Portside

Both analytical and droll, Terry Eagleton's Culture explores how culture evolved from rarified sphere to humble practices, and from a bulwark against industrialism's encroaches to present-day capitalism's most profitable export. Eagleton both illuminates culture's collusion with colonialism, nationalism, the decline of religion, the rise of and rule over the "uncultured" masses, as well a means for cultivating social life and social change.

"Can there be Black liberation in the United States as the country is currently constituted?" asks Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in her new book. "No. Capitalism is contingent on the absence of freedom and liberation for Black people and anyone else who does not directly benefit from its economic disorder." Justin Campbell, in this review, surveys Taylor's analysis of the roots, present status, and future prospects of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The timeliness of The Butler's Child has just been demonstrated by the death of a black man in Baton Rouge at the hands of two ill trained young white police officers. Fifty years ago Steel thought of the Deep South as a dangerous and racist place. Today, however, it has become clear that racism and trigger-happy cops are national phenomena.

This memoir is last book written by the late Benedict Anderson, whose Imagined Communities (1983) was a major contribution to the modern understanding of the nation-state and of nationalism. As Joshua Kurlantzick shows, Anderson's life was as rich as his scholarship was provocative.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has gone through many editions, but the 1910-1911 scholars edition is nonpareil. Dennis Boyles' book says why, and enumerates what is lost when readers gain accessibility and cost-savings from easy access to Wikipedia and other venues but lose in depth and authority.

This memoir by physics and geology professor Anatole Dolgoff of his father, IWW activist Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990), beautifully captures the aura of the anarchist and related movements in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, says reviewer Peter Cole.

While a sharp contribution to discussions of women's oppression and liberation, the book under review is faulted for not demonstrating the actual radical connection between class and other forms of oppression. While rejecting a tendency to reduce Marxism to a one-dimensional critique of class, the book's author is faulted for downplaying the limits of intersectionality as not articulating--but instead fudging--the existing gulf between identity politics and Marxism.

The "great majority of people deemed philosophers in history," writes Justin E. H. Smith in this new book, "have not had PhDs, have not belonged to a professional philosophical organization, and have not carried out their careers in ‘departments.’” Smith teases out the significance of that observation, as he seeks to help us rethink what philosophy is and what it means to "philosophize." Robert Minto assesses Smith's effort.

Two startlingly realistic books by black female authors offering rich, contrasting and brilliantly wrought views of racial conditions for affluent and impoverished African Americans.

In this new book, Jerry Harris traces the links between the current stage of the development of transnational capitalism and the decline of democratic norms throughout society. Harry Targ guides us through this terrain, and, along the way, raises some critical questions about the significance of Harris's findings for today's social movements.