Reviews

In Nexus Review, professional experts and young talents review classical works, groundbreaking studies and topical essays on art, culture, history, politics and philosophy, combining a critical outlook with a broad vision and an accessible style. The books discussed in Nexus Review offer a broad view of culture, society and history that goes beyond a myopic concern with current affairs.

Theme

History

A Human History of the Mediterranean

The Great Sea

The role of the Mediterranean crossroads in bringing together the people from across it, and far beyond, is highlighted through a narrative style which ensures the place of the story in the history.
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Literature

Ausgewählte Gedichte

Stufen

The general artistic lure of some of Hesse’s poems is fading away; however, they maintain an exceptionally powerful human appeal, especially where Hesse’s love of life emerges: Und jedes Lied und jedes Buch / Und jedes Bild ist ein Enthüllen.
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Philosophy

An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

Ethics

Apart from a polemical assault on other ethical doctrines and the politics they sustain, this book provides a sketch of Badiou’s ethics of ‘processes of truth’.
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Art

The Looshaus

Once we have grasped that point there is no chance of being distracted by the verbal pyrotechnics in Loos’s polemics from understanding his architectural achievements.
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Society

The Places In Between

Stewart’s self-reflexive narrative is very knowing of the fact that his trek through Afghanistan comes not so much after the emperor Babur as after international media coverage of Operation Enduring Freedom, the first phase of the War on Terror.
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History

Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts

The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind

Pick sees both the necessity of the wartime militarization of psychoanalysis and the impossibility of accepting the theoretical principles upon which this was ostensibly based.
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Philosophy

Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit

Das Recht der Freiheit

Honneth follows Durkheim instead of Marx in interpreting the capitalist market not as system of domination but as an institution that promises the general realization of individual interests and capacities.
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Literature

Im Raum der Stille: Lektüren

Simply following Steiner’s train of thought constitutes a broadening of the reader's horizon
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Culture

What Ever Happened to Modernism?

Josipovici portrays modern English literature as ‘anecdotal’, ‘smooth’, ‘complacent’, ‘predictable’, ‘comforting’, ‘constricting’ the sum total leaving him with a feeling that ‘the world has been made smaller and meaner’.
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Biography

Reading Huizinga

Huizinga can find revelation in the clash of armies, in Jan van Eyck’s signature as witness to Giovanni Arnolfini’s wedding or the shimmering blue and yellow of a Vermeer dress.
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