Book Reviews
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…
Read Full Article...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…
Read Full Article...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…
Read Full Article...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…
Read Full Article...Books Reviewed in this Essay: Albert Camus. Algerian Chronicles. Edited by Alice Kaplan. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pierre Bourdieu. Algerian Sketches. Edited and Presented by Tassadit Yacine. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Polity Press, 2013. The Algerian War is misleadingly emblematic of the history of French decolonization. France’s…
Read Full Article...Irish novelist Edna O’Brien earlier wrote a biography of James Joyce so I was curious that in this memoir Country Girl she omitted A Portrait of the Artist in her long list of acknowledgements and influences. Portrait memorably starts its history with Baby Tuckoo and Edna also begins at the beginning – early childhood in…
Read Full Article...Higher education is in a state of crisis. The mania affecting the academy is profit, slashing the price of labour, increasing class size, destroying the tenure system with full-time non-tenure track and adjunct-proletarian labour, and increasing the power and size of the administration-ruling class. Student tuition always increases even during prolonged economic stagnation. Student debt…
Read Full Article...Review: Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013) Perhaps the most commonly-repeated cliché in regards to the writings of Karl Marx is that whatever the merits of his analysis of capitalism, he had little-to-nothing to say about what might replace it. Serious readers of Marx know this to be nonsense,…
Read Full Article...Albert O. Hirschman certainly led a life unlike most academics: born in Berlin in 1915, he engaged in street battles with Nazi thugs during his mid-teens, went underground and escaped Germany, fought in Spain for the Republic against the Fascists; joined the French army to fight the Nazis, and eventually even served in the US…
Read Full Article...Books Reviewed in this Essay: Lane Kenworthy. Social Democratic America. Oxford University Press, 2014. James Cronin, George Ross, and James Shoch, eds. What’s Left of the Left: Democrats and Social Democrats in Challenging Times. Duke University Press, 2011. What use might the European tradition of social democracy be to the American left? Lane Kenworthy’s answer…
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Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 3
Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 3
Between The Issues
