White Nationalists Find Sundry Faults with the U.S. Government
A review by Art Winslow
This April, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," the media world was briefly ablaze debating whether it was true. "Rightwing extremists," the report maintained, "have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda." Citing the economic downturn, it drew parallels to the 1990s, a fertile time in the development of militia-style factions. In a footnote, "rightwing extremism" is defined broadly as applying to groups, movements and adherents that are "primarily hate-oriented" toward particular religious, racial or ethnic groups, or "are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority," or may be dedicated to single issues such as opposition to abortion. What favorable timing...
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Valeria's Last Stand by Marc Fitten
 Since the days of Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, American authors have had a penchant for sweeping allegory, for tales that examine universal human qualities through the presentation of stylized and generalized characters. This tradition is carried on today by authors such as Cormac McCarthy in his...
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 "Everyone has three lives," Gabriel Garcia Marquez once told Gerald Martin. "A public life, a private life and a secret life." With little help from the novelist himself, who merely "tolerated" him for years before embracing him as his "official" biographer in 2006, Martin has picked through this...
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 Literature has given us many unsympathetic protagonists yet relatively few genuine monsters: Lolita's Humbert Humbert, Shakespeare's Richard III and American Psycho's Patrick Bateman come to mind. In each case, the writer was successful because the reader was drawn into the narrative by the beauty...
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 There are poets who show us the exterior world and poets who ferry news of their inner turmoil. Yet very few possess the double vision required to do both. Sylvia Plath surveyed and stoked the fires within her; Gary Snyder is far happier scouting for forest blazes in the Sierras.
Until he began...
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 In his spirited and comprehensive 2005 analysis Darwinism and Its Discontents, Michael Ruse argues that "from the beginning, right down to the present, many people have regarded evolution as a kind of biological equivalent to social progress. In this respect, it has been and still is an...
The Sky Below by Stacey D'erasmo
 Gabriel, the chimerical narrator of The Sky Below, Stacey D'Erasmo's episodic novel of mayhem and myth, was not the sort of boy his "sad brown bear of a father" could bond with. Entranced by the strange and terrible shape-shifting tales his mother reads to him -- Ovid's Metamorphoses, of all things ...
Amerika: The Missing Person: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text by Franz Kafka
 It's always tricky when an author's name becomes an adjective. Orwellian, Machiavellian, Faulknerian -- these designations make it hard to see a writer on his or her own terms. This is perhaps most true of Franz Kafka, whose sobriquet, Kafkaesque, has become a catchall for the weird and...
The Norman MacLean Reader by Norman Maclean
 Norman Maclean, who died in 1990, was a big two-hearted writer in several respects: He had one foot planted firmly in fiction, the other in nonfiction; his life was one of perennial migration between the urbane setting of Chicago and the rough-hewn environs of a lake in Montana; professionally, he...
Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008 by Clive James
 Clive James has been a fish out of water, a television personality and a poet, a memoirist who befriended Princess Diana . . . and an erudite critic, a regular in England's most important literary journals. Yet his own fame, as what the English call a TV presenter, ruined his reputation: "As a show ...
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Three Decades of Quality Writing and Criticism
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a non-profit organization consisting of more than 850 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns. To learn about how to join, click here.
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