The Imperial War for Drugs

AMERICAN WAR MACHINE: DEEP POLITICS, THE CIA, GLOBAL DRUG CONNECTION, AND THE ROAD TO AFGHANISTAN by Peter Dale Scott, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010

Coercive Environments

Education. Consumerism. Incarceration. Henry Giroux’s new book identifies these as three key forces in binding contemporary youth to the social structures of neoliberalism.

Jewish Anti-Zionism

Jewish opposition to the State of Israel arises partly from the sense that Judaism is a religion of introspection rather than political action.

A Great Yearning Fills Them All…

The search for an aesthetic and epistemological language of representation out of the shards of lives that were destroyed first by “progress” and then by two world wars becomes increasingly elusive and desperate. “Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz” by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer is one of the most eloquent culminations of that search and a powerful indicator of the physical and cultural traces that survive into the twenty-first century.

Racial Justice: New Structures and New Selves

In his famous March 2008 speech in Philadelphia, then-candidate Obama asked us to move beyond a racial politics that demands a perpetrator and a victim and instead to begin to embrace the full complexity of race in this country. Yet, as we enter the winter of 2010, this rhetoric of hope and change has given way to an administration that has been disappointingly silent on race, as well as milquetoast in its policy prescriptions, even as multiple populist movements stir up white fear and anger.

Prophetic Contingency: Why Jim Douglass’s JFK Book Matters

The best way to honor John F. Kennedy’s legacy is to muster the courage to walk again through the “dark history” associated with his short but consequential presidency, in order to learn its lessons and discover its hope. Jim Douglass’s “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters,” which Touchstone is reissuing this month as a trade paperback, is a reliable guide for that demanding task.

The Spirit of Sartre

Taken as a whole, the work of Jean Paul Sartre is that of a sensitive man with a good heart gradually coming to understand the distinctly social aspect of human reality — that while we appear to ourselves as alone and struggling to make sense of things from within our own isolation, we are actually always powerfully connected in our very being to each other and, through the networks of reciprocity that enable our material and spiritual survival, to everyone on the planet.

Why the Propaganda?

“A Lethal Obsession: Aanti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad” by Robert S. Wistrich: Review by Milton Viorst