Express
Time for a New Dance
By Justin MitchellToday’s black neoliberals and progressives may instinctively reject the singular image of blackness in America put forth in The Black Power Mixtape, but they have no clear, affirmative conception of African-American identity of their own.
In Conversation
WORLD OF DEBT: DAVID GRAEBER with Spencer Woodman
Painstakingly researched and sensitively composed, David Graeber’s latest book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, attempts a retelling of world history in which credit systems underpin the rise—and potential decline—of human civilization.
In Conversation
WINNERS AND LOSERS IN THE “NEW INDIA”: SIDDHARTHA DEB with Scott Sherman
Finely written, carefully reported, and imaginatively conceived, Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (Faber and Faber, Inc.) is one of the outstanding nonfiction books of 2011.
Docs In Sight
THE SLIPPERY SLOPE OF “TERRORISM”
IF A TREE FALLS’S SAM CULLMAN In Conversation with Williams Cole
If A Tree Falls explores complex questions about social change through means that target private property rather than human life and how government prosecution in the post-9/11 era aggressively uses wide definitions of terrorism—a strategy with potentially more destructive consequences than the dark eras of Red-baiting that stain American history.
A Race to Nowhere
By Ross BarkanAny mildly astute analyst of racial dynamics could have quickly debunked the idea that President Barack Obama’s election represented the dawning of a “post-racial” age for America. A single election could not heal centuries of dehumanizing oppression and close a widening wealth and health gap between black and white Americans.
A China Hand
By Michael TerryIn On China, Henry Kissinger makes a broad attempt to tell the story of China’s history, in the hope of being able to provide much-needed context to one of the leading global issues of the early 21st century: the essential yet confusing relationship between the United States and the rising Asian giant.
Voilà, Paris!
By Allen WilcoxThese special Americans, enumerated and discussed in David McCullough’s new narrative history, The Greater Journey, were traveling to Paris in the 19th century; to the Paris that had yet no Tour Eiffel; to a post-Bonaparte Paris that saw the reign of King Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III.
