Skip to main content

The International Brigades: Fighting Fascism in Spain

Dan Hancox The Guardian
Hemingway, Orwell and a host of others have written gainfully on the International Brigades’ resistance to Spanish Fascism. The book under review, based on extensive interviews and deep research, is considered by the reviewer to be the masterwork.

Buying Nazism

Bill Niven History Today
In the early years of Nazi rule, the vagueness of much Nazi ideology enabled many Germans to see in Nazism what they wanted to see.

Long Past Due: Joan Wallach Scott's On the Judgment of History.

Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed
Three efforts to right historical wrongs - Nuremberg Trials' prosecution of Nazi war crimes but not crimes against its own people, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation established the former if not the latter, and today's demand for reparations.

Reclaiming “Populism”

L. Benjamin Rolsky Los Angeles Review of Books
In this new book, Thomas Frank is challenging himself, writes reviewer Rolsky, "to rescue the terms 'populism' and 'populist' from the mouths of those he deems unfit to use them: the anti-populists."

The Novel and the Secret Police

Peter Coviello Boston Review
In Vineland, Thomas Pynchon's dour 1990 novel, the author of Gravity’s Rainbow anticipated a United States where all available definitions of freedom are channeled through security apparatuses understood as the greatest good. Sound familiar?

White Too Long

Lloyd Green The Guardian
This new book analyzes the history of the intertwined relationship in the United States between Christianity and white supremacy.

The Wages of Whiteness

Hari Kunzru The New York Review of Books
A deep dig into the literature on white supremacy shows how even such salient insurgent movements for social justice and racial equality as Black Lives Matter can be transmuted by corporate manipulation into instruments of ruling class stability.

White Women Were Avid Slaveowners

Parul Sehgal The New York Times
This new book offers new insight into how deeply slavery defined the lives of the enslavers and their families. It gives us new data regarding the scope of control that white women and girls, as well as males, had over the enslaved.

How Ronald Reagan Triumphed

Evan Thomas The New York Times
The fourth volume in historian Rick Perlstein’s critical series on the rise of the modern GOP’s far right shows Reagan as key in uniting a rank coalition that still epitomizes and explains much of the Republican Party’s sway.

Understanding Socialism

Gregory N. Heires Portside
Here is a new book that offers a concise but rounded introduction to socialism for our times.