Book Reviews

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…

Critics suggest that G. W. Bush’s presidency may well be the most important fact misshaping the 21st century; the long-term consequences may endure for generations. His less than compassionate conservatism has seen massive retrenchments from already niggardly social programs, and his disregard of the environment accelerated global warming. His economic policies created the largest budget…

Conservative commentators howled when, in 1998, Princeton University named Peter Singer DeCamp Professor in its Center for Human Values. This bioethicist takes nothing as sacred or tabooed-not the distinction of humans and animals or the sacredness of all forms of human life. He examines our assumptions about such matters and disturbs their unchallenged roots. Singer…

“Who is middle class?” I ask. Ninety-five percent of all my students-undergraduate and graduate-inevitably raise their hands high in the air. “Who works?” They stay raised. “Who carries credit card or other kinds of dept?”  Hands, unanimously, reach for the heavens. “Who has control over her/his work and her/his workplace?” Every arm goes limp, mirroring…

Michael Walzer’s new book assembles eleven articles published over the last 25 years, the latest in November 2003. The philosophical stances he devised and defended in Just and Unjust Wars are applied to the first Gulf War, Kosovo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 9/11, the “war on terror” and the Iraq War. His consistency is, to say…

If two books constitute a trend, then these two announce a shift toward a new political style on the American left: a style that is simultaneously lively and lonely, furious and vacuous. This style has precedents, but it is unique in the way it synthesizes existing themes, and it marks a break with the approaches…