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By David Sirota
$10.17
By Michael Lewis
$15.37
$18
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By William Pfaff — Governments, like corporations and modern organizations of all kinds, make much of systematically teaching “lessons learned” to those newly arrived to responsibilities, yet they seem infrequently to succeed.
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A new book investigates the illicit trade in antiquities and raises uneasy questions over cultural patrimony, the fevers of nationalism and the imperial ambitions of museums.
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A devastating and growing problem is explored in Michael Paul Mason’s riveting new book, “Head Cases.”
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Carolyn Eisenberg takes a close look at Melvyn Leffler’s “For the Soul of Mankind” to ask whether our current troubles are rooted in a history that continues to haunt us.
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A new book by Brenda Wineapple sheds light on the little-known relationship of the reclusive genius poet with one of America’s most fervent radicals.
Posted on Sep 11, 2008
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In “One Minute to Midnight,” Michael Dobbs’ definitive book on the 1962 crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, the question of lessons learned and unlearned remains as acute as ever.
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What is it about the region that provokes intense sectarian passions, prompting seemingly endless vendettas? “Kingmakers,” by Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, tells the story of British and American entanglement and how the modern Middle East was invented. It also offers an exemplary history of hubris.
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“Audition” details the life story, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes, of a pioneering journalist-entertainer who reported the news while making it in ways both admirable and troubling.
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In “Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies,” Barbara Slavin, a leading Middle East reporter for USA Today, offers a refreshingly nuanced and revelatory taxonomy of power within theocratic Iran that sheds light on its leaders and their ambitions.
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Illustration by Peter Scheer
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For 33 years, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review has brought the literary world to the doorstep of the nation’s largest book-buying community. That era is about to end, a fact that disturbs the section’s former editors who have written this formal protest.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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HBO
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Leading election integrity journalist Brad Friedman reviews HBO’s portrayal of the 2000 Florida recount and wonders whether we’re not headed for another stolen election.
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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.
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press.princeton.edu
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Sheldon Wolin’s new book offers a controversial but ultimately convincing diagnosis of how America’s democracy has succumbed to an unacknowledged totalitarian temptation.
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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.”
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Truthdig’s weekly book review, edited by Steve Wasserman, has won a Maggie award. Bill Boyarsky’s outstanding political reporting was also nominated, and we were up for best Web magazine overall. We’re proud to win recognition for our book review, which has featured important work at a time when newspapers around the country are cutting back on their book coverage.
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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.
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The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction has found a disturbing trend among Iraq rebuilding projects. Far too often, when work is incomplete, U.S. officials will revise or “descope” the terms of the contract to list the project as completed. One example: A $35-million children’s hospital in Basra that is marked completed despite the fact that it’s only 35 percent up and running.
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When the second plane hit the second skyscraper on 9/11, how many of us knew then just how radically our world would change?
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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.”
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news.bbc.co.uk
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Health nuts, take heed: A sweeping review of almost 70 scientific studies of the health benefits of vitamins and, in particular, those trendy antioxidants, has found “no convincing evidence” of increased lifespan. In fact, vitamins A, E and beta-carotene could even increase a person’s chances of dying prematurely, according to scientists at Copenhagen University.
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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.
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By Anthony Heilbut — 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?
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By Mark Dowie — How a few brave Americans took on a powerful company and the federal government to save the land they love.
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By Warren I. Cohen — 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.”
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By Yxta Maya Murray — The author who reviewed Margaret Seltzer’s phony memoir for Truthdig responds to the hoax and answers the singular question raised by such a deception.
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nytimes.com
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The father of modern conservatism died while at work in his study. He had suffered from emphysema. Buckley began his distinguished and varied career when conservative ideas were extremely unpopular and managed to build a thriving political movement. Buckley recently raised eyebrows by breaking with President Bush and challenging his conservative credentials.
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The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating memos and opinions rendered by the department that endorsed the practice of waterboarding, which many consider to be torture. The inquiry is unrelated to the FBI’s criminal investigation of the CIA, which destroyed video recordings of the waterboarding of suspects.
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By Larry Blumenfeld — 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.
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By Timothy Snyder — 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.
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By Mark Arax — 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.”
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AP photo / Baz Ratner
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By Milton Viorst — Can decent Israelis, caught between complacency and conscience, save their beleaguered country from the corruptions of power, religious fanaticism and crippling hubris?
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By Chalmers Johnson — 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.
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By Michael Gorra — 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.
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By Carol Brightman — 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?
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By Carla Kaplan — A new collection of letters between the fascinating Mitford sisters offers unparalleled insight into one of the 20th century’s most famous families.
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By Zachary Karabell — 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.
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By Benjamin Barber — 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.
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By Cristina Nehring — One of our most trenchant critics takes a withering look at how contemporary essayists in a global world have gone increasingly, foolishly, local.
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amazon.com
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By Eunice Wong — Todd Haynes’ film “I’m Not There,” “inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan,” shows that art reveals truth when it has the imagination to move away from the imitation of reality.
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By John Mack Faragher — 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.
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By Mark Sarvas — As the first Internet reporter for Yahoo News, Kevin Sites spent a year of living dangerously covering 20 wars all over the world. Is Web journalism the wave of the future? Mark Sarvas, a pioneer of literary blogging, takes a close look.
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The Pentagon is evaluating how it can streamline the process that allows recruits with criminal records to serve in the military. The proposed action is the latest in a series of cash bonuses and relaxed requirements that are meant to help the military cope with its recruitment problem. We can think of a much more effective measure to get young men and women to sign up for military service: End the war in Iraq.
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AP Photo / Victor R. Caivano
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By Marc Cooper — A former translator for Chile’s Salvador Allende reviews three books evaluating the remarkable rise of Venezuela’s irrepressible Hugo Chavez.
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“The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart and John Oliver take down the most recent Democratic disappointment: the Senate’s all-night session. Oliver, political theater critic for the show, gives his most scathing review to date.
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Does Anything Change in Los Angeles With Election of New Mayor?
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