Portside

With this book, Springsteen has joined the ranks of those musicians who have also produced first-rate autobiographies. Indeed, the musician's biography has developed into its own literary genre. Long-time music critic Christgau offers a detailed appreciation of this important memoir.

Disagreement on the left reigns over pornography. Is it in essence the objectification of capitalist commodity relations applied to "the other" with possibly disastrous social consequences, or is its celebration of eroticism potentially subversive of an entire repressive culture? The book under review examines the modern porn industry where the Internet has made it ubiquitous, and access on many sites even free. So if this isn't our fathers' old titillations, what is it?

One of the newer fields of academic study is called "Affect Studies," described by Maggie Doherty as the "humanistic and social-scientific investigations of the ways that feelings are generated, experienced, and interpreted" In this review, she explores how two authors use ideas generated by this field to explore the political life of feelings.

As more and more settlers arrived in the English colonies, the property they owned north and south increasingly took the human form of African slaves, encouraging the credo that freedom for some required the enslavement of others. The books under review exhaustively cover the early slavery period, where even the Puritan ideal of a city on a hill actually rested on the backs of numerous enslaved and colonized people.

Arlie Russell Hochschild has taken readers deep into the lives and minds of contemporary conservative voters and Donald Trump supporters. As reviewer Sean McCann shows, Hochschild's new study offers welcome insight into the forces that are driving our divisive politics.

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.