Book Reviews
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…
Read Full Article...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…
Read Full Article...Myths are cherished most intensely in academic disciplines that perpetually protest too much that they despise them. One does well to recall that even in modern physics seasoned warriors such as Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck were moved to recall with mouth-agape astonishment their encounters with the infinitely wily obstructions, diligent deviousness and ‘circling of…
Read Full Article...Doctors take a pint of blood from me twice each month. A crapshoot of parental genetics came up snake eyes, twice in a row, to give both my older brother and me a rare and tiresome condition. We must regularly undergo a medieval regime of bloodlettings, otherwise we will slowly rust-up inside due to an…
Read Full Article...In many ways, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is the reason I majored in English as an undergraduate and, subsequently, attended graduate school to become an English professor. Put plainly, reading Catch-22 changed the course of my life more powerfully and definitively than nearly any other experience I’ve had before or since I first picked up the…
Read Full Article...The epigraph to Alexandra Ouroussoff’s slim, revelatory, and important ethnographic study of Wall Street firms comes from an anonymous “Chief Financial Officer of one of the top five commodity extraction companies.” Identified only as “Ron,” he opens the book with the tough-guy grumble: “I wouldn’t buy a book on risk if it was the last…
Read Full Article...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.…
Read Full Article...“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…
Read Full Article...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…
Read Full Article...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…
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Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 3
Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 3
Between The Issues
