Monthly Review Press

Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality reviewed by The Progressive Standard

Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality reviewed by The Progressive Standard

February 20, 2024

In Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality, Salim Lamrani, a French journalist and professor of Latin-American studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne Paris IV, raises important questions about the condition of journalism today and the role played by privately owned, centrally controlled media cartels. As an important addition to his previous work, The Economic War Against Cuba, Lamrani, examines media treatment of Cuba taking an investigative journalist’s approach to dissecting a variety of claims made about life and politics on the island since the revolution of 1959.

Help Support our Friends at AK Press

Help Support our Friends at AK Press

February 20, 2024

Please read this appeal from our friends at AK Press, the important publisher of anarchist and radical books and distributor of titles from many small presses, including Monthly Review Press, as they recover from a devastating fire at their warehouse in Oakland, California. To make a donation, please visit this page, or to purchase books from AK Press, visit their website.

In Walt We Trust reviewed on Truthout

In Walt We Trust reviewed on Truthout

February 20, 2024

In Walt We Trust is a sprightly, extended essay or first-person peroration by a young lit prof who felt a ton of frustration and heartache, or at least headache (self-medicating with alcohol, he tells us), and in despair, threw himself at Whitmania. That is, the poetry, the life, the setting and the aura. The project was obviously successful and not only because of the resulting book. He feels, he insists, better about life, death and even sex – the trifecta that pretty much wraps up human earthly possibilities. But he had to take a gloomy field trip to Camden, New Jersey, to get his mind in place.

Read an excerpt from In Walt We Trust on Salon

Read an excerpt from In Walt We Trust on Salon

February 20, 2024

In the late 1850s, Walt Whitman wrote a series of poems celebrating what he called “manly love,” the love men had for other men. Whitman included the poems in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass under the heading “Calamus,” a plant with a suggestive, phallic-shaped flowering spike growing out of it. As I discuss in the next chapter, the exact nature of this manly love—essentially, whether it involved genitals or not—remains very much unsettled.

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space reviewed in New York History

Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space reviewed in New York History

February 20, 2024

Hell’s Kitchen’s tenements have long captured the attention of reformers, scholars, and the American public. In Hell’s Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space, Joseph J. Varga combines a sophisticated use of critical space theory, with a nuanced investigation of social relations among residents, reformers, and state agencies, to shed light on development in this notorious neighborhood during the Progressive Era’s transformative years. Utilizing Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of space as “lived, conceived and perceived,” Varga reveals that the physical features of the area, social relationships of work and home, reform efforts, ethnic and racial alliances, and government allotment of funds played a role in creating and giving meaning to space on Manhattan’s Middle West Side.

Labor in the Global Digital Economy reviewed in The Progressive Populist

Labor in the Global Digital Economy reviewed in The Progressive Populist

February 20, 2024

Who is the cybertariat? Why care? Ursula Huws, author of Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age (Monthly Review Press, 2014), has answers as a class-based technology shapes our world. An historical continuity emerges in her writing. This approach casts context on the current moment.

Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century reviewed in Too Much online

February 20, 2024

Activist University of Illinois scholar Robert McChesney has for some time now been a compelling voice on the “political economy of communication,” an emerging new discipline that’s probing how our media go about entrenching “the privileges of those at the top.” This field, McChesney argues in this engaging new book, belongs on our political center stage. Our deeply unequal social order, he explains, has simply ceased working for average people.

Read an excerpt from Robert McChesney’s Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century in Social Policy magazine

February 20, 2024

The major premises of the media reform movement remain unchanged: communication systems develop largely as a result of policies, since there is no such thing as a natural “default” course of development. From the development of copyright and postal subsidies for newspapers at the dawn of the Republic to the licensing of telephone, broadcasting, and cable TV monopolies, the state has been in the middle of the creation of the media. For example, the Internet’s shift from an anti-commercial, egalitarian institution in the early 1990s to a “whoever makes the most money by any means necessary wins” undertaking was not foreordained by the gods. It was the province of politics.

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