Reviewed: Uncle Swami: South Asians in American Today by Vijay Prashad (The New Press, 208 pp., $21.95). Preet Bharara, A Punjab-born U.S. attorney, prosecutes Raj Rajaratnam, a Sri-Lankan born billionaire insider trader: For people of South Asian descent, United States assimilation has arrived. It happened quickly after race-based immigration quotas were lifted in 1965. Immigrants then […]

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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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The New York Times list of “well-known and polarizing figures in public education” on the board of the new advocacy group StudentsFirstNY includes: former D.C. School Superintendent Michelle Rhee; former New York School Superintendent Joel Klein (now working for Rupert Murdoch); Eva S. Moskowitz, who now runs a charter-school chain; former Mayor Ed Koch, and “venture […]

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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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