
Professors, Politics and Pop
Reviews
It is frightening to think the [Jon Wiener] teaches history at a university ...
Wiener takes the modern university as his beat, and covers it like a police reporter ... Wiener’s mean streets are the think tank, the scholarly symposium, and the faculty lounge. And when he’s had enough of this academic low life, he listens to Elvis, Springsteen and the Beatles. He even listens to Frank Sinatra.
In this book, Jon Wiener demonstrates his great skill as guerrilla sharpshooter in the forty-year war that the National Security State has been conducting against the American people. These reports from the field—the resistance—illuminate Nixon and Watergate as never before, reveal in fascinating detail the turbulence within Academe, invoke pity if not awe for that unexpected victim of state, Frank Sinatra.
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Wiener is good at spotting, and blasting, paranoid fantasy and incompetence in high (and low) places and his range of targets is impressively wide ... [his] surveys are lucid, trenchant and brief.
Observer
Verso suggests
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An Orchestra Beyond Borders: Voices of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
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Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France
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Five Lessons on Wagner
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Secular Devotion: Afro-latin Music and Imperial Jazz
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The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel
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Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?