American author Robert Stone is attuned to the havoc latent in masculine pride and to the hostility likely to break out for no particular reason between males of our species.
Fun With Problems: Stories by Robert Stone, Hougton Mifflin Harcourt, 195 pages, $24
Reviewed by Harvey Blume
Though one of our prose masters, Robert Stone is less acknowledged [...]

An engaging book from a London-based journalist that sets out to illuminate a challenging slice of Jewish history.
“Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance” by Michael Goldfarb, Simon and Schuster, 408 pages, $30.00.
Reviewed by Harvey Blume
Michael Goldfarb is an American-born, London-based contributor to NPR (as well as to THE [...]

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu, Princeton University Press, 248 pages, $16.95.
Reviewed by Harvey Blume
In 1916, as Europe waged an horrific war that, nearly a century later, makes even less sense, if possible, than it did at the time, refugees, renegades, draft dodgers, opportunists, revolutionaries and artists massed in [...]

When discussing Friedrich Engels’s lament for lobster salad, Tristram Hunt dubs him “the original champagne communist,” but his biography is far from a damning portrayal.
Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt. Henry Holt & Company, Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $32.
Reviewed by Harvey Blume
Among the most memorable words Karl Marx ever wrote [...]

By Harvey Blume
The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) Directed by Uli Edel
At Kendall Square and Coolidge Corner Cinemas
There are some things the German Red Army Faction — the RAF, or Baader Meinhof Gang — had in common with ultra-militant elements of the American New Left, as I knew and participated in it in [...]

Counterfactual thinking came to my mind while watching a documentary about the Kennedy clan that ran on public television after Ted Kennedy died.

By Harvey Blume
When Niall Ferguson is not slugging it out with Paul Krugman about whether deficit spending by the Obama administration will wreck the economy, as he swears it will, or rescue [...]

By Harvey Blume
Let me tell you why I heartily dislike and contemn Quentin Tarantino’s “The Inglorious Basterds.”
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By Harvey Blume
In an interview I did with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1997 (for the now defunct “Boston Book Review”), we talked, naturally enough, about the issue of race in America, and about Gates’s sense of mission, as scholar and writer, in relationship to it. One thing in particular that he said sheds [...]

By Bill Marx
I am juggling editing and writing duties between two blogs, theartsfuse and World Books for the website of BBC/PRI’s radio program The World, which is produced at WGBH in Boston. The section aims to be a critical conversation made up of reviews, commentaries, interviews, podcasts, and news stories about international literature. Respected [...]

By Harvey Blume
To play Xiangqi (Chinese chess) as earnestly as I have been lately is to revisit a familiar situation, one in which I am at the gateway of another culture, hungry for the experience, but positioned as a junior. That was the case with African drumming and with neurological difference, for example, especially Asperger’s [...]