Rogue States

by Noam Chomsky Presented with a massive sale on a large number of Noam Chomsky books, I recently found myself the proud owner of about a billion of them, so expect them to crop up in my reviews periodically, at least for the foreseeable future. (It was kind of hard to decide which of his…
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The Golden Boy

by Grant Matheson The Golden Boy is Matheson’s memoir about his personal experience with narcotic and alcohol addiction. It starts by relating the beginnings of the illness taking shape in the early 2000s, when he was a physician practising in Charlottetown, and how his life spiralled out of control as he sank deeper and deeper…
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The Pigeon Wars of Damascus

by Marius Kociejowski I made a mistake with this one––not a disastrous mistake, mind you, though it sure felt like it at first. You see, The Pigeon Wars of Damascus is Kociejowski’s follow up to his earlier work, The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool, a book which I have yet to read. I didn’t,…
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We Owe You Nothing

edited by Daniel Sinker We Owe You Nothing is a collection of select interviews from Punk Planet magazine from the late ’90s and early noughties. Most of the interviewees are musicians from punk bands, but also people from the ’biz side––people running record labels or distribution networks––as well as individuals and groups involved in politics…
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The Iran-Iraq War

by Pierre Razoux The Iran-Iraq War is an in-depth exploration of the terrible conflict that wracked the Middle East through most of the ’80s. Razoux starts us off by thrusting us into the heated political climate in the region immediately before the war broke out, moves into the initial, largely ineffectual military campaigns, and then…
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Iraq Under Siege

edited by Anthony Arnove Iraq Under Siege is a collection of articles, essays, and interview transcripts documenting the deleterious effects of UN-imposed, US- and UK-backed economic sanctions placed on Iraq through the entirety of the ’90s. Written pre-9/11, the pieces portray the widespread suffering that befell the average Iraqi during the period while leaving members…
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On Killing

by Dave Grossman I honestly don’t remember where I first heard about On Killing, but it sure intrigued me at the time. Grossman’s book is about the conditioning employed by modern militaries in order to persuade reluctant soldiers into effectively killing, the emotional and psychiatric toll killing has on soldiers, and––I didn’t realize this, then––how…
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In Search of a Better World

by Payam Akhavan Akhavan was an Iranian immigrant to Canada in the late ’70s, and part of the religious minority that was soon to face the brunt of the hate and violence to come from the radical Iranian government that took charge after the revolution. He became a successful lawyer within the International Criminal Court…
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The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell The Room is a bad movie, but it’s more than that. It’s a special kind of bad, an elite kind of bad, described as a modern Plan 9 from Outer Space or the Citizen Kane of bad movies––the kind of bad movie with a lasting legacy. The Disaster Artist…
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Child of the Dark

by Carolina Maria de Jesus Child of the Dark is the diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, who lived in a favela, a slum, of São Paulo in the late ’50s. (Well, longer than that in truth, but this is at least the period recounted within these pages.) With only a second-grade education, she sold…
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