Book Reviews
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…
Read Full Article...Books Reviewed in this Essay: Hannah Gurman, ed., Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Press, 2013) Ivan Eland, The Failure of Counterinsurgency: Why Hearts and Minds are Seldom Won (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013) Gian P. Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Press,…
Read Full Article...Review of Warren Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy by Warren Breckman. Columbia University Press, 2013. 376p. Twenty-five years ago the revolutions of 1989 transformed the political landscape of the Cold War world. Crises were nothing new in the history of Marxism—the dates 1914, 1933, 1956, and 1968 all come to mind—each prompting…
Read Full Article...Ebony & Ivy: Race Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder
Review of Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) It has become an article of faith that American exceptionalism starts with our lack of a feudal past. Settled by sturdy farmers and righteous artisans, the story goes, we were spared the long, bloody…
Read Full Article...Lost & Found Books is an occasional Logos series reconsidering books that reviewers argue were lost in the shuffle, fell unjustly by the wayside or are otherwise worth a revival. Submissions are welcome but it is wise to propose pieces first.– KJ Lost and Found Books: Dave Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougall Street (New…
Read Full Article...How could it be possible that the contemporary global financial system remains basically unaltered from its state before the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression? And more pointedly, how could the Left have failed so miserably while the Right has grown stronger and more boisterous than ever? In Never Let a Serious Crisis go…
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Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 3
Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 3
Between The Issues
