Portside

This new book, says reviewer Rosen, carefully studies the life of the multiracial working class in a U.S. town, and, in the process, "painfully reveals that traditional working-class life is over."

When Art Spiegelman wrote the introduction (below) to a collection of vintage Marvel super-heroes, a passing negative reference to Trump was enough for the publishers to jettison the quality introduction.

Whitehead’s follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning Underground Railroad exhumes the unmarked graves of a hellish Florida reform school.

Fascism may be resurging, but so is socialism. Yet what would a genuine post-scarcity, egalitarian, democratic, communist society look like? The author thinks he knows, offering tantalizing if evanescent glimpses that tweak the imagination.

Lepore argues, says reviewer Detrow, that "advocates for liberal democracy ceded the field of studying and interpreting American history to nationalists." Democracy's defenders must retake the initiative of telling our nation's stories.

They may not all be beach reading, but this clutch of books will keep any reader busy--working or not--in the doleful last days of summer.

Novelist and writer Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Here is the speech she gave on that occasion.

Two differently themed books complement each other; one on the rise of white power at home and the other on anti-communist adventures abroad show the domestic scourge nurtured by foreign experiences even as the global Right employed its services.

Here is a book, says reviewer Nava, that makes "a significant contribution to queer history and to understanding the forces that shape contemporary queer identity."

Fed -up with the imperial adventures of their own western capitalist governments, some radicals wrongly side with foreign dictators in the name of anti-imperialism. The book under review aims to move beyond a disabling “the West and the rest” binary.