Harvey Blume

Book Review: Timothy Leary and Daniel Ellsberg — Dangerous Men?

March 31, 2010
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By Harvey Blume The major problem with these treatments of Timothy Leary and Daniel Ellsberg is that they portray their main characters as if there was no possible resonance between them, as if they came from different eras. The Harvard Psychedelic Club, by Don Lattin, HarperOne, 256 pages, $24.99. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel…

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Short Fuse: Robert Stone’s ‘Fun With Problems’

March 9, 2010
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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…

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Short Fuse: The History of Jewish Emancipation

January 7, 2010
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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…

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Short Fuse: The Revelatory Carnival of Andrei Codrescu

November 24, 2009
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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…

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Short Fuse: Homage to a Champagne Communist

October 15, 2009
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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…

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Short Fuse: The Baader Meinhof Gang as Action Film

September 18, 2009
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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…

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Short Fuse: What If(s)?

September 2, 2009
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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…

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Short Fuse: Tarantino’s Nazi-killing Cotton Candy

August 28, 2009
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By Harvey Blume Let me tell you why I heartily dislike and contemn Quentin Tarantino’s “The Inglorious Basterds.”

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Short Fuse: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Applies the Corrective

August 13, 2009
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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…

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Short Fuse: Xiangqi Fever

June 15, 2009
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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…

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