Book Reviews

The Taboo Truths of the Conspiracy Minded
Reviewed by Michelle Goldberg

Stephen J. Sniegoski’s The Transparent Cabal is a disturbing and revealing book, though not for the reasons the author intends. Sniegoski aims to show that U.S. neoconservatives masterminded the Iraq war in the service of Israeli hegemony, a proposition that has plenty of truth to it. In doing so, though, he veers back and forth over the often-fuzzy line separating harsh but legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism from paranoid conspiracy mongering. His book is an almost textbook illustration of the way far Left anti-Zionism and far Right antisemitism can bend towards each other and begin to overlap...

A Longtime Anti-Racism Activist’s Take on History
Reviewed by Loretta J. Ross

It is so irritating to watch Pat Buchanan on MSNBC. There he was on Morning Joe, blaming the financial crisis on banks lending to people of color. His makeover as a respectable “conservative” pundit – conveniently forgetting his racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic slippages – is a testament to the power of the mainstream media to shape a Wonderland world Alice would have recognized...