Archive | Review

  Leïla Sebbar, The Seine Was Red. Paris, October 1961: A Novel (translated by Mildred Mortimer).  Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008.  xxiv + 116pp.  $17.95 U.S. (pb).  ISBN 10-0253-2202-38. The official French obfuscation of the police violence against Algerians in Paris in October 1961 has inspired long-term personal and collective memory retrieval that […]

  Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution.  Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.  x + 415 pp.  Notes, bibliography, and index.  $39.95 U.S.  ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12499-5 (hb). The subtitle of Michael Sonenscher’s book calls to mind at least two different, and separate, historical problems.  First, […]

In his June 17 “review” of our book The Politics of Genocide, for Pambazuka News,1 Gerald Caplan, a Canadian writer who Kigali’s New Times described as a “leading authority on Genocide and its prevention,”2 focuses almost exclusively on the section we devote to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.3  Caplan says virtually nothing about […]

  Eric R. Dursteler.  Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean.  The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science Series.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.  Maps, illustrations.  312 pp.  $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-8324-8. Eric R. Dursteler’s work, which examines Venetian-Ottoman coexistence in the late sixteenth and early […]

  Nelida Fuccaro.  Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.  xvi + 257 pp.  $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-51435-4. In many ways, the city of Manama (now the capital of Bahrain) shares affinities with other Gulf city-states.  Like Dubai, Kuwait, and Muscat, the port city drew […]

  Ronald H. Chilcote.  The Portuguese Revolution: State and Class in the Transition to Democracy.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010.  xix + 316 pp.  $79.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7425-6792-4. The Portuguese Revolution that brought regime change on April 25, 1974, did not bring about a revolution: the popular revolutionary elements that tried to move the […]

  Brodwyn M. Fischer.  A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.  xx + 464 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-5290-9. From the 1920s to the 1950s, largely under the impetus of reforms associated with Getúlio Vargas (president, 1930-45, 1951-54), the Brazilian state expanded significantly and extended […]

  Christopher Candland.  Labor, Democratization and Development in India and Pakistan.  London: Routledge, 2007.  216 pages. This book, by Christopher Candland, sets out to provide a documented analytical and empirical study of the linkages between organized labor, development, and democratization in India and Pakistan from the colonial period till date.  It attempts to explain why […]

  Max Lane, Unfinished Nation: Indonesia before and after Suharto, Verso, 2008. There was a time when everyone seemed to be talking about Indonesia.  Well, they were talking about it on Joe Duffy and Pat Kenny at least, and that’s as near as makes no difference in this country.  As East Timor voted to extricate […]

  Jane E. Goodman and Paul A. Silverstein, eds., Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments.  Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.  282 pp.  $35.00 U.S. (pb).  ISBN 978-0-8032-1362-3. Pierre Bourdieu is unequivocally one of the most important social scientists of the twentieth century, having influenced a strikingly wide range of […]

  Social Justice and Neoliberalism: Global Perspectives.  Adrian Smith, Alison Stenning, and Katie Willis, eds.  Macmillan/Zed Books, 2008.  253 pages. Following the tradition of critical geographers, this book explores the expansion of neoliberalism into different spheres and spaces of everyday life.  It consists of a collection of essays by writers from the global South, the […]

  Maryam Panah.  The Islamic Republic and the World: Global Dimensions of the Iranian Revolution.  Pluto Press, 2007.  232 pp.  ISBN: 978-0-7453-2622-1, ISBN10: 0-7453-2622-6. Review of The Islamic Republic and the World Maryam Panah offers a refreshingly different and powerful account of the causes and consequences of the Iranian Revolution.  Drawing on recent developments within […]

  Martin Axmann.  Back to the Future: The Khanate of Kalat and the Genesis of Baloch Nationalism 1915-1955.  Oxford University Press, 2009. In a country where nationality is defined in terms of religion and religion alone, “the Baloch nation” can hardly find a legitimate space, even as a term of reference.  There is no notion […]

  Paul R. Hanson, Contesting the French Revolution.  Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.  xii + 229 pp.  Bibliography and index.  $89.95 U.S. (cl).  ISBN 978-1-4051-6083-4; $34.95 U.S. (pb).  ISBN 978-1-4051-6084-1. When Blackwell published a volume on the French Revolution in its Essential Readings in History series in 2001, Ronald Schechter began his introduction to […]

  John Bellamy Foster.  The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.  288pp.  $17.95 (pb).  ISBN 9781583671795. This book is a major achievement.  It combines enormous breadth of scholarship with consummate theoretical integration to produce a powerful political argument.  It should be required reading for anyone who cares about […]

  Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt.  Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.  x + 261 pp.  $33.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-56639-448-2; $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-56639-447-5. Between the Civil War and World War II the length of the American work week decreased dramatically.  Since the end of World War II, the rate of decline has become positively […]

  Naomi Andrews, Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism, Lanhan, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006.  210 pp.  $66.00 (hb).  ISBN 10-0739-108-441. In Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism, Naomi Andrews brings her readers into a complex conversation that touches on individualism and egoism, on the nature […]

  Jana K. Lipman.  Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.  x + 325 pp.  $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-25539-5; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-25540-1. A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to serve on a Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations panel with Jana K. Lipman. […]

  Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution.  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008.  x + 493 pp.  $45.00 U.S. (cl).  ISBN 978- 0691124988. Michael Sonenscher begins, “This is a book about the sans-culottes and the part that they played in the French Revolution” (p. 1).  Actually, there are no revolutionary sans-culottes […]

  Jean-Clément Martin, Violence et Révolution: Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national.  Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006. 339 pp.  Bibliography and index.  23.00 Euros (pb).  ISBN 2-02-043842-9. This work subtitles itself an “essay on the birth of a national myth”.  The “myth” in question, as the first pages of the Introduction make clear, is […]