Book Reviews

John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. (W.W. Norton, 2015).  Prior to his death in 1983, Tennessee Williams had twice designated Lyle Leverich, a San Francisco-based theater producer who had never written a book, as his authorized biographer, but those individuals controlling the Williams Estate were less enthusiastic. Thus, impressed with the success of…

Alexander Gallas. The Thatcherite Offensive: A Neo-Poulantzasian Analysis (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016) Nicos Poulantzas is a thinker awaiting a revival of interest. A theorist of states, classes, and the dynamics of fascism and authoritarianism, his work has some obvious relevance for contemporary political problems. Born in Greece in 1936, he relocated to Germany and then…

Jeremy Walton, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Since the very beginning of the Turkish Republic in 1923, both scholarly and popular accounts have frequently tended to frame the country – their object of analysis – in a way that produced two effects: First, these…

Bhaskar Sunkara (ed.), The ABC’s of Socialism. Brooklyn: Verso, 2016. It can be difficult to remember amidst the daily news onslaught that there was not so long ago a real chance that America would elect a real progressive to the White House, one who openly though sometimes confusingly spoke about the value of socialism. The…

Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017 Every now and then, one comes across a book that is so out of touch with reality, it could only have been written by an academic. When the reality that the author is…

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Assembly. Oxford University Press, 2017.   Since the 1990s Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have coauthored several controversial volumes of note about contemporary politics and emancipation. This time they offer Assembly, a book that revisits many themes of their earlier publications. Despite this, the new volume also presents a significant…

Peggy Seeger, First Time Ever: A Memoir. Faber and Faber, 2017. Peggy Seeger has written an at times intimate biography charting her early years and her  marriage to British folk legend Ewan MacColl, which produced several talented children. The book’s title, First Time Ever, is drawn from a MacColl song which produced a huge hit…

Asad Haider. Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. London: Verso   Lenin famously said that “imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism”.  But then Lenin never saw Facebook. Social media invites its users to treat all previously intimate and private connections with other human beings as moments for profit-making; all our…

Review: Andrew Feenberg, Technosystem. The Social Life of Reason, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Our modernity is not just a question of values such as equality of individuals, of fair social organization, nor of speeches and communication. It is also a question of objects, systems and procedures and how they shape our gestures and behaviours:…