Political Media Review

The gradual creep of the gay liberation movement toward assimilation dates back to the mid-1970’s. Yet, so does the critique of the process. Debate about the limitations of a gay agenda organized around marriage, military service and increasingly punitive hate crimes laws dominated the SexPanic! meetings in the late 1990’s in New York.

Tim Wise opens his compelling and formidable book with words from Barack Obama’s famous 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention: “There’s not a black America, and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

Anyone looking to educate themselves on the history and principles of anarchism should look no further for a starting place than the books in AK Press’s Working Classics series. The series as a whole represents some of the finest writings on anarchist theory and practice ever published

Rhetoric for Radicals is about organizing, activism, and radicalism; in short, it’s a comprehensive text for changing the world. This book approaches activism as a rhetorical labor and argues in a concise, yet substantive, five chapters that effective radicalism must involve sound rhetorical practice.

With the publication of Mad Bomber Melville, Leslie James Pickering has done a great service for those who—as he puts it—“can take inspiration from someone who was far from perfect but never gave up the struggle” (133). Pickering’s biography of Sam Melville does not seek to idolize its subject but is an honest effort to preserve an important history which holds challenging lessons for present day readers.

In the relatively rare moments when I happen to think about the state of sociology and what it could mean for ongoing social movements, I find it generally depressing.

“What do you read for fun” is indubitably one of those questions for which answers are reserved for fiction writing, Garfield and celebrity gossip magazines. Fun. Harmless a word, though loaded with assumptions.