“Brecht today” sounds like a wake-up call or a polemical assertion, reassuring us that indeed Brecht’s works are still relevant today.  Yet, one might just as well imagine the rising intonation of a question – “Brecht today?” – expressing doubt as to whether Brecht’s writings can still generate interest beyond their historical value.  Who or what…

November 17 marks seventeen years since the Czech Civic Forum and the Slovak Public against Violence choreographed the demise of one of the last Soviet-orbit regimes. In kind, there are three anniversaries coming up in 2007—the centennial of Jan Patočka’s birth; thirty years since his death; and the thirtieth anniversary of “Charta 77.” That bold…

To read Dr. James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline (1970) is to be transported, as if by the tang of a Proustian biscuit, back to the ’60s, back to the lived reality-the very qualia of that era are resurrected in this book.  But the perspective is unfamiliar.  Instead of a Bobo stroll down the lane of…

Background: Open Market “Freedom” vs. Democracy Inrecent times there has been a general shift to the left in Latin American politics.  The traditional center-right parties that had controlled politics in most of the South and Central America were not really democratic ones.  They were patronage parties deeply rooted in a culture of corruption and often…

Books discussed in this article: Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War and Fascism, xvi + 278 pages.  $ 90.00 Herbert Marcuse, Towards a Critical Theory of Society, x + 242 pages. $ 90.00 Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s, xiv + 209 pages. $ 80.00 Edited by Douglas Kellner.  Volumes One and Two include a…