Book Reviews

At the height of the Vietnam War a sly Harvard law student addressed an assembly of parents and alumni. “The streets of our country are in turmoil,’ he said. “The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might. And the republic…

Thiscurious new novel is closely fitted to the bare bones knowledge of the actuality of the life of a world-famous mathematician and physicist, and for some years the head of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Dublin: Erwin Schrödinger. For Belton’s work is an odd literary amalgamation: deeply thought with some fine writing at times…

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press,by Kristina Borjesson, Revised and Expanded Edition, Prometheus Books, 2004 This collection of essays and articles is intriguing and irritating in almost equal measure. The inside stories of life in the news media are revealing: they show how many sectors of the American media are…

John Rose’s The Myths of Zionism (2004) is a long overdue book fearlessly examining the strategic, historical and ideological roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a true tour de force. Most books on this fraught subject tend either to be inquiries into the international forces behind the conflict, devoid of historical depth, or else are reportorial…

Most of the controversy surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict is, in my view, contrived. The purpose of contriving such controversy is transparently political: to deflect attention from, or distort, the actual documentary record. One can speak of, basically three sources of artificial disagreement: (1) mystification of the conflict’s roots, (2) invocation of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust…

Iconic actor Peter Lorre once was described fondly as a rococo cherub gone slightly astray, but as Youngkins 613 page opus shows, this extremely talented man strayed very far indeed from his astonishingly accomplished theatrical beginnings propelled by the rise of Nazism, a World War, fickle Hollywood, and a witch hunt, to name but a…

“The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory” (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, quoted in Said’s Orientalism, p. 25). “The focus of the book is on…

Fiction and philosophy have had an uneasy time in the wake of 9/11. Perhaps it’s because no intellectual response can match or adequately combat the political response of the Bush Administration, which was swifter, more brutal, and more insidiously deceptive than even the most seasoned members of the Left imagined. In the wake of this…

When an author is as publicly active as Lawrence Lessig, and when a book comes with a supporting web site, an author’s blog, and surrounded by previous and subsequent discussions of many of its themes and proposals, the reviewer can find it difficult to know where to start. Anybody with more than a passing interest…

One of the fundamental ideas of late 20th century America was that the collapse of actually existing communism reflected a permanent turn in human affairs. Francis Fukuyama called it “the end of history”: the exhaustion of alternatives to the liberal democratic state in the form we see it today. Proclaimed in 1989 as the Soviet…