Category: Book Review

The Pro-Privatization Shock Therapy of the UK’s Covid Response There is a larger game afoot in the UK government’s privatization-friendly Covid-19 response. The outsourcing bonanza has coincided with Britain’s tense…

One Small Vote for Lockport, NY, One Giant Lesson for 2020 America As we face the unprecedented circumstance of a presidential election during a pandemic, the right to vote by…

The Magic Mountains of the Acoma Pueblo and Thomas Mann In January, not long before the pandemic arrived, I traveled to Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, some sixty miles from…

The Scandal of Our Drug Supply Katherine Eban’s disquieting, often unnerving, and at times infuriating new book Bottle of Lies ranges across the pharmaceutical industry in several countries, but its…

France: After Lockdown, the Street When the lockdown—le confinement—finally began to lift on May 11, giving way to a tenuous period of reopening—le déconfinement—Paris looked the same. And yet it wasn’t.…

Days in the Life of Tetsuya Noda Born in 1940, Tetsuya Noda, one of Japan’s foremost print artists, began keeping illustrated diaries as a young boy, drawing and writing about…

Fiction and Responsibility The Gringa, a recent novel by Andrew Altschul, raises an important question: Does fiction, particularly fiction that claims to be based on history, have any responsibilities at…

‘The Most Ignorant and Unfit’: What Made America’s Worst Ever Leader? Alexander Hamilton observed that “the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is by…

It is a Choice (because Kanye) The rapper chooses his vacancies. Room does not choose the rapper. The rapper walked into rooms. or were dragged into rooms. were dragged into…

Wanting Wrong The narrator of Miranda Popkey’s first novel, Topics of Conversation, is the daughter of an old Hollywood family, now in gentle decline. Her nice, white life “was going…