FROM: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Criterion Books, New York, 1955, forward by Saul Bellow) Notes on the Liberal Bourgeoisie, Alienation, the Struggle for Survival: In 1862 Dostoyevsky visited London to see the famous Crystal Palace, a capitalist and imperialist wonderland of…
Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2017) On Nine-Eleven George W. Bush “awoke” to a reality he defined in the coming months as Good against Evil, with the “evil doers” a set (never precisely…
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press, New York, 2016) Highly regarded Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s new book, “Strangers in Their Own Land” is an effort to “get inside” the emotional world of…
Perspectives: Fighting in the Streets: The 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. This short essay was first published in the Wichita Eagle on Thursday, August 8, 1996 as part of a short-lived experiment the newspaper conducted called “The Eagle Writer’s Group”. It was short lived because…
A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflections on a Year of Books by Alberto Manguel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2004) “It occurred to me then that, rereading a book a month, I might complete, in a year, something between a personal diary and…
Perspectives: Fascism Lite: The ‘Ur-fascism’ of Donald J. Trump and Company Things to read: “On Message” by Lewis H. Lapham: From Age of Folly: America Abandons its Democracy (Verso, London/New York, 2016). “Containing Trump” by Jonathan Rauch: From ‘The Atlantic’, March 2017. “How to Build…
Perspectives: Political Lynching and the Popular Mob: Donald J. Trump Against the Central Park Five Reading and Viewing: “New York: Sentimental Journeys” by Joan Didion, The New York Review of Books, January 17, 1991. The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding by…
South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2017) “California Notes” began as an assignment from ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Didion never wrote the piece, but she collected a large number of notes,…
Perspectives: Sorrows of the Digital Age or, Communication absent Faces, Hands and Bodies—the Un-Social Network. One can only ponder the scene: The family gathered at the dinner table, each of the five, or six, or seven, staring down at a screen. One, maybe, involved with…
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse (Beacon Press Edition, Boston, org. published 1964 pb.) I read One-Dimensional Man as a philosophy student at the University of Kansas during the mid-1960s. As a reader of Hegel, Marx and Freud,…