Book Reviews

  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…

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…

  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…

(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…

(New York: Saint Martins Press) Over the last decade, at least nine books have appeared with the name ‘J. Robert Oppenheimer’ in the title, and no doubt the trend will continue. Some are biographies, covering Oppenheimer’s life as family man, as physicist, as ‘father of the atomic bomb’, as victim of a witch hunt during…

The three essays comprising this book are (1) Secularism without Secularization: Reflections on the Religious Right in America and India, (2) Hindu Ecology in the Age of Hindutva: The Dangers of Religious Environmentalism, (3) Making Science Sacred: How Postmodernism Aids Vedic Science. In her introduction Nanda is gratified that the Hindutva party in India recently…

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf) The name “Robert Fisk” has become synonymous with dangerous truth-telling in his reporting about the Middle East—truth-telling of a kind so rare in journalistic circles that those seeking to suppress the facts about what the Western powers have done to the region and its people usually resort to the usual…

Had President Dwight D. Eisenhower not initially used it, I would have recommended the title Mandate for Change. Instead, Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (A.A.U.P.) and Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has a Kingian title for his recent volume on academic freedom…