Matthew Lau is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and an associate professor of English at Queensborough Community College, CUNY. He is the author of Sounds Like Helicopters: Classical Music in Modernist Cinema.
Louis Menand’s new history of Cold War art and thought The Free World wants to rehabilitate liberal anti-communism. To do so, it downplays both the political repression of the US left and imperial America’s genocide against its Third World political opponents.
It’s the fortieth anniversary of Apocalypse Now’s voyeuristic adventure to the dark side of human nature. But the real victims of the Vietnam War are forgotten in its cheap thrills.
Fifteen years after his death, Stephen Jay Gould’s ideas have never been more vital.