Portside

The study of comic books has emerged in the last decade or so as a serious academic discipline. And it's about time. It's not news to many people that the stories and art found in these little magazines are not only entertaining; they also contain interesting, and sometimes profound, social content. Kent Worcester looks at three new books on Wonder Woman, the comic that emerged during World War II and was an early harbinger of feminist ideas.

One of the biggest literary stories of the summer has been the controversy over To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee's new novel, Go Set a Watchman. It turns out To Kill a Mockingbird hero Atticus Finch, as portrayed in this new book, was far more racist than fans of Lee's earlier novel remember. Should they have been surprised? Laura Marsh talks to several scholars who say Finch's racism was here all along, if readers had only taken the care to look.

Max Blumenthal, whose book The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza allows the young men and women of Gaza to speak, offers a gripping and unembellished look at the misery on the ground in the Gaza Strip during the Israeli government’s homicidal Operation Protective Edge in summer 2014, the third war in this tiny stretch of land in the last six-and-a-half years.

"Humans are the most curious among animals," writes Caspar Henderson in this review of Alberto Manguel's meditation on inquisitiveness. "Even very young humans are better" than other animals, even the smartest ones, "at noticing the novel, the accidental and the serendipitous and at using that experience to imagine new opportunities.' Henderson's review is a kind of "three-cheers" for this special quality that is among those that distinguish our species.

Looking back after 50 years at the few pros (the real lack of jobs) and the many cons (an over-reliance throughout on allegedly debilitating cultural factors) of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's explanation for high African American poverty rates in his Report on the Black Family and Poverty.

In this look at three new and “valuable contributions to our cultural thinking and political thinking on today’s feminist movement,” Rinku Sen finds much to praise; however, she criticizes these authors because they “treat these two realms as largely disconnected from each other.” That’s too bad, Sen adds, because the movement is strongest “when cultural and political interventions reinforce each other.”

The book under review examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts by workers to resist and the housebreaking of a long-running anti-capitalist ethos from imaginative, frenzied opposition to diffuse, angry, but ultimate accommodation. While a residual 19th century fight-back culture built the CIO and defended the New Deal into the 1960s, it lacked the same emancipatory charge it had earlier, and unions shifted to cautious monitors of the working class

Ta Nehisi Coates is best known for his June, 2014 article in the Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations." Since then, he has emerged as one of today's most important commentators on racism and anti-racism. His new book has garnered both praise and push-back, placing it right at the center of our contemporary debates on the subject. Here, Josie Duffy calls it "an important book—perhaps the most important in a generation—on how race in this country functions."

Here is bigotry as a systematic, total mindset having a special affinity for right-wing movements. The author explores its appeal, the self-image it justifies, the interests it serves and its complex connection not so much to antiquity as modernity, shaping the conspiratorial and paranoid worldview of true believers, elitists and chauvinists. It enables their hiding behind mainstream conservative motifs to support policies disadvantaging the targets of their contempt.

As Annette Gordon-Reed notes in this review, John Quincy Adams is probably best known through Steven Spielberg's portrayal of him, in the film Amistad, where he defends enslaved people who revolted aboard a slave ship. He was also a President of the United States and the son of a President. As we consider an election contest that might be one between two "dynastic" seekers of the office, this biography offers a look back at the first "dynastic" presidency.