bookreviews
Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph Nesteroff, Abrams, 312 pages, $30 The first paragraph of the book jacket lays it out: "There is a common belief that we live in unprecedented times, that people are too sensitive today, that nobody objected to the actions of actors, comedians, and filmmakers in the past. Modern pundits would have us believe that Americans of a previous generation had tougher skin and seldom complained. But does this argument hold up to scrutiny?" There's a good point underneath the hyperbole. People tend to believe—and pundits, politicians, and ac...
Reason
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pages, $30 When the Clock Broke, by the progressive essayist John Ganz, is a solidly educational and entertaining work of political history. While Ganz winningly doesn't bash you over the head page by page with the larger point he's trying to make, the stories he chooses to tell about the early 1990s are meant to hit home how elements of American political, cultural, economic, and ideological life back then laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's "Make Americ...
Reason
Charles Fort lived a century ago but is still invoked fairly frequently today: the "inspired clown" (as the screenwriter and playwright Ben Hecht called him) who haunted the New York Public Library, collecting reports of anomalous events and devising wild theories to account for them. Fort's influence after he died isn't as widely appreciated. But Joshua Blu Buhs makes a strong case in Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers that the eccentric writer cast a long shadow, leaving a mark not only on the world of Bigfoot hunters and UFO buffs but also in literat...
Reason
The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, W.W. Norton & Company, 384 pages, $29.99 Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank, thinks that taxation is a precondition for freedom, not a threat to it. The current political problem, he argues in The Road to Freedom, is that the right (which for Stiglitz includes libertarians as well as conservatives) rejects the Founding Fathers' idea of no taxation without representation in favor of opposing any taxation at all. This is a problem, he continues, because market failures are more extensive and seve...
Reason
The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence and the Politics of Policing in America, by Michelle S. Phelps, Princeton University Press, 304 pages, $29.95 Being a writer at the right place at the right moment is a mix of chance and preparation. Michelle Phelps, a University of Minnesota sociologist, began researching lethal police encounters and the politics of policing in Minneapolis in 2015. She was sitting at her desk writing up the results of her research on May 25, 2020, when a Minneapolis cop killed George Floyd. Phelps has now published The Minneapolis Reckoning, the results of reviewing h...
Reason
閲覧を続けるには、ノアドット株式会社が「プライバシーポリシー」に定める「アクセスデータ」を取得することを含む「nor.利用規約」に同意する必要があります。
「これは何?」という方はこちら