Portside

With its numerous religious awakenings and repeated instances of religiosity as political theater, it's easy to forget US civic life is secular. Author Kevin Kruse argues that the effort to ground political rights in spiritual authority and not in democratic discussion and decision-making originated with a coterie of corporate heads, right-wing politicians, reactionary pastors and cultural icons as a bulwark against progressive politics and New Deal legislation.

Scholars are producing increasingly detailed accounts of how the U.S. government utilized artists and culture in the Cold War anti-Communist crusade. According to former diplomat John H. Brown, this new study, by Greg Barnhisel, shows that an important factor in making modernism work for U.S. Cold War interests involved "defanging modernism of its radicalism and turning it into an international vehicle for whitebread all-American convictions."

The compendious catalogue of a recent exhibit offers representations of art as practiced by numerous Plains tribes from first encounter with Europeans to their near decimation not only from military conquest and rough frontier justice but from European-spawned disease. Much of the work is likened to that of Italian painters of religious scenes during the Renaissance, which might be defined as the depiction of social life sustained by a sacred sacrifice of blood.

The history of public housing in the United States can be read, in part, as a history of the modern impoverishment of racial minorities, in particular, of the African American population. As reviewer Rhonda Y. Williams notes, Edward G. Goetz has written a "multi-layered analysis of housing policy and redevelopment," in a book that "explicitly examines black removal from urban spaces and the perpetuation of racialized poverty."

Marx called it "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and its militants those who "stormed heaven." For 76 days in 1871, this first experiment in workers self-government and armed defense against troops of the old order also made costly mistakes leading to its slaughter. The author chronicles not only Commune governance and the role of women as leaders and fighters, but the intricacies of a counter-revolution that sought nothing less than crushing Paris' working class.

First-time author Leila Abdelrazaq has produced a work that, in the words of reviewer Beenish Ahmed, "provides a human face to the often overlooked experiences of refugees." Rendered in the form of a graphic novel, it is a unique visual and literary testament, and a special glimpse into the world of those who have been displace by conflict from their homes and from their familiar worlds.

Born into the segregated rural South, James Gustave ("Gus") Speth didn't see the oppression and poverty his black neighbors faced. A confrontation at a northern university with civil-rights advocates in the early 1960s triggered a life-long moral compulsion to support the burgeoning civil rights struggle. The newly minted anti-racist grew into a leading environmentalist, political activist, prolific author and Yale dean. The book under review is his memoir.

In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison has created what Walton Muyumba calls "a tragicomic jazz opera played out in four parts." Here is his review of this eagerly awaited new work by the artist who is arguably the greatest novelist working in the United States today.

The Patriot Act is a nightmare for immigrants without papers already living precarious lives of dead-end jobs, zero-hour contracts, squats, and physical danger. When a young Asian woman, alone in the U.S., meets an ex-serviceman, himself traumatized by three tours in Iraq and living in a basement flat , the two bond in a tough but brilliant first novel absent stock characters or cartoon emotionality but with a profound and intimate knowledge of life on the margins.

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) was the most influential African American poet of the last half-century. His was a wide ranging, experimental practice that left its mark on literary poetry, spoken word verse, and hip-hop. He was a socially committed and engaged intellectual who combined a Marxist enthusiasm with a linguistic panache that resulted in a rich, humorous, and rigorous body of work. Patrick James Dunagan looks at a summing-up collection of his work.