Book Reviews
America’s revolutionary founding document
For Liberty and Equality: The Life and Times of the Declaration of Independence
By Tom Mackaman, 4 May 2013
A book that seriously considers the impact the Declaration of Independence is most welcome reading in 2013, a year which has seen an intensifying assault on the most basic principles of America’s founding document.
The Green Corn Rebellion: 1935 novel about an episode in the American class struggle
By Vince Ostroweicz, 28 January 2013
William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion offers a fictionalized account of an August 1917 uprising in Oklahoma against conscription during the First World War.
An exercise in myth-making
Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History by Jenny Hocking
By Nick Beams, 26 November 2012
Whitlam's demise is presented as the downfall of a social reformer, almost totally ignoring the global context in which the 1975 Canberra Coup took place.
Book review
Wolfgang Brenner’s Hubert in Wonderland: A life in the shadow of Stalinism
By Sybille Fuchs, 29 October 2012
The well-documented story of a boy from a small village in Germany’s Saar region, who travels to Moscow at the age of ten in late 1933. He is destined never again to see his homeland or most of his family.
A guest review
Bento’s Sketchbook—John Berger’s “Way of Seeing” Spinoza
By Kamilla Vaski, 20 September 2012
Bento’s Sketchbook is a collection of stories, some of them simply vignettes, always connected to a drawing, either as the source of the story or the result of it. The “Bento” of the book’s title is Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza, the seventeenth century philosopher.
A brief for racial politics
The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander
By Helen Halyard and Fred Mazelis, 18 September 2012
For Alexander, the driving force of American society is racial “caste” oppression, not the class struggle.
College Leadership Crisis: The Philip Dolly Affair—a satire of contemporary American community colleges
By Charles Bogle, 22 August 2012
College Leadership Crisis: The Philip Dolly Affair is largely successful in satirizing the corporate model so prevalent on American college campuses.
Book review:
A hard life, then Hurricane Katrina: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones
By Sandy English, 13 August 2012
Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones, is an organic and spontaneous portrait of a family living in Mississippi before, during and after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
A portrait of a “people smuggler”
By Mike Head, 21 July 2012
The People Smuggler puts a human face on those involved in refugee boat voyages, and exposes myths peddled by Australian governments.
The reactionary politics of Grace Lee Boggs
By Shannon Jones, 2 July 2012
In The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century, Detroit’s Grace Lee Boggs advances a political perspective thoroughly hostile to the interests of the working class.
Book Review:
Canadian imperialism’s intervention in the Russian Civil War
By Vic Neufeld, 30 June 2012
Benjamin Isitt has excavated an important, but long-buried historical chapter—the story of the Canadian ruling class’ intervention in the Russian Civil War and the fierce opposition it provoked among Canadian workers, including among the conscript soldiers sent to fight alongside the counter-revolutionary White armies.
Film critic Andrew Sarris 1928-2012: An appreciation
Andrew Sarris and American filmmaking
By David Walsh, 26 June 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is reposting here an article originally published on July 1, 1998. See also the accompanying interview with Andrew Sarris, also from 1998, with a new introduction following his death June 20.
Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman: A valuable, passionate portrait of a great actress
By Charles Bogle, 18 May 2012
Biographer Dan Callahan makes a convincing case for finding the source of Barbara Stanwyck’s acting style and depth in her childhood and adolescence. His analyses of her performances are highly observant and passionately written.
Daniel Woodrell’s The Outlaw Album: Short, honest, brutal and beautiful stories
By Christine Schofelt, 9 March 2012
Set in the small towns and rural areas of Woodrell’s native Missouri and Arkansas, the stories in The Outlaw Album depict troubles of a universal nature.
Jack London’s The Iron Heel: An enduring classic
By Jack Hood, 8 March 2012
In his futuristic novel, The Iron Heel (1908), American author and socialist Jack London chronicled a revolutionary struggle beginning a century ago this year, in 1912.
Chuck Palahniuk’s Damned: Damned if you do
By Christine Schofelt, 4 January 2012
Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) has made a career of trying to be the literary equivalent of a “shock jock.” His latest novel, Damned, takes us on a journey characterized by contrived and banal disgust.
Poetry review: Carol Ann Duffy’s The Christmas Truce
By Jackie Warren, 27 December 2011
The latest work by Carol Ann Duffy, the UK’s Poet Laureate, is a book-length children’s poem that reflects on the moments, during World War One, leading up to the “Christmas Truce” of December 24 and 25, 1914.
That Deadman Dance—an imaginative story about indigenous Australians and European settlers
By Gabriela Zabala, 22 December 2011
Kim Scott’s novel uses poetic and creative lyrical prose, cleverly shifting between the ‘voices’ and consciousness of the European settlers and the Noongar.
Exciting and engaging: Richard Dawkins’ The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True
By Christine Schofelt, 12 November 2011
In his latest book, written for young people, evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins shows how—and why—to fall in love with reality.
Woman as animal: Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River
By Janel Flechsig, 21 October 2011
Bonnie Jo Campbell came to national attention in 2009 with her short story collection, American Salvage, which became a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent novel, Once Upon a River, was released in July.
Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour Leader
A transparent attempt to rebrand Labour
By Dave Hyland, 13 September 2011
Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour Leader (Biteback Publishing, ISBN: 978-1-84954-102-2) is less a biography than an extended memo, written by Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre from the standpoint of explaining to disappointed supporters of David Miliband how his younger brother, Ed, won last year’s Labour Party leadership election.
Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director—a new biography of a major American filmmaker
By Charles Bogle, 12 September 2011
In writing Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director, biographer Patrick McGilligan has performed the valuable service of tracing the fitful arc of a great and troubled director’s life and career.
Correspondence
A letter: Some thoughts on author Stan Barstow (1928-2011) and postwar British social realism
29 August 2011
Stan Barstow, who died August 1, was best known for his 1960 novel A Kind of Loving.
Book Review
Guantanamo: My Journey—David Hicks exposes torture and government criminality
By Richard Phillips, 19 May 2011
Former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks has written a valuable exposure of the barbarities perpetrated against him by the US military and Canberra’s role in his illegal detention.
Inside WikiLeaks—an attack from a former supporter
By Johann Müller, 1 April 2011
Domscheit-Berg, a former employee of WikiLeaks has written a book which seeks to discredit the whistle blowers’ web site.
A remarkable glimpse at art and politics in Depression America
A review of American Letters 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock & Family
By David Walsh, 24 March 2011
American Letters 1927-1947 is a fascinating volume that sheds light in particular on the Depression years in the US and some of the intellectual and artistic trends that emerged during that harsh era.
An interview with Sylvia Winter Pollock
By David Walsh, 24 March 2011
A conversation with the co-editor of American Letters 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock & Family
The Guardian’s hatchet job on Julian Assange
By Robert Stevens, 10 March 2011
WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, published by the Guardian newspaper, is a politically-motivated hatchet job aimed at discrediting Assange and facilitating his persecution.
Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore: The devastation of a major American city
By Tim Tower, 5 January 2011
Detroit was once synonymous with automobile manufacturing and the dominance of American industry. Today’s cityscape is rife with images of decay. Andrew Moore’s photographs in his Detroit Disassembled give expression to the city’s historical tragedy.
The legacy of Leonard Bernstein: a book review
By Fred Mazelis, 24 November 2010
A recent book by Barry Seldes adds something important to the study of Leonard Bernstein’s life and work. Seldes, a professor at Ryder University in New Jersey, is the first biographer to have studied the conductor-composer’s massive FBI dossier.
The Stieg Larsson phenomenon
By David Walsh, 8 September 2010
The three novels by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, published in the US as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, have attracted much attention around the world.
Photo book of the month: Red Star Over Russia
A visual history by David King of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the death of Joseph Stalin
By Adelbert Reif, 19 August 2010
David King’s Red Star Over Russia is a truly superlative photo book!
German journalist Götz Aly denounces pension system
By Stefan Steinberg, 13 August 2010
In his attack on the German welfare state the journalist Götz Aly speaks on behalf of an increasingly unstable petit-bourgeois social layer that tossed aside its youthful radicalism a long time ago and has been able to forge a lucrative career during the past three decades.
A sense of unease: Tobias Wolff’s recent fiction collected in Our Story Begins
By Sandy English, 10 August 2010
Over the past thirty years, Tobias Wolff has produced several collections of short stories, novels, and popular memoirs, especially This Boy’s Life, as well as In Pharaoh’s Army, about his experiences during the Vietnam War.
Confessions of a scoundrel
The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour, by Peter Mandelson
By Dave Hyland, 5 August 2010
Peter Mandelson played a central role in the transformation of the reformist Labour Party into an openly right-wing capitalist party.
Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System
An insider’s critique of education “reform”
By Walter Gilberti and Jerry White, 27 July 2010
Diane Ravitch’s book presents a summary on the attack on public education, from its origins during the Reagan era to Obama’s Race to the Top.
Present historic: Carlyle, Robespierre and the French Revolution
By Ann Talbot, 17 July 2010
Ruth Scurr has done an enormous service by producing a collection of extracts from Thomas Carlyle’s powerful narrative The French Revolution to add to her earlier biography of Robespierre in which she uncovers something of the character and motivations of a man who is more usually hidden in the “blood red mist” of the Terror.
Present historic: Carlyle, Robespierre, and the French Revolution
Part two
By Ann Talbot, 16 July 2010
Ruth Scurr has done an enormous service by producing a collection of extracts from Thomas Carlyle’s powerful narrative The French Revolution to add to her earlier biography of Robespierre, in which she uncovers something of the character and motivations of a man who is more usually hidden in the “blood red mist” of the Terror.
Present historic: Carlyle, Robespierre and the French Revolution
Part one
By Ann Talbot, 15 July 2010
Ruth Scurr has done an enormous service by producing a collection of extracts from Thomas Carlyle’s powerful narrative The French Revolution to add to her earlier biography of Robespierre in which she uncovers something of the character and motivations of a man who is more usually hidden in the “blood red mist” of the Terror.
Letters on Strange Fruit by Kenan Malik
11 May 2010
The following letters were sent to the WSWS in response to Nancy Hanover’s review, “‘Strange Fruit’ by Kenan Malik: A polemic against racism and identity politics”
“Strange Fruit” by Kenan Malik: A polemic against racism and identity politics
By Nancy Hanover, 8 May 2010
Kenan Malik has situated himself in the crosshairs of the dispute over the nature of race, arguing from the standpoint of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific objectivity.
An American liberal looks at health care systems around the globe
By Fred Mazelis, 29 March 2010
The Healing of America, by longtime Washington Post journalist T.R. Reid, a proponent of health care reform, raises some important issues, despite the severe inadequacy of both its analysis and its prescriptions for change.
The Lacuna, or what’s missing
By Sandy English, 27 March 2010
In The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver recounts the life of a fictional writer named Harrison Shepherd, mixing his story in with those of such historical figures as the Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
Successful launch of In Defence of Leon Trotsky at Sydney’s Gleebooks
By our correspondent, 4 February 2010
An appreciative audience of 150 filled the upstairs auditorium of Sydney’s Gleebooks bookstore last night to hear David North launch his In Defence of Leon Trotsky: A Reply to the Falsifications of Robert Service.
J.D. Salinger (1919-2010): An appreciation
By James Brookfield, 2 February 2010
American author J.D. Salinger, best known for his 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye, died Wednesday, January 27. He was 91.
What does particle physics tell us about the nature of matter?
By Chris Talbot, 20 January 2010
Frank Wilczek’s book can be recommended as an attempt to explain to a lay person the implications of more than 50 years of particle physics. Wilczek is a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist.
A letter on George Eliot’s Adam Bede
16 January 2010
The following letter was sent to the World Socialist Web Site in response to “In praise of George Eliot’s Adam Bede on its 150th anniversary”.
Much further reading required: Trotsky: A Graphic Biography, by Rick Geary
By Kevin Martinez, 13 January 2010
In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the life and thought of Leon Trotsky, particularly among the youth. There must be objective reasons for this.
In praise of George Eliot’s Adam Bede on its 150th anniversary
Part 1
By David Walsh, 30 December 2009
This year marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, along with Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The publication of George Eliot’s Adam Bede in 1859 also deserves to be noted.
Considering Norman Mailer and his work: a letter
19 November 2009
A letter sent to the WSWS on the work of Norman Mailer.
In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of Robert Service's Trotsky
By David North, 11 November 2009
Trotsky: A Biography by Professor Robert Service, has been brought out with considerable fanfare. The British publisher is Macmillan. In the United States, Service’s book has been published by the Harvard University Press. What underlies this evident interest of British academics in Leon Trotsky, who has been dead for nearly 70 years?
The “Hegel renaissance” and other questions
A comment on The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
By Alexander Fangmann, 5 November 2009
Last year saw the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. The volumes of the Cambridge Companion series contain collections of essays by scholars working on a particular philosopher or subject area.
The “Hegel renaissance” and other questions: Part 2
A comment on The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
By Alexander Fangmann, 4 November 2009
Last year saw the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. The volumes of the Cambridge Companion series contain collections of essays by scholars working on a particular philosopher or subject area.
The “Hegel renaissance” and other questions: Part 1
A comment on The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
By Alexander Fangmann, 3 November 2009
Last year saw the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. The volumes of the Cambridge Companion series contain collections of essays by scholars working on a particular philosopher or subject area.
What does reality require from fiction?
Aravind Adiga and Indian society
By Sandy English, 29 September 2009
Aravind Adiga’s new book of interrelated short stories, Between the Assassinations, exhibits many of the strengths of his Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, and fewer of its defects.
Defending historical truth
Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR, by Vadim Rogovin
By Andrea Peters, 9 September 2009
Vadim Rogovin’s Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR is a seminal study of the purges that wiped out the entire generation of Bolshevik leaders and socialist workers and intellectuals who led the October 1917 Revolution.
A Thousand Splendid Suns: The plight of Afghan women only partially depicted
By Harvey Thompson, 8 August 2009
Khaled Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, like his first, The Kite Runner, is set against the background of Afghanistan’s recent history.
An interview with David N. Gibbs, author of First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia
By Charles Bogle and Paul Mitchell, 23 July 2009
Earlier this month, the World Socialist Web Site posted a review of First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention by David N. Gibbs, Associate Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Arizona. Professor Gibbs has been gracious in granting the WSWS an interview.
A sharp exposé of US “humanitarian intervention” in the former Yugoslavia—but some false conclusions
By Charles Bogle and Paul Mitchell, 13 July 2009
Professor David N. Gibbs is to be commended for writing the first full-length academic exposé of the “widely accepted consensus” that the Western powers intervened reluctantly in the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s.
Book review: The Unit
Dispensable people
By Marge Holland, 30 June 2009
As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, a good many artists and writers are attempting to gauge the impact on a human level of collapsing economies and the bankruptcy of hitherto accepted solutions to society’s problems.
Book review: Death in the Haymarket
The eight-hour-day movement and the birth of American labor
By James Brewer, 19 May 2009
Death in the Haymarket by James Green is an important contribution to the early history of the American labor movement.
Questions and answers on the Hollywood blacklists—Part 2
An interview with film historian Reynold Humphries
By David Walsh, 12 March 2009
Last month the WSWS posted a review of Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History by Reynold Humphries. We subsequently conducted an interview with the author, which we are posting in two parts.
Questions and answers on the Hollywood blacklists—Part 1
An interview with film historian Reynold Humphries
By David Walsh, 11 March 2009
Last month the WSWS posted a review of Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History by Reynold Humphries. We subsequently conducted an interview with the author, which we are posting in two parts.
Stories from coal mining towns in Appalachia
An interview with author Ruth White, author of Little Audrey
By Jane Stimmen, 6 March 2009
The WSWS recently interviewed Ruth White, whose book Little Audrey deals with 1948 life in the coal town of Jewell Valley, Virginia.
The anti-communist purge of the American film industry
By David Walsh, 4 February 2009
Reynold Humphries, former professor of Film Studies at the University of Lille 3, has written a valuable new account of the blacklisting of left-wing writers, actors, directors and producers in the American film industry
Novelist John Updike dead at 76: Was he a “great novelist”?
By David Walsh, 29 January 2009
A major figure in American literature for the past half-century (his first full-length novel appeared in 1959), John Updike published more than 60 works—novels, collections of short stories, volumes of essays, art criticism and more.
The Dark Side by Jane Mayer
A chronicle of US war crimes
By Shannon Jones, 17 January 2009
Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side presents a detailed account of the Bush administration’s assault on democratic rights, and authorization of torture, in the name of the “war on terror.”
The decline of Austrian social democracy
Norbert Leser’s The Decline of the Eagle
By Markus Salzmann, 3 January 2009
Leser’s new book patently fails to examine why, under conditions of globalization, the social reformist program of the SPÖ has failed. Instead, he explains the decline of the party on the basis of purely subjective factors.
Revealing Australia’s dark past—The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police
By Mary Beadnell, 2 December 2008
The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police is a valuable exposure of the systematic military-style violence employed against Aboriginal people in the Australian state of Queensland during the second half of the nineteenth century.
A Marxist perspective on jurisprudence
By Kevin Kearney, 26 November 2008
Michael Head’s book, Evgeny Pashukanis, A Critical Reappraisal, shines the light of day on one of the most important legal theories to come out of “the boldest and most sweeping experiment of the 20th century”—the October 1917 Russian Revolution.
Little Audrey by Ruth White: a family in postwar Virginia
By Jane Stimmen, 24 October 2008
Written for young adults, this book deals with life in a Virginia coal town in 1948.
European history in the longue durée
Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe
By Ann Talbot, 9 October 2008
Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans: Themes and Variations: 9000 BC--AD 1000, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008)
An exchange on Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui
17 September 2008
A letter to the World Socialist Web Site from a reader on Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, followed by a reply by Sybille Fuchs.
The Spanish Civil War by Andy Durgan
Britain’s Socialist Workers Party lends credence to Stalinist line on Spanish Civil War—Part 2
By Ann Talbot, 17 September 2008
Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War: Studies in European History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: New York, New York)
The Spanish Civil War by Andy Durgan
Britain’s SWP lends credence to Stalinist line on Spanish Civil War—Part 1
By Ann Talbot, 16 September 2008
Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War (New York, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). The Spanish Civil War generates a massive body of historical work every year. This book stands out and merits attention because Andy Durgan is associated with the British Socialist Workers Party.
Revelations of war crimes and moralizing idealism
By Charles Bogle, 10 September 2008
The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, by Ron Suskind. New York: Harper, 2008, 398 pp.
Casting about for the truth of 9/11: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
By Sandy English, 27 August 2008
Falling Man by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2007, 246 pp.
The genealogy of torture
Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali
By Shannon Jones, 29 May 2008
Torture and Democracy, Darius Rejali, Princeton University Press: 2007, 880 pp., $39.50
True to form, the Goodmans provide a fig leaf for the Democrats in Standing Up to the Madness
By Christie Schaefer, 27 May 2008
Amy Goodman and David Goodman, Hyperion, 2008 (Hardcover), $23.95
But who, after all, was Victor Serge?
By Andras Gyorgy, 19 May 2008
Unforgiving Years, by Victor Serge, translated by Richard Greeman, NYRB Classics, 2008, 368 pages (paperback)
A superficial analysis of global capitalism—Part 2
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, Allen Lane: 2007
By Nick Beams, 28 February 2008
This is the conclusion of a two-part review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Part one was posted on February 27.
A superficial analysis of global capitalism—Part 1
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, Allen Lane: 2007
By Nick Beams, 27 February 2008
This is the first of a two-part review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Part two will be posted on February 28.
75 years since the Nazi assumption of power
Hitler’s “intelligible response” to the contradictions of global capitalism
The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze
By Stefan Steinberg, 8 February 2008
Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Allen Lane: 2006, 832 pages, now available in German translation
Trying too hard in the wrong places: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Sandy English, 25 January 2008
New York: Riverhead Books, 2007, 340 pp.
A lively and engaging walk through history for children
By Christie Schaefer, 21 January 2008
Stones and Bones by Char Matejovsky, illustrations by Robaire Ream, Polebridge Press, Hardback, $19.00
Edmund Wilson’s literary essays and reviews from 1920 to 1950: Just in time
By Andras Gyorgy, 30 November 2007
There is fortunate timing to the Library of America’s bringing out in two volumes Edmund Wilson’s Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s and Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s.Their publication may help dispel the mausoleum feel to the comments Wilson receives with every appearance of his own writings or writings about him. He was, many reviewers insist, America’s preeminent “man of letters,” with the word “last” added to drive the final nail in the coffin housing a man of action, as he was in reality for the early, most productive and interesting decades of his life.
Bolsheviks in Power - Professor Alexander Rabinowitch’s important study of the first year of soviet power
By Frederick Choate and David North, 9 November 2007
The following review is also available as a pdf.
World War Z: Monsters of this society’s own making
By Christie Schaefer, 25 October 2007
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks, Three Rivers Press (CA), $14.95
Recycling Stalinist lies about the Spanish Civil War
By Ann Talbot, 6 October 2007
El Escudo de la Republica by Angel Viñas (Barcelona: Critica, 2007)
After the storm: James Lee Burke answers Katrina’s wrath with his own
By Robert Maxwell, 20 September 2007
James Lee Burke, The Tin Roof Blowdown, Simon & Schuster and Jesus Out to Sea, Simon & Schuster
A fighter for Marxism in America
James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928, by Bryan D. Palmer. University of Illinois Press, 2007, 542 pp.
By Fred Mazelis and Tom Mackaman, 18 September 2007
The publication of a biography of James P. Cannon, one of the leading figures of early American Communism and the founder, in 1928, of the American Trotskyist movement, is a major event.
Germany: “Human Rights in Times of Terror” by Rolf Gössner
By Elisabeth Zimmermann, 20 August 2007
Rolf Gössner, Menschenrechte in Zeiten des Terrors—Kollateralschäden an der “Heimatfront”(Human Rights in Times of Terror—Collateral Damage on the “Home Front”), Konkret Verlag, Hamburg: 2007, 288 pages, €17
Two novels about America’s future: writers need a new perspective
By Sandy English, 1 August 2007
The Road by Cormac McCarthy, New York: Random House, 2006, 287 pp. The Pesthouse by Jim Crace, New York: Doubleday, 2007, 255 pp.
John Henry: From folk legend to Communist superhero
By Jonathan Keane, 15 May 2007
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry: The Untold Story of an American Legend, New York, Oxford University Press 2006, 214 pp.
The Unknown Terrorist: A novel about the “war on terror”
By Gabriela Zabala-Notaras and Ismet Redzovic, 8 May 2007
Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist, Sydney, Picador 2006, 325 pp.
A lesson from history regarding Mr. Blair
Edward Pearce’s The Great Man, Sir Robert Walpole
By Ann Talbot, 20 March 2007
Edward Pearce The Great Man, Sir Robert Walpole: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain’s First Prime Minister (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007) 352 pp.
Dennett’s dangerous idea
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel Dennett, Viking Adult, 2006, 464 pages, $26
By James Brookfield, 6 November 2006
American philosopher Daniel Dennett’s latest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, was attacked from the right last February in the pages of the New York Times Book Review by Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic.
History of an early American uprising
By Jonathan Keane, 5 October 2006
The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty, by William Hogeland, Scribner, 2006, 302 pages
A timely reminder of America’s Enlightenment origins
By Charles Bogle, 31 August 2006
Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer, 543 pages, Oxford University Press, 2004, $17.95
John Updike’s Terrorist
By David Walsh, 25 August 2006
John Updike, Terrorist, New York, Alfred A. Knopf 2006, 310 pp.
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