Short Fuse
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…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreCounterfactual 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…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume Let me tell you why I heartily dislike and contemn Quentin Tarantino’s “The Inglorious Basterds.”
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreJames 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,…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy 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 before…
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