Archive | Review

  Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa.  Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.  342 pp.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-299-21950-5. In the 1970s and 1980s, an edited volume focused entirely on African colonial intermediaries such as interpreters, translators, clerks, and secretaries would not have aroused much interest from historians of […]

  Child of the Sit-Downs: The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger, by Carlton Jackson, WKU Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History.  Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2008.  256 pages, $39.00 (cloth). This wonderful book is a most welcome biography of Genora Dollinger, labor reformer and feminist.  Genora (her husband told Dr. Jackson that she […]

  Frances Hasso.  Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan.  Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East Series. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005.  ix + 231 pp.  Bibliography, index.  $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8156-3087-6. Frances Hasso makes abundantly clear what her book, Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan, […]

  Penelope Rosemont, Dreams & Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, sds & the Seven Cities of Cibola, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago, 2008, ISBN 978-0-88286-234-2 Despite an era made for modern-day state and corporate Metternichs there are stirrings, movement, growing discontent.  In the words of Buffalo Springfield’s song, “There’s something happening here.  […]

  Introduction by Michael D. Yates Over the past several years, a vigorous debate has taken place within organized labor and among its allies over how best to rebuild a dying labor movement.  Much of the is debate has centered around the actions and arguments of the leaders of the nation’s largest union, The Service […]

Tarek personally asked me to review his book, Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State (CM).  With a book being favorably reviewed in the Canadian (and US and UK) media, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Huffington Post, the UK Guardian, and the Asper-family owned newspapers (Ottawa Citizen and […]

  Join us for a discussion of race, class, and the new economy with E. Paul Durrenberger, coauthor with Suzan Erem of On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5. On the Global Waterfront, new from Monthly Review Press, tells the present-day story of longshoremen in Charleston, South Carolina, who successfully confronted […]

  Sociologist and historian at Yale University, Immanuel Wallerstein has described the globalization of capitalism, and today he criticizes Western “universalist” justifications of expansionism. In your book European Universalism, you revisit the 16th-century debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda on the American Indians.  In what respect does this debate seem to you particularly relevant to […]

  Israel’s Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland.  Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE.  The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia […]

  Lara Deeb.  An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon.   Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics Series.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. ix + 263 pp. Illustrations, footnotes, glossary, bibliography, index. An Enchanted Modern by Lara Deeb is an important book that illustrates and explores the lives of real, modern, Muslim women.  Published […]

  Dror Ze’evi.  Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourses in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900.    Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xiv + 223 pp.  Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. According to one tradition, the Prophet Muhammad once ordered a handsome youth from the tribe of ‘Abd Qays to sit behind him, so that he (the […]

  Have you heard an anti-immigrant argument that you feel is wrong,  but need the facts to contest?  (For example: “Immigrants are a drain on social services.”)  Do you have your own fear or concern about the issue?  (For example: “Are the lowest-paid US-born workers really hurt by immigration?”) Bring your concerns to one of […]

  THE BIG RED SONGBOOK Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Salvatore Salerno (eds.) BUY THIS BOOK The 2007 publication of The Big Red Songbook is long overdue.  Folklorist Archie Green has been in possession of 29 editions of the legendary Little Red Songbook of the IWW since Wobbly folklorist John Neuhaus entrusted them to […]

“An ecological approach to the economy is about having enough, not having more.” — John Bellamy Foster “For the first time . . . nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely […]

  NEW DEPARTURES IN MARXIAN THEORY by Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff BUY THIS BOOK Being a Marxist requires considerable gumption — especially in the United States.  Those who take Marxism seriously in a hostile intellectual and political environment are only too aware of this struggle.  At worst, interest in Marxism is perceived […]

I wrote this as a paper for a seminar in history during my first year of grad school at the University of Washington in 1984.  It was a labor of love for me because it gave me an opportunity to read every single issue of Monthly Review , all of which were carefully kept in […]

Tiya Miles, now age 36, came to the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2002.  She is an Assistant Professor in the Program in American Culture, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies Program.  Miles is the co-editor with Sharon P. Holland of Crossing Waters, […]

  Need a crash course on the present state of the world?  Want to untangle the terminology, separate the victims from the victimizers, understand the dynamics of unilateralism, and deduce what can be done about it all?  I’d like to introduce you to a small literary arsenal. A good place to begin is the book […]

REVOLUTION IN THE AIR: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max ElbaumBUY THIS BOOK I first met Max Elbaum in Vermont in 2002 at a conference against the war organized by the Burlington (VT) Anti War Coalition.  We had communicated via email and telephone before about his book Revolution in the Air […]

  Michael Perelman, Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology, Monthly Review Press, 2006, 238 pages, $20.00 RAILROADING ECONOMICS: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology by Michael Perelman BUY THIS BOOK Railroading Economics by Michael Perelman is an indictment of economists.  But the indictment is not, thankfully, the familiar rehearsal of untenable […]