The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics, by Kathryn Sikkink (New York: Norton, 2011). One of the most shocking scenes in Mad Men, the popular TV series about the hard-drinking advertising scene of the 1960s, occurs in the pristine upstate New York countryside.
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The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust, by Jerry Silverman. Jerry Silverman has written much more than a songbook. He brings to life the rise of fascism and the horror of the Holocaust in songs and text.
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Some say soccer is politics and others consider it poetry. Jimmy Burns and Simon Kuper lay bare the connections between what happened on the European fields and the world around them.
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At worst, Hemingway & Gellhorn is the best bad movie you'll see all year. It has two stars--Nicole Kidman and Clive Owens--at the top of their game and the chemistry between them incandesces. There’s a great supporting cast too: David Strathairn as the crushable John Dos Passos; Tony Shalhoub as Mikhail Koltsov, the Stalinist...
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Patience Darton’s life is an encapsulation of some of the 20th century’s most critical moments. Without an ounce of didacticism, her life shows the reader the abiding truth of “the personal is political.” No didacticism then, just a truth rendered with grace and melancholy (wrenching understatement is Patience’s forte) and delivered in a way...
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Smith, Richard K. and R. Cargill Hall.  Five Down, No Glory:  Frank G. Tinker, Mercenary Ace in the Spanish Civil War.  Naval Institute Press.  Oct. 2011.  377 pp.  illus.  Timeline.  Notes. index.  ISBN 978-1-61251-054-5.  $36.95. (Buy at Powells and support ALBA.) The reader will note from Five Down, No Glory’s introduction that this study...
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Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War. By Peter Stansky and William Abrahams. Stanford University Press, 2012. (Buy at Powells and support ALBA.) In 1966, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams published Journey to the Frontier, which followed the lives of two young poets from families with strong intellectual and artistic backgrounds, both...
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Names matter. Paul Preston’s choice of The Spanish Holocaust, his latest and most ambitious account of the massive violence unleashed in the wake of the 1936 coup, is as polemical as it is well-pondered. It reflects a conscious attempt on Preston’s part to reframe how we think about the war in Spain and its...
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Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in Twenty-First Century America, by Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler. The New Press, 2011. (Buy.) Somewhere lurking in our imaginations we carry a picture of ourselves responding to a rap at the door to be bullied by agents of the FBI.  Fantasy is nurtured by films like...
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The Last to Fall, The Life and Letters of Ivor Hickman – an International Brigadier in Spain, by John L. Wainwright’s. Hatchet Green Publishing, 2012. From the cover photograph, of the International Brigade volunteer’s weather-beaten face to the closing lines of "The Last to Fall, The Life and Letters of Ivor Hickman – an International Brigadier...
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