Portside

The Frankfurt School produced some of the most noted Marxist intellectuals of the last century. Reviewer Robert Minto says this new group portrait offers an accessible entryway into the minds of these thinkers, whose work and ideas have often been labeled unnecessarily difficult and obscure.

Even in the era of the Beatles and Motown's roster of stars, the brilliant James Brown established a place that was his alone. His was not about magic, it was about power that could not be denied by anyone brought within its field of influence. What the book's author also finds is a wary solitariness that paradoxically found its fullest expression in Brown's ability to give himself so completely in performance to suggest a generosity approaching self-immolation.

The upsurge in interest in the ideas of Socialism also means a reassessment of its traditions. Jack Ross offers a new, ambitious attempt to come to terms with the history of the Socialist Party in the United States, an organization, and movement, whose story is one of this country's modern legends. In this review, Harold Meyerson, who, as he points out, was a part of this history, takes a look.

Labor historian E.P. Thompson is perhaps best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class. The collected essays reviewed here, many either out-of-print or difficult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963. They show Thompson as also a dedicated educator of workers, a sharp polemicist, a skilled political theorist and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons and for a rebirth of the socialist project.

Much of the political debate this election season concerns who will win the support of working class white voters. At the same time, as Alec MacGillis notes in this review of two new books on the history and present conditions of this sector of the population, much of this discourse strains under the influence of condescension, sentimentalism, and a host of explicitly or implicitly stated biases.

As the Olympic Games go, the reviewer says, it's time to ask the big question: which were the worst Olympics ever? David Goldblatt's The Games is a history of the tarnished Olympics, from Avery Brundage to, yes, London 2012. The evidence shows indisputably that it was Hitler's Berlin games of 1936, which set the stage for spectacle and nationalist-racialist sentiment.

Although this book is two years old, and this review is over a year old, the relevance of A. J. Muste still resonates in this political season, where the always essential questions of war and peace should take center stage. Muste helped shape the modern peace movement in a host of ways. This book, and this review, offers a window into the life and times of this important movement figure.

Democracy briskly and transparently recasts traditional world histories and world populations frequently left out of the narrative into a consideration of how different political alliances, including those of repressed and typically underrepresented groups, demand democracy through use of language and direct action. Democracy connects the local and the global, as well as the past and present, in understanding the complex and shifting notions of democracy.

This new survey of a 50-year arc of Latin America's recent history comes from the pen of one of our most esteemed Marxist historians. Reviewer Tony Wood offers this informative review.

The Council on Foreign Relations is a supercharged, highly connected establishment think tank. While producing reports and staffing varied policy working-groups, its recommendations are invariably market-based. CFR leaders and members pass through the revolving door of the federal government to high positions of authority, no matter which party holds power. The book under review, Wall Street's Think Tank, charts the council's key links to US imperial policy.