September 4, 2000 Features Never Mind the Bollocks BY BILL BOISVERT Here's the new Republican Party The Battle of Philadelphia BY DAVE LINDORFF Working It BY DAVID MOBERG Will unions go all out for Gore? Black Radicals Regroup BY SALIM MUWAKKIL Detroit hosts the Black Radical Congress. Mad Sheep Scare BY TERRY J. ALLEN Farmers, scientists and the USDA square off in Vermont. News Cleaning Up BY HANS JOHNSON Missouri, Oregon consider campaign finance initiatives. Star Strike BY BEN WINTERS Actors demand a better deal. Renegade or Redeemer? BY STEVE ELLNER Hugo Chavez leads Venezuela into a new era. The New Front BY KARI LYDERSEN American anti-abortion groups crusade in Ireland. Profile BY TED KLEINE Johnny Lira is in their corner. Views Editorial BY DAVID MOBERG Big money problems. Appall-O-Meter BY DAVID FUTRELLE A Terry Laban Cartoon Dialogue: The Balkans More Conspiracy Theories? BY EDWARD S. HERMAN A Humanitarian Crusade BY DIANA JOHNSTONE Culture A Man for All Seasons BY HOWARD ZINN Francis Wheen's Marx: A Life. Interstate Rambler BY PHILIP CONNORS On the road with Larry McMurty. England's Dreaming BY JOHN GHAZVINIAN History falls off the back of a lorry. Under the Influence BY JASON SHOLL Sadie Plant writes on drugs. Vanishing Act BY JOSHUA ROTHKOPF Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man. Presidential Dance Parties BY GREG SMITHSIMON

England's Dreaming By John Ghazvinian In Search of England: Journeys into the English Past By Michael Wood University of California Press 336 pages, $24.95 As Michael Wood reminds us in his book, In Search of England: Journeys into the English Past, 1997 was a big year for England. As Hong Kong was handed back to China, a new prime minister swept into power promising almost complete autonomy to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as an end to the House of Lords as we know it. England has had to seriously re-evaluate its collective understanding of the past. John Major's warm-beer-and-cricket vision of England already seems as quaintly distant as wartime rationing, but the myths and fictions about English history and English identity are still very real to the emasculated carapace that 50 years of post-imperial decline has left behind. And it is these myths, and their connection to historical reality, that Wood sets out to explore. Wood's particular interest is the late Anglo-Saxon period and the early Middle Ages. And England's past, as we are reminded from the get-go, is more multicultural than some might like to think. Indeed, there was no such thing as an "England" until successive waves of Britons, Celts, Angles, Saxons, Danes and Vikings - each exercising power over a different part of the island - were united under the rule of the kings of Wessex in the 10th century, only to be conquered themselves by a band of Vikings living in the north of France in 1066 - the Normans. Wood is not interested in making a political point about asylum-seekers - or anything else - but does explore the darker corners of what might be called England's historical imagination. The first part of the book highlights the complexities and contingencies of the country's early Medieval past - the what-ifs and the almost-wasn'ts of a murky and unstable time in the history of the North Atlantic Archipelago   TOP HOME SUBSCRIBE MAIL   In These Times © 2000 Vol. 24, No. 20