Portside

The numbers tell us that the African American upper middle and upper classes are little more than a sliver of those classes as a whole. In what Rebecca Hussey calls a "formally innovative" new memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson shows us what it is like to have grown up in this tiny world during the latter half of the last century.

Walter Benjamin found his calling after accepting he would never get a job as an academic, so he junked hitherto unfathomable reflections on language to cover contemporary culture, with an emphasis on its more popular forms, for newspapers and general publishers. His radio broadcasts, many aimed at children, show writing that is engaging, vivid and, above all, understandable. Conclusion: the best thing that ever happened to the man was his failure to land a lectureship

These may be banner days for African American poetry and poets. For example, this year the Pulitzer Prize for poetry went to Digest, by black poet Gregory Pardlo, of Brooklyn. Yet the book trade remains overwhelmingly white. Pardlo is one of a growing number of poets and writers of color who are now challenging racial inequality in publishing, as Angela Chen reports. Along with Chen's article are links to reviews of Pardlo's prize-winning volume.

Legendary rock star Patti Smith's look back expresses supremely well the tentativeness of every movement forward, the sense of following a path so risky, so sketchily perceptible, that at any moment one might go astray and never be heard from again, never perhaps even hear from the deepest part of oneself again. For a book that ends in success, it is acutely sensitive to that abyss of failure that haunts the attempt to become any kind of artist.

Pro baseball player and coach Dusty Baker was a teenage rock and roller. His new memoir details those years, centered on the legendary Monterey Pop Festival, where Jimi Hendrix played his way to stardom. Charles Bethea profiles Baker in advance of his memoir of those year of hanging out with a host of legendary musicians and learning how rock and roll is like baseball.

The spread of capitalism as a global system and neoliberalism as its dominant economic policy has its analogue in the triumph of English as its undisputed enabling linguistic. The book under review argues that not only is this single-language sway historically unprecedented in allowing universal communication, but that its flattening effects on native languages and national discourse come with their own disabling downsides.

The Man Booker prize, given annually for best English language novel published in the United Kingdom, was awarded this week to Marlon James, for his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. He is the first writer from Jamaica to win the prize. The novel is a tale of 1970s-1980s Jamaica, CIA plots, and violence. It is "a story about Jamaica that doesn’t only take place in Jamaica," says Kei Miller, who reviewed the novel late last year.

Scott McLemee predicts another round of slamming/defending Nazi-tool philosopher Martin Heidegger with the forthcoming English publication of his The Black Notebooks...l'affaire Heidegger has been recycled on at least three or four occasions. It's as if the shock of the scandal was so great that it induced amnesia each time. Trashing Heidegger distracts us from our own appalling national stupidities and our galling national avarice -- our own little darkenings.

It may seem as if Christian conservatism, as a social movement, has always been with us. However, as Kim Phillips-Fein observes in this review of Kevin M. Kruse's history of the phenomenon, much contemporary conservative Christian discourse reflects "specific politics of the post-New Deal era, and the effort to shore up Christian commitments to capitalism as opposed to the welfare state."

Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land, Peter Neil Carroll's new collection, takes us on a fascinating odyssey across an increasingly broken America. With a cast of characters as disparate as Billy the Kid, closet racists, grave robbers, ghosts along the Natchez Trace, blue collar workers and the short-sighted corporations that exploit them, these poems share an undercurrent of looming disaster, a deep knowing that things are about to turn bad. (Cultural Weekly)