2014 is ending with a deadeningly familiar script: an expanding war in the Middle East, and a corporate media lapping up every justification from the Pentagon.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Our Favorite Books of 2014 - Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger's Journey Out of the Military and Across America and #Newsfail: Climate Change, Feminism, Gun Control, and Other Fun Stuff We Talk About Because Nobody Else Will - Book review

2014 is ending with a deadeningly familiar script: an expanding war in the Middle East, and a corporate media lapping up every justification from the Pentagon. Fortunately, two books were released in 2014 that arm us with the ability to confront these challenges.

I can recommend no book with greater enthusiasm than Rory Fanning's Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger's Journey Out of the Military and Across America (Haymarket Books). Fanning was a U.S. Army Ranger-turned-political-radical by his experiences in Afghanistan. The book searingly weaves together both the personal and the political of both life at war and Fanning's epic walk across the United States, as he attempts to make sense of what the army has done to him. He unflinchingly takes the reader through both the indoctrinating realities of being an army ranger and the ways in which the humanity of individual soldiers still has the power to emerge.

Then there is #Newsfail: Climate Change, Feminism, Gun Control, and Other Fun Stuff We Talk About Because Nobody Else Will (Simon & Schuster), a book by the Indymedia demigods of Citizen Radio journalist Allison Kilkenny and comedian Jamie...