Three-fourths of the way into Ralph Nader’s new book, The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future, Nader addresses the runaway militarism that is becoming an existential threat to American democracy. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and […]

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Reviewed: Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War by Edmund Wilson (Norton, 848 pp., $37.95). Fifty years after its publication, it’s still easy to understand why Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore got people all hot and bothered. Wilson devoted about 800 pages to “the literature of the American Civil War,” and at first blush, it […]

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Reviewed: Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me by Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman (Hill and Wang, 176 pp., $24.95). There are several reasons Harvey Pekar’s posthumous screed, Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, might spark discomfort. The underground-comic writer’s books themselves are always uncomfortable, both in their lack of “coolness” and in the roughness of their humor […]

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Fifty years ago, a Johns Hopkins–educated zoologist did something that few at the time thought was possible. With the publication of one book, she started a national debate about the universally accepted use of synthetic pesticides, the irresponsibility of science, and the limits of technological promise. She also challenged the metastatic growth of the synthetic […]

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Reviewed: Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars Is More Important Than Winning Them by David Keen (Yale University Press, 312 pp., $38). Heraclitus said that war is the father of all things, and though the great Greek’s utterances are  wisdom for the ages, this one-liner is way past its sell-by date. Sure, war is undeniably the big daddy of bigger military […]

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