Reviews Archives - Page 9 of 17

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Franz Kafka, Sociologist of Domination

A Review of “Kafka, Angry Poet”

November 16, 2018 • by Richard Lachmann

Kafka, Angry Poet ([2011] 2015), Pascale Casanova’s final book (she died in September 2018), offers an innovative and insightful reading of Kafka’s literary work and of his place in early twentieth century Czech, German, and Jewish intellectual debates. However, Casanova does more, and what she does deserves attention from sociologists concerned ...

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‘To the Angels and the Sparrows’

A review of John Gray’s, Seven Types of Atheism

November 1, 2018 • by Alexandre Leskanich

It was incomprehensible to Pascal, who lived in horror of perpetual oblivion and staked his happiness on the immortality of the soul, that an individual could be ambivalent in respect to eternity. Such a person, ‘indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness’, ...

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Being and Surrounding

A Review of Gianni Vattimo

September 26, 2018 • by Gabriel Serbu

The imminent end of most life on Earth due to environmental catastrophe is no longer a matter of mythological prophecies or science fiction flicks, but a scientific fact. Yet few scientists speak freely about it as their careers usually depend on external corporate funding. What is needed in the face ...

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A Kaleidoscopic Novel of Radiant Beauty

The new English Translation of Ondjaki’s Transparent City

September 19, 2018 • by Bongani Kona

To read the full review of Transparent City, visit the Johannesburg Review of Books – a trove of reviews, essays, poetry, photographs and short fiction from South Africa, Africa and beyond. In Cape Town, in the early nineteen-seventies, construction began on what would be known as the Foreshore Freeway Bridge. Designed with the intent ...

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BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee’s answer to The Birth of a Nation

August 28, 2018 • by Mark Allan Williams

“Do the Right Thing.” “Jungle Fever.” “Malcolm X.” Now “BlacKkKlansman.” No maker of feature films in our time, or perhaps during any time, has placed so much of their work at the center of the social and political discourse as Spike Lee. His cinematic voice is political and his platform is ...

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Hiding in Plain Sight

Revealing the Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire

August 17, 2018 • by Christopher Gioia

Post Stonewall activism in the gay community ushered in an era of liberation that would result in a social shift toward increased visibility and acceptance. One of the most critical victories was the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders in 1973. Franklin Kameny, ...

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Science Fiction and the Angel of History

A review of, ‘Sorry to Bother You’

August 10, 2018 • by Benjamin Balthaser

"It was 100 years ago… by which I mean last Monday" Brooke Gladstone of NPR's On the Media sighed after Trump's performance in Helsinki. Whatever one thinks about our current president, Gladstone's sigh is the kind of thing one hears a lot these days, as the calamities and once-in-a-century happenings pile up ...

Science Fiction and the Angel of History

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Indictus: by Natalie Eilbert

A review

August 7, 2018 • by Sarah V. Schweig

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smarrita … Io non so ben ridir com’ io v’ entrai, tanto era pien di sonno in su quel punto che la verace via abbandonai ... —Dante Alighieri, Inferno 1. That words are “filthy” and yet poetry is redemptive is the provocative ...

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“The Young Karl Marx”

A film review

July 30, 2018 • by Ronald Tiersky

After a month in American theaters, the box office for “The young Karl Marx” was all of $58,277. This is almost incomprehensible as this is a wonderful, politically, historically and culturally rich film. A major international collaboration with first rate foreign actors, the film played at a single indie theater on ...

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Justice Through Solidarity

Bernice Yeung’s In a Day’s Work

July 23, 2018 • by Eileen Boris

Bernice Yeung exposes the sexual harassment and rape endemic to isolated fields, offices, and homes. Despite poverty, undocumented status, and economic desperation, women farmworkers, janitors, and domestic workers have mustered the courage to overcome shame and speak out against abuse. Yeung chronicles their personal journeys. Nonetheless, it is easy to ...

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Was it all futile?

Review: John Kelly’s ‘Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain’

July 14, 2018 • by Ian Birchall

Among the many moral panics aroused by Jeremy Corbyn's accession to the Labour leadership has been the return of the spectre of Trotskyism. Lord Hattersley has warned that ‘the old gang is back’, referring explicitly to the Militant grouping of the 1980s; Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson has produced ‘evidence’ ...

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Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

A review of Steven Zipperstein’s new book

July 5, 2018 • by Marci Shore

Steven Zipperstein’s new book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, is uncannily timely: today in particular we might appreciate the irony of fate that American anti-racism can trace one line of origin to a backwoods region of the Russian Empire. This region, Bessarabia, is among those parts of Eastern Europe ...