The Poverty of Power: Energy and the Economic Crisis, by Barry Commoner. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 314 pp. Barry Commoner’s book is not merely a comprehensive statement of the environmentalist outlook on the energy crisis; Commoner integrates his description …
Since World War II there has been no significant change in the employment probabilities of both blacks and whites. In both good times and bad, black unemployment rates are approximately twice as high as those of whites. This was true …
The Dying of the Light, by Arnold A. Rogow. New York: G.B. Putnam’s Sons. 384 pp. America is bleak house. Arnold Rogow, a political scientist whose work has always transcended traditional academic divisions of labor and who combines the perspectives …
Albert Speer has an absorbed and patient look as he answers questions about his complicity in Hitler’s war crimes, through hour after hour of Marcel Ophuls’s documentary, The Memory of Justice. “What makes you do this?” Ophuls finally asks. “It …
Is the PCI—Partito Comunista Italiano—”different”? Different from what, should be the immediate response to so general a question. No longer the sectarian party it was at its birth, nor the paragon of popular-front tactics it became in the 1930s, the PCI …
Fur years ago, when he wrote on busing for Dissent, William Taylor cited as evidence for blacks still wanting integration the loud cheers with which an audience of black educators and leaders greeted a statement by Derrick Bell, a black …
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images. . . . T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land In …
Before the organization of industrial unions, skilled workers in America were truly an “aristocracy of labor.” Commanding higher wages and a near-monopoly with their skills, they worked in isolation from the rest of the American work force. Most of the …
There is nothing that can put the Italian crisis into perspective quite like a few weeks in Italy itself, riding the rickety buses, coping with the ineffectual officialdom, bringing fresh linens to neglected patients in state hospitals, eating in desperate …
There are writers with so enticing a style that, in their own behalf, they must stop themselves and ask: “Is what I am saying true? Charming yes, persuasive also; but true?” This has, or should, become a problem for Lillian …
There is a group of citizens in our country who are subjected daily to flagrant denials of their fundamental rights. They are deprived of their liberty without notice, for acts that do not constitute crimes. Such treatment of any other …
This article is reprinted, with the editors’ permission, from the English-language Kibbutz journal Shdemot (issue 4, 1975). A Hebrew version appeared in the early ’70s in the Israeli daily Davar. The author is a senior lecturer in Arabic literature at …
On Jimmy Carter Editors: It seems to me that Mario Soares, speaking from far-off Portugal, showed more understanding about Jimmy Carter and the 1976 elections than those Dissent editors who were wringing their hands and expressing various degrees of distress …
First, let me free myself of certain political constraints in this brief speculation about the Jimmy Carter phenomenon. That done, I think the analysis can be made much more candidly. I intend to vote for Carter and to work as …
In Britain today, Labour ministers carry on the “long revolution” for social justice in the face of a downward economic spiral. The British Labour party unites evangelical, workingclass sentiment (“The Red Flag Holds the People’s Blood,” delegates sing at every …
