Books & Media Reviews
Detroit: An American Autopsy
Detroit is one of those taxing places that require you to have an opinion about them. This opinion expresses no mere preference. It amounts to a stance, from which may be inferred your electoral leanings, your racial politics, your union sympathies and the general sunniness of your disposition. The ...
Reviewed By: Paul Clemens
There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Chinua Achebe, Nigeria’s distinguished Professor of Literature based in the United States, has recently published ‘There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra’, his war time memoirs and reflections on the process leading to Nigeria’s darkest page in history and its outcome. The 333-pag...
Reviewed By: Tarila Marclint Ebiede
Fire in the Ashes: 25 Years Among the Poorest Children in America
It’s a topic that is more timely than ever. More Americans are wrestling with the challenges of poverty in the wake of the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis, both of which hit families of color particularly hard. The gaping disparities between children of different racial and socioeconomi...
Reviewed By: Wendy Kopp
HBO documentary about Sergio Viera de Mello airs May 2010, beginning May 6
September 7, 2012 This month, beginning May 6, HBO television will premiere its riveting documentary “Sergio” based on the book “Chasing the Flame” by Samantha Power about the Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. The film includes notable interviews from refugee and aid exp...
Reviewed By: Steve Hansch
The Price of Inequality
Joseph E. Stiglitz’s new book, “The Price of Inequality,” is the single most comprehensive counterargument to both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican laissez-faire theories. While credible economists running the gamut from center right to center left describe our bleak present as the re...
Reviewed By: Thomaas B. Edsall
The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at all Costs
Last year a Newsweek article made public President Obama’s reading list. Its message was promising: A third of the books focused on former presidencies. Yet according to “The Emergency State,” David C. Unger’s ambitious and valuable overview of 20th-century presidents and national security, ...
Reviewed By: Karen J. Greenberg
Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West
Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West” by Blaine Harden...
Reviewed By: Andrew Salmon
Tinderbox : How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It
Just a few months ago, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a leading firebrand of the global AIDS movement, Stephen Lewis, said at a conference that the money given to Africa by the U.S. global AIDS initiative called PEPFAR and by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria amounted to “partial ...
Reviewed By: John Donnelly
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
This is an astonishing book.eye view of the “undercity” of one of the world’s largest metropolises; as an intensely reported, deeply felt account of the lives, hopes and fears of people traditionally excluded from literate narratives; as a story that truly hasn’t been told before, at least n...
Reviewed By: Shashi Tharoor
World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development
The 2012 World Development Report (WDR) is a watershed moment: it is the first time that the World Bank, the world’s largest and most influential development institution, has devoted its flagship publication to gender. Kate Bedford of the University of Kent argues that the report leaves the Bank f...
Reviewed By: Kate Bedford Bretton
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