Review Essays

This timely and important collection brings together a group of prominent geneticists, biologists, medical researchers, psychologists, philosophers, and historians to engage in what Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man referred to as “debunking as positive science”: “sound debunking must do more than replace one prejudice with another. It must use more adequate biology…

Books reviewed: Power to the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture, 1964-1974, edited by Geoff Kaplan. Full Circle: The Life & Works of Karl-Heinz Meschbach, written by Karen Black.   BUSTED! It was late 1968, after the protests and repression around the Democratic Convention. KOed by asthma,…

Laura Iannelli. Hybrid Politics. Media and Participation. London: Sage, 2016. Dan Mercea. Civic Participation in Contentious Politics: The Digital Foreshadowing of Protest. London: Macmillan, 2016 Laura Iannelli’s review of research literature on media and democratic participation is a worthy reference book, yet one offering sophisticated analysis and asking important questions. She argues that “newer” media…

Rüdiger Safranski, Goethe – Life as a Work of Art. Liveright, 2017.   Goethe is too little known in the US and UK despite the existence for over two hundred years of excellent translations, some of the earliest by women (Sarah Austin and Anna Swanwick). Even the best book on Goethe and England (by Jean-Marie Carré,…

In a new volume titled WikiLeaking: The Ethics of Secrecy and Exposure, editors Christian Cotton and Robert Arp collect eighteen short essays intending to explore a series of moral questions regarding secrecy, transparency, concealment, and disclosure using WikiLeaks as their heuristic. Written in the style of the “Philosophy and Pop Culture” anthologies one finds at…

Poking around a used book store during my third year of college, I came across a copy of Michael Walzer’s 1980 essay collection Radical Principles. Walzer’s name was familiar: I had browsed Dissent, the journal he edited, in the college library, and my social theory professor had assigned an essay from that book, a critique…

This is a dispiriting book. How could it not be, arriving as it did—upon a scene already deeply etched by “economic, political, and cultural and not least ecological ” (p. 255)—amidst a pandemic of unfathomable personal, social, and economic consequences in the face of which the political leaderships of some of the world’s most vainglorious…