Reviews / Books & Literature
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The Red Decade by Eugene Lyons
A remarkable work studiously ignored when it was published in mid-1941 and alternately attacked or maligned by America’s mainstream press and censored class-rooms since. Could perhaps be sub-titled “The Great American Children’s Crusade” except...
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Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci and the Occupation of the Factories, 1919-1920
My first comment is to note that the not-so-kind Professor—and it seems there is no aspect of human affairs so absurd or so preposterous that some professor somewhere has not built a highly lucrative...
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The Army of the Potomac: A Stillness at Appomattox
Written by the doyen of Civil War historians, this is the final work in a series of ground-breaking narratives on the emergence of the Union Army from virtually nothing in the crucible of unexpected...
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The Course of Empire: A history of three centuries in which a new race engulfed a continent
A glittering tome replete with fire and fancy. Historian DeVoto details the inundation of North America by Europeans and the tearing of the veil of ignorance that lay over the continent of mystery coming...
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Crossing Over: The Stories Behind the Stories
This is a self-revealing work by a man who believes he possesses a special ability to communicate with the spirits of deceased persons. While by definition, the ability of psychics cannot be proven or...
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The Dark Genius of Wall Street: the Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons
An intriguing analysis of the most successful of Wall Street speculators. Though the favorite whipping-boy of Progressives and a prominent symbol of the wastefulness and harm caused by the unregulated stock-market speculation of the...
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The Death of Common Sense
Once upon a time, a wise king ruled a wondrous land called NewDeal. He wielded power with efficiency and cut through wasteful red tape by giving all of his workers the discretion to make...
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The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society
What’s most surprising about this book is, first, its belated recognition of a trend that had been proceeding apace for decades when this book was written in 1990, and second, the author’s failure to...
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Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Upton Sinclair is alive and well, reborn as Eric Schlosser. In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser has unleashed a powerful assault on the American meat-packing industry and its avenues of transmission of its oft-tainted products...
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Diamond: The History of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair
An in-depth chronicle of the inner workings of the international diamond trade. Necessarily, since two-thirds of the trade was until recently controlled by De Beers Consolidated Mines, this book is at the same time...