Portside

This new book joins a growing literature that takes a look at and tries to uncover the roots of today's right wing movement.

Hugo Chavez, with Ignacio Ramonet, Chavez: My First Life (translated by Ann Wright) Verso, 544 pp, Hardback, $36.00, August 2016, ISBN 978 1 78478 383 9 A balanced look at the early days and years in power of Venezuelan general cum President Hugo Chavez, who, while widely accused of authoritarian practices against his opposition, was singular among Latin American populist leaders in never aligning with the nation's bourgeoisie or turning on his left allies.

A new book examines Du Bois's radicalism, tracing its career-long development.

British artist, novelist, prodigious essayist and poet John Berger, best known for her magisterial and approachable Ways of Seeing and who died in January, is remembered here for his radical approach to Art, when it functions to make sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, when it becomes a meeting place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, what Berger called guts and honor.

A writer tells the story of his left wing family. Reviewer Scipes takes us on a tour.

A writer tells the story of his left wing family. Reviewer Scipes takes us on a tour.

With all the toxicity coming out of the White House and the GOP-dominated Congress, it's important to remember how insufferable were the politics of the neoliberal Democrats in power under Bill Clinton. The book under review (an article derived from the book is below) should help us remember how malignant were the Clinton years when it came to economic and social justice.

This week the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, named Tracy K. Smith as the U.S. Poet Laureate for 2017-2018. Smith is the fifth African American poet and the fourth black woman to hold the honor. She is the author of three books of poems, the most recent of which, Life on Mars, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. A link to the Library of Congress citation, and a review, from 2012, of Life on Mars, are posed below.

National Public Radio's media critic Brooke Gladstone talks with the Poynter Institute about the myth of post-fact journalism and the need for journalists to ferret out and offer common pools of accurate information, if only to provide contending parties with a basis to negotiate and for democracy to work.

The acclaimed Indian novelist and essayist whose first novel, The God of Small Things (1997) was a prize-winning, international sensation, has just published a new novel that reviewer Walter describes as "a bright mosaic."