Portside

For the Labor Day holiday, David Salner offers a poet’s glimpse of what it feels like not to be working while working a long shift at night.

Kafka's life was itself Kafkaesque, and if you want to know its span and its ending better- the book's author contends and the reviewer agrees - readers need to start at the beginning. The book under review is the third of a three-volume biography that critics widely call definitive.

This new book reminds us of the scope and power of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, beginning a century ago. As reviewer Scott McLemee points out, however, to only point out the Klan's racist heritage can be deceptively simplistic. McLemee reminds us that what made the Klan a mass force in the 1920s was that the movement's reactionary politics and racist passions "were widespread enough to count as mainstream.'

A year after racial discontent neared levels not seen since the Rodney King beating case, the country finds itself convulsed by controversies over neo-Nazis emboldened by Donald Trump’s rise to power. Now, a burst of new films, many of them documentaries, are taking a deep look beyond the headlines at the lasting impact that racial schisms and racism have on Americans’ everyday lives.

By folding a discussion of mental illness and its stigmas into the series, The Tick has proven a powerful source of representation.

The circus--as in Bread & Circus--is coming to town but as Oregon poet Amy Miller explains with brilliant clarity, it will not set you free.

Building on her past work analyzing capitalism, Naomi Klein, in the book under review, does not stop with an analysis of the crises. She not only argues how to defeat the new shock politics of Trump (explicit in the subtitle), but outlines a resistance politics that not only rejects what she terms a domination/subordination dynamic but proceeds from saying "no" to the existing order to a "yes" to other values. Favoring the book, the reviewer wishes she had dug deeper.

This book is an important addition to U.S. left wing movement history. This brief author interview appears on the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). James and Grace Lee Boggs were independent Marxist revolutionaries who worked in Detroit beginning in the 1940s, were among the earliest theorists of 1960s Black Power, and were influential in the revolutionary movement in Detroit as well as nationally and internationally.

Like countless other black men, Colin Warner was ensnared in a system that was rigged against him in every way. The police, the prosecutors, the prison guards and some of his own lawyers cut corners, rush to judgment and ignored the clear evidence of his innocence... He spent 20 years in prison.

In his new book, Einstein’s Beets: An Examination of Food Phobias, the distinguished writer and scholar, Alexander Theroux, discusses some of the current scientific and psychological research into food preferences and aversions