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By James C. Hormel and Erin Martin
By John Howard
$19.14
$23
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Image via Shutterstock
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By Jesse Eisinger —
A new book examines the House and Senate through the evolution of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and “Congress comes across as the nation’s grandfather: antiquated, inconsistent, as slow-moving as it is dull-witted.”
Posted on May 16, 2013
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By Gabriel Thompson —
“Daily Rituals: How Artists Work,” which describes the routines of more than 150 creative people, including playwrights, composers, painters and writers, is a compact, quirky and frequently delightful book.
Posted on May 9, 2013
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Politico’s piece on New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson implied she was a “bitchy woman character”; fossil fuels may never be depleted and this could be the best and worst thing to happen; meanwhile, violence is less rampant on YouTube than on television programs. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Apr 29, 2013
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By Allen Barra — We talk with Clive James, translator and cultural critic, about tackling Dante’s masterpiece. “Dante,” writes James, “was the first to put the scientific attitude into art.”
Posted on Apr 26, 2013
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Nation Books
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By Jeremy Scahill — The killing of U.S. born, al-Qaida-affiliated cleric Anwar al-Awlaki set a dangerous precedent here in America.
Posted on Apr 25, 2013
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By Steven V. Roberts —
Twelve years before Jackie Robinson began dismantling baseball’s racial barriers, an integrated team of five whites and six blacks played in Bismarck, N.D., and went on to win the national semipro championship.
Posted on Apr 18, 2013
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By Rayyan Al-Shawaf —
Adeed Dawisha’s new book examines why democracy has historically failed to take hold in the Middle East, and contemplates the current and future role of Islamists.
Posted on Apr 11, 2013
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By Dina Temple-Raston —
The details about the courts at Guantanamo Bay have remained sketchy. Until now, as a new book explains how a small group of Bush-era political appointees developed a parallel justice system designed to ensure a specific outcome.
Posted on Apr 5, 2013
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By Peter Richardson — “The ways capitalism works and does not work,” Robert McChesney writes in his new book, “determine the role the Internet might play in society. ... The problem is that [Internet] celebrants often believe digital technology has superpowers over political economy.”
Posted on Mar 26, 2013
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By Vinca LaFleur —
Many of the adults interviewed by author Emily Bazelon “could access, with riveting clarity, a memory of childhood bullying. … These early experiences of cruelty were transformative, no matter which role you played in the memory reel.”
Posted on Mar 19, 2013
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By Chris Hedges — Nick Turse’s book about the Vietnam War exposes the sickness of the hyper-masculine military culture, the intoxicating rush and addiction of violence, and the massive government spin machine that lies daily to a gullible public and uses tactics of intimidation, threats and smear campaigns to silence dissenters.
Posted on Mar 12, 2013
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By Robert G. Kaiser —
Good and evil are inseparable in history: “Liberal democracy prospered because of an accommodation with racial humiliation,” writes Ira Katznelson in “Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time.”
Posted on Mar 6, 2013
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By Gabriel Thompson —
Nearly 60 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott comes “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” the first scholarly biography of the woman who risked much and spoke little.
Posted on Feb 27, 2013
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By Allen Barra — A new biography, “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,” has collected fascinating details of David Foster Wallace’s life, but fails to examine his development as a writer.
Posted on Feb 12, 2013
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By Rachel Newcomb —
For an audience that may consider the present moment uncritically, Jared Diamond’s “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?” reminds us that in the headlong rush to modernity, much has been lost.
Posted on Feb 5, 2013
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By Lisa Pasold —
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s new book, “Time of Useful Consciousness,” is a fresh missive looping through the history of America from a 93-year-old Beat who has always refused to sit down.
Posted on Jan 29, 2013
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By Michael Dirda — MacDonald Harris is a writer “too good to be neglected,” writes Philip Pullman in the introduction to this reissue of Harris’ highly original 1976 novel “The Balloonist.” Set in 1897, it follows a middle-aged Swedish aeronaut as he aims to sail over the Arctic in a balloon to the North Pole.
Posted on Jan 23, 2013
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nationinstitute.org
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By Tracy Bloom — The historian and author’s new book about the Vietnam War reveals for the first time, in painstaking detail, the full atrocities committed by American forces in that country.
Posted on Jan 19, 2013
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By Peter Richardson — Dave Zirin, in “Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down,” returns to his favorite topics: race, gender, unions, the corporatization and corruption of sports, and athletes willing to speak out on any of the above.
Posted on Jan 15, 2013
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By Michael S. Roth —
Oliver Sacks’ graceful and informative new book, “Hallucinations,” explores the surprising ways in which our brains call up simulated realities that are almost indistinguishable from normal perceptions.
Posted on Jan 8, 2013
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By Lauren B. Davis — Since the founding of America, bankers have been a bit of a problem. Perhaps more so, J.R. Moehringer seems to say in his new novel “Sutton,” than the honest, hardworking bank robber.
Posted on Jan 2, 2013
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By H.W. Brands —
Author Robert M. Utley’s account of the elusive Geronimo is a fascinating but sometimes frustrating story.
Posted on Dec 26, 2012
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By Lauren B. Davis — Georgina Harding’s “Painter of Silence” is a disturbing portrait of war, seen through the eyes of a deaf artist.
Posted on Dec 18, 2012
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By Jonathan Yardley —
“A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico” is a probing and timely study of “the rise of America’s first national anti-war movement.”
Posted on Dec 11, 2012
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By Ralph Nader —
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new tour de force book “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder” is a frame-of-reference altering work that a Wall Street Journal reviewer confessed he would have to read “again and again”
Posted on Dec 6, 2012
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By Rayyan Al-Shawaf —
In “Stranger to History,” a memoir recounting Aatish Taseer’s travels through several predominantly Muslim countries, Pakistan emerges much worse after an attempt to “fix” it, a project that also eventually leads to the killing of the author’s father.
Posted on Dec 5, 2012
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In this excerpt from the foreword to “Stranger to History,” Aatish Taseer reflects on the political assassination of his father in Pakistan last year and how the message of his book, published in the U.K. in 2009 and recently in the U.S., is even more relevant today.
Posted on Dec 2, 2012
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By Ron Charles —
In Colm Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary,” the mother of God is a troubled woman, haunted by Golgotha, hunted by assassins and waiting for death.
Posted on Nov 27, 2012
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By Jean Randich — “Participation in the arts is a guarantor of other human rights because the first thing that is taken away from vulnerable, unpopular, or minority groups is the right to self-expression,” Francois Matarasso says in “Acting Together, Volume II.”
Posted on Nov 20, 2012
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truthdig.com / lapressclub.org
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Mel White took home the top prize at the L.A. Press Club’s Fifth Annual National Entertainment Journalism (NEJ) Awards in the online critic category.
Posted on Nov 19, 2012
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By Tim Riley —
“The John Lennon Letters” collects and reproduces 285 postcards, telegrams, to-do lists and other writings from the former Beatle’s early childhood to Dec. 8, 1980, hours before he was killed.
Posted on Nov 14, 2012
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Alexander Baxevanis (CC-BY)
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Nobody fights better than writers, so it’s a little sad that novelists Salman Rushdie and John le Carré have agreed to stop hating each other.
Posted on Nov 13, 2012
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By Dina Temple-Raston —
Mark Bowden’s “The Finish” reveals something you might not have known about the plan to kill Osama bin Laden: The Obama administration had considered a third option for taking out the al-Qaida leader—a sniper drone still under development.
Posted on Nov 8, 2012
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White House/Pete Souza
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By Ebony Utley — “Articulate While Black” moves us away from the content of the president’s messages to an exploration of their delivery, and effectively parlays his style shifting from Black Language to white American English into a national conversation on how we see and hear race.
Posted on Oct 24, 2012
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By Ebony Utley — Avery Arlington, the main character of the novel “Elsewhere, California,” is someone you know: the awkward, only black girl in class, the girl hanging out at the 7-Eleven magazine rack wishing she was anybody but herself, and the artist whose work makes you uncomfortable.
Posted on Oct 10, 2012
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By Tom Artin — Sue Prideaux’s splendid “Strindberg: A Life” sets out not to record every jot and tittle of August Strindberg’s passage from birth to death, but to limn a vivid portrait of its complex, often self-contradictory and brilliant subject.
Posted on Sep 26, 2012
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By Michael Dirda —
The writer’s diaries reveal that he was happiest while gardening and watching his hens. But he also comments that “apparently nothing will ever teach [the rich] that the other 99 percent of the population exist.”
Posted on Sep 19, 2012
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Flickr/92YTribeca
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By Marcia Alesan Dawkins — Baratunde Thurston’s “How To Be Black,” part memoir, part investigative journalism and part cheeky instruction manual, explores such topics as “How to Be the Angry Negro” and “How to Be the (Next) Black President.”
Posted on Sep 11, 2012
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By Troy Jollimore —
Maureen N. McLane’s deeply personal and eccentric “My Poets” is a meditation on the works that have “most marked” her by Chaucer, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Emily Dickinson, Shelley and Louise Gluck.
Posted on Aug 21, 2012
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By Peter Richardson — “Subversives” shows how the two men and their allies sabotaged the careers of law-abiding citizens, defended reckless police violence and exploited an appalling double standard in the political use of FBI intelligence.
Posted on Aug 14, 2012
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AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez
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By Steven V. Roberts —
Lopez Lomong had never heard of the games when he tagged along with friends in Kenya to watch the 2000 Sydney races on a grainy, black-and-white TV powered by a car battery. Now, he’ll run the 5,000-meter for the U.S. in London.
Posted on Aug 7, 2012
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By Nomi Prins — “Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times” tells the stories of unlikely dissenters who were not radicals, but rather ordinary people compelled to act when the system they believed in went terribly wrong.
Posted on Jul 31, 2012
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Velovotee
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By Deanne Stillman — It’s not often that we learn of books that have motivated people to act and it’s even more out of the ordinary to hear of three such books at the same time—and how each played a role in the same public event.
Posted on Jul 16, 2012
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By Ewen MacAskill —
“Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain” offers a clear picture of the sordid relationship that existed between the Murdoch press, the police and senior politicians.
Posted on Jul 11, 2012
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AP/Michael Probst
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By Chris Hedges — If universities think a Milton Friedman or a Friedrich Hayek is more important than a Virginia Woolf or an Anton Chekhov, then we become barbarians.
Posted on Jul 9, 2012
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Ray Bradbury, who died Tuesday night at the age of 91, spoke in 2008 with Truthdig’s Steve Wasserman about his books and the passions that drove his writing. The video, text excerpts and full transcript follow.
Posted on Jun 7, 2012
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Photo by (CC-BY)
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By Steve Wasserman — From the start, Jeff Bezos wanted to “get big fast.” He was never a “small is beautiful” kind of guy.
Posted on Jun 2, 2012
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By Roxana Robinson —
The central theme of “When I Was a Child I Read Books,” the powerful new collection of essays by Marilynne Robinson, is the examination of the soul and of its central attributes—generosity, caritas, understanding—and of the miraculous presence of these things in the world.
Posted on May 31, 2012
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