Book Review Archive

The War Lawyers, Review by Tracey Blasenheim

The War Lawyers expertly reveals how lawyers in the 'kill chain' make possible “juridically sanctioned violence” and upend attempts to humanize warfare through law. Yet, to whom do these legal arguments speak? Can lawyers legitimize imperial war?

By

Tracey Blasenheim

Black Food Matters Review

Struggling for equity in production and consumption of food without reckoning with the larger, ever-evolving structures of racial capitalism that were “never created for Black survival” (Garth & Reese, 2020: 3) will never produce justice.

By

Jed DeBruin

The University as a Settlement Principle Review

Parsing the entanglement of Italian urbanism and campus design in the post-1968 moment, Francesco Zuddas recounts a set of spatial responses to the popular discontent that had crested by way of academia onto Italy’s national sociopolitical scene.

By

Bader AlBader

The Role of Forgetting in the Liberal World Order

Bevins’s "Jakarta Method" shows that the conception of a hesitant, cautious liberalism on the global stage itself depends on a selective geopolitical amnesia. Only by forgetting the savagery through which American-led globalization occurred can the order it built come to seem natural or just.

By

Sammy Feldblum

The Sense of Brown, review by Moon Charania

Sense of Brown is more than a sketch of brownness as an ontology of relations; it is an opportunity to sit inside Muñoz’s writing and thinking space, an almost wistful feeling of being in his thoughts as they formed, as they firmed. Reading Muñoz’s essays invokes a meditative feeling, one gets a sense that Muñoz was reflecting on his ideas, the drafty in/coherence of this ensemble reveal the essay as process.

By

Moon Charania

Work Won’t Love You Back, Review by Jared Spears

Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back considers the changing cultural compulsions that surround work as it increasingly makes demands not only on our time, but on our inner lives as well.

By

Jared Spears

Review of The Promise of Infrastructure

In a piece focused on time and its infrastructural entanglements, Zannah Matson examines how the promise of infrastructure structures our relationship to the future, and thinks alongside the unfinished and interrupted forms that infrastructures often take.

By

Zannah Matson

Review of The Deficit Myth

Stephanie Kelton’s "The Deficit Myth" provides an enjoyable and accessible condensation of the emergence of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) over the last twenty years or so, and what it means for the Left’s version of economic populism.

By

Kolson Schlosser

Locating Value, Review by Lauren B Wagner

The chapter authors of Locating Value are wrestling with the disconnect between the abstract and sometimes arbitrary systems that enable exchangeable value and their material-world consequences.

By

Lauren B Wagner

Review of Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism

Arboleda demonstrates an astounding grasp of parallel debates within Marxist theory in particular and great skill at being able to deftly weave them together into a structure that reads remarkably well given its theoretical scope.

By

Angus McNelly