This week, the global left mourns the passing of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and debates his legacy. As I have spent no time in Venezuela, I defer to those more knowledgeable, like George Ciccariello-Maher. Here I would just like to remind people of one moment in Chavez’s career. During his famous speech at the United [...]
2012 was the year that the class-oriented political rhetoric introduced by Occupy Wall Street (OWS) percolated throughout American society, affecting both the election and social struggles. This was so even as Occupy itself was in a downward spiral for much of the year. Although the Occupy encampments had mostly been repressed by the beginning of [...]
We’ve never asked for your financial support before, but we are asking now. The mainstream press doesn’t pay attention to books on the left. “The New Jim Crow,” one of the best selling books from the left in the last ten years, and a work that is reshaping the national discussion about racism, prisons, and [...]
Could a book be more timely than journalist Gary Weiss’ “Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul?” The Republican vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, is an unabashed fan of the “objectivist” philosopher and novelist Rand. Simultaneously, another Rand fan, blogger Pamela Geller, has made headlines by purchasing ad space in San Francisco and [...]
The seemingly obvious answer to the question above is no. Presently the main policy debate in Washington is over how to cut the deficit, and what cuts to “entitlement” programs would make the most sense. Foreign policy discussions often focus on which interventions should be considered priorities, while ending the empire of bases and stopping [...]
The folks at Amazon have created an “Election Heat Map” that indicates trends in the purchase of political books. In line with the practice of TV networks on election night, states are labeled “red” or “blue” depending on what sorts of books are selling more. “We classify books as red or blue if they have [...]
Joining a growing body of work on radical movements of the seventies, Michael Staudenmaier’s new book has revived interest in the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO). Small but influential, it is probably most often referenced these days because its members included Noel Ignatiev and Ted Allen, both of whom produced major intellectual contributions to understanding racism [...]
The late Harvey Pekar, most famous for “American Splendor,” returns with “Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me,” a graphic novel autobiographically exploring American Jews’ relationship with Israel. Writing at Electronic Intifada, Joy Ellison explains: “Pekar’s father believed Israel to be the fulfillment of religious prophesy. His non-religious mother believed Israel would fulfill the promise [...]
Gore Vidal died on July 31. The “author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist,” in the words of Wikipedia, was an important figure for the American left. Virtually no American author as well respected in the mainstream took such radical stances. Like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, he did not simply appeal to American’s better [...]
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 [...]
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