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In Walt We Trust reviewed on Truthout

In Walt We Trust reviewed on Truthout

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.

Read an excerpt from In Walt We Trust on Salon

Read an excerpt from In Walt We Trust on Salon

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.

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space reviewed in New York History

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space reviewed in New York History

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.

Labor in the Global Digital Economy reviewed in The Progressive Populist

Labor in the Global Digital Economy reviewed in The Progressive Populist

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.

Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century reviewed in Too Much online

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.

Read an excerpt from Robert McChesney’s Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century in Social Policy magazine

February 20, 2024

The major premises of the media reform movement remain unchanged: communication systems develop largely as a result of policies, since there is no such thing as a natural "default" course of development. From the development of copyright and postal subsidies for newspapers at the dawn of the Republic to the licensing of telephone, broadcasting, and cable TV monopolies, the state has been in the middle of the creation of the media. For example, the Internet's shift from an anti-commercial, egalitarian institution in the early 1990s to a "whoever makes the most money by any means necessary wins" undertaking was not foreordained by the gods. It was the province of politics.

Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century reviewed by Counterfire

February 20, 2024

At the end of the 1980s, the mood among anti-Apartheid activists was gloomy. Many of them considered the situation in South Africa to be as bad as ever, and chances of abolishing the racist system seemed slim. Two years later, Nelson Mandela was a free man, and a couple of years after his release, he was the first president of post-Apartheid South Africa. Robert McChesney tells this episode at the beginning of his latest book to point out a lesson of which we need to remind ourselves every so often: social change is rarely accurately predicted.

Race to Revolution reviewed in the Progressive Populist

Race to Revolution reviewed in the Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow by Gerald Horne (Monthly Review Press, June 2014) enters a crucial, if little known, period of chattel bondage and its aftermath for islanders and mainlanders. What people of African descent do and say to be free is his special focus. Horne leaves mainstream history in the starting blocks. His book is a guided tour of people freeing themselves on both sides of the Florida Straits. He fleshes out that history. It should inform the current phase of relations between Uncle Sam and Cuba. The book's context flows from the centrality of the slave trade and traders to what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the "world-system." In Spanish Florida and Cuba, antebellum and post-bellum America, skin color signifies class status, creating and challenging the dominant political economy.

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