Book Reviews

At a time when India and Iran are mentioned together as countries whose nuclear aspirations have gained the ear of the world, Talking India furnishes a salutary reminder of other conversations that can take place between ancient civilizations and of the rich history, now only occasionally remembered, of the intellectual, cultural and political exchanges between…

Melinda Tankard Reist, editor, Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics (Australia: Spinifex Press, 2006) Harriet McBride Johnson, Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2005) Ninety years ago the Washington Post asked, “Who are the unfit?” and then answered its own question by noting that the…

Murambi, the Book of Bones. by Boubacar Boris Diop Translated by Fiona McLaughlin. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2006. This translation of Diop’s internationally acclaimed novel, originally published in French,[1] introduces one of Africa’s most important political novelists to an English-speaking audience. Murambi was born out of an initiative by African writers to commemorate and reflect upon the Rwandan…

Intriguing, entertaining and frighteningly plausible. That, in a nutshell, describes Kyle Mills’ political thriller, The Second Horseman, an ‘airport reading rack’ novel about a nuclear holocaust facing the Middle East as a unquestioningly pro-Israel America stokes Islamic fanaticism. Despite some loose ends and plot hiccups, this is by far the best of Mills’ works and…

Judging by the queries about the book from usually indifferent New York City Subway riders, The History of Human Rights certainly has an interested audience outside the academy. To be sure, considering the “slaughter bench of history,” and the twentieth century’s innovations of mass murder, the development and institutionalization of human rights the book charts…

When Kurt Vonnegut finally finished Timequake one decade ago, the exasperated writer claimed that he would never write another book. Technically, he still hasn’t. In 1999’s Bagombo Snuff Box, Vonnegut merely collected several short stories he’d previously written and in 2001’s God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, he simply published a few short pieces he’d performed…

It has taken almost thirty years for human rights activists, judges, historians, and social scientists to begin documenting the history of long-known abuses in Latin America, as well as to plumb the exact role played by the U.S. in these sordid events. It appears that a generation had to pass before key archives opened and…

Dennis Ross served as a key architect of US policy in the Middle East in his capacities as the head of Policy Planning in the State Department under James Baker III in the administration of George H.W. Bush (1989 – January 1993) and then as chief negotiator for Arab-Israeli issues under Bill Clinton’s two Secretaries…

Rethinking and reexamining the history of the vital relations between science, technology and the state is an increasingly urgent task. Any serious endeavor to do so must bring back into the policy equation the military connection, spotlighting what  Deleuze and Guattari in  A Thousand Plateaus bluntly call the War Machine. Since Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address…