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July 24, 2008
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BOOK REVIEW

Book Excerpt   |   Book Review   |   Film Review   |   In the News   |   Theater   |  

View older articles: Page 1 of 2 pages  1 2 >

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William Pfaff on General Motors

Are workers to blame for the fix that General Motors (along with many other corporations) is in? A new book by Roger Lowenstein argues that they are. He couldn’t be more wrong.

Posted on Jul 18, 2008 54 COMMENTS


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Ellen Garrison on ‘All the Sad Young Literary Men’

Are Keith Gessen and his posse really the voice of the Zeitgeist, the intellectual heirs to Norman Mailer and George Plimpton? Or just the highbrow version of Judd Apatow?

Posted on Jul 10, 2008 7 COMMENTS


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Ruth Rosen on ‘The Populist Vision’

Do the socially progressive ideals that jump-started 20th-century reform movements have lessons relevant to the concerns of 21st-century America? A new book makes a strong case that they do.

Posted on Jul 3, 2008 25 COMMENTS


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Doug Henwood on the Global Power Elite

Are we now ruled by an international “superclass” that hollows out traditional notions of national sovereignty, and whose loyalties are only to the bottom line and its own members?

Posted on Jun 27, 2008 10 COMMENTS


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Tony Platt on American Eugenics

Here’s a story, both chilling and inspiring: how prisoners at an Oklahoma prison in the aftermath of the Depression led a struggle to limit the practice of compulsory sterilization.

Posted on Jun 20, 2008 31 COMMENTS


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Richard Flacks on Tom Hayden

For 50 years, Tom Hayden has been an indefatigable organizer on behalf of the disenfranchised, and now, with the publication of his “Writings for a Democratic Society,” we have a chance to trace the arc of activism of an American original who continues to make history.

Posted on Jun 12, 2008 6 COMMENTS


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Nicholas von Hoffman on ‘The Big Squeeze’

A new book by New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse argues that the plight of American workers, both white-collar and blue-collar, is growing worse, putting the American dream out of the reach of tens of millions of citizens.

Posted on Jun 6, 2008 25 COMMENTS


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Gary Indiana on Hobsbawm’s ‘On Empire’

Eric Hobsbawm, one of our most celebrated historians, looks at what makes the American Colossus uniquely dangerous in its imperial overreach at the dawn of the third millennium.

Posted on May 30, 2008 8 COMMENTS


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Amy Wilentz on Rachel Corrie

The just-published journals of Rachel Corrie, killed by an Israeli bulldozer, reveal her to have been a natural-born writer and a spirit full of intensity and yearning whose lust for life and sense of justice made her untimely death all the more tragic.

Posted on May 23, 2008 44 COMMENTS


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press.princeton.edu

Chalmers Johnson on Our ‘Managed Democracy’

Sheldon Wolin’s new book offers a controversial but ultimately convincing diagnosis of how America’s democracy has succumbed to an unacknowledged totalitarian temptation.

Posted on May 15, 2008 193 COMMENTS


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 14 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 24 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 113 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 33 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 66 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 5 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 123 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 79 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 52 COMMENTS


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