Book Reviews
Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy. Edited by Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor. New York: Verso, 2015. The Kurdish-controlled city of Kobane in northern Syria has attracted international attention as the site of some of the fiercest fighting in the struggle against ISIS. In the summer of 2014,…
Read Full Article...Steve Fraser has taken a bold, sweeping look at US history, ultimately seeking to answer the question of why there has been so little resistance to the great increase in economic dislocation and income inequality during the late 20th-early 21st centuries. A provocative and vexing question. Fraser believes that by plumbing the American experience from…
Read Full Article...Those of us living in these early decades of the twenty-first century are haunted by the grand dream of global solidarity. An ever-present reminder of the failures of past struggles, this dream, which inspired the great socialist tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, stands apparently thwarted today. Long after the failure of the Russian Revolution…
Read Full Article...This is a tale of terror, with implications well beyond the mean streets of Boston. On its surface the true story of the career, capture and trial of life long Boston Irish American gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, T.J. English’s enthralling narrative in Where the Bodies Were Buried actually focuses on exposing the failings of the…
Read Full Article...Is psychoanalysis kaput ? If not, ought it be put out of its misery? Sigmund Freud and his notorious ‘problem child’ have fallen on very hard times and for reasons having virtually nothing to do with their real merits, argues historian Eli Zaretsky in his latest book. Though a collection of five previously published articles,…
Read Full Article...Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty provides a compelling and accurate diagnosis of the contemporary ills plaguing the rise of the all-administrative university. Ginsberg’s analysis strongly resonates with my own experience at several different institutions (public and private) over the last ten years, as I have personally witnessed how administrators have used their positions…
Read Full Article...How did conservative evangelical Christianity become the default religion of the US government, despite the legal separation of church and state? Kevin M. Kruse sees this as a Twentieth Century development, a process that started with the Eisenhower administration, continued through several others, and eventually solidified with the Reagan administration. The book offers impressive detail…
Read Full Article...South Africa seldom reaches news headlines nor are its politics a topic of much public concern elsewhere anymore. It has, in a certain sense, fallen into benign neglect. Internationally, the anti-apartheid sympathy for the Mandela administration extended itself right up to the current political regime, giving current president Jacob Zuma an unearned reprieve from scrutiny.…
Read Full Article...Mary Wisniewski is a seasoned pro with a long career as an ace reporter for the Chicago dailies and for Reuters, and it shows in her superb biography of Nelson Algren, the writer who made Chicago “his trade.” Like James Joyce and Dublin, Franz Kafka and Prague, and Alfred Doeblin and Berlin, Algren’s knowledge of…
Read Full Article...In 1965 a coup d’état took place in Indonesia. The left-leaning government of President Soekarno (var. Sukarno) was replaced by a military regime headed by General Suharto. Soekarno’s presidency had balanced itself on the so-called Nasakom, the attempted harmonisation of three major forces in Indonesian life: Nasionalisme (Nationalism), Agama (Religion) and Komunisme (Communism). The Communist…
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Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 2
Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 2
Between The Issues
