Book Reviews

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The philosopher Susan Neiman, after professorships at Yale University and Tel Aviv University, has been director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam for 23 years. At the beginning of her new book, “Left Is Not Woke”, she makes it clear where she is coming from and what her concern is: “I was raised in Georgia during…

Somewhere in the yawning archives of WFMT Radio in Chicago is an ancient tape recording of a Bob Zimmerman/Dylan interview with the estimable Studs Terkel, which is utterly, inevitably, charmingly  and teasingly fabricated. The encounter with the unfailingly genial Studs disclosed a rich fantasy life as told by Dylan’s painstakingly constructed imaginary persona, flourishing all the folk…

Novelist and screenwriter John Nichols, a staunch but wonderfully wry leftist, is best known for the comedic laid-back subversive prose style of The Milagro Bean Field War, later made into Robert Redford’s second film (after Ordinary People) as director.  But even that illustrious novel only forms the opening salvo of  what became the “New Mexico trilogy”, including what…

The period from 1878 to about 1882 is usually known as “The Land War” in Irish history.  Under the guidance of the recently released Fenian prisoner, Michael Davitt, Irish tenant farmers took on their landlords.  For the more moderate, the goal was to secure the “Three Fs” – Fair Rent, Free Sale and Fixity of Tenure.  At its…

We cannot choose the life into which we are born. Part of our human trajectory involves coming to terms with our biological and social legacies. It is poignant, then, to witness the efforts of parents risking everything to imbue choice into the genetic lives of their offspring. It is this human desire, this wish for…