The cautionary tale of Superman
The Joe Shuster Story: The Artist Behind Superman Julian Voloj Super Genius, 2018 Superman has always been identified as representing truth, justice and the American Way. He was an unambiguous…
reviews
A Threat of the First Magnitude, reviewed by Don Hamerquist
available from leftwingbooks.net The recent book by Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher, “A Threat of the First Magnitude”, focuses on the FBI counterinsurgency operation against the Maoist sector of the…
Parasites in paradise: behind the capitalist curtain
Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite Jake Dernstein Henry Holt & Co., 2017 Every year, sometimes several times a year, the…
Torkil Lauesen Answers Bromma, on The Global Perspective
available from leftwingbooks.net Dear Bromma Thanks for the review and comments. It is rewarding to receive reflective feedback on your work. I was hoping for this kind of discussion. The…
Reading Torkil Lauesen’s The Global Perspective (Bromma, 8/18)
Rocinha Favela in Brazil. The transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises to be as drastic, as disorienting a change as was the original european colonial…
The North End Revisited: Photographs by John Paskievich
The North End Revisited: Photographs by John Paskievich John Paskievich University of Manitoba Press, 2017 With her body still missing on a warm Winnipeg April, the Indigenous community held a…
We All Live in a Mediocracy
Mediocracy: The Politics of the Extreme Centre Alain Deneault Between the Lines, 2018 Alain Deneault has become one of the most important Canadian public intellectuals Anglosphere audiences have never heard…
Examining the American nightmare
The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism Henry A. Giroux Routledge, 2018 This new work by one of the world’s leading social critics, the founding theorist…
Trees and teargas: worldviews clash at Barriere Lake
Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake against the State Shiri Pasternak University of Minnesota Press, 2017 Events from a chilling October day in 2008, on a gravel road entering…
Where Are the Riots of Yesteryear? Remembering May 1968
May Made Me: An Oral History of the 1968 Uprising in France Mitchell Abidor AK Press, 2018 This month marks the 50th anniversary of the wave of radical revolts and…
The Mirage of Pension-Fund Activism
The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon David Webber Harvard University Press, 2018 In her 2016 book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age,…
Indian Horse is a Film All Canadians Must See
Indian Horse Stephen Campanelli Elevation Pictures, 2017 Indian Horse, a film based on the late Richard Wagamese’s bestselling novel, opens in theatres nationwide on April 13th. Wagamese was a masterful…
Review: My Hands Were Clean
Tom Bradley is one of those writers who sends me running to the dictionary. That is praise and damnation at the same time, but more of the former. Because like…
Review: The Cache and Other Stories
I thoroughly enjoyed this new collection of short stories and poems, by Sherry D. Ramsey. As always, her fiction is rooted in authentic human emotions, problems and foibles, even when…
Marx at the Movies
The Young Karl Marx Raoul Peck Diaphana Films, 2017 Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx opened on Friday, February 23 at the Metrograph in N.Y. and the Laemmle Royal in…
New Classes for a New Class Politics (Gabriel Kuhn)
I spent the past weekend writing a German review of the new Kersplebedeb edition of David Gilbert’s Looking at the U.S. White Working Class Historically, originally published in 1984. While…
Roundup of more great reviews of The Fatness
Reviews continue to get posted about my new book. If you haven’t already checked out Joe Mahoney’s funny video review of The Fatness, you definitely should. There’s also a new…
Assorted Nonsense Reviews The Fatness
My buddy and fellow-writer, Joe Mahoney, has done a charming and funny video reviewing The Fatness. In addition to having wonderful taste, Joe writes fiction himself. You can check out…
Hué Back When: the Bloodbath in Vietnam Was Us
Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam Mark Bowden Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017 For Mark Bowden, author of Hué 1968, the pivotal battle of the War…
Force of Evil: Abraham Polonsky and Anti-Capitalist Noir
Force of Evil Abraham Polonsky The Enterprise Studios, 1948 Years ago I worked in the law office of attorney Leon Despres, former Alderman for Chicago’s Fifth Ward, which comprehends Hyde…