Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'book review'
The best plan would be skip this review and run out and purchase a copy of Nadeem Aslam’s The Blin...
The interview is one of the journalist’s best tools. If done right, an interview provides a considerable amount of information about the views of the interviewee and interviewer, while also informing the reader about the subjects covered. Certain journalists made the in...
“I want a happiness without a hole in it, I want the bowl without a crack”
–From ‘The Golden Bowl’
Mumbai.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s screenplays did not scream, or even appear to make profound st...
Although the term “good slave owner” is no doubt an oxymoron, it is not difficult to refer to one of Margaret Wrinkle’s white characters in her haunting novel, ...
Since receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, Chinese writer Mo Yan has been subjected to a torrent of criticism from western reviewers and other scribes. Most of this criticism focuses on what they perceive to be a lackluster criticism of the Chinese governme...
So—if you assume as I did that Mary Roach’s Gulp will be straight narration down the ali...
Novels about life under totalitarian regimes are generally not very uplifting. Think of Romanian novelist Herta Muller’s recent works translated into English. Or go back a little further—to the Baltics or Eastern Europe—and fiction that dwells on Communism’s...
In the late 1990s and early part of this century I worked as a researcher and writer for the journal Southland Prison News. This small journal usually ran about thirty pages and was sent out to prisoners incarcerated primarily in the US South. Edited by an inma...
Close in its structure to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ...
There’s a perverse desire for understanding in Manuel Joseph’s second novel, The Illicit...
At the end of James Lasdun’s chilling account of being stalked, Give Me Everything You Have...
If there is one nation whose political situation has been omnipresent and important to the history of the past seventy-five years, it would be Iran. Much to the dismay of those imperial powers that have tried to subdue and manipulate them, Iran’s people have refused t...
Though Kamala Markandaya (1924-2004) spent most of her life as a writer in England, her eleven novels (beginning with Nectar in a Sieve, 1954), were set almost exclusively in India, typically depicting traditional life and values and the ways they came into conflic...
Yes, there is a white dog in Eleanor Morse’s lovely novel—lovely, in spite of its violence—and, it is with that dog that we should begin. Apparently abandoned, or at least a stray, white dog (a female) begins following Isaac Muthethe when he escapes from South Af...
If a journalist wants to paint crazy pictures of alliteration and description, then the place for them to write used to be in the sports section. Speculation and flights of poetic fancy were not only allowed but expected. That most iridescent of journalists, Hunter S. Tho...
The opening chapter (“Philadelphia and Jubilee, 1925”) of Ayana Mathis’s disturbing story, Th...
“Every good person deep down is an anarchist,” said Paul Avrich, who died in 2006 after spending his academic life at Queens College and writing 10 books on anarchism that included The Haymarket Tragedy, Sacco and Vanzetti, and two oral histories – ...
First, the box containing Chris Ware’s fascinating graphic novel—or, perhaps more accurately, graphic stories: 11 ½” x 16 ½” and 2” thick, lavishly decorated with images from the contents. The timing of the release of Building Stories was obvious...
April 1975. University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. A friend and I sat at a literature table in front of the Student Union building. It was lunchtime and we were putting in our hours talking with people about the issues of the day. University cutbacks were...
In the machinations of Empire, religious and ethnic differences are often used to justify wars and repression. Historical examples abound. Animosity between nations’ ruling elites are framed in religious terms to rile up the populace and convince them the antagonism...
When considering left-leaning essayists in the United States of the past half century, three names stand out in my mind. Alexander Cockburn, Andrew Kopkind and Gore Vidal. Sure, there are others, but for me, these are the troika I prefer. Kopkind has been gone for s...
Much of Yan Lianke’s epic novel, Lenin’s Kisses, reads as if it has been lifted from a...
Many of us—old African hands, like myself, and Chinua Achebe’s millions of readers—have waited for this book: what happened to Africa’s greatest novelist during the Biafran war, when the Igbos in Eastern Nigeria broke off from the newly-independent country and dec...
Do Governments and Corporations lie, cover-up and maintain secrecy as they harm our planet and us? Joe Mangano’s new book Mad Science – The Nuclear Power Experiment clearly lays it out that they have done so for more than half a century.
This book is a page-t...
In this big, often too sprawling novel, the unnamed journalist erstwhile narrator/main character be...