After Roe v Wade was overturned after nearly fifty years, what will it mean to be a woman in America and what kind of country is it becoming? This is what the book ‘The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America’ explores, reviewed by Adele.
review
Love as a revolutionary force
August 14, 2024Review of the book ‘El capital amoroso’ by Jennifer Guerra, a five-part essay that challenges our ideas and practices of love in modern society, and aims to restore its revolutionary meaning.
Review: Gaza Writes Back
July 19, 2024Review of “Gaza Writes Back,” a collection of short stories, the majority written by Palestinian women, in the wake of Operation Cast Lead, perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces 2008, through 2009.
Review: When Men Buy Sex: Who Really Pays?
April 30, 2024Adele reviews ‘When Men Buy Sex: Who Really Pays?’ Canada’s most comprehensive book on the struggle to abolish prostitution.
Review: A We without State
March 15, 2024The pamphlet ‘A We without State” by Yásnaya Aguilar Gil, a voice of the Mixe people, deconstructs the word “Indigenous” and poses the idea of a world “not as a sum of national States…but as an ever-changing, collaborative and adaptable conglomerate of tiny social structures, as my community.”
Review: Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions…
February 28, 2024Adele reviews a fascinating history of three interconnected projects of the radical feminist community in the Oakland, Calif., area over the past 40 years: an underground self-help abortion network, clinics run on feminist principles, and clinic defense organizations.
Review: A More Beautiful and Terrible History
February 22, 2024Van Gelder reviews ‘A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History’, by Jeanne Theoharis, now available as ebook. The work is a deep critique of 21st century recall and commemorations of the Civil Rights Movement, and thus a valuable weapon to fight the suppression of Black history.
‘Israelism,’ a documentary
February 14, 2024Van Gelder reviews documentary ‘Israelism,’ in which two U.S. Jewish teenagers, filmed over a seven-year period, became disillusioned and then opposed their pro-Israel education. Since Oct. 7, 2023, requests for screenings have risen, despite discrediting, censorship and suppression.
‘Internal Melodies’: music and dialectic
December 16, 2023Can dialectics be expressed musically? ‘Internal Melodies,’ the new album from pianist Dan Tepfer and saxophonist Miguel Zenón, is a journey from one’s outermost external reality to one’s closest self, from reason to emotion, from the social to the individual and back again.
Review: American Women and the Fight for Equality
October 31, 2023Adele reviews ‘Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920 to 2020’ by Elizabeth Griffith, a history of the U.S. feminist movement from the years leading up to the achievement of women’s right to vote to 2020.
‘Succession’ and the dehumanization of today’s world
August 5, 2023‘Succession’ is a TV series vaguely based on the family running the Fox Corporation. It shows the immense influence of such a company in the daily life of U.S. citizens, but what shocked the reviewer most is how it depicts the dehumanization of human relationships in today’s world.
Review: ‘The 1619 Project’
May 14, 2022‘The 1619 Project’ tackles U.S. history since the first enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia—from multiple perspectives. Each essay is grounded in original sources, scholarly works, interviews and oral histories. Historical events, photographs of ordinary African-Americans and poetry surround each essay, adding a human touch.
Review: Reproductive Rights as Human Rights
November 17, 2021In ‘Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice,’ Zakiya Luna discusses how SisterSong, the reproductive justice organization, was based and operates on the concept of human rights.
Review: ‘Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America’
February 2, 2021In her book, Ijeoma Oluo discusses the serious damage caused when we expect white men to have all the leadership roles in a society. The damage is not only to women and people of color whose voices are not heard, and to society, which loses their input, but to white men themselves.
Review: ‘Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements’
A feminist review of “Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.” The author, Charlene Carruthers, sees it as “a book for all people who are curious about and committed to the struggle for Black liberation.”
Review: Women Are Blamed for Everything
November 29, 2020A feminist review of a book by Jessica Taylor, ‘Women Are Blamed for Everything: Exploring the Victim Blaming of Women Subjected to Violence and Trauma’ that explores how and why each victim of abuse was always blamed in some way although it was never her fault, even internalizing self-blame.
‘Power Worshippers’
July 1, 2020“The Power Worshippers” by Katherine Stewart explains the religious Right as a “Christian nationalist” movement. This is not a grassroots movement but one deliberately designed by ultra-rich businessmen and families to impose complete political, social, and economic control.
Review of ‘Full Surrogacy Now’
April 30, 2020Adele’s critical review of the book “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family” by Sophie Lewis as “a disappointing attempt to find a radical path to a just society of new human relationships by way of commercial surrogacy.”
Revolution in Permanence in Syria, After the Uprisings
March 22, 2020Review-essay (longer version) on the book ‘Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience’ by Joseph Daher. With a combination of ruthless criticism and consistent solidarity, the author situates the Assad regime and Syria’s three counter-revolutions into a broader trend of global neoliberalism.
‘Leftover Women’
March 17, 2020Review of ‘Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China’ by Leta Hong Fincher, which debunks the Chinese government’s propaganda that the status of women has been soaring since the introduction of corporate capitalism.
Review of Joseph Daher’s ‘Syria After the Uprising’
Review of the book ‘Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience’ by Joseph Daher. The author situates the Assad regime and Syria’s three counter-revolutions into a broader trend of global neoliberalism.
Essay: Revolution in Permanence: Trotsky, Marx, Dunayevskaya
January 22, 2020Review from Mexico of the book ‘La filosofía de la revolución en permanencia de Marx en nuestros días’ (Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day. Selected Writings by Raya Dunayevskaya).
‘Last Days at Hot Slit’
August 31, 2019A review of “Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin,” edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder.
‘Poverty and Profit’
March 9, 2019Matthew Desmond’s book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” is an important contribution to understanding the workings of exploitative housing, although he fails to appreciate that, under the capitalist system, the best-intentioned programs will always become conduits to extract money from the poor.
Review: “October: The Story of the Russian Revolution”
July 6, 2017Review of the book “October: The Story of the Russian Revolution” by China Miéville.