Reviews Archive | Los Angeles Review of Books

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The Gangs of Guatemala
Global organized crime syndicates have descended on a country with an essentially inoperative legal system and an economy in permanent crisis.
Jeffery WebberMay 21, 2014
The Third Korea
John Delury thinks we’ve been misunderstanding North Korea for far too long, and offers Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin’s new edition of The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History as a solution.
John DeluryMay 21, 2014
Privilege, Anxiety, and Life in the Modern Middle East
Joseph DanaMay 18, 2014
History in the Making: Tunisia’s Revolution
Nathaniel GreenbergMay 18, 2014
Porous to the World Around Me: The Writing of Valeria Luiselli
Jeffrey ZuckermanMay 18, 2014
“The Past Is Another Country”: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act
The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a triumph of one vision — one history — of one America over another.
Zach DorfmanMay 17, 2014
- History
Blake Bailey’s Splendid Things
Blake Bailey avoiding the traps of the memoir form.
Nicholas MirielloMay 16, 2014
Expanding Criticality
The Hammer’s Take It Or Leave It investigates the convergence of appropriative tactics with the charge of institutional critique among a generation of radical artists.
May 16, 2014
The Writer, Truth, and Negotiations
Kara KrauzeMay 16, 2014
Everything Can Be a Myth
Paul KincaidMay 16, 2014
Then Again I: On If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table
“I come first, second, and third. Then nothing, then again I; and then all the others.”
May 15, 2014
The Magnificent “Accretion of Random Habits”: On Language, Perception, and the World
Language and culture are intrinsically messy, each mixing the practical with the shambolic.
May 15, 2014
Shoring Against the Ruins
A new biography on Walter Benjamin lays out his major works as part of an evolution of thought.
May 14, 2014
Supremely Frustrating
Justice Stevens says it’s time to change the constitution.
May 13, 2014
Into the Woods: Adulthood and Adultery in Michelle Huneven’s Off Course
Susannah LuthiMay 12, 2014
- Literary Fiction
Irritated Critics
This is and is not the book Ellen Willis fans asked for.
Lisa LevyMay 12, 2014
- Gender & Sexuality
- Music