Commentary, reviews and other supporting material.


University of California Press site for "America's Top Pundits"

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Dangerous Pundits

Samuel Huntington
Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations
Thomas Friedman
Dinesh D'Souza
Robert D. Kaplan
Richard Herrnstein
Charles Murray
Randy Thornhill
Craig Palmer

Other critiques of dangerous pundits

Anthony Marx on Samuel Huntington

Robert Kagan on Robert Kaplan

Cheryl Brown Travis on Thornhill and Palmer

People For the American Way on Dinesh D'Souza

American Anthropological Association Public Anthropology Site

Matt Taibbi reviews Thomas Friedman

Norma Solomon reviews Thomas Friedman

David Corn discusses Thomas Friedman and other Neo-cons

New York Review of Books on Thomas Friedman


Resources for Teaching with Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong

Discuss teaching with Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong


Suggested Further Readings

Excerpts from Huntington and his critics:

Jonathan Benthall. 2002. "Imagined Civilizations?" In Anthropology Today 18(6) pp.1-2.

Samuel Huntington. 1993. The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs 72 (3), pp.22-49.

Samuel Huntington, 1996. "The West, Civilizations and Civilization." Chapter 12 of Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Orde.r NY:Touchstone, pp.301-321

Edward Said. 2000. "The Clash of Definitions: On Samuel Huntington," chapter 46 of Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp.569-590.

Excerpts from Kaplan and his critics:

Robert Kagan. "The return of cheap pessimism: Inside the Limo." The New Republic Online (4.10.2000).

Robert Kaplan, 2000. "The Coming Anarchy" (Chapter One) and "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" (Chapter Two) of The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. New York:Random House.

Alternative Readings on Conflict and Warfare:

In the Balkans:

Deborah Christie. 1993. Bosnia: We are all Neighbors. London: Granada TV film.

Ger Duijzings. 1999. "Albanian Dervishes versus Bosnian Ulema: The Revival of Popular Sufism in Kosovo." Chapter 5 of Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo. London: Hurst and Co, pp. 106-131.

Noel Malcolm. 1998. Kosovo: A Short History. New York: NYU Press.

Myron Weiner. 1971. "The Macedonian Syndrome: An Historical Model of International Relations and Political Development," World Politics 23 (4), pp.665-683

In Africa:

Catherine Besteman. 1996."Representing Violence and 'Othering' Somalia." Cultural Anthropology 11(1): 120-133.

Philip Gourevitch. 1998. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families : stories from Rwanda.. New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

William Reno. 1998. Warlord Politics and African States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner.

In General:

Noam Chomsky. 2003. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. NY: Metropolitan Books.

Hugh Gusterson. 1999. "Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination." Cultural Anthropology 14(1):111-143.

Chalmers Johnson. 2004. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic. NY:Metropolitan Books.

Mary Kaldor, 1999. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Polity Press.

Michael Klare. 2001. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. NY: Metropolitan Books.

A.L. Kroeber. 1953  'The Delimitation of Civilization.'  Journal of the History of Ideas 14:264-75.

Robert Jay Lifton, 2003. Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World. NY:Thunder’s Mouth Press.

Catherine Lutz. 2002. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon.

Richard Payne. 1995. "Foreign Policy Begins at Home: Cultural Influences on U.S. Behavior Abroad," chapter 1 of Richard Payne, The Clash of Distant Cultures: Values, Interests, and Force in American Foreign Policy. SUNY Press, pp.1-34.

Jessica Stern. 2003. Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. Ecco Books.

Excerpts from Friedman:

Thomas L. Friedman. 2000. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, chapter 16, "The Groundswell (Or the Backlash Against the Backlash)", pp. 348-364.

Thomas L. Friedman, 2002, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, "Prologue: The Super-Story," pp. 1-11, and "Diary: Travels in a World Without Walls: September 11, 2001-July 3, 2002," pp. 295-379.

Alternative Readings on Globalization:

George de Martino. 2000. Global Economy, Global Justice: Theoretical Objections and Policy Alternatives to Neoliberalism. London and New York: Routledge.

Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerud, eds. 2005. Anthropology of Development and

Globalization: From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberalism. Malden, MA: Blackwell Press.

Paul Farmer. 2003. Pathologies of power: health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

David Graeber, 2001, "The Globalization Movement: Some Points of Clarification." Items and Issues 2(3-4):12-14. New York: Social Science Research Council.

David Graeber. 2003. "The Globalization Movement and the New Left," in Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century, Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney, eds. New York: Basic Books.

Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds 2002. The Anthropology of Globalization: a Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Carolyn Nordstrom. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International

Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Joseph E. Stiglitz. 2002. Globalization and its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton

Excerpts from D'Souza:

Dinesh D'Souza. 2000. "The Lottery of Success: Who Wins, Who Loses." Chapter 4 of

The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an age of Techno-affluence. New York :Free Press.

Dinesh D'Souza, "Two Cheers for Colonialism."  Chronicle of Higher Education
(May 10, 2002).

Dinesh D'Souza, "Technology and Moral Progress."  Red Herring (Jan. 15, 2002).

Alternative Readings on Class in the U. S.:

Phillipe Bourgois. 1995. In search of respect : selling crack in El Barrio. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lisa Dodson. 1999. Don't Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and

Girls in America. Boston: Beacon.

Barbara Ehrenreich. 2001. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. New York:Metropolitan Books.

John Gilliom. 2001. Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and

the Limits of Privacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Arlie Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich,eds. 2003. Global Woman: Nannies,

Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. NY:Metropolitan Books.

Katherine S Newman. 1999. No Shame in my Game : theWorking Poor in the Inner City. New York: Knopf and the Russell Sage Foundation.

Excerpts from Thornhill and Palmer:

Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer. 2000. "Why Men Rape." The Sciences 40:30-36.

Alternative Readings on Rape:

Susan Brownmiller. 1975. Against our will : men, women, and rape. New York : Simon and Schuster.

David M Buss. 1995. "Evolutionary Psychology: A New Paradigm for Psychological Science." Psychological Inquiry 6:1-30.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, "The Five Sexes." The Sciences, March/April 1993, pp. 20-24.

Ruth Hubbard, 1990. "Rethinking Women's Biology" in The Politics of Women's Biology. New Brunswick: Rutgers, pp. 119-129. ]

Elisabeth A. Lloyd. 2003. Violence Against Science: Rape and Evolution. In Evolution, Gender, and Rape. Cheryl Brown Travis, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 235-261.

Richard Lewontin. 1991. A Tale Told in Textbooks. In Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. New York: HarperPerennial,.

Emily Martin. 2003. What is "Rape"?-Toward a Historical, Ethnographic Approach. In Evolution, Gender, and Rape. Cheryl Brown Travis, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 363-381.

Excerpts from Murray and Herrnstein and their critics:

Allen, A. et al. 1996. The Bell Curve: Statement by the NIH-DOE Joint Working Group on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Human Genome Research. American Journal of Human Genetics, 59:487-488.

Steven Fraser (ed.) 1995. Bell Curve Wars: Intelligence and the Future of America (NY: Basic Books,)

Murray, C., and Herrnstein, R. J. (1994) Race, genes, and I.Q. – An apologia. The New Republic, Oct 31: 27-37.

Alternative Readings on Race:

American Anthropological Association. Statement on "Race". May 17, 1998. (http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm)

M. G Kenny. 2002. Toward a racial abyss: Eugenics, Wickliffe Draper, and the origins of the Pioneer Fund. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 38, 259-283.

Jefferson M. Fish, ed. 2002. Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum

Jonathan Marks. 2002. What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ashley Montagu.1997. Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Sixth edition. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.


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