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Street Fighting Men

Luca Provenzano Los Angeles Review of Books
This book is an international history of the movement named "Antifa," discussing its roots and constraints. Reviewer Provenzano offers an assessment.

The Black Novelist History Forgot

Robert B. Stepto  The Washington Post
Himes was a pivotal and versatile post WW II-era American novelist whose work influenced several generations of African American and other writers. A new biography of the novelist is drawing national attention.

A Memoir of Life as Che Guevara’s Kid Brother

Peter Canby The New Yorker
Che’s youngest sibling, Juan Martin Guevara, remembers his revolutionary brother and the family's travails after his murder by the Bolivian military with the aid of the CIA.

If He Hollers, Let Him Be; He's Chester B. Himes

Charles R. Larson CounterPunch
A hard look at African-American author Chester Himes, whose literary fame and financial success later in life hardly made up for the oppressive racial travails that preceded it and forced him to live much of that life abroad.

Klan 2.0: Some 'Good People'

Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed
In The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, Linda Gordon emphasizes broad patterns, making the book more timely than even the headlines of white nationalist outpourings the past months would suggest, writes Scott McLemee. What stands out in Gordon’s book is that the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s tried to create a world unto itself through spectacle, mass communications and branding.

It All Began with Adam and Eve

Michael Schaub NPR
Stephen Greenblatt gives a new look into one of our civilization's origin myths and its role in the development of misogynist discourse.

What Is Great about Ourselves

Pankaj Mishra London Review of Books
Five books by neoliberal authors extolling glories that never were, the essayist eviscerates a state of mind that flatters a cosmopolitan liberal tolerance that has been more at home with nationalism, imperialism and even racism and a worldview that presupposes a chasm between civilized whites and uncivilized nonwhites. even accusing leftists of enabling racism by such affronts as squashing alleged dissimilar people together on buses, trains and subway cars.