Sunday, December 17, 2006

Bookforum

The Dec/Jan 2007 issue is now out. Free online content includes "Fathers and Son: W.G. Sebald" by Mark M Anderson, and "Jesus' Sun" Ben Ratliff's review of The Wisdon of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets compiled and introduced by John Corbett. There is also a long review of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's book Why Arendt Matters, by Sarah Kerr :
"In her later work, Arendt continued to surprise. Jonathan Schell relates in a new introduction to On Revolution how much Arendt was inspired to hope again by the example of the quashed 1956 Hungarian uprising. Here, once more, she went against the grain, finding possibility in what had seemed, politically speaking, an obvious cause for despair. But the democratic turn in the late 1980s of societies from the Philippines to South Africa, Poland, Chile, and Czechoslovakia seemed to bear out her prescience about the kind of affirmative, spontaneously arising power of self-organizing citizens that might be tyranny's Achilles' heel."

www.bookforum.com