Book Review: Democracy Promotion, National Security and Strategy by Robert Pee
The era that Pee covers was, of course, one of high political and cultural tension, thus the arguments that he elucidates in Democracy Promotion are often controversial and heavily mediated by particular political and social persuasions. It is therefore refreshing to find that Pee’s opening chapter recognizes many of these tensions and seeks to forge a path between them.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576-1642 by Gavin Hollis
In Absence, Hollis discusses the picture of America circulated, he theorizes, by London theatres via “theatergrams” and “theatermemes”. Respectively, these terms comprise elements of character, scene, and situation; and shared allusions, ideas, catchphrases, and the like [3]. More precisely, Hollis discusses and tracks across plays: the ‘meme of the craven adventuring Virginian colonist; the ‘meme of cannibalism; the ‘meme of the displaced Indian; and the theatergrams of European males disguising themselves as Indians [27-9].
Continue ReadingBook Review: Melville in his Own Time edited by Steven Olsen-Smith
During my first research trip to the United States in Summer 2012, I persuaded my friend Margaret to drive us to Pittsfield, Massachusetts to visit Arrowhead – Herman Melville’s farm house. I was half-way through a PhD thesis on Melville, and felt that I couldn’t visit Massachusetts without going to the place where Melville wrote Moby-Dick. Partly, this was touristic curiosity, but there was some bit of me that thought I might better understand the books I was writing about if I could go to the place where Melville wrote them – if I could picture Melville in his immediate context.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Political Polarization in American Politics edited by Daniel J Hopkins and John Sides
The polarization of American politics is often seen as a damning indictment of a political system which concerns two political parties for the majority of the time. Polarization is announced as a modern day symptom that has ‘impeded negotiation, compromise, and good governance.’(11) It is a view shared by both those individuals within the political theatre and also observers of American government.
Continue ReadingBook Review: South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration by Marcia Chatelain
In a society where social movements such as ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Campaign Zero’ are vital and powerful, this book reminds readers of the struggles that black migrants and citizens have found in supposedly progressive cities since the thirteenth amendment was ratified. Chatelain’s book is particularly important in recognising the different, and tiered, elements within feminism faced by women of colour.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Paul Auster’s Writing Machine: A Thing to Write With by Evija Trofimova
“…[T]o be an Auster critic always means to be slightly lost” (4). With this statement, Evija Trofimova sums up the experience (or plight) of Paul Auster’s collective readership, from the casual reader to the most observant critic.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Baptists in America: A History by Thomas S. Kidd and Barry Hankins
What do Jimmy Carter, former United States’ Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, the late Jerry Falwell, and progressive thinker Walter Rauschenbush have in common? The answer is that they were all American Baptists. In Baptists in America: A History, Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins try to make sense of the diverging views and characters that make up the story of Baptists in the United States.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States by William Huntting Howell
Stressing in his introduction that his concern is the ‘facts on the ground’ (11) in American history, Howell draws on quotidian and largely overlooked aesthetic projects such as the design of coins and schoolgirl samplers to offer some genuinely original work on how creative work in America was consanguineous with the processes of state-building.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Pynchon’s California edited by Scott McClintock and John Miller
This collection of essays offers additional proof of Pynchon’s continued centrality in American literature by displaying the politics of place and premeditated murder of some California stereotypes although Pynchon lets the utopian dreams for California, America, and the 1960s gracefully, painfully recede yet linger in these works as well.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace edited by Philip Coleman
In Adam Kelly’s overview of the critical field surrounding David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), he notes that during the last years of Wallace’s life there was ‘a steady stream of scholarly interest, but more recently that stream has become a torrent’ (46). If we consider the vast amount of blogs, reviews, and think pieces, that have emerged to coincide with the recent U.S. release of the film The End of the Tour – which portrays five days with Wallace on the promotional tour for Infinite Jest (1996) – we can discern that that torrent has become a deluge. Indeed, it may be that we are fast approaching – or have already hurtled past – the point that marks ‘peak Wallace’.
Continue Reading