Review of Henry A. Giroux, America's Education Deficit and the War on Youth, Monthly Review Press, 2013.

     A former PR apparatchik in the US Dept. of Education (DOE) in Obama’s first term, Paul Cunningham, has penned a snarky attack on Diane Ravitch, the best known liberal opponent of the bipartisan “reforms” of public education that are destroying it.

Books reviewed:

Charles V. Bagli, Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made (Dutton, 2013).

Laura Gottesdiener, A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home (Zuccotti Park Press, 2013).

Review of John Eric Marot. The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History. Chicago: Haymarket, 2013.  References. Index. 274 pages. $28.00.

We hoped that our book, Continental Crucible, would open up a discussion of the future of the North American Left and labor movement, a discussion that is urgent in the face of the relentless capitalist offensive of the last forty years.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have proposed constitutional changes and legislation that would for the first time since 1938 allow foreign companies to explore for and produce oil in Mexico.

The bloody dissolution of the sit-ins in Al-Nahda Square and Raba'a al-Adawiyya is nothing but a massacre—prepared in advance. It aims to liquidate the Muslim Brotherhood. But, it is also part of a plan to liquidate the Egyptian Revolution and restore the military-police state of the Mubarak regime.

In the left-academic circles in which I travel, the March release of Vivek Chibber’s book-length critique of Subaltern Studies caused quite a stir. Chibber debated one of his antagonists, Partha Chatterjee, at a plenary session of the Historical Materialism conference in May, a confrontation which provided endless fodder for debates on FB and within the Left blogosphere.

Book Review of Stuart Easterling. The Mexican Revolution: A Short History, 1910-1920. Chicago: Haymarket, 2012. Ilustrations. Chronology. Index. Notes. 167 pp.

Book Review of Martin Comack. Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-1921. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. 97pp. Paperback or e-book: $24.99

Dear New TFA recruits in Chicago,

Can we talk about your teaching plans, as if you came to my office, as do lots of students and college grads thinking about becoming a teacher?

“There is not a Black America and a White America….there’s a United States of America.” So proclaimed Barack Obama, to wild applause, at the launching of his national and global celebrity in his instantly lauded 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Address.