Reviews Archives - Page 9 of 17

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Love and Hope in the New Left

A Review of Making History, Making Blintzes: How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America

February 21, 2019 • by Maurice Isserman

In the summer of 1974 Dick Flacks, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, published an article entitled “Making History vs. Making Life: Dilemmas of an American Left” in the political quarterly,Working Papers for a New Society. Long defunct, the publication Working Papers was distinguished, among other things, for ...

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How to Live One’s Values in All The “Little” Choices

A Review of Making History, Making Blintzes: How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America

February 20, 2019 • by Myra Marx Ferree

Living in interesting times is reputedly a curse, but Mickey and Dick Flacks tell a story of such times that makes them positively charming. The title suggests a voyage of discovery, both of each other and of national experiences and values, but the book itself has less to say about ...

How to Live One’s Values in All The “Little” Choices

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A Place of Grief and Revolution

A Review of Gina Apostol’s Filipino novel, Insurrecto

February 7, 2019 • by Jen Mediano

When you crack open Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto, there’s an old-timey cast of characters and a listing of parts and chapters set off by florid fonts and curlicues. The reader thinks this will serve to orient her. If I use this key, you think, I will know who the main and minor ...

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The Politics of Female Sexuality in ‘Lipstick Under My Burkha’

What a recent Bollywood film can tell us about risk, pleasure, desire and feminism.

February 4, 2019 • by Shiv D. Sharma

In an advisory issued by the Information and Broadcasting ministry in December 2017, the Indian government banned the telecast of condom advertisements across all television channels until 10 pm on the contention that some of them were “indecent and can impact children.” The implicit idea behind the advisory is that anything involving ...

The Politics of Female Sexuality in ‘Lipstick Under My Burkha’

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From Tax Laws to Military Benefits

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Early Battles Against Sex Discrimination

January 23, 2019 • by Tanya L. Roth

In late December, Focus Features released On the Basis of Sex, a biopic about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Starring Felicity Jones, On the Basis of Sex highlights Ginsburg’s journey through law school, her teaching career, and her family relationships, particularly with her husband, Martin, and her daughter, Jane. The film shows ...

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Crusader Without Violence 60 Years Later

The first biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is reissued

January 21, 2019 • by Jo Freeman

Lawrence D. Reddick was a history professor at Alabama State College — the state school for blacks — when the Montgomery Bus Boycott brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence in 1955-56. They had known each other casually in Atlanta; both had moved to Montgomery to accept jobs only recently. On ...

Crusader Without Violence 60 Years Later

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Feminism and the Intersectional Politics of Anger

Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger

December 28, 2018 • by Holloway Sparks

I began reading Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger the week of Brett Kavanaugh’s second appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Like so many other feminists, I found Kavanaugh’s bellicose and evasive performance utterly infuriating, and I was incensed by Republicans’ sputtering indignation that he had to address the accusations ...

Feminism and the Intersectional Politics of Anger

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Tiny Animals

Season one of ‘My Brilliant Friend’

December 23, 2018 • by Marissa Brostoff

I think they are cockroaches, streaming out of the sewer by the thousands, but they might be rats -- we see them from a distance, and because it is dark and there are no people in the shot, just the empty street and the dirty white cement of the housing ...

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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 ...