Greg Sharzer’s new book argues against the smaller-is-better, do-it-yourself ethos that is common sense among many contemporary activists. Fans of Jodi Dean‘s aphorism, “Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chickens,” will want to check it out. Those more sympathetic to locally oriented activism may learn something as well. According to Valerie Zink, writing at [...]
Charles Ferguson, whose hard-hitting examination of the financial crisis, “Inside Job,” won an Academy Award for best documentary, returns with “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America” exploring, among other distressing elements of the U.S., the failure to prosecute any of those responsible for the colossal fraud leading up to the [...]
Political Scientist Fredrick Harris’ new book focuses on a strangely underexplored aspect of Barack Obama: the impact of his presidency on African American politics. According to Harris, the Obama presidency has accelerated a shift away from politics that seek to directly challenge racial inequality. To make this argument, the book includes a broad narrative of [...]
History professor Vijay Prashad’s book, the first major left examination of the Arab Spring, highlights the way NATO’s intervention in Libya has derailed the liberatory movement in favor of neoliberalism and geopolitics as defined by the Gulf states and the U.S. In Prashad’s view, Ghadafi was not an implacable foe of imperialism, but, rather, in [...]
Whatever happened to Occupy? The movement that rocked the U.S. in the fall of 2011 has faded to background noise. A recent “National Gathering” drew 500 participants, not an impressive number considering how many were roused to action all over the country just months earlier. The “general assembly,” the much-celebrated participatory democratic institution that was [...]
Is there anything Left Eye on Books should say about “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the blockbuster pulp romance that has offered a welcome boost in sales receipts for bookstores, sex toy manufacturers, and hardware stores? Lynn Parramore has an article on Alternet suggesting that the sadistic hero of the book, Christian Grey, embodies the values [...]
In what is likely to become a classic, Greek political economist Yanis Varoufakis traces the origins of the global crisis and looks beyond the U.S.-dominated world. By Boris Stremlin In 1944, just as the institutions of the postwar monetary order were being fashioned at Bretton Woods, Karl Polanyi published his now-classic historical reconstruction 19th century [...]
Like Box
