Book Reviews

Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo’s screed against Western Marxism is a product of the Cold War that dominated global politics between the end of World War II until the Fall and Collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989 and the early 1990s. The structuring Manichean dichotomy that organizes its polemic is a Battle between East and West, with…

Once confined to the arcane recesses of literary theory seminar rooms and abstruse academic journals, postcolonialism can say today that it is thoroughly in vogue. More than mere lingo for the self-righteous pseudo-left, it is now the policy for academic administrators who cannot seem to get on the bus fast enough. Even amidst the vigorous…

Repeating Revolutions examines how France’s revolutionary past became a working political language during Algeria’s struggle for decolonization from the 1930s through the 1960s. Johnson’s central claim is that invocations of “1789” mattered because they operated as historical analogies that shaped political perception and legitimated action. Defenders of empire appealed to revolutionary universalism to portray French…

In this book, philosopher William Paris develops an account of racial injustice that centers the relationship between freedom and time. In his own words, Paris aims to “develop the hypothesis that racial domination is at bottom the domination of time by one group over another and thus emancipation must entail delivering the control of time…

A chapter by comic artist Kevin Pyle in the new graphic non-fiction collection Partisans centers on the “spomeniks,” massive, abstract concrete monuments that the Communist dictator Tito commissioned all over postwar Yugoslavia. Some 14,000 in all, the spomeniks were the new regime’s way of simultaneously commemorating the sacrifice of the anti-fascist partisans during World War…

Perhaps now, a decade or so since the landmark study of a unique but mostly forgotten director, can the importance of Edgar Ulmer be appreciated.  Or perhaps not. Ulmer so successfully evades categorization, and dwelt so often and long in the low-production-value world of films, that he has not yet truly emerged as an important…

This volume, by a cultural scholar teaching at Indiana University, South Bend, could not have appeared at a more auspicious moment. Some Facebook participants describe it as ”the most talked-about book,” and with good reason. It speaks about the long and (for the most part) quietly held non-zionist sentiments of many Jewish Americans.  At a…

Chaisty and Whitefield offer a compelling and meticulously researched investigation into how Russian citizens have come to understand, and sometimes resist, the hybrid political economy that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Drawing on nearly three decades of longitudinal survey data, the authors trace the evolution of public attitudes toward a system that…

In Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, David Golumbia takes it upon himself to defend democracy from what he called “cyberlibertarianism,” a nebulous right-wing ideology that pervades the entire discourse surrounding digital technologies, even in self-defined left-wing spaces. The danger of cyberlibertarianism, he says, is that it undermines democracy by undermining governmental power. “One…

The collapse in recent years of a major comic distributor, leaving hundreds of thousands of comics of all kinds unsold, marks yet one more phase in the genre’s long boom-and-bust history. Frederic Wertham, long known as the bete noir of comics at the close of their historic heyday, has often seen as the witness for…