Washington Babylon with Ken Silverstein and, with Jeffrey St. Clair, the best-selling Whiteout: the Press, Drugs and the CIA. His most recent book with St. Clair was Five Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond and Al Gore, A Users Manual. This fall, CounterPunch/AK Press will publish The Politics of Anti-Semitism (Everything You Wanted to Know About Anti-Semitism But Felt Too Guilty to Ask), edited by Cockburn and St Clair.
