New Left Review produced a massive bumper January issue to mark its 50th anniversary. It includes several interesting pieces, for example, Mike Davis’s “Who Will Build the Ark?”1 This confronts the future of the planet with a characteristic mixture of… Continue Reading
Michela Wrong, It’s Our Turn To Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower (Fourth Estate, 2009), £12.99 Kenya was long seen in the West as a stable country where journalists, NGOs and Western businesses could set up their headquarters.… Continue Reading
John Grahl (ed), Global Finance and Social Europe (Edward Elgar, 2009), £79.95 Over the last 30 years European economies and their financial systems have undergone profound structural changes. Capital markets (bonds and equity) have become the main source of borrowing… Continue Reading
Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene Debs, the Great War and the Right to Dissent (Harvard University, 2008) £22.95 On 16 June 1918 Eugene Debs, one of the leaders of the American Socialist Party, spoke at a mass meeting in Canton,… Continue Reading
Alistair Horne, Kissinger’s Year: 1973 (Orion Books, 2009), £20 Grace Livingstone, America’s Backyard: The United States and Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror (Zed Books, 2009), £18.99 The reviled Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who came… Continue Reading
Tom Behan, The Italian Resistance: Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies (Pluto Press, 2009), £18.99 The Italian people played a central role in liberating themselves from fascist dominance and Nazi occupation in 1943-5. Hundreds of thousands of people, mainly from the… Continue Reading
Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy (Verso 2009), £9.99 In the preface to this new collection, the French philosopher Alain Badiou offers a withering assessment of the state of contemporary philosophy. He attacks those modern philosophers content to… Continue Reading
Nick Davies and Darren Williams, Clear Red Water: Welsh Devolution and Socialist Politics (Francis Bootle Publishers, 2009), £7.99 Nick Davies and Darren Williams have written a thought-provoking book, which has been compared to the classic 1912 pamphlet The Miners’ Next… Continue Reading
Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman(Zero Books),£7.99 Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman is an important contribution to the latest string of books on feminism and women’s liberation, most importantly Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy and Sexism and the System by… Continue Reading
Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African–American Politics (Verso, 2009), £12.99 “Although it seems heaven-sent we ain’t ready to see a black President.” Tupac Shakur, the author of these lines, was one of the most iconic and outspoken representatives… Continue Reading