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 [...]

James Toback’s new documentary about boxer Mike Tyson explores a demonic urgency that fattens on the destruction of others.
By Harvey Blume
At the end of “Tyson,” James Toback’s documentary about him, the ex-heavyweight champ, now 43 years old, breathes heavily and falls silent. He seems talked out, and is certainly, by his own admission, punched out. [...]

By Harvey Blume
Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme have become symbols of fraud, greed and dull-witted naiveté, of lax oversight, slobbering credulity, and rank criminality — the whole slew of failings and circumstances that have beggared Wall St. and deflated the global economy. Damien Hirst is less known.

He’s no billionaire swindler, merely a [...]

By Harvey Blume

The Economy Cometh
Niall Ferguson, “The Ascent of Money,” Penguin Press, 2008
It’s way past time to utter the dread G word about the economy, the G word being “Godzilla.” The economy as we now experience it, is like the monster in the 1998 American remake: it rises from unfathomable depths [...]

By Harvey Blume
“The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America,” Riverhead Books. $25.95.

Steven Johnson’s new book is as dull and dispiriting as much of his previous work has been eye-opening and exhilarating. In the past, even if Johnson’s conclusions were questionable — as with the high praise [...]

“White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chess Board”
By Daniel Johnson.
Houghton Miffilin, 384 pages, $26
Reviewed by Harvey Blume

The book’s thesis about the Cold War is that chess was nothing less than sublimated war between the US and the USSR.
For something that is neither war, per se, [...]

By Harvey Blume
“Dreaming up America”
By Russell Banks
Seven Stories Press,
176 pages, $21.95
This book of essays by novelist and short story writer Russell Banks was published before our country’s financial crisis reached the acute stage from which it may or may not be recovering, or the author would surely have voiced bracing opinions and commentaries veering toward [...]

By Harvey Blume
Whether you are seriously hooked on chess or casually intrigued by it, you probably think of the tables in Cambridge’s Holyoke Center as the Boston area’s one big outdoor chess venue. That’s, after all, where the Chess Master sets out his board a few tables down from his counterpart, the redoubtable Chess Mister. [...]

By Harvey Blume
Though it does not originate in the Kuiper Belt, the Beijing summer Olympics (8/8/08-8/24/08) is bearing down upon us like an outsized asteroid, bringing China out of feudal/communist distance into full twenty-first century relief. Sports, at this point, remain secondary:before we get to ping-pong, swimming, the shot-put and gymnastics, Americans have unprecedented [...]

by Harvey Blume
Marcel Duchamp famously tweaked art for being inferior to chess, saying: “From my close contact with artists and chess players I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” Duchamp backed this opinion up by abandoning art for years [...]