Review Essays
In the 2019 UK General Election, beleaguered by a concerted campaign of print and broadcast media attacks, enfeebled by in-party subterfuge, and twisted inside out over how to resolve the salient issue of Brexit, a ragged and limpen Labour Party succumbed to a heavy defeat. Jeremy Corbyn, the first politician proposing a break from neoliberal orthodoxy to front…
Read Full Article...Evil is a concept with a hazy definition. Admittedly I use the term without having a confident grasp of what behavior constitutes evil. Does evil mean very or extremely bad behavior? Yes, but not precisely because evil, I conclude, connotes conduct that is not relative to other behaviors. It goes beyond them and touches the…
Read Full Article...The primary paradigm for psychiatry at the moment is founded on the premise that mental disorders are largely a result of genetic, biologic causes, and therefore treatment rationales and understanding of mental illness are firmly rooted in this paradigm. Genetic research purports to demonstrate the truth of its premise. This research however, is beginning to…
Read Full Article...Books reviewed: The Pox Lover: An Activist’s Decade in New York and Paris by Anne-christine d’Adesky, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements by Hilary Moore and James Tracy (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2020) Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and Future of Addiction by…
Read Full Article...Derrida, Kristeva and Foucault. Whatever you might think about these legends of French Theory and American academic culture, reading Thomas de Zengotita’s Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics will have you wondering who is having the thoughts: Is it the Cartesian subject, skeptical and analytical; a French postmodern not-a-subject, intertwined with an infinite cascade of texts; or, perhaps,…
Read Full Article...Review Essay: Magda Teter’s Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism
The Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013 to protest anti-Black racism, especially the killing of Blacks at the hands of the police, was arguably the largest protest movement in the history of the United States. It created a tectonic shift in the understanding of the systemic character of racism in American society and…
Read Full Article...Reviews of Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (Metropolitan Books, 2010); Philip S. Golub, Power, Profit & Prestige: A History of American Imperial Expansion (Pluto Press, 2010); Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, (Metropolitan Books, 2010). America’s supreme position in the world is coming ever more into question…
Read Full Article...It now seems indecent, given the almost total amnesia enveloping this celebrated enterprise, to pose any tart questions about what actually happened at Second City; something that might stumble beyond the booster reviews, cozy nostalgia, and promo brochures. When amnesia corrodes to official memory it seems downright unpatriotic to suggest that the place now reeks…
Read Full Article...John Ehrenberg, J. Patrice McSherry, Jose Ramon Sanchez and Caroleen Marji Sayej, eds. The Iraq Papers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Thomas Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. When future generations analyze the Iraq War I hope they concentrate on the tactics…
Read Full Article...Books reviewed in this essay: Jack McLean, Loon: A Marine Story (Ballantine Books, 2009) Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011) Karl Marlantes, What It Is Like to Go to War (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012) Mourn for the Marines. Had our country only learned from “Mad Jack” Percival’s…
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Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 1
Latest Issue
2024: Vol. 23, No. 1
Between The Issues
