Book Reviews

My students often question me about the current state of American politics and society. Being located in a plainly proletarian city, they aren’t so much asking for an empirical account of the conditions they are already observing for themselves. Instead , they want me to explain how the ‘greatest country in the world’ could find…

Foreign policy not so long ago seemed to move in maddeningly elitist ways far outside the public sphere of ordinary citizens, but it’s now almost downright de rigueur for many Americans, stung by ‘blowback’ effects, to be interested in its arcane details. As  a result of technological innovations ranging from a 24-hour news cycle to…

In Persian there is a piece of proverbial wisdom that praises a statement, a report, an analysis, or even a book, for being brief-and thereby beneficial.  To a person who is not getting to the point, Iranians politely plead to be “brief and beneficial.”  Danny Postel’s book, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, does a good…

Don’t dare be a liberal – never mind, a leftist. That was the message of McCarthyism and its ideological cousins through the Seventies in anthropology. If you tried it, the FBI and CIA would see to it that you paid dearly. This is the major finding of David Price’s Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s…

For me, fresh out of a Chicago suburb, it served as the diving board to Bohemian oblivion: a Second City show seen in 1961. To encounter people in post Fifties America, on a stage, skewering Ike, Liberal-indifference, and cookie-cutter Suburban conformity was bliss in that airless Cold War Utopia. Second City director Paul Sills was…

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…