Reviews
In our submissions guidelines we say to reviewers that our goal is not to learn about the book (or movie, dance, play, etc.) being reviewed, but for the reviewer to use the book as a pretext to teach us something about the nature of reality as understood by the reviewer and perhaps stimulated by the book. A tall order. See how we are doing:
Books
How Come We Exist?
by Donald Shriver
We meet in these pages eloquent summaries of how the evolution of the human mind may be the greatest mystery of all. Generations ago, modern physicists and astronomers informed us that “one of the stranger things about our universe is that we are present in it.”
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Books
Our Exile: A Chilean Memoir of Dislocation
by Deena Metzger
Ariel Dorfman is one of our era’s many citizens of nowhere, and Feeding on Dreams is the story of his exile from Chile. It was an accident, a gift of destiny, or a curse, that he was not at La Moneda, the Presidential Palace, on September 11, 1973, the day of the coup by General Augusto Pinochet. That day, Salvador Allende died and Dorfman received a permanent enemy to orient him in his disoriented life.
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Film
A Polish Depiction of Genocide and Redemption
by Ralph Seliger
In Darkness, Poland’s nominee and a finalist for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, immediately plunges the viewer into an unrelenting world of thuggery and mass murder in Nazi-occupied Poland.
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Film
Renouncing the Nuclear Idol
by Art Laffin
The film, The Forgotten Bomb, is a stark reminder of how we, as a people, have betrayed our trust in God and, for sixty-six years, have instead placed our trust in a nuclear idol.
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War & Peace
A Hope for Empathy
by Donald Shriver
On 9/11 we had the brief fortifying message from folk around the planet, “We are all Americans now.” Not blessed with a president who knew how wisely to respond to that world outpouring of empathy, we catapulted into a “war” against terror from which we have scarcely recovered.
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Books
No Drawing: Art, Politics, and Gaza
by Sam Ross-Brown
A CHILD’S VIEW FROM GAZA Edited by Howard Levine Pacific View Press, 2011 Back in 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote her famous essay “The Personal Is Political” in response to the criticism that feminist consciousness-raising efforts were just “therapy.” In 2011, …
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Books
Strategy and Memory for Progressive Believers
by Christian Iosso
Gary Dorrien's latest book, Economy, Difference, Empire, is an indictment of imperialist fantasies, enormous suffering visited on others, and the “shredding” of America’s reputation in “the war on terror.”
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Books
The Rhetoric of Family in U.S. Politics
by Laura Lovett
No Direction Home is a powerful and compelling piece of cultural and political history that fundamentally reframes the history of the modern American family. Whether you lived through the 1970s or not, you will not be able to think about that decade and those that followed the same way again after reading this remarkable book.
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Poetry
Lamenter-in-Chief
by David Wojahn
Let us hope that Pinsky’s new Selected Poems will help to dispel the more jaded views of his accomplishments. For Pinsky is an important figure. He is also, as Tony Hoagland has rightly observed, “a much stranger poet than is generally acknowledged.”
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Books
A Palestinian Peacemaker’s Story
by Ronit Avni
Jundi’s coming-of-age story is chronicled in the illuminating book, The Hour of Sunlight, co-authored by him and his friend, former colleague and author/documentary filmmaker/playwright Jen Marlowe. The title derives from Mahmoud Darwish’s stunning poem, “On This Earth.” Like Darwish’s poetry, Jundi’s life is a tale of dislocation, of yearning, of delight in the details and a reverence for the written word.
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