The factual platform for Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America is the appalling reality that the United States “is the world’s greatest jailer.” Though this may be taken as a commendation, let me assure it is a condemnation—
The relationship of the Israelites to capitalism is, of course, the stuff of ethnic mythology and racial slander—Jews are both the sniveling Fagin-like shylocks controlling the world’s economy and the ardent, anti-capitalist, revolutionary zealots. This is also the stuff of contradictions. Good thing Catholic University mentor
Hebrew University of Jerusalem historianRobert S. Wistrich‘s new tome, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House), is a whale of a book, not only because it runs 1200 pages but also because having spent 20 years in its preparation, one could speculate its
Richard Reeves, who is best known as a presidential biographer having written reliable and useful monographs on John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan (though my favorite of his oeuvre is his 1982 retracing of Alexis de Tocqueville’s American visit, American Journey: Traveling with Tocqueville, an undertaking French celebrity
Of the infamous quartet of apocalyptic equestrians, Famine seems to be the least studied or, perhaps more accurately, the least visible. Economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda’s Famine: A Short History (Princeton University Press) ameliorates that with a fine balance of storytelling and scholarship. There is no question about the
That portion of the human community that self-assigns itself the task of reminding all of us the lowly values of the human species and regularly intones and scolds “I told you so” with every disaster, natural or manmade (its obvious we can include that disingenuous popinjay, Pat Robertson) is
In the United States, My Lai may still be remembered as the one recognized massacre of the Vietnam war. And the El Mozote (see Mark Danner) carnage may be recalled by a few Americans who were aggrieved by U.S. involvement in Central America in the Reagan years. Now comes
Thankfully, due to the efforts of people like historians Howard Zinn, Sean Willentz, Ray Raphael, and others, the historical revisionism that views American history from the bottom up—so-called people’s history—has escaped the constricting cloisters of the academy and found its way into people’s conversations. Evidence
As long as I am levitating in the mid-last century, I should note that Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking film Psycho, released in 1960, is the subject of David Thomson’s latest book, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchock Taught America to Love Murder (Basic Books). Thomson, who is
Back in 1995 (or ‘96), Jon Lee Anderson’s definitive biography of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevera was published, and within a short time two others joined the Che historiography. Since then there have been some additions but the focus has been on the Cuban revolutionary hero as an icon. And of
