AltWeeklies Wire
Ronald Dworkin's Doomed Wish for Rational Politicsnew
Democracy in America is still much as de Tocqueville described it: illogical persnickety white folks, especially not-overly-educated non-urban white folks, asserting their independence. So why does a grown-up intellectual like Dworkin, a distinguished legal theorist with Ivy credentials, believe that these people, these Americans, are going to participate in a reasoned debate about anything?
Artvoice |
Bruce Fisher |
08-17-2009 |
Nonfiction
'Free Ride' Dissects a Media Smitten With the McCain Mythosnew
Brock and Waldman hypothesize that the media, weary from covering a corrupt government and the self-centered politicians that are its lifeblood, suffers a hero-sized vacuum that needs filling. Enter McCain. After Clinton's semantics and Bush's chickenhawk warmongering, a straight-talking former POW cuts quite the dashing figure.
Artvoice |
Matthew Miranda |
07-25-2008 |
Nonfiction
'U.S. vs. Them' Explores the Paranoid Style in U.S. Foreign Policynew
In a new book on American foreign policy, New Republic editor J. Peter Scoblic spends a couple of hundred pages reviewing the historical record of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and the current Bush presidency before getting to the real nub of the issue, in which he is succinctly correct: Conservatism, he writes, "although it has a clear intellectual pedigree, operates on a deep psychological level as well."
Artvoice |
Staff |
06-02-2008 |
Nonfiction
'Rock On' Takes Us into the Bowels of the Recording Industrynew
The main draw is not the book's humor but its behind-the-scenes tour of the profit-driven, out-of-touch mismanagement of a major record label.
Read 'Bad Money' and Weepnew
After reading the new book by Kevin Phillips, a painful realization dawns: Not one of the people running for president is addressing how interconnected and serious America's economic, ecological, and security problems are. Worse, the bankers and hedge-fund speculators who created the credit crisis are financing the campaigns of Democrats -- the only politicians likely ever to rein them in.
Artvoice |
Bruce Fisher |
05-16-2008 |
Nonfiction
Collection Explores Writing as Revolutionary Activismnew
Spanning over a quarter century of conflict in the Middle East, and forwarding the voices of sixty poets from multiple nations, this collection offers an intricate understanding of what it means to resist, to give birth to change, to create meaning out of astonishing political chaos and violence
X.J. Kennedy's Latest Disappointsnew
While the usual X.J. Kennedy suspects—rhyme-and-meter mastery; a playful, often sardonic personality—thrive throughout, Peeping Tom's Cabin suffers from lethargy of theme.
'American Poets in the 21st Century': The New Poeticsnew
With apocryphal proclamations ("poetry is dead") being as common as formal innovations, the task of understanding where today's poetry fits in literary history and who is writing it is incredibly loaded.
Who Really Killed JFK?new
Vincent Bugliosi's 1,612-page book, which he spent 20 years working on, lays out a case in support of the Warren Commission findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of the president.
Artvoice |
Cy Alessi and Peter Koch |
11-09-2007 |
Author Profiles & Interviews
In Exile: Maung Tharanew
When four Burmese students were sentenced to seven years in prison for carrying one of his books, Thara decided it was time to escape the country before he met a similar fate. Now he lives in Buffalo, where he talked to us about about his exile, his country and the recent protests there.
Artvoice |
Ken Ilgunas |
10-19-2007 |
Author Profiles & Interviews
Tags: Maung Thara, Smiling and Nodding
'The Book of Ocean': An Odyssey of Imaginationnew
Larkin's first book is a prism of paradox, a poetry aware of its own disguise.
Dorn Has an Unique and Complex Vision of Americanew
Too much poetry focuses on the beautiful, the lyrical, the sublime moments of our lives -- though you'll find all this in Edward Dorn, you'll just as often find political invective, sharp satire and a critical wit.
A Surprising Mix of Erudition and Popular Culturenew
An accomplished collection of poems that balances humor and sadness with surprising agility and grace.
This Book Opens Younew
To read it is to find yourself complicit in anguished dreams, carved and quartered by the eerie harmonics of a jagged, many-edged voice.
'Vermeer's Light': Sound Often Dominates Over Sensenew
Bowering, the first Canadian poet laureate, delights in language and in word-play.
