Steven Hager: 30 books

"Extremely well-written" --Dave Marsh.... "The best and most reliable history" --Robert Palmer.... "Thrilling, intricate story" --Greil Marcus.... "Hager is an ace reporter" --Robert Chrisgau.... "Formidable job of reporting" --Ken Tucker.... "It's...

Steven Hager lived through the 1960s on the front lines of a social revolution, and traveled from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock to Stockholm, Sweden, eventually landing back in Urbana, Illinois wondering how the revolution went so off-the-rails. Although Hager is mostly known for non-fiction conspiracy...

Despite an avalanche of disinfo being dumped through the major media over the decades, the assassination of JFK has finally unraveled. A renegade CIA station working with a Sicilian secret society orchestrated the assassination, but their participation could never have been so massively covered-up...

"The idea is not to make war on religion, but to help it evolve, so we can put an end to war for religion, because right now, religion is the problem and not the solution. Religion and magic are the same thing, and a sense of enchantment has always been an essential part of ceremony and ritual." --Steven Hager

This book represents the Holy Grail of early hip hop journalism, written by the only professional journalist to travel to the South Bronx in the early 1980s to document the origins of the culture. For anyone interested in "first generation," this is the most authentic portrait of hip hop...

Bugsy first appears in my short story "East Village" as a 16-year-old runaway living near Tompkins Square Park in 1967. Here we meet him again exactly one decade later and his circumstances have changed dramatically. If you don't set a course in life, you begin to drift, which has good and...

Ever wondered about the real meaning of "The Wizard of Oz?" Who do you think really controls the banking industry? What are the connections between the intelligence agencies and organized crime around the world, and how do these connections affect the banking industry? Was the financial...

Phase 2 was one of the creative forces that helped birth hip hop. He was a master writer and is often credited with inventing the bubble letters that evolved into Wild Style. He was an early break dancer who helped create the dance style know as top rocking. And Phase even had a brief stint at singing...

President Lincoln was killed by a cabal inside his own administration because he was making secret plans to forgive the South and allow them to re-take their seats in Congress. This plan did not sit well with the radical Republicans who had taken control after secession because it would have upset...

"The outrageous energy of the participants and their subsequent notoriety will carry the reader through this uncritical, discursive pop history that begins with CBGB's and its development as the premier club for punk rock... The author then covers various groupings that were to make Manhattan's...

After attending New York/New Wave at P.S. 1, I discovered Futura's subway car "Break," which opened my eyes to the realization that a highly creative subculture was flourishing underground in New York. This was my first profile of anyone in that subculture, and I based it on my favorite...

On September 21, 1982, when my first Village Voice feature story was published, many in the media thought rap music was a fad that would soon disappear. Meanwhile, I was already predicting it would soon take over the world, which it did. Although Kool Herc and Coke La Rock pioneered the hip hop style,...

The Fun House was a dance club in New York that reached a peak in the mid-1980s. It was famous for under-age patrons, rampant drug use, occasional fights, and no-nonsense bouncers (all of whom looked like Gold's Gym poster boys). I spent a few weeks going there and wrote this report originally for...

Rick Simpson was a Systems Engineer for a hospital in Nova Scotia when he discovered the benefits of eating concentrated cannabis oil. When Simpson began treating people who were suffering from a wide variety of illnesses, including cancer, the Canadian government arrested him. Jack Herer initially...