Heide Gerstenberger, Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, translated by David Fernbach (Brill, 2007), £139.10 Heide Gerstenberger’s Impersonal Power is an ambitious book. It tries to give an explanation for the form and content of the bourgeois… Continue Reading
Jerzy Borzecki, The Soviet–Polish Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar Europe (Yale University, 2008), £35 After 1917 it was not just the best known Bolsheviks who saw the October Revolution as the beginning of the international revolution—millions of… Continue Reading
BR Burg, Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), £50 Neville Hoad, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), £12.50 Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy… Continue Reading
Iain Ferguson, Reclaiming Social Work: Challenging Neoliberalism and Promoting Social Justice (SAGE, 2007), £21.99 This summer Wirral council announced it would shed up to 30 social worker posts because the “personalisation agenda” means these qualified social workers are no longer… Continue Reading
Tareq Ismael, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2007), £50 Early on the mornings of 14 and 15 February 1949 a macabre sight met the eyes of passers-by in Baghdad. Bodies dangled on… Continue Reading
Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics & Scholarship in Israel (Verso, 2008), £14.99 This is an exhaustive analysis by an uncompromising Israeli scholar of many of the intellectual and literary documents, based on their original languages, that bind… Continue Reading
Lewis H Mates, The Spanish Civil War and the British Left: Political Activism and the Popular Front (Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), £52.50 Few international events have had such an impact on British domestic politics as the Spanish Civil War. Despite… Continue Reading
Randall H McGuire, Archaeology as Political Action (University of California Press, 2008), £17.95 Archaeology is political. It can even provoke bloody confrontation. Over 3,000 people died during communal riots in India and Bangladesh after a Hindu nationalist mob destroyed the… Continue Reading
A review of Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: International Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia (University of Illinois, 2007). On 14 May 1913 longshoremen on the Philadelphia docks walked out on strike demanding a 10 cent an hour pay rise,… Continue Reading
September 1958 saw the first issue of a journal called International Socialism. It was in duplicated form and undoubtedly had a very limited circulation, being produced and distributed by the tiny Socialist Review Group which counted its members in tens… Continue Reading