February 20, 2024
You are almost certainly reading this review on a computer screen, on a mobile device, tablet, laptop or PC. It's probably one of many, many things you’ll read onscreen today. Some of your uses of new technology will be for leisure, recreation and education, and some will be work-related. The information, communication and technology industry (ICT) is all around us, almost like air or water.
February 20, 2024
Acts of violence assume many forms: they may travel by the arc of a guided missile or in the language of an economic policy decision that contaminates drinking water, and they may leave behind a smoldering village or a starved child. The all-pervasive occurrence of violence makes it seem like an unavoidable, and ultimately incomprehensible, aspect of the human world, particularly in a modern era. But, in this detailed and expansive book, Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree demonstrate otherwise. Widespread violence, they argue, is in fact an expression of the underlying social order, and whether it is carried out by military forces or by patterns of investment, the aim is to strengthen that order for the benefit of the powerful.
February 20, 2024
In Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality, Salim Lamrani, a French journalist and professor of Latin-American studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne Paris IV, raises important questions about the condition of journalism today and the role played by privately owned, centrally controlled media cartels. As an important addition to his previous work, The Economic War Against Cuba, Lamrani, examines media treatment of Cuba taking an investigative journalist's approach to dissecting a variety of claims made about life and politics on the island since the revolution of 1959.
February 20, 2024
Please read this appeal from our friends at AK Press, the important publisher of anarchist and radical books and distributor of titles from many small presses, including Monthly Review Press, as they recover from a devastating fire at their warehouse in Oakland, California. To make a donation, please visit this page, or to purchase books from AK Press, visit their website.
February 20, 2024
In Walt We Trust is a sprightly, extended essay or first-person peroration by a young lit prof who felt a ton of frustration and heartache, or at least headache (self-medicating with alcohol, he tells us), and in despair, threw himself at Whitmania. That is, the poetry, the life, the setting and the aura. The project was obviously successful and not only because of the resulting book. He feels, he insists, better about life, death and even sex - the trifecta that pretty much wraps up human earthly possibilities. But he had to take a gloomy field trip to Camden, New Jersey, to get his mind in place.
February 20, 2024
Join Monthly Review Press author Cal Winslow for a discussion of his new book E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left. 7 PM, April 9, 2015, at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, WA. Cal Winslow will consider the legacy of the late historian E.P. Thompson, the writer and activist widely considered the outstanding historian writing in English in the Twentieth Century.
February 20, 2024
In the late 1850s, Walt Whitman wrote a series of poems celebrating what he called "manly love," the love men had for other men. Whitman included the poems in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass under the heading "Calamus," a plant with a suggestive, phallic-shaped flowering spike growing out of it. As I discuss in the next chapter, the exact nature of this manly love—essentially, whether it involved genitals or not—remains very much unsettled.
February 20, 2024
Hell's Kitchen's tenements have long captured the attention of reformers, scholars, and the American public. In Hell's Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space, Joseph J. Varga combines a sophisticated use of critical space theory, with a nuanced investigation of social relations among residents, reformers, and state agencies, to shed light on development in this notorious neighborhood during the Progressive Era's transformative years. Utilizing Henri Lefebvre's understanding of space as "lived, conceived and perceived," Varga reveals that the physical features of the area, social relationships of work and home, reform efforts, ethnic and racial alliances, and government allotment of funds played a role in creating and giving meaning to space on Manhattan's Middle West Side.
February 20, 2024
Who is the cybertariat? Why care? Ursula Huws, author of Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age (Monthly Review Press, 2014), has answers as a class-based technology shapes our world. An historical continuity emerges in her writing. This approach casts context on the current moment.
February 20, 2024
Activist University of Illinois scholar Robert McChesney has for some time now been a compelling voice on the "political economy of communication," an emerging new discipline that's probing how our media go about entrenching "the privileges of those at the top." This field, McChesney argues in this engaging new book, belongs on our political center stage. Our deeply unequal social order, he explains, has simply ceased working for average people.
