Book Reviews
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…
Read Full Article...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…
Read Full Article...Reviewed by Emad El-Din Aysha The swan song of the literary missionary! While not the best of John le Carré’s novels, The Mission Song is certainly far ahead of his previous symbolic disaster, Absolute Friends, and once again proves that he is the master of the post-Cold War political thriller and factually way ahead of…
Read Full Article...Review of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, edited by Richard Greene, W.W. Norton & Company, 2008 Graham Greene’s life was not half over when he summed it up as “useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring.” As an officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service, he offered that account…
Read Full Article...The publication history of Beautiful Children makes for what is now an old story, but still a telling one. Charles Bock, its author, comes from the provinces (Nevada) and an unconventional upbringing (son of Las Vegas pawnbrokers). He struggles through school and college until he discovers the “second wave” of American postmodernist writers, a nearly…
Read Full Article...This book is like so many others. It is made of paper, full of text and pictures, and bound together with a hard cardboard cover. It is a stereotype, a copy, familiar and trite. The book does not know it is a stereotype, however. It cannot gain or lose by being reduced to the simplified…
Read Full Article...Our understanding of reality is paradigmatic. That is, it comes from a learned picture drawn by culture and ideology. There can be various aspects to a paradigm: political, scientific, religious, etc. and sometimes they can overlap and even be contradictory. Also, they all are capable of changing over time. Individuals who live through such…
Read Full Article...Books under review: Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso, 2007) Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008) Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) The use of spatial arrangements as strategies to control and even eradicate rebellious populations in warfare has…
Read Full Article...Engels has always deserved more consideration than he’s gotten from his English-speaking biographers. The two best treatments of his life and work have been around for quite a while but their sophistication, length and density make them a bit unsuitable for introductory readers. That’s our loss of course, but Sam Cooke was probably speaking…
Read Full Article...(New York: Scribner) John Le Carré has resisted writing about the war on terror, unlike the other mass market thriller novelists, focusing instead on the seldom reported crimes of big business (The Constant Gardener) and intrusive Northern governments (The Mission Song). In A Most Wanted Man he tackles it head on, but from the victim’s…
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Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 2
Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 2
Between The Issues
