"Djelloul Marbrook, 'a highly skilled outsider,' bursts into poetry with this splendid first book, which brings together the energy of a young poet with the wisdom of long experience."-Edward Hirsch

"Succinct, aphoristic, rich with the poet's resilient clarity in the face of a knockabout world, Far from Algiers is a remarkable and distinctive debut."-Cyrus Cassells

About the Review

SAM'S BIOGRAPHY

HISTORY OF THE REVIEW: The story so far and some unofficial moments in an official city.

PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM - Sam Smith's Decoland Band & other gigs

END OF AN ERA FOR THE REVIEW'S EDITOR

For over 40 years the Review has been a consistent critic of the Reaganesque economy that led to the 2008 financial collapse.

We reported on NSA monitoring of U.S. phone calls in 1998, years before it became a major media story.

In 2003 Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

The Review started a web edition in 1995 when there were only 20,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are about 70 million active sites. The Review ranks in the top three percent of all American sites. It began an e-mail edition in 1994.

The Review became the first publication to report in depth on what would become known as the Clinton scandals. Before Clinton's nomination, we listed more than a score of institutions and individuals - nearly all of whom would be linked to criminal misdoing before the end of the Clinton administration

Our 1990 article on the savings & loan bailout scandal was selected by Utne Reader as one of the ten most under-covered stories of the past decade.

In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened.

In the 1980s, we reported on the dangers of computerized voting and suggests possible solutions including an independent review of software and an adequate audit trail.

Beginning in the 1970s, we argued that the war on drugs was wrong and would not work. It hasn't.

We argued for light rail and other transit alternatives in the 1970s that were later widely adopted.

In the 1970s we published a first person account of a then illegal abortion

In 1966 we published two articles on auto safety by Ralph Nader

Our arguments for DC statehood in 1970 led to the creation of the DC Statehood Party, now the DC Statehood Greens.

In 1965 we called for the end of the draft.

We proposed bikeways in the 1960s.

We proposed community policing in the 1960s

We opposed and helped stop the planned freeway system that would have made DC like an east coast Los Angeles.

We published first person reports from the Mississippi pivotal civil rights summer of 1964.

For many years we provided alternative coverage of the arts, with writers such as Tom Shales (now with the Washington Post and a nationally syndicated TV critic) and Patricia Griffith, later president of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, was also among the paper's arts critics.
Our arts section later became the Washington Review of the Arts that lasted for 25 years and won numerous awards.

We featured the work of photo editor Roland Freeman, the first photographer to win a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Freeman would become a leading photographer of the civil rights movement.

We long published the only urban planning comic strip in America, drawn by DC architect John Wiebenson.
Until its author was released from prison, we published what was then the only column written from behind bars for a non-prison publication.

In November 1990 we devoted an entire issue to the ecologically-sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely -- from Utne Reader to the Atlanta Constitution and the San Francisco Examiner.

Over the years many interesting writers and cartoonists have graced our pages. Among them: Eugene McCarthy; We have also featured the work of such alternative cartoonists as Ron Cobb, Tony Auth, Tom Tomorrow and Bill Griffith and the columnist Dave Barry long before they were picked up in the journalistic mainstream.

What others say. . .

An alternative press icon if ever there was one -- NY Press

A truly independent journalist with his feet firmly grounded in the city of neighborhoods and everyday people. - Patrick Mazza, Progressive Populist

-- A larger than life presence in the nation's capital . . .A truly original voice in American journalism: humorous and plain spoken and filled with common sense -- Jay Waljasper, Utne Reader

Inimitable -- Mother Jones Magazine

Sam's a cynical cat -- Marion Barry

The Progressive Review has been a luxuriant jungle of old-school reporting and frenetic information exchange since before blogs were blogs, and before the Internet was the Internet. - Jason Zannon, Democracy in Action

Sam Smith has been a lonely populist voice in Washington, a journalist who's chronicled the waste, the misdeeds, the scandals, and spending that make Washington Washington. Smith is a natural-born iconoclast who refuses to give up being a barnstormer - Jacki Lyden, NPR

One of the nation's leading visionaries. -- Charlie Spencer, Charlie Spencer Show

Notorious journalist -- Seattle Weekly

Washington has but a very few observers of the caliber, honesty and overall orneriness at the right times and places as Sam Smith -- Stephen Goode, Insight Magazine

Sam's one of the few independent voices left. -- Eugene McCarthy,

He has a wonderful combination of being absolutely realistic about the vagaries of people in political life while still being an idealist. -- Peter Edelman

A reputation for wit, intelligence and anger. -- Claude Lewis, Chicago Tribune

Smith is an island of reason and information in a sea of narcissistic blather. -- City Paper, Washington

Sam Smith is an antidote to mindless speed reading. He makes you pause between paragraphs in order to mull over the captivating morsels he is placing in your imagination. - Ralph Nader

There are butts that need kicking in this country . . . Sam Smith is handing out the boots. -- Alex Steffen, The Stranger, Seattle

Smith offers [a] community based, participatory politics that's neither left nor right wing but the whole bird. . . . His work is not different from what quality journalism ought to be: truth-seeking, independent, fair-minded and debunking. -- Colman McCarthy, Washington Post

His saucy judgments remind one of the way H. L. Mencken handled presidential campaigns." -- Robert Sherrill, The Texas Observer.

The Tom Paine of the Nineties -- Chuck Stone

Lucid . . . Keep going, Sam -- Mario Cuomo