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By Anthony C. Infanti/The Conversation
Talk of tax reform always seems to be in the air.
Last fall, Republicans in Congress hastily pushed through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, hailing it as “historic legislation” and “once-in-a-generation tax reform.”
But that legislation has proved unpopular because it is widely and accurately viewed as tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, with any effort at reform being merely coincidental.
Posted on October 26, 2018
By SIU Press
Monica Berlin’s Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live resides at the turbulent confluence of relentless news cycles and the repeated rending of our interior lives. In Berlin’s poetry, sorrow makes its own landscape – solitary, intimate, forward-looking. Whether we attempt to traverse it or choose to bypass, her poems show us where we live, how we carry on.
Posted on October 24, 2018
By Simon & Schuster
As a young man, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time.
In this remarkable biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historians have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. There has not been a major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. David Blight’s Frederick Douglass affords this important American the distinguished biography he deserves.
Posted on October 22, 2018
By Story Club South Side
Commemorate, commiserate, and celebrate with Story Club South Side!
Join us as we invite spirits living and dead to tell stories and celebrate Dia de los Muertos together!
We will be creating an altar de ofrenda at the show, and our audience is invited to participate by bringing a photo or memento of someone who has passed on. We’ll have art supplies on hand, as well, for those who’d like to make a tribute on the spot.
Posted on October 18, 2018
By Jaclyn/Six Minutes For Me
“A new and used bookshop located on the second floor of the historic Fine Arts Building in downtown Chicago. Open every day!”
Posted on October 15, 2018
By SIU Press
Focusing on the life of ambitious former slave Conway Barbour, Victoria L. Harrison argues that the idea of a black middle class traced its origins to the free black population of the mid-19th century and developed alongside the idea of a white middle class. Although slavery and racism meant that the definition of middle class was not identical for white people and free people of color, they shared similar desires for advancement.
Posted on October 12, 2018
By Barnes & Noble
Political books have seen a 57% sales jump compared to last year.
The data also shows that three states that voted blue in 2016 have trended toward books that are positive to President Trump, while two states that voted red lean toward buying books critical of him.
Meanwhile, the states that were most likely to buy books supporting Trump were: Texas, Florida and North Carolina. The states that were most likely to buy books critical of the president were: New York, California and Massachusetts.
Posted on October 11, 2018
By Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg/Take Care
Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg’s book How to Save a Constitutional Democracy is out from the University of Chicago Press later this month, and will be the basis of a blog symposium on Take Care.
The confirmation process of Brett Kavanaugh has been decried by many for damaging the U.S. Senate’s norms of civility and the U.S. Supreme Court’s nonpartisan reputation. But that process, and in particular the September 27th hearing on allegations of attempted rape by Kavanaugh, has had a much more specific risk to the Court as an independent institution. This risk will cast a disabling shadow on any vote cast by Kavanaugh in a case that yields predictable partisan divisions.
Posted on October 9, 2018
By Lotte Buch Segal/The Conversation
Munir is a Kurdish man in his forties. We met several times in his home, with his family, and in the clinic where he has been for therapy. It took him a long time to open up.
Even though his wife knew that he had received medical assistance to counter the long-term effects of physical torture under Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, she did not know the details of what had been going on in the multiple places of confinement he, as a Kurdish activist, had been detained in Iraq – least of all that he was raped at a local branch of the Mukhabarat, the regime’s infamous intelligence service.
About his time in prison, Munir stated that “I lost everything there; I lost my manhood.” Derivatively, his imprisonment had on more than one occasion resulted in a row in which his wife would wonder about his lack of desire for conjugal intimacy. In this sense both his actual time in the prison and the way in which this moment in time continuously exert pressure on his conjugal relation has turned his imprisonment into a temporal marker of emasculation because of both the rape and the way in which his wife misconceives of him.
Posted on October 4, 2018
