(University of Chicago Press, 2020), vi + 285 pgs.
They are called the greatest generation. They came of age during the Great Depression and went to fight the Nazis and the Japs in World War II. They were the greatest generation, but it is not just fighting that they were great at.
Just after the D-Day anniversary in 2019, I reviewed another University of Chicago Press book titled
What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, by Mary Louise Roberts. That book proved and meticulously documented, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that U.S. soldiers in World War II were the greatest generation of whoremongers in the history of the American military.
In a career-spanning installment of the journal
BioScience s In Their Own Words oral history series, Missouri Botanical Garden President Emeritus Peter Raven illuminates numerous topics, sharing insights related to the sustainability of human civilization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the importance of science in addressing the world s greatest challenges. Raven, a recent coauthor of A Call to Action: Marshaling Science for Society, highlights the importance of public outreach in overcoming deeply rooted societal problems. Among them, he argues that our present economic system sees natural productivity like every other commodity, as something that grows in proportion with demand. Guess what, says Raven, it doesn t. It s got a real limit. The limit is known as the planet Earth.
In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
When I began writing this column two years ago, I initially restricted myself to discussing only titles that were out of print. But over the past year, as publishers continue to increase their efforts to resurrect lost classics, I’ve begun including pieces about previously neglected books that have been rediscovered and repackaged for a new generation. There are many success stories: the unexpected triumph of the Vintage Classics edition of John Williams’s
Stoner, a book that sold less than two thousand copies when it was first published in 1965 before falling swiftly out of print, but as a reprint went on to become the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2013; or Lucia Berlin’s unforeseen posthumous literary stardom in 2015 after her selected short stories,
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. R. Jamil Jonna is associate editor for communications and production at
Monthly Review. Brett Clark is associate editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah.
The authors thank John Mage, Craig Medlen, and Fred Magdoff for their assistance.
The U.S. economy and society at the start of 2021 is more polarized than it has been at any point since the Civil War. The wealthy are awash in a flood of riches, marked by a booming stock market, while the underlying population exists in a state of relative, and in some cases even absolute, misery and decline. The result is two national economies as perceived, respectively, by the top and the bottom of society: one of prosperity, the other of precariousness. At the level of production, economic stagnation is diminishing the life expectations of the vast majority. At the same time, financializatio