From HNN, a poll find 61% of historians rate the Bush presidency as the worst ever. From the latest issue of Logos, Dick Howard on American democracy after Bush; a review of books on the Bush presidency; a review of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges; a review of Are Americans Becoming More Peaceful? by Paul Joseph; a review of Frances Fox Piven's Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America; an essay on celebrating novelist Alberto Moravia at 100; an article on sixty years of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus; creative genius or crazy scientist? paranoid or persecuted? An essay commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Wilhelm Reich; Janos Kelemen writes in defense of The Destruction of Reason by Georg Lukacs; and how would Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit be relevant today? by Frank M. Kirkland. Tim Griffin reviews Cole Swensen’s Ours. From New Scientist, a look at why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable; and will a pandemic bring down civilisation? A case of the blues: Congressional Republicans have lost ground on every possible front — can Tom Cole turn things around? From Vanity Fair, the Bush administration lawyers who pushed for extreme interrogation techniques at Guantanamo could be charged with war crimes; Philippe Sands follows the torture trail.
