To imagine a socialist United States is what many people might consider a utopian vision. In that particularly pragmatic strain of American thought, utopian has an almost pejorative association to it, too. As in, get real, that’ll never happen. In fact, so thoroughly have the intellectual traditions of socialism been marginalized in the United States
Category: Book Reviews
In the early years of the 20th Century, Albert Schweitzer was already a well-known European intellectual and concert musician when he decided to change his life and enroll in medical school. With his medical degree, Dr. Schweitzer would move to what was then French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon) where for many years he ran a
Curtis White is a retired English professor, novelist and literary and cultural critic. Mostly, he is an intellectual troublemaker. This is a good thing. In his 2003 book, The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, White offered a uniquely scathing critique of the state of critical imagination in popular American culture. The Middle Mind remains
JOURNALIST OF THE RANK AND FILE I heard the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel speak three times. The first occasion was at the San Francisco Book Expo in the mid-1990s. Then a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, the famous “guerrilla journalist” took the stage at a local church
Healing in Community: Finding Health and Freedom in a Palestinian Refugee Camp Mateo Bernal (CreateSpace, 2011) 256 pages. Treating illness involves getting to the root of a health condition. Or, ideally at least, it should. In the real world much medical practice is geared toward ameliorating symptoms, without necessarily curing the underlying condition. Certainly the
MARK HARRIS 