Book Reviews

Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (Crown Publishers, 2012)   Twilight of the Elites is a book intended to influence progressive understanding and action and has been positively received as such by influential progressive celebrities among others. Such positive evaluations are quite at odds with my assessment of what Hayes has wrought.…

“Where have you gone, C. Wright Mills?  Sociology turns its lonely eyes to you”—with apologies to Simon and Garfunkle—would have better captured Stanley Aronowitz’ recent intellectual and political biography of Mills than the uninspiring title chosen.  Yet this reviewer implores readers not to get caught up with the chosen title, but rather to dive right…

Books Reviewed in this Essay: Gregory D. Summer, Unstuck in Time: A Journey through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels (Seven Stories Press, 2011). Charles J. Shields, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life  (Henry Holt and Company, 2011). Tom McCartan, Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (Melville House, 2011).   “What are…

Book Reviewed: Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (Gallery, 2012).   “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner was correct. For too long history’s outcasts and victims’ were stripped of their pasts and denied a voice for the future. The task of the historian is…

In the four months between its UK and US publication this book has left indelible marks. Ben Goldacre’s case for comprehensive reporting of drug trials has been cited in British parliamentary debates, national newspapers and medical journals. He has become a central figure in a new campaign to change the regulation of trials, requiring all…

Alan Turing was an outstanding British mathematician who joined the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS) at the renowned Bletchley Park on the first day of the Second World War. He was just 27. Before the war he had made a name for himself by introducing the concept of a ‘universal computing machine’. At Bletchley…

In 1960 Paul Nelson founded the Little Sandy Review with his partner Jon Pankake and made it one of the first Zines to garner a small but influential audience, which grew not by hype but solely by word of mouth. The Little Sandy had a circulation of perhaps a thousand (my guess) and all of us…

John T. Nichols (not to be confused with The Nation columnist), age 73, is a novelist, non- fiction author and screen writer who moved to Taos, New Mexico from the East Coast following the success of the 1969 film version of his best selling novel, The Sterile Cuckoo. Nichols fell in love with his adopted…