Book Reviews

(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…

Never Pure, the title of Steven Shapin’s new collection of essays, refers to the fact that science always has been tainted inescapably by politics, morality, cultural subjectivity and the influence of elites. The subtitle, meandering and humorous, is a declarative underscoring of the author’s intent: to disabuse his audience of the idealized notion that pure…

I. Thesis Israel seems to be a good laboratory for the study of mass delusion. Not just the delusional nature of Israeli ideas and feelings about other people’s behavior, say that of the Palestinians, Lebanese Shiites, or Iranians. Not just the delusional nature of their understanding of their own behavior as perennial victims. Israel’s potential…

George Orwell’s conviction that prose should be as clear as a window pane would have made no sense to many earlier political writers. So Ralph Lerner suggests in Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times. Several prominent authors of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries intentionally opted for opacity and complexity instead of clarity…

  Do digital media technologies present the potential for the shaping of political discourse that differs from traditional forms of media, like newsprint?  Digital media is examined in Boler’s volume as a political force that shapes our perceptions. Digital Media and Democracy contextualizes the force of digital media and offers a relevant survey of the…

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision last year– opening the floodgates for corporate monetary influence over elections – was a landmark victory for the “business civil liberties” movement founded by the Chamber of Commerce in the early 1970s. At that time the Chamber invited Lewis Powell (shortly before his appointment to the Supreme Court)…

Benjamin Franklin recounts in his Autobiography that during his years as a printer’s apprentice he developed a “bookish inclination” and a fondness for “the arts of rhetoric and logic.” He writes: About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them.…