1 comments about From Border Crossings to Campaign Trail: Chronicle of a Latina in Politics.

1. Emma Sepulveda emigrated to the United States from Chile in 1974, a young college student who had supported President Salvadore Allende and thus was in some degree of peril following the coup that left Allende dead. She learned English, became a U.S. citizen, eventually earned a Ph.D. in Spanish language and literature, won prizes in photography, poetry and for literary criticism, and became extremely involved in community activism to improve the lot of Latinos in her adopted city of Reno, Nevada. She also traveled back to Chile to help Las Arpilleristas, the mothers and wives of those who "disappeared" under the Gen. Pinochet reign of terror and who were trying to locate the whereabouts (or remains) of their loved ones. These women made tapestries to both publicize and raise money for their cause. Sepulveda helped make a documentary about these women, and it won a Peabody Award.

   Twenty years after she arrived in the United States, Sepulveda ran for the state senate from her local district. In a grass-roots, pavement-pounding, door-knocking campaign, she got first-hand glimpses into not only the lives of recent immigrants but others among our society's disenfranchised: children and senior citizens in poverty, single mothers and divorcees working low-paid jobs. Her encounters with disaffected gun nuts and others are a bath of cold water, although a measure of humor is included. Sepulveda visited the halls of power not only in Nevada but in Washington, D.C., to raise money for her campaign against a well-heeled, white Republican male, Nevada political insider. The reader may end up feeling as if he or she has run a political campaign.

   Sepulveda's blow-by-blow account of her campaign - dirty campaign tactics and all (including phoned death threats) - is a captivating chronicle of present American society and our democratic election process. It also spins a compelling tale of an immigrant's journey (early chapters describe life in Argentina and Chile and the Allende saga), and paints a portrait of the slowly emerging clout of Latinos in our country.

No comments about Adventures in Criminology.

No comments about Foreign Adventures.

No comments about Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends: Incomplete Theory and Complete Bibliography of Irving Louis Horowitz.

No comments about The House on Palmer Street.

No comments about Stealing the Borders.

No comments about Max Weber and the Dispute over Reason and Value: A Study in Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics (International Library of Sociology).

No comments about C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical and His American Intellectual Roots.

2 comments about Adorno: A Political Biography.

1. Jaeger's book ends with the claim that "by the time that Adorno died in August 1969, the normative potential of his theory was already exhausted," and that "the abstractions of exchange and money [had become] the ideology of a world without symbols, of a universality without culture." There is no recognition that this would imply the continuing 'normative potential' of Adorno's thought. This book is littered with similar mis-steps. Jaeger attacks Adorno's use of psychoanalysis as a critical tool, hut he himself traces Adorno's theory of the relationship between language and music to "an overwhelming sense of gratitude to his mother's voice." How could anyone write a biography on Adorno which fails to reflect on itself to this degree?
   Internal inconsistencies aside, there are problems of content. For no apparent reason, Jaeger stages Adorno's thinking as a clash between Athens and Jerusalem (although the entirely gratuitous mention of Leo Strauss might hint at an esoteric reading of the present book). Jaeger returns again and again to Jewishness, but always other peoples' Jewishness: Horkheimer, Celan... why all this in a book on Adorno? Well, Jaeger has a clear dislike for him. So Adorno - not Jewish enough, too anti-capitalist, too utopian - is often absent. This dislike is in turn understandable, since he is clearly incapable of understanding Adorno's ideas: see, for instance, the section on Heidegger and 'The Jargon of Authenticity'; or Jaeger's 'interpretation' of the Frankfurt School's sociology as a vision of society as "a kind of tabula rasa: people in it live without traditions, without religion, without nations and without a state." Bizarrely, two pages are given over to Ralf Dahrendorf's complaints about the Institute for Social Research, before we learn that Dahrendorf spent barely a month there.
   "Today's reader [of Minima Morali] may be struck not only by the lack of genuine observations on America but may gain only an inadequate idea of the author's empirical existence [sic]: but if Adorno had been identical with the 'implied author' he would no doubt have been prevented from writing the book by sheer unhappiness."
   Like the above sentence, this book is grammatically flawed, rhetorically atrocious (what exactly is a 'genuine observation'? Is it to be distinguished from an ungenuine one?), and showcases a total lack of understanding of its subject. Finally, it is self-absorbed. Jaeger's apparent desire to justify post-modern capitalism crushes any possibility of objective judgement.
   For all that, if read as a collection of portraits (of, amongst others, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Mann and Fromm) it's a nice way to pass a winter afternoon. But don't pay full price.



2. Although an authoritative intellectual biography of Adorno is needed, this book doesn't fill the gap. Despite the sub-title, the author ranges freely across Adorno's work in philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, music and literature, and just over two hundred pages (of main text) is not enough space to deal adequately with the material, let alone with the additional portraits of associates such as Horkheimer and Kracauer. Some of Adorno's major works, such as Negative Dialectics, receive cursory treatment, and either the author, or possibly the translator, is not comfortable with technical philosophical arguments. Some discussions of Heidegger's views, for example, are nonsensical.
   
   This has the appearance of a hasty piece of work, and as one reads on, the impression grows that the author has little respect for his subject. As a person and thinker, Adorno was surely flawed, but his story deserves a more balanced, detailed and informed recounting.

No comments about Karl Mannheim (Key Sociologists).