Friday, August 29th   I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire

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What's Love Got to Do With It? A Review by Carolyn See Susan Squire, a journalist who has written about couples and parenthood, has bitten off a huge chunk of subject for herself. Contrary to the "contrarian" in her subtitle, she doesn't provide an argument against marriage; she simply records what people (i.e., men) in Western civilization have thought about it -- "why it came about, what it was supposed to accomplish, who was behind it, and how it was implanted into the minds of the many" -- up until the time of Martin Luther. (There's a good reason why she stops with him.) Squire gets off to a shaky start, hypothesizing a hunter-gatherer society in which " 'women's work' has yet to be downgraded . . . each sex contributes something essential that the other isn't equipped to procure or produce on its own -- and therefore [is] of relatively equal stature." It's a little dizzying to think of a skin-clad savage grunting out a pleasantry like "I really appreciate these wheat cakes you've made. I certainly wouldn't have the time or...   Read the entire review More reviews from Washington Post Book World

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips Getting It Wrong A Review by Robert M. Solow Turmoil in the financial market and insecurity in the labor market -- we have plenty of both -- bring out good and bad books, like good and bad mushrooms after a rain. In the instance before us it is the financial market that is in turmoil, and this is definitely not a good book. The only nice thing I can say about Bad Money is that taking critical aim at our complex, overblown, and now evidently dangerous financial system is a fine idea. The trouble is that Kevin Phillips stays throughout at the superficial level of Chicken Little. Terrible things are happening, and will continue to happen...   Read the entire review More reviews from The New Republic Online				The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own. by David Carr Reporter Unsettled by His Investigation of His Dark Past A Review by Steve Weinberg While cementing his life as a substance abuser in Minneapolis during his teen years, David Carr crossed the state line to enroll at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. "My crowning achievement came early," Carr writes. "As a freshman, I won the beer-chugging contest, drinking five 12-ounce beers in under 20 seconds....I stayed for two years and moved in with a lovely girl, Lizbeth, whom I soon wore out. I ended up working at a local nursing home, where I found myself the lone male on night shifts full of townie girls. It was a good life until one night when I was doing laundry at one...   Read the entire review More reviews from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America by William Graebner Girl, Interrupted A Review by Caitlin Flanagan The thing you have to understand about Patty Hearst, the reason that her fantastically sui generis story resonated so deeply within so many millions of ordinary American households, is that back then a lot of girls like her were disappearing. They were not California publishing heiresses, certainly; nor was the agency of their disappearance abduction at gunpoint. But disappear they did. One moment their lives could be summed up in a series of photographs not so different from the ones flashed on the nightly news over and over again: Patty in a first-communion dress at age 8; smiling with her...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Atlantic Monthly				U.S. vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Underminded America's Security by J. Peter Scoblic The Democrats & National Security A Review by Samantha Power [Ed. note: This review also covers Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.] 1. Since the Vietnam War the Republican Party has developed a reputation for having a superior approach to national security. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call "issue ownership." Partly, this is for particular historical reasons. President Eisenhower...   Read the entire review More reviews from New York Review of Books
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein Orthogonian Visions A Review by Thomas J. Sugrue To borrow a colorful phrase that Newt Gingrich coined to lambaste his Democratic critics, I was a "counterculture McGovernik," albeit a premature one. In the election of 1972, my locker partner John Murphy and I ran the fifth-grade McGovern/Shriver campaign at St. Mary of Redford School in northwest Detroit. We lost big. Of the eighty or so kids in Sister Zita and Sister Mary Ann's classes, only about a fifth joined us in supporting the Democratic ticket. The one black student in the class was with us. We also had a strong hunch that Sisters Zita and Mary Ann, both enthusiastic about the post-...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Nation				X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker by Alex Cox The Scouse(r) That Roared A Review by Gerry Donaghy Alex Cox's legacy rests largely on a movie that he made a quarter century ago. Repo Man, quite possibly the only film to combine L.A. punk swagger with Robert Aldrich's classic nuclear noir Kiss Me Deadly, skewered everything from American consumerism to UFO cultists to Scientologists and successfully captured the zeitgeist of Ronald Reagan's America. The spirit of the times may have been on display in the film, but a half-hearted attempt at distribution by its studio kept it from most moviegoers' radar. However, while Repo Man may have been hard to find in cinemas, it quickly found an...   Read the entire review More reviews from Powells.com