Portside

Photographer Dawoud Bey has been taking portraits of a wide range of African American subjects for decades. His powerful, but apparently unassuming style imprints on our minds the beauty of everyday people.

The book under review charts two worlds of the Jazz industry, paying attention both to the joy it brought to listeners alongside the depth of racism and economic exploitation behind the music.

This first novel by famed essayist Coates explores the world of slavery and abolition. The author "re-creates the world of the pre-Civil War South," says reviewer Fear, "with a journalist’s eye and ear for detail."

As the far right grows world-wide through the confluence of traditional conservatives, authoritarian elements, white nationalists and previously marginal fascists, its sway makes struggles against capital problematic. A new book charts alternatives.

In their encounters with Western art, Soviet audiences found ways to reimagine themselves.

Decades after the US retreat from Vietnam, the causes of the war and the outcome are still controversial if not murky, its lessons still not understood by US foreign policy makers. A comprehensive new book aims to clear away much of the detritus.

The argument that's usually framed as "identity politics" versus "class politics" is one of the animating features of today's insurgent left. Both this book and reviewer Gandesha seek to unpack this argument's complexities.

Acclaimed Marxist sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, author of numerous works on capitalism as a world-system, including a sterling four volume study completed in 2011, died on August 31 at the age of 88. A fulsome remembrance appears below.

Followers and chroniclers of jazz have long known Detroit as the home and source of a host of the music's finest practitioners. This new book documents much of that history, bringing the story up to today.

Peter Martin's The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight Over the English Language shows Noah Webster as the sort of ideologue who's convinced he has a historical mission and carries himself accordingly, writes Scott McLemee.