Portside

Tim Alberta is a fine guide to the world of conservative US Christians, their dispiriting march to the right, and its ugly cost.

Michael Yates reviews Ballad of an American, a newly released graphic biography of Black actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson. The book gives an uncompromising look at a complicated, passionate man, wholly dedicated to the cause of liberation.

Urban socialists blazed a path toward social democracy. Leftists who want to reclaim this tradition face a whole new set of obstacles.

This survey of counterculture protest in late 20th century Europe offers readers a look at a set of movements that are fondly remembered, but that also deserve to be far better known.

This study, which focuses on the 2020 protests after George Floyd's murder, offers, says reviewer Smith, "the first truly comprehensive account of that summer."

This "brilliant act of novel-making," writes reviewer Orringer, "builds a wholly believable and infinitely faceted reality around" the experiences of two fathers that each lost a child to war, and the friendship that developed between them.

Written nearly six years ago about the brutal French colonial suppression of the Algerian population. Is the civilian population of a colonial-settler regime ever a legitimate military target?

This book, says reviewer Dunbar-Ortiz, "contains a passionate narrative" by Paul Auster, a poet and novelist, alongside "stark and somber black-and-white photographs of sites of mass shootings" by Spencer Ostrander.

In a new biography, the Velvet Underground front man embodies a New York that exists only in memory.

This new study of the Communist Party USA, says, reviewer Wendland-Liu, "is at its best in its detailed treatment of political debates and the labor histories of the formative period and the popular front period."