notanotherbookreview

 The Playground NY/LA , Barefoot Theatre Company & Pontifex Productions presents ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST by Dale Wasserman, based on the novel by KEN KESEY. Directed by Francisco Solorzano (April 30th-May17th, 2026)      During the Vietnam War era, the politics surrounding ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO's NEST , the novel, were volatile. "Counterculture" was not a "trend" in a time, when the nightly news showed the ritual of body bags being unloaded from planes for burial. Thousands of young men were dying in what was increasingly viewed as a brutal lost cause, a superpower game. Canada was the destination for an underground railroad of young men fleeing the war; whether students with high numbers in the lottery, or soldiers in the U.S. After the Kent State shooting of peaceful student protestors, a photo of a young woman placing a flower inside a gun barrel, was famous, as "They Shoot Students Don't They" marathon dances on campuses rais...

Connor Martin's debut novel , THE SILVER FISH, is an espionage fiction, where the personal and the political are intertwined in ways unanticipated. Unlike Le Carre's  Smiley's People (1979), where the British, U.S., and Russian networks and operatives seem clearly delineated,  THE SILVER FISH  layers the complexity of players and objectives into the implacable business of international corporations and governments. Human beings, local "foot soldiers" with ambiguous ambitions, are expendable and always in flux, amid competing and mutable goals  A prelude to this new world disorder might be the apocryphal story about Putin rumbling around the Kremlin "basement" during his Covid lock-down. Pondering the scattered legacy of Catharine the Great's Empire, he vowed to regain the lost territories of that empire. If true, did Putin's machinations intersect with Trump's debt to him?  (After multiple bankruptcies in the 1980s, Trump did visit Russia in ...

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS beautifully resurrects "Both an extraordinary 1930s text on anarchism in its original sense of liberatory principles of equality and mutual support, and short chapters with all age-appropriate illustrations and explanations of each principle. This book is certainly for progressive parents and their children."   “Help: To those who hesitate, give them encouragement: to those who despair of seeing victory far away, give them courage. Mutual help is a sacred and universal duty.” "Anarchy is a political and social state characterized by the absence of government, hierarchy, or enforced authority. It emphasizes voluntary cooperation, individual autonomy, and mutual aid rather than coercive rule. While often associated with chaos, proponents see it as a self-organized, free society."--wikipedia What is Anarchy? In my education,  Anarchy w as a political philosophy for crazy people, like the Russian who infamously rolled marbles across a stage during ...

The back cover of  The Beginning Comes After the End:  Notes on a world of change calls it   a sequel to  Hope In The Dark.  That book relates the historical moment in 1955, w hen Grace Lee Boggs ushered in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That event, says Solnit, began the era of progressive social change. Now it may seem eclipsed in a distant past.. What we may not realize in our present world's incessant "newness" is the ageless persistence of social values--old ways and wisdoms. In our rising world view,  interconnection is a core value. Solnit shows how underlying transformations are often obscured by a longer arc of history. The scale of what's underlying is seldom recognized. Yet these currents shape destiny.  In Rebecca Solnit’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a world of change, there is plenty of evidence for a long view of political change. Though in our current period of backlash, after decades of progressive change, ...

Bamboo Dart Press consistently delivers the unexpected and brilliant in form and content. Of these delectable slender volumes by Peter Wortsman, the editors explain, "The poems are condensed and diverse, reflecting the mind of a poet and collage artist. Paintings, also created by the author, are interspersed among the poems."  For the first time, these books are offered internationally. Sets of four or two are available."Bamboo Dart Press explains the latest book in the series.   What We Leave Behind , Peter Wortsman’s fourth book of cut-ups, he lets the words run wild, in some cases, as in French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s  Calligrames  (1918), letting words break ranks and dance on the page; in other cases, coupling word and image; and finally, succumbing to the lure of the visual in collages in which words play a subordinate role or disappear altogether. If, as this book’s first poem maintains, “we know each other from what we leave behind,” Wortsman write...

“Censorship had raised gossip to the level of official communication.” 1933: The Year the Nazis Seized Power" by Philip Metcafe.0\--  The Gossip Columnist, Sunday, April 22 , 1945    It's been a strange experience, reading this book at this time in the United States. It's arrived as democracy is under daily assault in Congress and the streets of our cities. Processes similar to those used by the Nazis have been echoed in our news headlines, attacks on our institutions, including press repression. I asked Martyn Burke , author of the new novel, THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST (1/27/26 DarkSpur Press), the following question:          Q. What is there from your own experience that you brought into the story of The Gossip Columnist? A. "In totalitarian societies I’ve seen the terror and the crushing of moral guidelines, and always there is the question you ask yourself: “How did it get to this?” I spent a lot of time researching the step-by-step descent o...