Book Reviews

This volume, by a cultural scholar teaching at Indiana University, South Bend, could not have appeared at a more auspicious moment. Some Facebook participants describe it as ”the most talked-about book,” and with good reason. It speaks about the long and (for the most part) quietly held non-zionist sentiments of many Jewish Americans.  At a…

Chaisty and Whitefield offer a compelling and meticulously researched investigation into how Russian citizens have come to understand, and sometimes resist, the hybrid political economy that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Drawing on nearly three decades of longitudinal survey data, the authors trace the evolution of public attitudes toward a system that…

In Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, David Golumbia takes it upon himself to defend democracy from what he called “cyberlibertarianism,” a nebulous right-wing ideology that pervades the entire discourse surrounding digital technologies, even in self-defined left-wing spaces. The danger of cyberlibertarianism, he says, is that it undermines democracy by undermining governmental power. “One…

The collapse in recent years of a major comic distributor, leaving hundreds of thousands of comics of all kinds unsold, marks yet one more phase in the genre’s long boom-and-bust history. Frederic Wertham, long known as the bete noir of comics at the close of their historic heyday, has often seen as the witness for…

Roger Frie’s new book on an underexplored aspect of Fromm’s life, namely, his experiences with Nazism and the Holocaust is a significant—indeed, groundbreaking—contribution to Fromm scholarship as well as to Holocaust research. In addition to offering a thoughtful and meticulous analysis of parts of Fromm’s life hitherto generally hidden from view, the book explores a…