Profiles in Dissent is a collection of remarkably fresh and provocative interviews with some of the iconoclastic thinkers and activists of our time. These candid conversations — ranging from Howard Zinn to Chalmers Johnson, Cindy Sheehan to Mike Davis, Ann Wright, who retired from the State Department to protest the Iraqi invasion and became "a felon for peace," to Boston Globe columnist James Carroll — focus on the Bush administration's imperial dreams and ham-handed acts. They suggest new ways to frame American global policy, while catching something of the white heat of our moment, and offer a chronicle and original perspectives on our troubling times. Tom Engelhardt, creator of the website TomDispatch.com — who has been called "the I.F. Stone of the internet" — brings the immediacy of the moment to his introductions and his questions. His daily Tomgrams contain his parsing of contemporary news events, as well as his posting of original content from some of America's leading progressive thinkers. A quarter million readers a month visit his website (and hundreds of thousands more read his dispatches posted elsewhere on the Internet).

An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a fellow of The Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism school of the University of California, Berkeley.