Book Review: Sing for Your Life, a Story of Race, Music, and Family
by Harold C. Ford In 1994 at the age of 12, Ryan Speedo Green was taken forcibly to Virginia’s infamous DeJarnette Center after he threatened to kill his mother and his brother. The lowest point for Green at DeJarnette may have been when his downward spiraling behavior landed him in solitary confinement, as related by Daniel Bergner in the 2016 book Sing for Your Life, A Story of Race, Music and Family: “He stood at the door...
Review: Why are we killing the planet? “The Myth of Human Supremacy” nails troubling answers
By Robert R. Thomas Human supremacy, according to Derrick Jensen, is a contradiction in terms. In The Myth of Human Supremacy, Jensen’s impassioned and intelligent analysis of the myth that proclaims we humans are superior beings, posits his approach with essential questions like, superior to what and whom? and the how and the why of that? Dedicated to Planet Earth, the book’s opening quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of...
Review: “The Kremlin Playbook” depicts eroding democracies, prompting heebie-jeebies
By Robert R. Thomas While looking for a Canadian hockey channel between the interminable rash of mind-numbing commercials during the final two minutes of a basketball game, I stumbled upon the conclusion to a C-SPAN telecast of a federal intelligence hearing. I never got back to the the game. What caught my attention was mention of a book with a jock title: The Kremlin Playbook. Published in October 2016 as a combined report by the...
Review: From “Flint coney” to “Chevy in the Hole,” Flintstones, Michiganders have unique lingo
By Jan Worth-Nelson Ted McClellan, author of the regionally hot-selling How to Speak Midwestern from Belt Publishing can utter accents from Buffalo to Minneapolis and dissect how those accents came to be. He can also spell out origins of dozens of beloved and often sarcastic, often hilarious local phrases, from “Ooey Pooey” to “Bloomingulch” to “Naptown,” — and that’s just three...
Review: Idiot America by Charles P. Pierce
Review by Robert R. Thomas Reading a book by its cover is dicey business, but a cover can be enticing, both the graphic design and the title and typography. Such was the case with Charles P. Pierce’s IDIOT AMERICA How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. George Washington, sword drawn, seated on an English saddle with no horn astride a green dinosaur caused me to pick up the book. Pierce, a staff writer for The Boston...
Book review: Flint represents “domestic terrorism,” “state-sponsored violence” in America at War with Itself
By Robert R. Thomas In his penetrating new book, America at War with Itself (City Lights Books, 2017), Henry A. Giroux devotes an early chapter to the Flint water crisis, asserting that it epitomizes a menacing “new authoritarianism” and contends that what happened here was “an act of state sponsored violence.” His Chapter Four, “Poisoned City: Flint and the Specter of Domestic Terrorism,” opens with a...
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