Books
Boston Review Books are accessible, short books that take ideas seriously. They are animated by hope, committed to equality, and elude political categories. The editors aim to establish a public space in which people can loosen the hold of conventional preconceptions and start to reason together across the lines others are so busily drawing. The series is published by MIT Press.
Race, Incarceration, and American Values
Glenn C. Loury
Cloth / September 2008
“Loury's claims are well-supported with genuinely shocking statistics . . . the slim volume keeps up the pace of the argument without being overwhelming.” — Publishers Weekly
Economist Glenn Loury argues that the United States' extraordinarily high incarceration rate is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy, but the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Our system, Loury argues, should be unacceptable to Americans, and his call to action makes all of us responsible for ensuring that it changes.
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The Men in My life
Vivian Gornick
Cloth / September 2008
“Gornick is a vigorous and sophisticated thinker. . . . [The Men in My Life] illustrates how magnificent the literary yield of human frailty can be. . . . [An] excellent collection.” — Anne Garner, Library Journal
In the acclaimed The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Vivian Gornick took on literature’s problematic love affair with love itself. Here she turns her attention to the other large subject of great literature: the struggle for inner freedom. Gornick, a major figure of second-wave feminism, found particular inspiration for this struggle in the work of male writers, from H. G. Wells and Randall Jarrell to V. S. Naipual, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Roth. From these talented men—who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women had known, but suffered endlessly from the ravages of angry self-doubt—Gornick learned what it really means to make art while wrestling with one’s inner demons.
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Why Nuclear Disarmament Matters
Hans Blix
Cloth / April 2008
“It's the least daunting and most accessible book on the subject I've ever seen.” — Diane Rehm, host of NPR's Diane Rehm Show
In 2002 Dr. Hans Blix, then chief United Nations weapons inspector, lead his team on a search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Before the United States went to war with Iraq the next March, he maintained there were no WMD in Iraq. History proved him right. Why Nuclear Disarmament Matters includes specific suggestions–how the UN can set the stage for a credible multilateral disarmament and nonproliferation process; what kind of treaties would be most helpful–and recommendations for regional policy, including providing the Middle East with enriched uranium for civilian nuclear power production but not allowing uranium enrichment there.
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The Road to Democracy in Iran
Akbar Ganji
Foreword by Joshua Cohen and Abbas Milani
Cloth / April 2008
The Road to Democracy in Iran, Ganji's first book in English, demonstrates his lifelong commitment to human rights and democracy. A passionate call for universal human rights and the right to democracy from a Muslim perspective, it lays out the goals and means of Iran's democracy movement, why women's rights trump some interpretations of Islamic law, and how the West can help promote democracy in Iran (he strongly opposes U.S. intervention) and other Islamic countries.
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Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life
Alan A. Stone
Foreword by Joshua Cohen
Cloth, 2007
“This brilliant book is like that ideal conversation after a movie. Few critics have Alan Stone's moral, psychological, and spiritual subtlety, or even his patience and scope. With his psychologist's eye for complex elemental human relationships, Stone is an inspired guide through the American and foreign film world. I wanted to watch, or watch again, every movie in this book.”
— Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University
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What We Know About Climate Change
Kerry Emanuel
Afterword by Judith A. Layzer and William R. Moomaw
Cloth / September 2007
“Emanuel's words are measured and authoritative. His book should help reduce the huge gap between what is understood by the scientific community and what is known by the people who need to know, the public and policymakers.”
— James Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
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Making Aid Work
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee
With Alice H. Amsden, Robert H. Bates, Jagdish Bhagwati, Angus Deaton, and Nicholas Stern
Cloth / April 2007
In Making Aid Work, Abhijit Banerjee “aid optimist” argues that aid has much to contribute, but the lack of analysis about which programs really work causes considerable waste and inefficiency, which in turn fuels unwarranted pessimism about the role of aid in fostering economic development.
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The Story of Cruel and Unusual
Colin Dayan
Foreword by Jeremy Waldron
Cloth / April 2007
“[Dayan] builds her argument around one basic principle: that in a society of laws, we frame cruelty in terms of intent. Thus, she writes, we always have a loophole; it's not what we do but what we mean.... With [the] implicit sense that cruel and unusual punishment is an ever-shifting standard, it can't help but raise compelling questions, forcing us to reconsider our founding documents and what they say about us.”
— David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
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God and the Welfare State
Lew Daly
Foreword by James Carroll
Cloth / October 2006
“As the Religious Right speaks with denunciatory dogma and grows all the more shrill and the Religious Left whispers feebly back, Lew Daly offers a fresh and original way to think about democracy, politics, and religion when thinking has just about disappeared from the discourse. Pay attention: there is hope here.”
— Bill Moyers
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The End of the Wild
Stephen M. Meyer
Cloth / September 2006
“One of these terrifyingly clear little books.”
— Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“In just 97 quarto-sized pages, Meyer offers a more powerful and convincing dissection of the human predicament in relation to biodiversity than most full-length academic books.”
— Mike Hulme, Times Higher Education Supplement
“Meyer blends factual evidence with expressive prowess in such a way that his ideas cannot fail to make an impression. He offers enlightening illustrations and presents his argument with extraordinary clarity.”
— Rebecca S. Bundhun, New Statesman
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