Portside

A new book of essays by one of this country's most celebrated poets.

A new book on Donald Trump is as revealing of the foibles and dangers of this reactionary, mysogynistic megalomanic as any honest and brutal piece of opposition research can be. It's also a latent warning of how a future hard right candidate might succeed absent Trump's egregious vulnerabilities. The reviewer faults the book for what it doesn't offer and some readers might expect; any indication that centrist Hillary Clinton is no sure friend of working people.

Edward Albee, who died September 16 at age 88, was a major force in U.S. literature and one of the American theater's most significant playwrights. In this essay, Shehryar Fazli offers some insight into Albee's art by focusing our attention on his landmark 1963 play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Not so much as a comprehensive weekly review of one unitary book, the following contribution is a synthetic culling of classics on white supremacy and racialism in the United States. We at Portside believe the essay is must reading, as are the books cited.

This new book details a little-known aspect of the leaders of Nazi Germany: that many of them, including Hitler himself, were drug addicts. Rachel Cooke has interviewed author Norman Ohler and gives us this portrait.

The reviewer faults the book's author for deflating both Marx's and the author's own earlier stance as a creative British Marxist historian of the working class. While the reviewer grants that Jones offers solid accounts of developments in the British working class movement and in European radical politics that made the First International possible, he faults Jones for relying on a narrow reading of Marx's political economy at the expense of its revolutionary core.

With this book, Springsteen has joined the ranks of those musicians who have also produced first-rate autobiographies. Indeed, the musician's biography has developed into its own literary genre. Long-time music critic Christgau offers a detailed appreciation of this important memoir.

Disagreement on the left reigns over pornography. Is it in essence the objectification of capitalist commodity relations applied to "the other" with possibly disastrous social consequences, or is its celebration of eroticism potentially subversive of an entire repressive culture? The book under review examines the modern porn industry where the Internet has made it ubiquitous, and access on many sites even free. So if this isn't our fathers' old titillations, what is it?

One of the newer fields of academic study is called "Affect Studies," described by Maggie Doherty as the "humanistic and social-scientific investigations of the ways that feelings are generated, experienced, and interpreted" In this review, she explores how two authors use ideas generated by this field to explore the political life of feelings.

As more and more settlers arrived in the English colonies, the property they owned north and south increasingly took the human form of African slaves, encouraging the credo that freedom for some required the enslavement of others. The books under review exhaustively cover the early slavery period, where even the Puritan ideal of a city on a hill actually rested on the backs of numerous enslaved and colonized people.