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HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives by Tag 'book review'
I live in the small city of Burlington Vermont in the United States. Most every day I walk through the city’s main public square known by its street name. Church Street. A public street that has been semi-privatized, the street is the center of a struggle between ...
Tolstoy’s famous observation—“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—takes on new meaning in Héctor Abad’s ...
Much of his life, William Frances Dean Marshall Abbott—the eponymous main character of John Irving’s wicked thirteenth novel, ...
When you get to a certain point in your life, it can be rare to find something that astonishes you- well, at least in a good manner. I suppose the hideous always seems able to achieve new and varied freshness. They passed a law that allows WHAT? My new office is in a BATH...
It is not inaccurate to say that in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1912), once the ch...
Noam Chomsky has seen a lot of social movements. He cut his teeth on the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He participated in the anti-intervention struggles of the 1980s as well as in the World Social Forums that began in the 1990s. Now in...
If you have never heard of Ira Aldridge—“the most visible black man in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century”—his biography, by Bernth Lindfors, will come to you as a revelation. How can that be? Aldridge, who was African American, left the United Sta...
Run to your bookstore and get a copy of Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues and relish this w...
Hari Kunzru’s mind-blowing novel, Gods Without Men, charts the lives of quacks and charlatans, serious and devout thinkers, hippies and drop-outs, innocent bystanders—all drawn into an extraterrestrial search, beginning in 1775 and concluding in 2009, though ...
Sydney becomes absolutely iridescent in Gail Jones’ Five Bells, the story of four haples...
Zimbabwe again, though not through the eyes of the typical critic. No white observer, flaying Robert Mugabe and his cohorts; no African narrator crying in despair and frustration. Instead, a narrator who—although white—ponders the question of cause and effect, how...
Why America Failed, which this book is not about, is nonetheless a devastating and eviscer...
I’ve always been a fan of the novelist Upton Sinclair. From the day in junior high that I finished his classic about the US meatpacking industry, ...
Of the many novels with settings in Cairo, Albert Cossery’s The Colors of Infamy capture...
Hurricane Katrina lands full force in Jesmyn Ward’s probing novel,Salvage the Bones, win...
Binyavanga Wainaina’s unconventional memoir reveals a growing ambivalence, perhaps even pessimism, for both the country of his birth, Kenya, and the African continent itself. At the conclusion of his life’s story, Wainaina observes of recent Kenyan music and its in...
There are some musicians and composers whose style is so unique one recognizes their work instantly upon hearing them. Beethoven and Stravinsky. Dylan and Screaming’ Jay Hawkins. John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Billie Holiday and Lene Lovich. Likewise, there are writ...
You have to hand it to Dan Abrams. He’s in his mid-forties, never married, and either hoping that his book will get him hitched or frightened to death that, if it does, he’ll never live up to his wife’s expectations. The claim on the back cover will probably dri...
Michael Moore is first and foremost a story-teller – in the fine Celtic tradition. Moore has put his heart and soul into a memoir, ...
If you make the decision to tackle Haruki Murakami’s massive new novel 1Q84—925 oversi...
As the numerologists note our arrival at 11/11/11, our attention is better focused on this day as the anniversary of the end of the useless, worthless, horrifying war that turned so much of 20th Century into a twisted, violent mess. And on how we must prevent the same fro...
The rape of Nanjing has been well-documented many times over during the last seventy years but perhaps nowhere so imaginatively as in Ha Jin’s latest novel, ...
Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize (1998) winner José Saramago’s final novel, Cain, mu...
Gilad Atzmon captures the essence of his book, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politi...