Book Review: America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else by William Blum
Blum’s book is a tirade against the United States and its foreign policy, not just on the macro level, but aimed at specific individuals, from presidents down to the soldiers carrying out the policies on the ground.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Borders of Equality: The NAACP and the Baltimore Civil Rights Struggle, 1914-1970 by Lee Sartain
Lee Sartain focuses on Baltimore due to its historical significance as a border city and its proximity to Washington D.C. While racism and segregation existed here as they did elsewhere in the early twentieth century, Baltimore espoused a relatively large black middle class and offered some degree of black voice and representation.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory by Lynnell L. Thomas
The most striking feature of Lynnell L. Thomas’s book Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory is the author’s exhaustive and intimate knowledge of her subject matter: namely, the city of New Orleans.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Informal Ambassadors: American Women, Transatlantic Marriages, and Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1945 by Dana Cooper
The wave of American heiresses marrying British aristocrats in the late nineteenth century has often added colour to studies of Anglo-American relations and been subject to specialist scholarly enquiry (notably Montgomery’s ‘Gilded Prostitution’ (1989)). Where Montgomery was more concerned with the social and cultural impact of these marriages and their relationship to a changing British aristocracy, Cooper focuses on five of the most prominent of these women as non-traditional diplomatic agents operating at a key period in the development of the Anglo-American special relationship.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal by Jennifer A. Delton
Because Dwight Eisenhower was the only Republican President between 1933 and 1969, it is naturally tempting to argue that his eight-year tenure in the White House (1953-1961) was a more conservative period compared to his Democratic predecessors and successors.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction by Peter Ferry
Ferry weaves his exploration of masculinity in the works of Paul Auster, Bret Easton Elllis’ American Psycho, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis around the figure of the flâneur.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The American President in Film and Television: Myth, Politics and Representation by Greg Frame
Greg Frame’s work, The American President in Film and Television: Myth, Politics and Representation, is a tour-de-force of analytical investigation into the iconographical development and narrative frameworks of the fictionalised presidential genre.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism by Andrew Lawson
“In Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism Andrew Lawson traces the origins of literary realism to a fear of downward mobility that stemmed from the economic uncertainty caused by the growing instability of material wealth and the destabilising effects of the credit and market system. For Lawson, realism is a concrete genre that responded to a very un-concrete, pervasive economic anxiety.”
Continue ReadingBook Review: Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy edited by Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb
“Allard den Dulk provides by far the most impressive essay in the collection, suggesting a Sartrean model of pre-reflection as an ideal philosophical model for Wallace’s characters, an assertion that goes against the dominant critical consensus that Wallace was a proponent of choice.”
Continue ReadingBook Review: Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory, Edited by Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty
In contemporary Canada, especially with the on-going Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s attempts to provide a platform for the stories of injustice from the survivors of the Residential School system, discussions are taking place in relation to memory issues. How is the “truth” about the past constructed by different social groups? How can memory be “inherited” through generations? How can memory shape identity and a sense of belonging?
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