Book Reviews
Chris Hedge’s new book joins a burgeoning library on the worrisome rise of the radical Christian right in the United States. It is partly a journalistic account of the movement and partly a warning of the grave dangers it poses. As the title makes clear, Hedges sees the Christian right as a direct ideological heir…
Read Full Article...Paul Joseph readily acknowledges in his preface that the argument embodied in the title, Are Americans Becoming More Peaceful?, seems a paradoxical questionto pose today. In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th the United States started two major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It remains in both areas, fighting intractable insurgencies while a …
Read Full Article...When Mel Brooks had Hitler tripping across the stage in the “Producers,” the campy banality makes the horror manageable and laughable. Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the banality of evil almost had her burning at the intellectual stake, but the concept is indispensable for understanding the real world – and perhaps no more so than the…
Read Full Article...Starting in the 1960’s, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward elaborated their own powerful and distinctive analysis of political change in the United States. Theybegan with the protest movements of the 1960’s, and gradually expanded the scope of their argument to encompass much of 20th century U.S. history. After Richard Cloward’s death in 2001, Frances…
Read Full Article...My students often question me about the current state of American politics and society. Being located in a plainly proletarian city, they aren’t so much asking for an empirical account of the conditions they are already observing for themselves. Instead , they want me to explain how the greatest country in the world’ could find…
Read Full Article...Foreign policy not so long ago seemed to move in maddeningly elitist ways far outside the public sphere of ordinary citizens, but it’s now almost downright de rigueur for many Americans, stung by blowback’ effects, to be interested in its arcane details. As a result of technological innovations ranging from a 24-hour news cycle to…
Read Full Article...In Persian there is a piece of proverbial wisdom that praises a statement, a report, an analysis, or even a book, for being brief-and thereby beneficial. To a person who is not getting to the point, Iranians politely plead to be “brief and beneficial.” Danny Postel’s book, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, does a good…
Read Full Article...Don’t dare be a liberal – never mind, a leftist. That was the message of McCarthyism and its ideological cousins through the Seventies in anthropology. If you tried it, the FBI and CIA would see to it that you paid dearly. This is the major finding of David Price’s Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s…
Read Full Article...For me, fresh out of a Chicago suburb, it served as the diving board to Bohemian oblivion: a Second City show seen in 1961. To encounter people in post Fifties America, on a stage, skewering Ike, Liberal-indifference, and cookie-cutter Suburban conformity was bliss in that airless Cold War Utopia. Second City director Paul Sills was…
Read Full Article...At a time when India and Iran are mentioned together as countries whose nuclear aspirations have gained the ear of the world, Talking India furnishes a salutary reminder of other conversations that can take place between ancient civilizations and of the rich history, now only occasionally remembered, of the intellectual, cultural and political exchanges between…
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Latest Issue
2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2
Latest Issue
2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2
Between The Issues
