Book Reviews

How did conservative evangelical Christianity become the default religion of the US government, despite the legal separation of church and state? Kevin M. Kruse sees this as a Twentieth Century development, a process that started with the Eisenhower administration, continued through several others, and eventually solidified with the Reagan administration. The book offers impressive detail…

South Africa seldom reaches news headlines nor are its politics a topic of much public concern elsewhere anymore. It has, in a certain sense, fallen into benign neglect. Internationally, the anti-apartheid sympathy for the Mandela administration extended itself right up to the current political regime, giving current president Jacob Zuma an unearned reprieve from scrutiny.…

Mary Wisniewski is a seasoned pro with a long career as an ace reporter for the Chicago dailies and for Reuters, and it shows in her superb biography of Nelson Algren, the writer who made Chicago “his trade.” Like James Joyce and Dublin, Franz Kafka and Prague, and Alfred Doeblin and Berlin, Algren’s knowledge of…

In 1965 a coup d’état took place in Indonesia. The left-leaning government of President Soekarno (var. Sukarno) was replaced by a military regime headed by General Suharto. Soekarno’s presidency had balanced itself on the so-called Nasakom, the attempted harmonisation of three major forces in Indonesian life: Nasionalisme (Nationalism), Agama (Religion) and Komunisme (Communism). The Communist…

Inside a foreign policy seminar, as a sour sort of luck would have it, I actually heard an Army officer, who was on leave to pick up an advanced degree, blurt just a bit too blithely that drone strikes in Pakistan were perfectly fine because the national government quietly approved. Why? Remote control warfare was…

There is something way too flat about horizontalism. The political style associated with Occupy Wall Street has its defenders, including writers like Marianne Maeckelbergh and David Graeber, who find something lively and colorful in the horizontalist enthusiasm for long consensus-seeking meetings, rejection of “vertical” structures like representation or formal leadership, and conviction that a group’s…

In Hail, Caesar! the Coen Brother’s recent paean to 1950s Hollywood, there is a curiously political scene in a later part of the film: Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) a popular cinematic heartthrob is kidnapped by a group of disgruntled (and secretly communist) screenwriters. Having hidden him in a well-appointed beach-front property, the kidnappers add insult…

Martin Jay begins his reflections on the critique of reason by the first-generation Frankfurt school with the question: What did Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno mean by their notion of an emphatic conception of reason? Why was it necessary and what is its role? This is no doubt the right question to ask to begin…

Henry A. Giroux is a prolific scholar and public intellectual best known for his work in the field of “critical pedagogy” and on issues commonly grouped under the hypernym: “social justice.” His latest book, America at War with Itself, offers readers a way to “see through” the “dark clouds of authoritarianism” gathering over America, Europe,…