Book Reviews
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…
Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita is a wonderful book. It’s also a book I found myself quarreling with-not on every other page, but at certain points, and that vigorously. No doubt it’s intentional-I recently heard de Zengotita remark that he had learned to write the way he spoke in class and he is obviously an…
Peter Gordon’s A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity, is assuredly one of the best books on Adorno and Critical Theory to have been written in the last decades. The book is comprehensive but detailed, focused but expansive. It is about Adorno’s concept of happiness and the flouring life, but it is also…
In The Atlantic Realists, Matthew Specter sets out to historicize a tradition of international thought—realism—whose defining feature may be its claim to exist outside history. The book “conducts a genealogy of the realist paradigm in North Atlantic international thought” (2), asking “how [realist] intellectuals… [came] to believe that specific theories offered a privileged glimpse of…
Film scholars have in general spent surprisingly little time historicizing, theorizing, and analyzing the technological processes by which films actually get made. Even within studies of avant-garde and experimental cinema, which by necessity center individual filmmakers and their specific artisanal practices, emphasis is usually placed far more on formal analysis – itself leaning heavily on…
Latest Issue
2026: Vol. 25, No. 2
Latest Issue
2026: Vol. 25, No. 2
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