Book Reviews

This is definitely the right book at the right time. The straightforward style covers many of the best known cases of male aggression from the news, social media feeds, and the internet. As a chronicle of the worst gender aggression of our times, Cynthia Miller-Idriss lays out in stark detail the hatred of women that…

It is difficult, even now, to grasp how many revolutions—artistic, political or economic—exploded during the 1910s and how thoroughly they have been digested and turned against their best purposes. Or perhaps this is too easy and gloomy of an interpretation. A century is a blink in human history, and the effects have not been erased,…

With the US interventions from Iran to Venezuela, Jeremy Varon’s Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror is a reminder of all that can go wrong. “War is hell,” said General Sherman as Union troops moved to Atlanta in 1864; war is hell, then and now,…

Lauren Langman and George Lundskow’s new book, Visions of a Sane Society: Fromm and Critical Theory for a Free, Democratic, and Sustainable Future, is a bold effort to update Fromm’s ideas and make them relevant to the present conjuncture. The authors put forth many interesting and unique insights that build on Fromm’s thought while in…

Peter Richardson has given us a sharp, concise history of Rolling Stone, since its beginnings. When Ralph Gleason and Jann Wenner teamed to found Rolling Stone in 1967, the US was mired in Viet Nam, the media was trumpeting the “Summer of Love” and a counterculture  it barely comprehended, and the Manson murders were to…

Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo’s screed against Western Marxism is a product of the Cold War that dominated global politics between the end of World War II until the Fall and Collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989 and the early 1990s. The structuring Manichean dichotomy that organizes its polemic is a Battle between East and West, with…

Once confined to the arcane recesses of literary theory seminar rooms and abstruse academic journals, postcolonialism can say today that it is thoroughly in vogue. More than mere lingo for the self-righteous pseudo-left, it is now the policy for academic administrators who cannot seem to get on the bus fast enough. Even amidst the vigorous…

Repeating Revolutions examines how France’s revolutionary past became a working political language during Algeria’s struggle for decolonization from the 1930s through the 1960s. Johnson’s central claim is that invocations of “1789” mattered because they operated as historical analogies that shaped political perception and legitimated action. Defenders of empire appealed to revolutionary universalism to portray French…

In this book, philosopher William Paris develops an account of racial injustice that centers the relationship between freedom and time. In his own words, Paris aims to “develop the hypothesis that racial domination is at bottom the domination of time by one group over another and thus emancipation must entail delivering the control of time…

A chapter by comic artist Kevin Pyle in the new graphic non-fiction collection Partisans centers on the “spomeniks,” massive, abstract concrete monuments that the Communist dictator Tito commissioned all over postwar Yugoslavia. Some 14,000 in all, the spomeniks were the new regime’s way of simultaneously commemorating the sacrifice of the anti-fascist partisans during World War…