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by Juan Cole
$20.00
By Jennifer Baumgardner
$20
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A new book by Douglas Cazaux Sackman gives us new ways of thinking about the last man “uncontaminated” by modernity and explores our continuing nostalgia for the “wilderness.”
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A revelatory new book by Scott D. Sampson, one of our leading dinosaur paleontologists, suggests we have much to learn about extinction, global warming and energy flow from the biological experience of the charismatic beasts that roamed the Earth more than 60 million years ago.
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solvingpoverty.org
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The Republicans’ favorite punching bag, ACORN, has emerged from an external review process looking far less shady than its opponents would like, but the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now still has some management issues, according to the inquiry’s findings.
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Have nonbelievers misunderstood, even as they have mocked, the very concept of God—a concept that has more to do with practice than belief?
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In Theodore Roszak’s spirited new manifesto, he calls on aging baby boomers to rekindle their youthful idealism and remake America.
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Christopher Caldwell explores in his recent book what he terms Islam’s “adversary culture” now challenging Europe’s own sense of historical identity.
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In her important new book, Miriam Pawel chronicles how a movement to unionize farmworkers failed to realize its charismatic founder’s vision as his relatives turned a union into a family business.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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Does the prospect of deepening economic meltdown and political disarray raise the specter of a social upheaval and, perhaps, the collapse of capitalism, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression?
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“The Opposite Field,” a memoir by Jesse Katz, is a moving meditation about baseball, politics, and the unease of negotiating a new kind of American place.
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Is the biblical tale of Hagar “a creation story as important as the Garden of Eden,” as Charlotte Gordon argues in her provocative new book?
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Two new books explore the cultural achievements of the 1930s that continue to shape the American imagination.
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Julian Fellowes’ novel “Past Imperfect” provides a compelling fictive crossroads where the myths and realities of class collide.
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Tad Friend’s vivid memoir offers an insider’s guide to the peculiar anthropological habits of America’s now nearly extinct WASP ruling establishment.
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Kevin Starr’s newest volume in his magisterial series on California examines the dream of endless prosperity that was, for a time, synonymous with the American dream.
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Can liberalism be rescued from those who equate it with treason, terrorism, evil and even a mental disorder?
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A rare combination of bravura storytelling and social history, “L.A. Noir” will delight fans of hard-boiled film and fiction even as it challenges the myths of 20th century Los Angeles.
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Whatever one thinks of his politics, Elia Kazan was inarguably one of the 20th century’s greatest Broadway and Hollywood directors. A new book reveals the master at work.
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Are we entering an age in which the electronic image, endowed with the ability to manufacture its own reality, is hurling us into a state of collective self-delusion? Welcome to a brave new post-literate world where we confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge.
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Now 90 years old, America’s exemplary troubadour continues his lifelong project to agitate and organize through song, fulfilling his father’s dictum that “Music, as any art, is not an end in itself, but is a means for achieving larger ends.”
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Was Socrates an atheist, a guru to a strange sect and an elitist corrupting the youth of a democratic Athens defeated in the Peloponnesian War, as his accusers successfully charged? A new book by Robin Waterfield seeks to dispel the myths about “Why Socrates Died.”
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Why are New Orleanians—along with people from all over the world who continue to flock there—so devoted to a place that was, even before the storm, the most corrupt, impoverished and violent corner of America? “Nine Lives” by Dan Baum helps provide an answer.
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The daunting problems Bush’s successor has inherited may prove all but insurmountable as he makes his way through a thicket of difficulties—the nuclear ambitions of authoritarian regimes, the quagmire of Mesopotamia and the persistent bloodletting in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to name only the most prominent. A recent book by David E. Sanger, a longtime foreign affairs correspondent for The New York Times, offers a close-up look at the world Obama confronts.
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Is the pastoral arcadia of the country life far from derivatives and emissions and the other excreta of our modern cities all that it’s cracked up to be? Two new memoirs give readers who don’t want to stir from their armchairs to take up farming an insider’s look.
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Just how important is a baseball team’s manager to how well a team performs? A new book by one of baseball’s giants attempts an answer. You be the judge.
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Is there a social consequence to the increasing numbers of consumers who expect to get information and entertainment for nothing? Can there be too much of a good thing? “Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age” by Steve Knopper provides a useful autopsy.
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Can Robert Wright, the acclaimed author of “The Moral Animal,” square the circle in his new book on the persistent and vexing issue of what role religion plays in how human societies seek to comport themselves? Just how crucial to our modern ethical ideas like universal rights and equality among all persons is the notion of a single, all-powerful god?
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Two memoirs—Eve Pell’s “We Used to Own the Bronx” and Christopher Buckley’s “Losing Mum and Pup”—demonstrate, each in its own way, that all that glitters is not gold and that the price exacted by extreme social anxiety is very high indeed. A feast of the higher gossip and raw meat for social anthropologists.
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A provocative new book, “One State, Two States,” by revisionist Israeli historian Benny Morris breaks a taboo by asking whether anti-Zionism has become the anti-imperialism of fools. Can his polemic act as the ax that helps break up the frozen and brittle nature of a debate over the seemingly intractable war between Palestinians and Jews?
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Critic and crusader, the late I.F. Stone was an American original. Neither changing times nor his failing eyesight blunted his radical edge or dimmed his acerbic wit. A new biography by D.D. Guttenplan gives us the man behind the legendary muckraker.
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A new and outrageously entertaining biography of America’s first tycoon by T.J. Stiles, one of our best younger historians, sheds new light on the monumental life of what Stiles rightly calls “an instinctive predator” and his mixed and enduring legacy.
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Author, scholar and Truthdig contributor Chalmers Johnson passed away Nov. 20. In his honor, we are reposting this 2009 book review, which, like much of Johnson’s work, remains relevant to this day.
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Forty years after he helped destroy SDS, Mark Rudd condemns his role in Weatherman as “the greatest single mistake of my life … a historical crime.” How did it happen and what did it mean? Why did peaceful protest give way to violent resistance? What lessons are to be learned from the failure to spurn the seductions of charismatic cults?
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The debate over our 40th president’s role in ending the Cold War continues with the publication of James Mann’s “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan.”
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What’s it like when your father is an Iranian Marxist and your mother is a Jewish-American renegade and both are devoted organizers for the Socialist Workers Party?
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The great divide between religion that accommodates itself to secular knowledge and biblically literal religion that rejects any such knowledge that contradicts the Bible is the insufficiently explored story at the center of this Pulitzer Prize-winning historian’s most recent and otherwise compelling book.
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Is it really true, as John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge argue in their new book, “God Is Back,” that religion and modernity cannot only coexist but actually flourish together?
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Here are the five most-read stories of the last seven days, including Chris Hedges on America’s moral meltdown and Robert Scheer on the economic incompetents who find easy employment in the Obama administration. Full list after the jump.
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Matt Miller, a host of KCRW’s “Left, Right & Center,” has written a book full of necessary honesty and courage—a welcome effort to rid us of the nostrums and shopworn notions that cloud our thinking and constrain our politics.
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The publication of Sontag’s early diaries provides a revelatory look at the self-inventions of the late writer.
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A new book gives us one of the most indispensable poets in the English language whose work mines the terrain between hope and history.
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At last, a revisionist takedown of our 40th president, portrayed as an empty suit too often lauded by the common people he betrayed.
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Why does the Darfur violence arouse outrage but the slaughter of millions more in Congo does not? An indispensable new book by Gerard Prunier attempts an answer by combining cool analysis and scholarly dispassion without losing sight of the horror of its subject.
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Sherry Buchanan, previously the author of “Vietnam Zippos,” gathers together drawings, poems, letters and oral histories by 10 Viet Cong artists and offers a radically different view of the fighters whom Americans branded as Reds, gooks and fanatical killers.
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amazon.com
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There was a time when Russia was an economic power on the rise. Sean McMeekin’s new book, “History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks,” explains what nipped that growth in the bud.
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amazon.com
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A new book casts an illuminating spotlight on Colombia’s guerrilla war, fueled by cocaine profits and U.S. military aid.
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There’s a revolution underway in Chinese culture as young women flock from villages to factory employment in the cities, leaving traditional values behind.
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Thinking of whipping up another tuna casserole? You may change your mind after reading this convincing expose by Jane M. Hightower, a San Francisco doctor.
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By Regina Marler — A new volume of the late poet’s correspondence sheds fresh light on the anguish and art of Sylvia Plath.
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A new book argues that the Mississippi Delta was the birthplace of what in 1903 W.C. Handy called “the weirdest music I had ever heard.”
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us.penguingroup.com
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An insightful book discloses how a confidence game combined pride and cunning and stupidity to bring America to the brink of catastrophe.
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