Book and Movie Reviews

“The Revival of Pragmatism,” by Morris Dickstein.
February, 1999

The Washington Post, Feb. 7, 1999: “CINCINNATI — An appeals court has overturned a rapist’s 51-year prison sentence because a judge turned to the Bible while deciding his punishment.”

THE REVIVAL OF PRAGMATISM, edited by Morris Dickstein, 1998, contains a section on “Pragmatism and Law.” The first essay in this section is an excellent one by Richard Posner discussing legal pragmatism read more

The Heat is On
The Heat: Steelworker Lives & Legends, Cedar Hill Publications.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies — captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.”

That quote can be found at the front of “Tropic of Cancer” by Henry Miller. Setting aside Emerson’s sexism, mysticism, and read more

“The Nurture Assumption,” By Judith Rich Harris.

THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION: Why children turn out the way they do; parents matter less than you think and peers matter more, by Judith Rich Harris, Foreword by Steven Pinker.

This book appears to be very carefully put together. It’s not your usual genes vs. environment infotainment. The author, and the author of her foreword, seriously overplay the outsider autodidactic myth. Harris studied at a top graduate school, has co-written read more

Christian Parenti’s Iraq Uncensored
December 19, 2004
“The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq” By Christian Parenti, The New Press, 208 pages.

Parenti’s book provides a first-hand description of life in occupied Iraq, primarily the life of the occupiers, but also that of the occupied. None of this has been seen on the network news or read about in the corporate transcriptions of Pentagon PR that pass for newspapers in the United States. Yet much of it will read more

Why Aren’t Americans Happy
July 26, 2004

The past 30 years have seen tremendous growth in the United States in productivity and wealth, and yet we don’t all seem very appreciative. In fact, as Yale political scientist Robert Lane has documented, surveys have found Americans’ assessment of their level of happiness declining significantly. The same is not the case in other developed countries.

The United States contains less than 5 percent of the world’s population and spends read more

Day of Reckoning: A Review
By David Swanson, ILCA

Just before Albert Parsons was hanged by the state of Illinois on November 11, 1887, for a crime that evidence suggests he had nothing to do with (setting off a bomb in Haymarket Square, Chicago) and a crime that he certainly did do (campaigning for an 8-hour day with decent pay), he wrote a note to his two young children that concluded:

“My children, my precious ones, I request you to read this parting message on each recurring anniversary read more

Also published on Alternet.org

“Oh, hey, wait a minute, I tried that and it was a major disaster. I still can barely even begin to face what I did it’s so awful looking back on it.” This is the message that the recent film “Fog of War” sends from Robert McNamara to Donald Rumsfeld, from one Secretary of “Defense” to another.

“There is no alternative in this age of terror,” might be the response we could expect from Rumsfeld, who continues to read more

New Clothes for the Emperors Club

Nietzsche pointed out that Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” was misnamed, that it was a play about Brutus. The movie currently in theaters called “The Emperors Club” is not misnamed, but it is not about the teacher that critics claim it is about. Nor does the title refer to some sort of secret prep-school society, as “Dead Poets Society” did. The Emperors Club is the plutocracy into which George W. Bush was born, and its sins read more

“Dead Run; the untold story of Dennis Stockton and America’s only mass escape from death row.”

“Dead Run; the untold story of Dennis Stockton and America’s only mass escape from death row” tells the story of an innocent man killed by the state of Virginia for political reasons, an event made easy and in all probability common by a law banning the reopening of a case to hear new evidence later than 21 days after a conviction. This applies even to evidence illegally read more

“Secrets,” by Sissela Bok.

I recently read SECRETS, by Sissela Bok. She writes with the skill of a
philosopher and with the concern to actually do some good that is common to
most everyone except many philosophers. She distinguishes secrecy from
privacy. She distinguishes good secrets from bad ones. She defends the need
for privacy and secrets in several convincing ways, including some surprising
ones such as the need for surprise, but in an unconvincing read more