At Blog o’ Gnosis, Minister Ann Hill reviews Kelly Bulkeley’s Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History.

Dreaming in the World’s Religions finally answers the basic question: how did people in ancient cultures view dreams?

I call this a basic question, because anyone who spends a significant amount of time working with their dreams inevitably wonders how it was done in the past. In your religion, in other religions; by your ancestors, by other people’s ancestors. Dreams call us to understand our place in the world, and Kelly’s book answers the call because it addresses the problem with both comprehensive scholarship and also a deep love and appreciation for dreams.

You can listen to a podcast of Hill’s interview with Kelly Bulkeley here.

Two podcasts!

Cary Nelson (No University is an Island) on Baltimore NPR.

David Shneer (Torah Queeries) on BBC’s The World Today (starts at minute 32).

Take a look at their thoughtful, powerful review of Cary Nelson’s No University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom.

“[Nelson's] devotion to all that higher education stands for at its very best is admirable. His overall point is irrefutable. No university is an island, and we shall all swim together or we shall sink separately.”

At salon.com, Glenn Greenwald triumphantly defends the lawyers who have been working with detainees at Guantanamo Bay from attacks by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney. A podcast with Jonathan Hafetz, the editor of The Guantanamo Lawyers, is at the bottom of the article.

But that disgusting duo is also smearing countless civilian lawyers whose work since 9/11 has been nothing short of heroic: representing the most demonized and despised group of individuals, and devoting massive amounts of time, energy and resources to doing so, almost always for free and — particularly in the early aftermath of 9/11 — at substantial risk to their reputations and professional relationships. They did so to defend the most basic Constitutional liberties of all of us — as Lt. Col. David Frakt told Serwer: “What we have seen over and over and over is that the vast majority of detainees at Guantanamo are innocent” — and there are no words in the English language sufficient to describe how low and odious are the people responsible for this “Department of Jihad/Al Qaeda 7″ campaign.

As it turns out, one of the lawyers who has successfully represented Guantanamo detainees, Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU, co-edited a newly released book, The Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law, which documents the sacrifices made and the indispensable value of those who have fought against the system of lawlessness and brutality represented by Guantanamo. Hafetz himself represented Mohamed Jawad, a boy no older than 15 at the time he was detained in Afghanistan and shipped to Guantanamo, falsely accused of throwing a grenade at American soldiers who had invaded his country, and put in a cage for 7 years with no trial (where he twice tried to commit suicide), until finally being released last year after a federal judge granted his habeas petition on the ground of insufficient evidence.

A new review at Popmatters:

It’s damn near impossible to believe that the most popular song of the alternative music era – Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – was inspired, to some degree, by a personal hygiene product. After a bout of spray-painting graffiti around Olympia, Washington, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna returned to Cobain’s apartment. There, Hanna scrawled “Kurt smells like teen spirit” on the wall of his apartment, teasing him because he apparently spent so much time with his then girlfriend, Bikini Kill’s drummer Tobi Vail, he had started to smell of her deodorant.

Cobain didn’t know that Teen Spirit was a deodorant and thought that it was a reference to youthful revolution. The rest is history.

Vignettes like this form the most interesting parts of Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture and Social Crisis, the new book from sociologist Ryan Moore. Written as his doctoral dissertation (or as part of graduate research), Sells Like Teen Spirit attempts to plot the origins of music subcultures in the United States against the economic and political crises and situations that accompanied the time in which the music developed.

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a non-profit organization in Oakland, CA, has given Michelle Brown’s book, The Culture of Punishment, a 2009 PASS award! The PASS Awards (Prevention for a Safer Society) is the only national recognition of print and broadcast journalists, TV news and feature reporters, producers, writers, and those in film and literature who try to focus America’s attention on our criminal and juvenile justice systems, and child welfare systems in a thoughtful and considerate manner.

NCCD established the PASS Awards to recognize and honor media efforts that further public understanding of child welfare issues and crime control and prevention issues—especially those involving young people. NCCD is seeking the stories that illustrate current realities or the promise of reform, especially those that help people understand the complex causes of crime and what must be done to prevent and control it.

Andrew Wiest, author of the award-winning Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN, wrote a controversial op-ed for CNN.com. Read the full piece here.

Hattiesburg, Mississippi (CNN) — After the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, U.S. Col. Harry Summers remarked to his North Vietnamese counterpart, “You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.” After a moment, the North Vietnamese officer replied: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

Although that blunt exchange took place nearly 35 years ago, it’s still worthy of close consideration in light of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Americans did win their battles in Vietnam, but, as the outcome of the war made clear, raw battlefield prowess did not lead to victory. Why? Because the war there was not for Americans to win or lose. It was a Vietnamese war.

In this episode of our podcast series, Blog Editor Joe Gallagher talks to Ari Y. Kelman, author of Is Diss a System? A Milt Gross Comic Reader, about the history and lasting legacy of one of America’s first graphic novelists and pre-eminent Jewish humorists.

You can also read a review of Is Diss a System? on the New Republic’s book blog.

Check out SFGate.com for the Chronicle’s review of Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women by Leila J. Rupp.

In setting out to write a one-volume global history of love between women, Leila J. Rupp has taken on an ambitious project. One may say that it is as ambitious as love between women has proven to be audacious. The title of the book, “Sapphistries,” is itself a made-up word, signaling the very obscurity of its subject.

Still, Rupp succeeds in writing a fascinating and at times startling transnational history. When the evidence of love between women is fragmentary or speculative, she says so. The book is a synthesis of global feminist scholarship and historical fiction of the past 30 years, and Rupp’s 24-page bibliography is both a testament to the breadth of her research and a wonderful resource for readers.

An inspired debate at The Nation about the researching and reporting of the Latino crime rate in the United States referenced our author, Ramiro Martinez, and his book, Immigration and Crime.

It’s true that some academic specialists have generally been aware that Latinos didn’t have especially high crime rates (though as far as I know nobody’s previously used Unz’s particular methodologies to make the point directly and quantitatively). Even the volume of academic literature seems extremely scant, relative to the magnitude of the subject involved. Over the last decade, there have been a couple of books by Ramiro Martinez dealing with the subject, and a relatively small number of journal articles, few of which are very direct or explicit. But there’s a huge difference between academic specialists being generally aware of this, and perhaps occasionally communicating their results to other academic specialists via turgid journal articles and books, and this information getting out to a wider public audience.