book reviews

Daydreaming While Reading Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Edward Curtin “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.” Shakespeare, Macbeth People often laugh when I tell them that I go to sleep at 8:15 P.M.  They laugh harder when I say …

‘The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism’ Book Launch

When the restrictions under which we lived for two years were largely revoked in March 2022, the Great Reset of Western capitalism that was initiated in September 2019 was not revoked with them. On the contrary, the temporary removal of our rights and freedoms under lockdown is in the process of being made permanent in …

The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’

Marilyn Langlois, via the International Center for 9/11 Justice If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world… If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, …

REVIEW: Into the Uncanny Valley with Naomi Klein

Geoff Olson Canadian journalist Naomi Klein’s latest work, Doppelgangers: A Trip Into the Mirror World, is a peculiar mix of personal memoir, postmodern philosophy and historical survey. But it’s largely a brief against the American writer and activist Naomi Wolf and her fellow travelers in the “mirror world” of conspiracy-mongering. “In my defence, it was never my …

A Pandemic of Narcissistic Abuse

Lucy Davies Narcissism and its associated abuse; control, manipulation, greed, exploitation of power, an audacious sense of entitlement to name a few traits, has been the bedrock of our societies for thousands of years. Different people will relate to it from different experiences of various aspects of life, but whether these manipulative, conscience-void, power-grabbers are …

Virtue and Terror: How the New Normal was Created

Simon Elmer “If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the mainspring of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but swift, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is less …

REVIEW: The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Kevin Ryan Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet published his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism in June 2022. The book brings attention to the need to understand our own psychology in this time of global crisis. It outlines the process of mass formation by which the masses find themselves to be hypnotized members of a totalitarian state. It also …