Portside

A granular review of three recent books on the the political and intellectual legacy of French Marxian existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. As the reviewer notes, if you want to know why 50,000 people showed up to pay their respects at the writer/activist's 1980 funeral, these new books may provide the answer.

This fresh look at the 1971 Attica, New York prison uprising, which was brutally repressed by then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller, is not just a history. It is an intervention into contemporary debates about the U.S. prison system.

Frederic Jameson writes that for Raymond Chandler, a detective novel may reveal patterns that underlie the workings of our society. Reviewer Angela Woodward agrees, crediting Chandler's novels with brilliantly illuminating the grimy microcosm, played out "in the heart of the darkness of a local world without the benefit of the federal Constitution, as in a world without God." She finds that Jameson makes every strand of Chandler's oeuvre glisten with significance.

A century ago, Madison Grant was one of the most influential racists in the United States. Republican presidents echoed his ideas. He helped shape immigration legislation. His ideas showed up in U.S. literature and popular culture. Adolph Hitler was a fan. In this essay, Noel Hartman focuses on Grant's best-known book and reminds us how some of Grant's ideas have survived and resurfaced in our current presidential campaign.

While Michael Walzer's book on religious revivalism is acknowledged by the reviewers as a critical engagement and characteristically insightful, they also fault the author for wrongly diagnosing its effects and its prescription. In a link (below the review) Walzer replies, as do the reviewers.

This young Toronto-based poet won a place on the best-seller lists with her epigrammatic, haiku-like poetry that sometimes addresses emotionally difficult subjects. This is an unusual accomplishment for poetry in today's culture. Here is this remarkable writer's story.

Contrary to a too-commonly held assumption, book author Anne Trubeck argues that while writing by hand will likely become less practiced, it will not disappear, but evolve, as she insists its variegated world history amply shows. Just one possible precedent: the metamorphosis of letterpress printing into an artisanal form.

This book, which won the American Book Award last month, aims to reorient our thinking about slavery, by focusing on "slave-breeding," a practice that helped ensure the institution's survival after the Constitutional ban on the transatlantic trade went into effect in 1808. In this review, Malcolm Harris discusses the implications of the practice, by outlining just how central slavery was to the production of U.S. wealth.

Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged by some 80 percent. The book painstakingly recapitulates the systematic homicidal culling of the state's native American tribes . While not the final word on the ubiquity of the term genocide worldwide, it establishes that murder was the preferred and accepted method of social control for white settlers, gold miners. state militias and federal policy makers. The long-term consequences were staggering.

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.