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 […]

Read more

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 […]

Read more

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 […]

Read more

Reviewed: Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell (PublicAffairs, 320 pp., $26.99). Sixty percent of Republicans do not believe in evolution. Only 11 percent of Tea Party supporters think man-made climate change is real. But according to Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, authors of Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and […]

Read more

Reviewed: Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, by Linda Hirshman (Harper, 464 pp., $27.99). Wear at least three “gender-appropriate” garments to the bar or risk a police bust. Get booted from the Army for loving a consenting adult. Marry your beloved and keep paying the IRS as though you were single. The spectrum of humiliations and civil […]

Read more