Archive | Review

  James Rodger Fleming.  Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.  Columbia Studies in International and Global History Series.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.  Illustrations. xiv + 325 pp.  $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14412-4. In Fixing the Sky, James Rodger Fleming traces human efforts to control weather and climate from ancient […]

  David A. Kideckel.  Getting By in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-Class Culture.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.  xii + 266 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-34957-6; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-21940-4. During the last twenty years, Romanian mass media and most Romanian intellectuals have typically portrayed the miners of the Jiu Valley in Romania […]

  Toby Craig Jones.  Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.  312 pp.  $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-04985-7. Toby Craig Jones opens his book, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia, with a description of a scheme to transport Arctic icebergs to Saudi Arabia in […]

  Greenwashing Apartheid: The Jewish National Fund’s Environmental Cover Up.  JNF eBook (Volume 4).  May 15, 2011. The 63-year old State of Israel has had overwhelming success at hiding its true intentions and purposes, effectively whitewashing actions which, if properly understood, would be extremely disturbing to most people.  Thus the passage of laws discriminating on […]

  Michael Munk’s The Portland Red Guide is a historical guidebook of social dissent in Portland, Oregon, and links notable radicals, their organizations, and their activities to physical sites in the city. We had a brief conversation over e-mail with Michael Munk to talk about the book, now in its Second Edition, and his experience […]

  Robert Rabil.  Syria, the United States, and the War on Terror in the Middle East.  Westport: Praeger, 2006.  xxvi + 289 pp.  $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-275-99015-2. Robert Rabil’s book examines the ups and downs in Syrian-U.S. relations.  The final portion of its title, the War on Terror in the Middle East is, in reality, […]

  Andrej Grubacic.  Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia.  Introduction by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.  PM Press, 2010. This is not a typical book review and I am not a detached reader.  The book’s author, Andrej Grubacic, is a friend and collaborator, a comrade in the truest sense of the word.  And as he makes clear throughout […]

  Asʻad Ghanem.  Palestinian Politics after Arafat: A Failed National Movement.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.  x + 208 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35427-3; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22160-5. November 2010 marked the sixth anniversary of the death of Palestinian National Authority (PNA) president Yasser Arafat.  For the last two years of his life, the once […]

  The historic election of Barak Obama brought with it high expectations for a new direction in American foreign policy towards Cuba.  Unfortunately, hope has turned into disappointment halfway through his first term: the President continues to miss opportunities to alter the dynamics of the consistently contentious US-Cuba relationship. While the recent discharge of political […]

Fintan O’Toole.  Enough Is Enough: How to Build a New Republic.  Faber.  £12.99. Suppose you were swept to power on the back of a massive popular vote — say something like 80%, the kind of number that usually has the USA and its client states jumping up and down and calling you a leftist narco-terrorist. […]

  Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman is a slim but muscular volume, whose pithy prose goes straight to the heart of the challenges currently facing contemporary feminism.  Constructed as a series of short, cut-to-the-chase essays on a diverse range of ‘raw-nerve’ topics, from Sarah Palin and the War on Iraq to the veil and pornography, […]

  Scott A. Sandage.  Born Losers: A History of Failure in America.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.  x + 362 pp.  $16.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-674-02107-5. In the epilogue of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, Scott A. Sandage quotes a pivotal line from Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, that haunts his […]

  Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, eds.  Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle.  New York: New York University Press, 2009.  ix + 353 pp.  $79.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-8313-9; $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8147-8314-6. In the last two decades, a growing field of movement scholarship has complicated conventional representations […]

  Daniel Branch.  Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.  xx + 250 pp.  $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-11382-3; $24.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-13090-5. The two related themes in Kenya’s history that have drawn the most debate and interpretations are land and the Mau Mau war.  Daniel Branch’s study […]

  Phillip J. Cooper.  The War against Regulation: From Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush.  Studies in Government and Public Policy Series.  Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009.  288 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1681-7. Phillip J. Cooper is an accomplished scholar of the executive branch of the U.S. government and its interaction with the courts. […]

  Christa Salamandra.  A New Old Damascus: Authenticity and Distinction in Urban Syria.  Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004.  x + 199 pp.  $21.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-21722-6; $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-34467-0. Christa Salamandra’s A New Old Damascus: Authenticity and Distinction in Urban Syria is a thought-provoking analysis of one segment of the Syrian elite’s […]

  Hester Eisenstein.  Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Paradigm 2009).  xv, 293pp. The 20th century is often called the American century because of the US’s advance during that time to become the single greatest power in the world — economically, industrially and militarily.  The century’s story […]

  Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil.  Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.  Vii + 208 pp.  Illustrations, notes, and index.  $24.94 U.S. (cl), ISBN 978-0-691-1243-5. On March 15, 2004, the French government passed a law banning the wearing of « conspicuous signs » of religious affiliation within public schools.  The decision […]

  Kenneth Mouré, The Gold Standard Illusion.  France, the Bank of France and the International Gold Standard, 1914-1939.  Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.  x + 297 pp.  Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, and index.  $72.00 (cl.) ISBN 019-924904-0. Kenneth Mouré’s new book extends and develops the analysis of his previous study of Bank […]

  Michael Lebowitz.  The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.  Pp 192; $15.95 Only about ten or fifteen years ago, leftist theory was in a sorry state.  It seemed as if socialism had ceased to be a viable project with the fall of the Soviet Union.  Instead of an alternative […]