Skip to main content

Books Bob Dylan’s the Philosophy of Modern Song

Raymond Foye Brooklyn Rail
Dylan, writes reviewer Foye of this new coffee table-size book, "is sweeping out the ashes from the cave of a long career. He is casting a light on the Jungian shadows of popular song, examining both mechanics and metaphysics."

Law of Tehran Review – Gritty Iranian Crime Thriller Takes No Prisoners

Mark Kermode The Guardian
Iranian American screen polymath Payman Maadi (who made such an impact in films such as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is Samad, a cop waging an apparently unwinnable war on drugs in the Iranian capital. Having rounded up a vast community of addicts living and dying within a hellscape of giant concrete pipes, Samad and his deputy, Hamid (Houman Kiai), treat their captives like cattle, stripping and humiliating them, herding them from one overcrowded prison space to the next.

Alon Shaya Is Cooking for Connection

Laine Doss Broken Palate
Alon Shaya believes food can help people connect; sharing a meal is a powerful tool against the rising hate against Jewish people and everyone else. “Through cooking, you can share these stories with the goal of stopping prejudice and ending hate."

A Guest From War

Oksana Maksymchuk Manhattan Review
Ukrainian refugee poet Oksana Maksymchuk depicts life in exile as “an endless cellar/that’s now her mind.”

Staughton Lynd: The Perils of Sainthood

Paul Buhle Portside
Staughton Lynd seemed like a personal force almost more than a person within the antiwar movement of the 1960s. My Country Is the World largely and usefully recounts the controversies that came with his rise in the peace movement of the middle 1960s

The Untold Story of Capitalism

Joel Wendland-Liu Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
This book, writes reviewer Wendland-Liu, shifts the geographic focus of "origins of capitalism" debates from Europe "to the motion, spaces, circuits and conflicts in multiple global sites and stages of economic production relations."