Book Reviews

Pedro Pérez Sarduy, The Maids of Havana. Bloomington, Indiana: Authorhouse 2010. Reviewed by Linda Etchart Black skin White masks I am a sentinel Seated on the shell of a continent Lain by the music on the dawn Vibrant the bayonet bearing the name of the century Asleep is the music on the continent Vibrant its…

Arthur Koestler, Individualist Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic New York: Random House, 2009. Arthur Koestler authored dozens of books but one in particular provides the main reason to pay attention to him. Even if he cannot be seen as a reliably prescient and stalwart opponent of the twentieth…

Robert Cohen,“Freedom’s Orator”: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (Oxford, 2009) Edward P. Morgan, What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (University Press of Kansas, 2010)   On 15 November 2011, at the same spot on the Berkeley campus where “freedom’s orator” emerged into history in…

Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman were legends in their lifetimes and remain so to this day. Their peers thought of them as unconventional, eccentric, magical geniuses. As theoretical physicists, they had much in common – an ability to focus on difficult problems and pursue them, if necessary, for months on end. Their personalities were, however,…

Christopher Hitchens publicly courted posterity’s verdict and repeatedly stated the standard by which he sought to be judged. Introducing Arguably, the essay collection that appeared a few months before his death in December 2011, he notes that in a 1988 book, Prepared for the Worst, he’d “annexed a thought of Nadine Gordimer’s, to the effect…

Within hours of the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, while many American writers focused on feelings of horror and helplessness, Noam Chomsky soberly looked to the near future and wrote that these attacks would become “a gift to the hard jingoist right, those who hope to use force to control their…

For the United States, Hurricane Katrina was one of the two defining catastrophes of the first decade of the second millennium.  It had the same degree of impact on the political fortunes of President George W. Bush and the Republican Party as the attacks of September 11, 2001 (although in the opposite direction).  More importantly…