Book Reviews
Questions and answers on the Hollywood blacklists—Part 1
An interview with film historian Reynold Humphries
By David Walsh, March 11, 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 ...
Stories from coal mining towns in Appalachia
An interview with author Ruth White, author of Little Audrey
By Jane Stimmen, March 6, 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, February 4, 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 Am...
Novelist John Updike dead at 76: Was he a “great novelist”?
By David Walsh, January 29, 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...
The Dark Side by Jane Mayer
A chronicle of US war crimes
By Shannon Jones, January 17, 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, January 3, 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 ...
Revealing Australia’s dark past—The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police
By Mary Beadnell, December 2, 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...
A Marxist perspective on jurisprudence
By Kevin Kearney, November 26, 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 ...
Little Audrey by Ruth White: a family in postwar Virginia
By Jane Stimmen, October 24, 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, October 9, 2008
Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans: Themes and Variations: 9000 BC--AD 1000, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008)
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, September 17, 2008
Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War: Studies in European History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: New York, New York)
An exchange on Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui
September 17, 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.
