Portside

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.

A biography of the iconic Nina Simone. Using rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including talks with her daughter and extracts from Simone's private diaries), this examination of her life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for racial justice, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exiles in Liberia and Paris.

In what reviewer Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar calls a "poignant and beautiful, simple and without frills and from the heart" exposition, Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through seven of the main ideas of physics. These are, Jogalekar writes, not just ideas that have advanced our understanding of science, but they are also ideas that have "expanded our consciousness and connected us to our origins and future."

Branko Milanovic offers us not just a plethora of facts about income inequality but brings them into a sound and rigorous global perspective, showing that what are too often treated as isolated national issues are on a world scale income massively maldistributed. While some nations saw the growth of a middle strata (China, for one) the real increase in world income is owned by the unprecedented 50-percent rise in incomes for the top 1 percent globally.