Author Archive

Articles by Jordan Michael Smith | Email the Author

 

1. Critical Eye

   When McGovern met Mailer

   October 26, 2012 06:50 AM

   When former U.S. Senator George McGovern died in late October, he was valorized as the rare decent man working in a business of crooks, liars, and frauds. But this wasn’t just the usual whitewashing process that accompanies eulogies... Continue reading

2. Critical Eye

   How the US captured the real 9/11 mastermind

   June 29, 2012 06:50 AM

   The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | By Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer | Little, Brown and Company | 368 pages, $27.99 Terry McDermott’s Perfect Soldiers, released in 2005,... Continue reading

3. Critical Eye

   America’s forgotten war

   June 27, 2012 06:50 AM

   The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812 | By Troy Bickham | Oxford University Press | 325 pages, $34.95 If any large-scale war in American history has been forgotten, it is the... Continue reading

4. Critical Eye

   What it takes to win the White House

   May 14, 2012 03:00 PM

   The Candidate: What It Takes to Win—And Hold—The White House | By Samuel L. Popkin | Oxford University Press | 350 pages, $27.95 Academic political science and Washington policymaking once had a close relationship: during the Franklin Roosevelt and... Continue reading

5. Critical Eye

   Revisiting Henry Luce’s “American Century”

   February 29, 2012 01:46 PM

   The Short American Century: A Postmortem | Edited by Andrew J. Bacevich | Harvard University Press | 296 pages, $25.95 In 1904, Canadian prime minister Wilfred Wilfrid Laurier declared that “The 20th Century Will Be the Century of Canada.”* In... Continue reading

6. Critical Eye

   The Literary Roots of the Gay Revolution

   February 2, 2012 03:48 PM

   Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America | By Christopher Bram | Twelve Books | 371 pages, $27.99 In April of 2011, the pollster Nate Silver of The New York Times observed that four polls in eight... Continue reading

7. Critical Eye

   Tracing the Roots of Modern Conservatism

   September 14, 2011 12:09 PM

   The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party | By Michael Bowen | University of North Carolina Press | 272 pp, $45.00. The origins of the modern conservative movement are ostensibly... Continue reading

8. Critical Eye

   Searching for D.B. Cooper

   August 10, 2011 02:22 PM

   Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper| By Geoffrey Gray | Crown | 302 pages, $25.00 In the winter of 1971, a man calling himself Dan (misreported as D.B.) Cooper used a bomb to hijack a 727 boarding from Portland, Oregon,... Continue reading

9. Review

   Critical Condition

   February 25, 2010 03:33 PM

   Christopher Hayes is a European-style social democrat, who worked at the left-leaning In These Times before assuming his current job at the equally left-leaning Nation. Not too many decades ago, this exemplary progressive would likely have reviewed books for... Continue reading

10. Behind the News

    Contra Iran

    November 4, 2009 09:22 AM

    Thirty years ago today, Iranian students invaded the United States embassy in Tehran and captured seventy-one American diplomats, keeping fifty-three of them hostage for 444 days. The Iranian hostage crisis, as it came to be known, was a watershed moment... Continue reading

11. Behind the News

    Stenography Machines

    August 25, 2009 08:00 AM

    In a much-discussed Washington Post essay last week--“In America, Crazy is a Preexisting Condition”--the liberal historian Rick Perlstein argued that the mobs disrupting town hall meetings around the country are heirs to a long, if not proud, tradition... Continue reading