Portside

A long forgotten if seminal early Richard Wright novel is brought back to life by Library of America for a new generation of readers.

A biography of protean intellectual Edward Said situates the advocate for Palestinian statehood as a deep political thinker and skeptic of identity politics would both excoriate the crimes of Israel and the US and denounce Arab despotism.

A bio of Israel's first prime minister by a leading Israeli journalist views Ben Gurion as not only a committed Zionist but an early advocate of "Greater Israel" and, like those succeeding him, a steadfast enemy of rapprochement with Palestinians.

Biography of a world-class reactionary fixer who has thus far immobilized the Israeli left, won over Sunni Arab states paralyzed by fear of Shia Iran and is poised to become the longest serving prime minister is Israeli history.

If anyone doubted Black Americans still today suffer unfairly from incarceration rates and other horrific inequities out of all proportion to their numbers in the population, the case was closed by Michelle Alexander in her masterly The New Jim Crow (2010). Comes now James Forman Jr., to argue convincingly that key sections of the black community themselves abetted the criminalizing of black youths in a misguided effort to make so-called law and order work for them.

Soumission, Michel Houellebecq's novel about a Muslim party's takeover of France, is "a melancholy tribute to the pleasure of surrender." It's 2022, the National Front is set to win the presidency, so the Socialist and Gaullist parties bloc so that a charismatic centrist Islamist politician wins instead. Whether or not France deserves a moderate Islamist state, "it has found in Houllebeque a sly and witty chronicler..." An English version will appear in September.