Book Reviews
Books reviewed: Martin Duberman, Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left (New York: The New Press, 2012) Anthony Arnove, Howard Zinn Speaks: Collected Speeches 1963-2009 ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012) The American Association of University Professors was founded 100 years ago in 1915 to defend academic freedom for professors who were initially under siege…
Read Full Article...The Invisible Bridge, the book jacket informs us, “is the story of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Thus are we introduced to the third volume of Rick Perlstein’s exploration of the birth and growth of contemporary American conservatism, centering on the rise of Ronald Reagan. (He has produced other books centering on…
Read Full Article...The Brecht Industry rolls on: doctoral dissertations, journals, blogs, websites, YouTube, and memoirs comprising millions of pages, much to the consternation of the boys at the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, who must be musing on how it is that an ardent anti-capitalist has entranced the cognoscenti and, much like Che, taken the moral high-ground…
Read Full Article...Of late, the tendency of media pundits and so-called Middle East experts has been to explain developments in Iraq as being due to factors intrinsic to that country and the region as a whole. They are viewed as being rooted in history, either of recent vintage—that is, as a consequence of the artificial borders set…
Read Full Article...At a time when ‘shining’ India seemingly stands poised to become a global economic powerhouse steered by new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, selected by an increasingly impatient and disgruntled electorate, Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen’s book, An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, serves as a timely critical eye-opener for anyone interested in understanding the…
Read Full Article...Books Reviewed in this Essay: Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, New York, London, Verso, 2014 Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism, London, Allen Lane, 2014 Something for Nothing It is not easy to decide whether something can be in itself, or whether nothing…
Read Full Article...Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy – the many faces of Anonymous, by Gabriella Coleman. Verso Books. 2014 The Politics of Open Science, by Alessandro Delfanti. Pluto Press, 2014 Hardly a day passes without some news of hacking in the headlines. Somebody hacks into a bank’s systems, governments hack into email servers routinely, the North Koreans or…
Read Full Article...Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) A book with the defiantly downbeat title Why We Lost is not geared to enchant ‘higher circles’ or make much of a media splash. Count that in its favor. Moreover, in military memoirs…
Read Full Article...Review of Michael Gould-Wartofsky, The Occupiers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Occupy was the largest political mobilization of my lifetime. The explosion of energy it produced gave the feeling of perpetuity, with thousands of volunteers supporting each other through donations of food and standing together in solidarity against the police. But as the encampments…
Read Full Article...Eduardo Galeano, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History London: Allen Lane 2013. Translated by Mark Fried Eduardo Galeano’s Children of the Days is neither a calendar nor a history; nor does it cover all of humanity. It is selective, as it has to be, with less emphasis on the East and more…
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Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 2
Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 2
Between The Issues
