Portside

The reviewer highlights some of the noteworthy (and readable) academic press books coming out in the first half of 2021.

This newly published collection of newspaper columns enriches our understanding of this singly important revolutionary theorist and activist.

A deep dig into how the steel industry collapse affected hundreds of thousands of decently paid workers, contrasted with the surge of hospital and nursing home hiring that never matched former pay rates or union protections afforded steel workers.

A symptom of our society's ongoing crisis is the loss of live, in person community networks and the personal and social relations founded on those networks. This book explores this problem and offers solutions.

Senate filibuster, invented to uphold slavery, needs abolishing before any progressive legislation passes. The author offers an insider’s account of how reactionary politicians use the upper house to repress working people and hamstring democracy.

This book, writes reviewer Nair, "recovers a long-forgotten history of urban organizing," by focusing on five Chicago and Philadelphia groups that were active in the 1960s and 1970s.

Boas was an outlier in a field that tolerated if not justified white racial superiority over the world’s “lesser” breeds, He and his intellectual successors— largely women-did what scholars and journalists need to do: listen, ask questions, observe.

Pundits up in arms about removing offensive tropes from his books forget this is part of a long tradition, from Mary Poppins to Nancy Drew.

A former student and admirer of the late Canadian Marxist Leo Panitch writes on his influence as a teacher, scholar and militant.

"If Wikipedia is a test case for techno-utopianism," writes reviewer Panovka, "it is also a test case for an older ideology similarly unfashionable these days—your garden-variety Enlightenment-era liberalism."