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May 9, 2008
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 * NEW! * Geoffrey Wheatcroft on ‘Muqtada’

In this first-ever biography of the religious leader many predict will take over Iraq after the Americans leave, Patrick Cockburn, one of the most-respected correspondents in the Middle East, provides a dramatic look at a man Paul Bremer denounced as a “Bolshevik Islamist.”

Posted on May 9, 2008 2 COMMENTS


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Jeff Madrick on ‘High Wire,’ Peter Gosselin’s Look at the Economic Meltdown

A star reporter for the Los Angeles Times has written a clear, even elegant anatomy of an economy that is much worse than you probably think.

Posted on May 2, 2008 21 COMMENTS


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Troy Jollimore on Martin Amis’ ‘The Second Plane’

When the second plane hit the second skyscraper on 9/11, how many of us knew then just how radically our world would change?

Posted on Apr 24, 2008 87 COMMENTS


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John Lukacs on Nicholson Baker’s ‘Human Smoke’

Was World War II necessary? In an exercise in literary hygiene, a distinguished historian casts a skeptical eye at an acclaimed novelist’s revisionist take on the “Good War.”

Posted on Apr 18, 2008 15 COMMENTS


Steve Wasserman on Fidel Castro

What will history say about the implacable anti-imperialist and unrepentant revolutionary who has held power in Cuba for nearly 50 years? The publication of Fidel Castro’s and Ignacio Ramonet’s “My Life: A Spoken Autobiography” helps us understand the man and his myth.

Posted on Apr 10, 2008 13 COMMENTS


Willie Brown
AP photo /Tony Avelar

Bill Boyarsky on the Inimitable Willie Brown

More than a quarter of a century before Barack Obama made his name with a speech at the Democratic National Convention, another African-American politician, Willie L. Brown Jr. of San Francisco, did the same—but under much different circumstances.

Posted on Mar 31, 2008 20 COMMENTS


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Fred Branfman on Tom Brokaw’s ‘Boom!’

What kind of look back to the ’60s manages to almost entirely ignore or miss the point of the Vietnam War?

Posted on Mar 28, 2008 32 COMMENTS


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Anthony Heilbut on MaryBeth Hamilton’s ‘In Search of the Blues’

What accounts for the strange need of some white scholars—from the plantation nostalgists of the late 1890s to the “Blues Mafia” of the 1960s—to honor African-American culture by trying to save black people from themselves?

Posted on Mar 21, 2008 13 COMMENTS


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Mark Dowie on Michael Shnayerson’s ‘Coal River’

How a few brave Americans took on a powerful company and the federal government to save the land they love.

Posted on Mar 13, 2008 10 COMMENTS


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Warren Cohen on the Rise (and Fall) of the Neocons

Just who are the “neocons,” where did they come from and how was it they came to wield so profound an influence among the highest circles of America’s policy elites? These are some of the questions asked by Jacob Heilbrunn in his new book, “They Knew They Were Right.”

Posted on Mar 6, 2008 71 COMMENTS


Larry Blumenfeld on New Orleans’ Refusal to Vanish

Ned Sublette’s remarkable new book tells an inspiring story of resilience and resistance by ordinary men and women who won’t cooperate in their own erasure.

Posted on Feb 22, 2008 6 COMMENTS


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Timothy Snyder on the Forgotten Holocaust

One of the great crimes of the 20th century—the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories—is all but forgotten. “The Unknown Black Book” helps us remember.

Posted on Feb 15, 2008 131 COMMENTS


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Mark Arax on California’s Capitalist Founders

It is said that behind every great fortune there is a crime. Here’s a true-life drama of self-invention, greed and ambition involving four larger-than-life men who singly, and together, helped create California. A book to be read after you’ve watched “There Will Be Blood.”

Posted on Feb 7, 2008 13 COMMENTS


Artillery
AP photo / Baz Ratner

Milton Viorst on Israel’s Tragic Predicament

Can decent Israelis, caught between complacency and conscience, save their beleaguered country from the corruptions of power, religious fanaticism and crippling hubris?

Posted on Feb 1, 2008 89 COMMENTS


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Chalmers Johnson on the Myth of Free Trade

A powerful new book by a young South Korean-born economist at Cambridge University provides a compelling critique of the contradictions and hypocrisies of globalization and neoliberalism. The perfect antidote to the nostrums of Thomas Friedman.

Posted on Jan 24, 2008 53 COMMENTS


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Michael Gorra on J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Diary of a Bad Year’

The Nobel Prize-winning author of such stunning (and controversial) novels as “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “Disgrace” offers up his 19th book, about a South African writer, like Coetzee himself, who now lives in Australia and tries to understand the role of a writer caught between hope and history.

Posted on Jan 17, 2008 8 COMMENTS



Doug Henwood on Robert Kuttner’s ‘The Squandering of America’

Just how sick is the U.S. economy? Just how deep is the divide between the super-rich and the rest of us? Just how bad would a meltdown of our political economy be? And what, if anything, can be done about it?

Posted on Jan 10, 2008 37 COMMENTS


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Carol Brightman on the 1960s

Three new memoirs by veterans of the New Left provide nuance and complexity to a tumultuous decade whose political and cultural legacy is still contested. Bonus points to those who can answer the question: Do you still need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows?

Posted on Jan 3, 2008 45 COMMENTS


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Carla Kaplan on ‘The Mitfords’

A new collection of letters between the fascinating Mitford sisters offers unparalleled insight into one of the 20th century’s most famous families.

Posted on Dec 28, 2007 3 COMMENTS


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Zachary Karabell on Mark Lilla’s ‘The Stillborn God’

With religious passions inflaming and complicating politics worldwide, the very project of a secular future is threatened.  In “The Stillborn God,” Mark Lilla reveals the roots of the age-old quest to bring political life under God’s authority.  He also explores how modern Western thinkers found a way to free politics from theological power and build barriers against destructive religious fanaticism.

Posted on Dec 20, 2007 169 COMMENTS


supercapitalism

Benjamin Barber on ‘Supercapitalism’

Can an overheated market remedy an underachieving democracy?  Can the public interest be served by an economic engine in which corporate rivals use government to quash their competitors?  These and other questions are the subject of a provocative new book by Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Clinton.  Benjamin Barber, author of “Jihad vs. McWorld” and “Consumed,” takes a close look at Reich’s argument.

Posted on Dec 13, 2007 42 COMMENTS


Pakistani Missile
AP photo / B.K. Bangash

Andrew Cockburn on the Islamic Bomb

A quartet of new books provides an inside look at Pakistan’s nuclear smuggling network and how it flourished. A sordid tale of how the United States simultaneously acted as an enabler for the construction of the “Islamic Bomb” and coddled the Islamists who might one day control it.

Posted on Dec 6, 2007 25 COMMENTS


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Cristina Nehring on What’s Wrong With the American Essay

One of our most trenchant critics takes a withering look at how contemporary essayists in a global world have gone increasingly, foolishly, local.

Posted on Nov 29, 2007 40 COMMENTS


Hard Road West Cover

John Mack Faragher on the ‘Hard Road West’

One of the most gifted historians of the American West takes a close look at the remarkable tale of triumph and tragedy that Keith Meldahl recounts in his dramatic story of the largest overland migration since the Crusades, as well as the equally compelling epic of the geology of the harsh and sublime Western landscape.

Posted on Nov 22, 2007 2 COMMENTS


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Nicholas von Hoffman on ‘The Conscience of a Liberal’

Why is it that so many voters continue to elect reactionaries who do their best to disenfranchise them? The answer, says Paul Krugman in his new book, is racism.

Posted on Nov 15, 2007 127 COMMENTS


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