In his courageous book Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his 15-year-old son, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains to him the “justifiable” verdict in the killing of Michael Brown, a black teenager who was shot eight times by a white police officer and then left in the streets. This fatal shooting came on… Read more »
Posts in: culture & reviews
Review of Hardly War — Memories of the “Forgotten War”
Hardly War, by Don Mee Choi / Wave Books, 2016 / Illustrated; 97 pages Don Mee Choi is a South Korean poet, translator and anti-militarist now living in the U.S. Through a startling, kaleidoscopic collection of prose, poems, and photographs in her new book, Hardly War, she makes a powerful case against the U.S. justification… Read more »
Television Review: Sting like a “Bee” — the piercing satire of “Full Frontal”
There’s a ferocious new wit in town. Her name is Samantha Bee and her late-night cable show, Full Frontal, is passionate, outraged, straight-forward, and honest. Bee spares nobody and nothing in politics or public life: “There’s a lot of shame to go around.” The Canada-born comic appeared for a decade as a correspondent on The… Read more »
Movie Review — Edward Snowden: from patriotic geek to NSA whistleblower
Oliver Stone’s Snowden is a gripping dramatization of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s journey through the totalitarian madness of the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA). Commenting on the film, the director and co-writer blew a little whistle of his own. “They say we have freedom of expression; but thought is financed, and thought is controlled, and… Read more »
Blood at the Root book review: Forsyth County, Georgia — a saga of racial cleansing
Southern trees bear strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Using these lyrics from a poem by Abel Meeropol, immortalized in Billie Holliday’s song about lynching, author Patrick Phillips opens his tale of terror, theft and racial apartheid in one Georgia county, USA. Following a brutal assault on a white… Read more »
The art of Black working-class life
After last year’s hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, it’s refreshing to see two fine films about African American working people. Loving’s true story shows a brave couple persevering with their 9-year Supreme Court case that finally struck down laws against inter-racial marriage in 1967. Fences, by playwright August Wilson, delves into the strengths and tensions of a Black… Read more »
BOOK REVIEW — Eleanor Marx: spotlight on a socialist feminist pioneer
Read Rachel Holmes’ sensitive and absorbing biography of Eleanor Marx and you’ll fall in love with a radical heroine. In Eleanor Marx: A Life (Bloomsbury Press, 2015), the Karl Marx family and the 19th century socialist movement are vividly portrayed. Eleanor Marx is revealed as an important political leader, whom Holmes credits with being the… Read more »
Freedom Socialist book review — “Saving Capitalism”
What’s to save?
Off-Broadway (About 3000 Miles): “Come to the Cabaret!” is Smash Hit!
Never in the annals of Show Biz has such a dazzling array of stellar talent been assembled as graced the musical-comedy spectacular “Come to the Cabaret,” a raucous, irreverent and jazzy funfest presented in celebration of Gloria Martin’s birthday. Produced by the FSP and Radical Women in honor of the FSP’s indomitable organizer, the Cabaret… Read more »
Doris Lessing: The failure of the personal solution
Doris Lessing has attracted considerable attention as one of the foremost British novelists. Her books are widely discussed, and The Golden Notebook, her novel about “free women,” is a classic to many feminists. She has gained a dedicated following through her frank depiction of women, addressing the topics of sexuality, marriage and pregnancy from a… Read more »
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