Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies and the Reagan Era

Corruptions of Empire is a collection of essays and newspaper columns (mostly from The Nation and the Wall Street Journal) on a variety of political and cultural topics, including Ronald Reagan, the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, food fads, movies, TV shows, the ideology of James Bond, and Top Gun. Cockburn’s politics can be frustrating at times — a mix of conventional leftism and undeveloped contrarian views — but his essays are passionate, lucid, and sometimes entirely original.