Category: Books
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Review: Everitt’s Cicero
Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician Anthony Everitt Odds are, you have heard of Cicero. Considered one of Rome’s greatest orators, his writings are the major influence on how way we remember the last days of the Roman republic. The story of Cicero’s life is the story of end of last years…
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Review: Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues
Stone Butch Blues: A Novel Leslie Feinberg This novel/memoir chronicles the world of a working class lesbian, gay, and transgendered people in New York from the days before Stonewall to the early nineties. It is a classic and was at the time it came out the most important book written to date on transgender issues.…
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Review: Piven and Cloward’s Poor People’s Movements
Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward The classic Marxist tract every undergraduate leftist must read. Basically, by looking at specific case studies, including labor struggles and the civil rights movement, Piven and Cloward argue that poor people’s movements grow and flourish when they are amorphous and lead…
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Review: Defoe’s Moll Flanders
Moll Flanders: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (Penguin Classics) Daniel Defoe Moll Flanders is a bleak read. Everyone is pretty fucking awful. Moll herself can be read in numerous ways. She is a conniving, evil, women, brought low by her sins (this is arguably the way Defoe meant to portray her).…
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Review: Levy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl
Who Killed Daniel Pearl? Bernard Henri Levi Levy is an ass. Frankly, I have no idea why I thought reading this book was going to be a good idea. Perhaps it was worth the five hours or so it took to knock this one out, just so I know never to read anything by this…
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Review: Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas
What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Thomas Frank This is one of the most read (or at least most discussed) political commentary texts of 2000s. It seems like everyone I know is familiar with the thesis – that Kansas is an example of what is strange (and Frank thinks,…
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Review: Evan’s and Pollock’s Ireland for Beginners
Ireland for Beginners Phil Evans and Eileen Pollock A comic book telling of the history of Ireland. This is from the early days of the “beginners” series, when the books were still still crudely drawn and had a distinctly left political character. This one lets its politics show by being largely sympathetic to the Irish…
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Review: Marx’s Capital Volume I
Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics) Karl Marx This is another one of those reviews that feels a bit silly. If you’re interested in a life of a mind, you should read Capital. It’s one of the top ten most important books in history, and I am profoundly unqualified to review…
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Review: Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the 20th Century
Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century Eric Wolf Analysis of the revolutions in a bunch of peasant / developing countries seen through a pretty rigorous historical Marxist analysis. This is by one of the top dogs in Marxist anthropology and I really liked this book when I read it* It was the first sustained look…
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Review: Sifry’s Spoiling for a Fight
Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America Micah Sifry This is, I am pretty sure, the only thing close to a complete history of third parties in U.S. electoral politics. I picked it up because of a paper I was writing on fusion voting and the Working Families Party, but it was so interesting,…
Milo and the Calf 