Book Reviews

Review: Malachi O’Doherty, Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life

By Adeline Barbin
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Malachi O’Doherty, Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life. Faber and Faber, 2017. Gerry Adams earlier this year stepped down as leader of Sinn Fein, formerly or residually the political wing of the Provisional IRA, which forged a peace deal that, however shakily, has held since 1997 in the six counties commonly known as Ulster (of which…

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Mary Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2018)

By Erik Grayson
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In the prologue to Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, Mary V. Dearborn recollects “ask[ing]…whether a woman could bring something to the subject that previous biographers had not” (7). Her question is, at least in part, a response to the looming presence of “the Hemingway legend” in the American imagination, an impression of the man as “the…

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Daniel Finn, One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA (New York: Verso: 2019)

By Aidan J. Beatty
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The Provisional IRA appear now like an almost incomprehensible manifestation from another time.  Their militaristic ideology hardly aligns with the current avatars of the Anglophone Left – not the pacific grandfatherliness of Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, much less the multicultural intersectionality of AOC or Ilhan Omar.  The Provos’ use of violence against civilians has…

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Brett Anderson, Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn (New York: Little, Brown 2019)

By Warren Leming
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Brett Anderson was the lead singer with the British pop Group Suede – a successful English group that worked the clubs for years, and finally emerged with all the gleaming trophies: magazine covers, exotic ladies, fashionista pals, backstage ennui, chart topping records, and drug addictions.  As Anderson notes, all bands have histories as predictable as the…

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The Unconscious in Social and Political Life, (London: Phoenix Publishing House 2019)

By Iain Ferguson
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On the morning after Boris Johnson’s election as UK Prime Minister in December 2019, one television commentator predicted, correctly as it turned out, that there would now be a ‘battle of the narratives’ over the reasons for the Tories’ success. One narrative that has so far not figured in that battle is that of psychoanalysis.…

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Peter Riley’s Against Vocation: Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019) and Caroline Hellman’s Children of the Raven and the Whale: Visions and Revisions of American Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019)

By Ben Shepard
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Poetry comes from all directions: with Ferlinghetti, to and from Paris, Harold Norse from East Coast to West, from Brooklyn to Paris to San Francisco, recalling Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Cities are defined by their poets, traipsing from port to embarkation to shore leave, loitering, laboring, waiting, always wondering. “Under thy shadow by the piers…

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Andy Heintz, Dissidents of the International Left: New Internationalist Publications, (Oxford, University Press, 2019)

By Michael Karadjis
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In this volume of interviews with an extraordinary range of people identifying with the political left or progressive social movements, Andy Heintz starts out seeking to answer a number of questions which are key to reconstructing a viable and relevant left today. For example, he asks whether there can be such a thing as “humanitarian…

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Review: George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century Alfred A. Knopf, 2019

By George Packer
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Richard Holbrooke’s diplomatic career, in this nearly Aesopian tale, forms a dismaying answer for those hardy true believers who reckon that working within a system is the best way to change it.  Of course, Holbrooke was no real rebel, but rather a razor sharp and mostly honest assessor of the international events he craved but…

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Review: Helena Sheehan, Navigating the Zeitgeist: A Story of the Cold War, The New Left, Irish Republicanism and International Communism Monthly Review Press 2019

By Aiden Beatty
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Helena Sheehan is a well-known and well-established presence on the Irish Left, an activist-academic with a strong form in meditative Marxist thought as well more accessible political commentary. As she shows in her new memoir, Navigating the Zeitgeist, it would be almost too obvious to say she led an “interesting” life, moving from post-war suburbia…

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REVIEW ESSAY: Dostoevsky as Political Agitator: Alex Chistofi, Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

By Sabby Sagal
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The notion of Fyodor Dostoevsky in familial life, as it were, is wonderfully explored in Christofi’s book, published just about in time for his 200th anniversary of his birth, but, however entertaining, there really is little to be said definitively of the likely effects of his notions of kinship or even romance in his literary…

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Latest Issue

2024: Vol. 23, No. 3

Latest Issue

2024: Vol. 23, No. 3


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