Book Reviews
Introduction In the preface of his most recent book, On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting: Oral Histories, Strategies, and Conflicts, Benjamin Heim Shepard (2025) states a powerfully obvious fact about the times we are living in: “With pandemics ebbing and tyrannies rising, we all need friends” (p. xiii). At a time when social movements are more…
Requiem for Communism, by Charity Scribner History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa, by Annie B. Coombes Charity Scribner’s Requiem for Communism analyzes the extremely tricky politics of memory in Europe after the fall of communism while Annie Coombes’ History After Apartheid examines the politics of visual culture and…
Critique and Affirmation in Erich Fromm radiates intelligence and insight. In addition to being thoughtfully written, meticulously researched, and exceptionally compelling, Matheus Romanetto’s new book is a meaningful contribution to Fromm scholarship. One of its defining features is its depth and breadth: the book covers, in some detail, a wide range of themes, from questions of…
The Real Edward Teller? As someone who worked on the development of the first British atomic bomb, on early ideas for a thermonuclear weapon, and on nuclear reactors for research and power production from 1949 through 1964, I have always been gripped by stories of the early nuclear pioneers in the United States: Hans Bethe,…
A year after his death in a Siberian prison, the New York Times reports, “Even in Death, Navalny Is Seen by the Kremlin as an Enduring Threat …Russian authorities have zealously prosecuted people with links to Aleksei A. Navalny’s organization inside Russia in the year since he died.” On the 12th day of the second…
History Lessons: How Textbooks From Around the World Portray U.S. History, by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward Founding Myths: Stories That Hide our Patriotic Past, by Ray Raphael For thousands of years political thinkers have recognized that myths are essential instruments of political power. Plato’s vision of a well-ordered republic famously employed a Myth of…
Dear Anne Norton, I found your book an engaging read for the memories it evoked and for the information it provided on the mindset of people whom we need to examine seriously. You brings to life the milieu from which Straussianism emerged, stirring vivid memories of the University of Chicago’s Political Science department some 30 years…
Imperialism used to be a theory; today, it is a rhetoric. The word shadows us wherever we go: on placards at anti-war demonstrations, sprinkled through the pages of left publications, and sprouting up in one conversation after another. Few seem to have noticed that the word has left behind the precise meanings it had several…
The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, by Paul Krugman The Roaring Nineties: Why We’re Paying the Price for the Greediest Decade in History, by Joseph Stiglitz Paul Krugman’s collection of opinion pieces from the New York Times exposes the utter shamefulness of a dark ongoing chapter in American political life that…
Hope Dies Last is the latest of Studs Terkel’s books on modern social history, following such gems as Hard Times, The Good War,’ and, most recently, Will The Circle Be Unbroken? All these oral histories have been honed rigorously into compulsive readability from extensive interviews with a wide gamut of people, formerly folks who often…
Latest Issue
2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2
Latest Issue
2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2
Between The Issues
