Portside

Instead of gifting sugar-laden sweets, try giving more nutritious snacks. Here are some fun ideas that serve as enjoyable and thoughtful gifts, and which can be motivational nudges toward living a healthier lifestyle.

Whether or not you agree with Lady Gaga’s estimation that American women are “fighting for their lives” following Trump’s win, the timing of the Republican nominee’s victory and The Handmaid’s Tale‘s spring 2017 premiere seems well-timed.

Hiroshima since August 6 1945 lives as a beginning and an end an existential dilemma. California poet Jeffrey Thomas Leong brings us to question: what if/not?

Liberal opinion holds that the Vietnam War was a mistake. The right continues to see it as a noble cause. Author Michael Uhl calls the slaughter in Vietnam planned and deliberate, saying that the United States would not tolerate then or now efforts by people in the Global South to escape the imperialist trap. Uhl writes as a participant, first as an intelligence officer and then as an historian, to paint a merciless and highly detailed picture of US policy at its rawest.

In this novel, Whitehead reimagines both slavery and the resistance to it.

Perhaps the Dump Star Wars story could be described as “silly.” But to deny the politics of Star Wars is to throw the franchise’s rich history under a bus the size of an Imperial cruiser. Star Wars may not overflow with civics metaphors in the fashion of “Star Trek,” but the sci-fi films did not exist in a political void.

“Good Girls Revolt” resisted the militant bra-burning feminist stereotype, instead depicting ambitious young women from a range of backgrounds — a black lawyer, a blond princess, a mousy aspiring novelist — each inspired to take action for unique reasons. It made feminism seem like an endeavor that was not only vital, but thrilling — and not just because of the newfound sexual freedom.

"Complete this report as fully as possible to the best/of your recollection. Do not consult video evidence." So the Carolina poet Dan Albergotti introduces the absurdities and illogic of bureaucratic obscurity that allows a person to avoid responsibility for discharging a deadly weapon.

John Rees, author of The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organization in England 1640-1650, (Verso, 2016; reviewed in Portside Culture, November 30, 2016) weighs in with his recommendations about some of the best fiction in English dealing with radical movements and the revolutionary experience.

Acclaimed Native American novelist Erdrich's fifteenth novel is a "multigenerational tale," writes reviewer Round, that "stretches across two centuries of life on the Northern Plains."