Book Reviews

As I walked toward my lodging at a respectable widow’s house near the Marino, my thoughts turned to teeth. I lost two molars when visiting the Hyde Park Exhibition in 1851. I blame the Sudan giant, sent by the Khedive of Egypt to decorate his pavilion. Such strong bones: camel meat, I expect. I left…

John Gray has a bone to pick. His latest book, Straw Dogs, takes aim at a host of targets in what appears to be a wholesale deconstruction of human thought. Religion, humanism, philosophy, belief in progress (indeed, belief in anything), industrialization, even civilization itself has, according to Gray, kept us from realizing our true nature:…

Dick Howard’s The Specter of Democracy is composed primarily of recent essays revised for this volume. They express ideas that he has been developing for about three decades. Cutting a broad swath, he critically explores the relations between theory, history, and politics. The essays reflect his intellectual journey—his early engagements with Marx, the Frankfurt School, and, especially,…

Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” remains the anthem of our times. We have been living with wars all our lives. World War II and Korea were central events for the generation before us. Vietnam was the defining experience for my American generation—whether we fought there, lost loved ones there, supported or fought against that vicious…

Sean Mitchell’s book is an illuminating account of the shifting landscapes of race and inequality that ravage Brazil in the early years of the twenty-first century. Deftly transitioning between an intricate plot of First-World catch-up through space technology, and the scorching socio-material inequalities that continue to assail the worst-off, he shows how inequality is produced…

Francis Fukuyama, former deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff, follows up his last book on Political Order and Political Decay with a book that relates personal identity to political identity, entitled Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. He is the author of The End of History and the…

“Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour’s got me on the rails It never seemed to make no sense, I couldn’t tell the difference Stay married, hate her guts, no no no divorce Little girls all end up pregnant, hypocrites in every convent– Gotta get out of the land of DeValera!”                          –song by Larry Kirwan & Black 47 band, “Land…

The heroes and heroines of my late teens were a remarkably and unapologetically rowdy bunch. Almost all were tagged Communists, or whatever was worse, and all were part of what was known as “the Great Folk Music Revival” led by Pete Seeger and a ragtag band of fellow singer/songwriters, chief among them the now iconic, though formerly firmly forgotten and…

The word “woke” has been used in connection with racial awareness for at least a century.  In tracing the history of this word, Aja Romano (2020) notes that its earlier use, as a call for African Americans to be wary of mistreatment, changed in more recent times to designate a critical perspective on political racial dynamics—first…