Reviews

When Worlds Collide, or Not

Space exploration and colonization will continue to seduce multi-billionaires eager to display their technical competence and power, but that does not mean they deserve such outsize attention. We as a species are much better off, the Weinersmiths point out in their book A City on Mars, using a “wait-and-go-big” approach of solving more problems on Earth prior to introducing our fraught selves to additional solar systems. Space settlement is not a goal to pursue, but a milestone that must be earned.

The Gipper and His Gallop Through History

The Reagan Renaissance will no doubt be helped by Max Boot’s thorough, engaging, and balanced new biography, Reagan: His Life and Legend. Although the book is 736 pages, it rarely drags and while the author admires his subject, he is not blind to Reagan’s faults.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

In The Sports Revolution, Columbia University history professor Frank Andre Guridy intervenes in this conversation by demonstrating that “Texas was central to the nation’s expanding political, economic, and emotional investment in sport.”

The Journey of the Black Scholar as Ideological Terminator

What makes Late Admissions so fascinating to read, and such an important autobiography, is its self-awareness: it is actually a story about how embracing one’s self-destructive tendencies, one’s voracious selfishness and appetites, gives life meaning because, if nothing else, they make life interesting to oneself and they actually make you interesting to other people. It is a book about the ferocity of self-regard.

Horror and the Misfits in the Heartland

Blake Eckard’s films serve up an undiluted, deliriously potent drink. Not everyone will find it palatable. But if you are open to downing the cinematic equivalent of several shots of 190-proof Everclear, belly up to Intensely Independent’s bar and prepare for intoxication.

Everybody Must Get Stoned

“the philosophy of modern song” doesnt have a conclusion so i guess this review can do without one too . . . if the stuff i just mentioned sounds appealing id recommend the book but otherwise not . . . thanks and much obliged.

Two Cheers for the Hollywood Sports Movie

Part film critique and part political pondering, Grant Wiedenfeld’s Hollywood Sports Movies and the American Dream provides not just a compelling case for the importance of pop culture (and more specifically the sports film) in the imaginary of the American nation, but also of how the collective experience of watching these movies can be its own form of civic engagement.

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