Book Reviews

Did it start with Bowie, or was it Gary Glitter—that vast mid-1970s dumbing down that glam rock initiated and then perfected? “Outrageous” outfits, the androgyny fix, retro Space fantasies, and at the fringes the desiccated meth freaks for whom the Velvet Underground was alpha and omega. The Stones, Yardbirds, Animals and even purist Eric Clapton;…

In December 2006, several months before the completion of my dissertation fieldwork in Istanbul, I offered a preliminary presentation of my research on civil Islamic foundations and secularism at the American Research Institute in Turkey, which had partially funded my research.  Although I had alerted several Turkish friends and colleagues of my talk, I was…

On a sweltering summer’s evening the crowd packed into Connolly Books, Dublin’s last radical bookshop, heard Conor McCabe’s book presented as “an examination of the house itself and not just of the broken furniture” that could become a “weapon.” The house and the furniture are seriously dilapidated. Following several years of steady growth in the…

When Mao Tse-Tung was alive he was cast alternately as bandit, communist leader, ruthless dictator, elder statesman, and mass murderer. Since his death the characterization is less ambivalent: hedonistic despot, reckless utopian, unbridled monster. The change is anchored in the twists and turns of history. The unfettering of capitalism in the wake of the collapse…