Cal Winslow (ed), E P Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays & Polemics (Lawrence & Wishart, 2014) £15.99 This collection of E P Thompson’s writings covers the period from 1956 to 1963, a tumultuous but also highly… Continue Reading
John Parrington, The Deeper Genome: Why There is More to the Human Genome than Meets the Eye (Oxford University Press, 2015), £18.99 John Parrington has written a lively and engaging popular science book about the history of genetics or what… Continue Reading
Antonio Gramsci (edited and translated by Derek Boothman), A Great and Terrible World: The Pre-Prison Letters, 1908-1926 (Lawrence and Wishart, 2014), £25 The Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci is widely acknowledged, even beyond the left, as one of the most important… Continue Reading
Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2015), £9.99 Arun Kundnani’s book about Islamophobia deliberately references the 1966 Hollywood movie, The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! With its repetitive title… Continue Reading
John Newsinger, Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939 (Bookmarks, 2015), £7.99 John Newsinger opens this timely account of working class struggle in the first half of the 20th century with what at first seems an incongruous statement: “We… Continue Reading
Kevin Ovenden, Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth (Pluto Press/Left Book Club, 2015), £11.50 I’m writing this review on the eve of a general strike (3 December) in Greece, the second against the Syriza government since it was re-elected in September. Alexis… Continue Reading
A review of Paul Le Blanc, Leon Trotsky (Reaktion Books, Critical Lives series, 2015), £11.99 Paul Le Blanc faced a daunting challenge when he agreed to write a book about Leon Trotsky and his life in exile for the Critical… Continue Reading
A review of Paul Hampton, Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity: Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World (Routledge Studies in Climate, Work and Society, 2015), £90 The complete and utter failure of the world’s governments to take meaningful… Continue Reading
P. Sean Brotherton, Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba (Duke University Press, 2012), £16.99 Cuba is back in the international news. In December 2014, it was announced that relations between Cuba and the United States were “thawing”;… Continue Reading
Lucia Pradella and Thomas Marois (eds), Polarising Development: Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis (Pluto Press, 2014), £22 Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall neoliberalism has dominated the global economy. The philosophy of TINA (There is No Alternative) became… Continue Reading