Let Me Live

Brad Snyder’s You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads revisits one of the more dramatic episodes in the ongoing saga of political repression and the resistance of the American left: the story of Angelo Herndon, a young Black communist organizer who was successfully prosecuted in Georgia in 1932 for attempting to incite an insurrection after an egregiously unfair trial and then freed after a nationwide campaign led by liberals and communists that occasioned two trips to the Supreme Court. In his review for Books & the Arts, Randall Kennedy commends the book as “both inspiring and sobering.” It “portrays vividly the exertions of a wide range of people who rallied to save Herndon. But it also reminds us of the relative recency of this judicial solicitude for the freedom of expression as well as the instability of that protection.…By the time the courts get involved in the defense of civil liberties, precious freedoms have already been lost.” Read “Angelo Herndon and the Radical Politics of Free Speech”

Mothers

Mothering is hard. It can often be alienating—from yourself and from others. But if the fantasy of the perfect mother, cheerfully tending to her flock, doesn’t hold sway over families the way it used to, an outline of those expectations, as Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You makes clear, still remains pressed into many women’s subconscious. Starring Rose Byrne, the film tells the story of Linda, a down-and-out mother navigating life in the absence of her husband (literally out to sea as a cruise captain) and with a daughter who has special health needs. The film almost never shows the daughter, but we do hear her: as a whining and pained voice calling for her mother. Linda is on edge—barely able to get through the workday or appointments with her child at the hospital and wasting the nights away high or drunk. The strategy of “keeping the child out of sight isn’t just meant to forestall the viewer’s nurturing instincts,” Beatrice Loayza writes in our review; it “hold[s] us firmly on Linda’s wavelength; it’s the film’s central crisis itself: the estrangement between mother and child.” In this way, Bronstein’s second movie is a marvel: intense and unsparing. Read “A Visceral Look at the Impossible Task of Mothering ”