Portside

In Burning Country, journalist Robin Yassin-Kassab and human rights activist Leila Al-Shami make plain that no matter how long the Syrian war rages or how distant a political settlement may appear, the world owes it to the Syrian people to hear their stories and support their cause. The book portrays the opposition as a movement of protest against Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime, something missed abroad amid the factionalism and power politics driving the conflict.

The Noise of Time, the new novel by Julian Barnes, is a fictionalized portrait of Dmitri Shostakovich, perhaps the most famous Russian composer of the Soviet era. Leslie Rieder, in this review, gives us a peek into the "utterly fascinating" tale Barnes has woven.

In David Looseley's take on the iconic French chanteuse Edith Piaf, her notoriously elusive life story is rendered as cultural history, drawing out what Piaf meant - and still means - to France and to her wider audience. Looseley notes that her musical persona was highly and brilliantly constructed. She projected a stage mask of suffering that was all the more affecting because the audience saw there was deprivation behind it. With Piaf, you underwent her.

This new book reconsiders the social and political impact of the energy crisis of the mid 1970s.

Mayer charts the domestic far-right effort to remake the political system through foundations, think tanks, university institutes, paid political commentators and huge campaign contributions by heirs to energy giant Koch Industries. One strategist admitted, "We want to decrease regulations. Why? It's because we can make more profit, okay?" Yet selling that line is hard. So they pose that ameliorative legislation denies the "opportunity for earned success" to the poor.

In Banking on Words, Arjun Appadurai argues that the 2008 financial crisis was, in essence, a failure of language. Narendar Pani finds that argument somewhat overstated, while at the same time acknowledging this book's "path-breaking" analysis of the role language has come to play in the way markets behave and are managed.

In left labor circles, it's been a settled question that the Haymarket martyrs, victims of ruling class justice, were framed, and May Day's radical origins are based on remembering the martyrs. The author of the books under review, using a close reading of the trial record, supports the court finding that the accused anarchists conspired to murder police during the epochal 1886 labor demonstration in Chicago. The reviewer strongly disputes the author's conclusions.

Michael S. Harper, who died on Saturday in Rhinebeck, N.Y. at the age of 78, was a major American and African American poet. He was a writer of complex poems that combined history and memory with a deep network of African American cultural, folkloric, and musical allusions and symbols. This brief biography of Harper is from the Poetry Foundation's website. A generous selection of Harper's work can be found on the Foundation's website.

The initiatives of the New Deal and FDR's Second Bill of Rights represented less a permanent triumph of the welfare state or a model for a progressive way forward than a unique combination of non replicable circumstances, including a temporary cessation of enduring tensions involving race, immigration, culture, class, and individualism, which served to sustain a pale social democratic reform for just a few decades. What followed instead was today's new Gilded Age.

In the period between the world wars, Stefan Zweig was among the world's best-known authors. His books would soon fuel Nazi bonfires. Zweig held that humanity could no longer afford the belligerent nationalism that had led them into the Great War. Yet Zweig was struck dumb by post 1933 events. That failure, the reviewer says, was of imagination, not nerve. Against the Nazis' depredations, all the consummate writer and speaker could muster was nostalgia for a lost world.