Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
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The Iron Heel – Jack London’s Oligarchic Rule
18 Jan 2020The name Jack London will ring up associations in most American readers from “To Build a Fire,” his enduringly…
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The Milkman — Civilians in a War Zone
08 Jan 2020In the summer of 1972 I spent a month, with my then dearest friend, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in…
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The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge
19 Dec 2019One winter afternoon Comrade Tulayev, an important Party official, is shot dead. By the time The Case of Comrade…
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Gustav Flaubert on Love and Revolution
10 Oct 2019Gustav Flaubert, known in the entire literate world as the author of Madame Bovary and not much beyond that,…
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The Use of Man — Aleksandar Tišma
20 Sep 2019Wars are waged and war novels are written. Seldom are they written about small, out-of-the-way places or non-heroic people, …
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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
26 Aug 2019Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in A Silicon Valley Startup (2018) by John Carreyrou has justly received dozens upon…
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The Communist – A Novel from Italy
21 Aug 2019The number of readers for a novel titled The Communist, in the United States, with its long history of…
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The Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
17 Jul 2019I know you won’t believe me that families of human beings arrived on tiny Easter Island before any such…
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Bullshit Jobs — A Review
12 Jul 2019David Graeber’s important new book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, begins with “a paradigmatic example” of a bullshit job as…
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Keeper of the Flame – A 1943 Movie for Today
27 Jun 2019In 1943 the United States was fully engaged in desperate wars in Europe and the vast Pacific. Film studios…
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The Fifth Risk – Michael Lewis
16 May 2019When I first saw the title of Michael Lewis’s 2018 book, The Fifth Risk, my associative circuitry immediately connected…
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The War: A Memoir – Marguerite Duras
01 May 2019Marguerite Donnadieu was seventeen years old when she moved to France from a small village near Saigon, Vietnam, where…
