Giroux, the Global TV Network chair at McMaster University, addresses in five short chapters the assault on the social state, unions, higher education, democratic values and the public sphere in general. He argues "if democracy is to be reclaimed as a radical idea ... it is crucial for progressives and others to struggle to create those formative cultures that enable people to translate private injustices into social and systemic problems." Girioux draws on Walter Benjamin's "Theses on History", C. Wright Mill's sociology, an analysis of "new media", the erosion of intellectual life and the rise of Economic Darwinism to show what an emerging politics of hope must overcome. Though heavy-handed, this isn't a pessimistic work and explicitly aims to undermine contemporary cynicism about capitalism and the (im)possibility of alternatives to it. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)