By John Broich/The Conversation

A week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 is the best-selling book on Amazon.
The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.
Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in domestic control.

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Posted on January 30, 2017

By SIU Press

“In this stunning poetry debut, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. Queer and light-skinned, with a Black mother from Morocco and a white father from the United States, Shanahan’s speaker navigates the constructs of race and gender, through the lenses of colonialism and immigration, exposing, with nuance and complexity, the instability of those constructs and emphasizing the divisiveness inherent in the naming of any one thing.
“With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zurich to London, and through history to the present day, this book is, on its surface, an unrelenting exploration of identity in personal and collective terms. Yet the collection is, most deeply, about intimacy and love, the inevitability of human separation and the challenge of human connection. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.”

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Posted on January 20, 2017

By Steve Rhodes

I hate the cliche of starting a story with a dictionary definition, but in this case I’m going to do it because “scathing” is the Word of the Moment:

scath·ing
ˈskāT͟HiNG/
Adjective.
Witheringly scornful; severely critical.
“She launched a scathing attack on the governor.”
Synonyms: devastating, extremely critical, blistering, searing, withering, scorching, fierce, ferocious, savage, severe, stinging, biting, cutting, mordant, trenchant, virulent, caustic, vitriolic, scornful, sharp, bitter, harsh, unsparing; raremordacious.

Oh please let’s start using raremordacious, I’m begging you all!
And why are we honoring this word today? Because it is the adjective used so abundantly in describing the Department of Justice’s “pattern and practice” report on the Chicago Police Department. To wit:

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Posted on January 18, 2017

Many of American journalism’s best-known and most cherished stories are exaggerated, dubious, or apocryphal. They are media-driven myths, and they attribute to the news media and their practitioners far more power and influence than they truly exert.
In Getting It Wrong, writer and scholar W. Joseph Campbell confronts and dismantles prominent media-driven myths, describing how they can feed stereotypes, distort understanding about the news media, and deflect blame from policymakers.
Campbell debunks the notions that the Washington Post’s Watergate reporting brought down Richard M. Nixon’s corrupt presidency; that Walter Cronkite’s characterization of the Vietnam War in 1968 shifted public opinion against the conflict; and that William Randolph Hearst vowed to “furnish the war” against Spain in 1898.
This expanded second edition includes a new preface and new chapters about the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, the haunting Napalm Girl photograph of the Vietnam War, and bogus quotations driven by the Internet and social media.

Posted on January 9, 2017

By W David McCausland/The Conversation

An interesting new book on how to improve the Scottish economy has a twist between its covers: it isn’t really about economics and the story it tells is not particularly unique to Scotland.
Tackling Timorous Economics is more about how the political and economic system in developed economies has become broken and how we might fix it. It should therefore be of interest well beyond Scotland’s borders. And it will challenge you to reflect on your own views on big issues like inequality and economic policy.

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Posted on January 6, 2017

By SIU Press

With the election of our first black president, many Americans began to argue that we had finally ended racism, claiming that we now live in a postracial era.
Yet near-daily news reports regularly invoke white as a demographic category and recount instances of racialized violence as well as an increased sensitivity to expressions of racial unrest.
Clearly, American society isn’t as color-blind as people would like to believe.
In Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education, contributors reveal how identifications with racialized whiteness continue to manifest themselves in American culture.

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Posted on January 5, 2017