Neil Faulkner, A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals (Pluto Press, 2013), £18 This is the kind of book that the now thankfully lesser-spotted postmodernists warned you about—an unashamed grand narrative of humanity’s global history; an attempt… Continue Reading
Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire (Harvard University Press, 2012), £29.95 This important new book is a thorough examination of the earliest human societies and… Continue Reading
Chris Mullin, A Walk–On Part, 1994-1999 (Profile Books, 2012), A View From The Foothills 1999-2005 (Profile Books, 2010) and Decline and Fall, 2005-2010 (Profile Books, 2011), all £9.99 “Chris is so right wing now, and so loyal and so Blairite,”… Continue Reading
Kate Bayliss, Ben Fine and Elisa van Waeyenberge (eds), The Political Economy of Development: The World Bank, Neoliberalism and Development Research (Pluto Press, 2011), £22 In 2006 the World Bank issued its Deaton Report, conducted by several established economists, assessing… Continue Reading
Paul Clark, Youth Culture in China (Cambridge University Press, 2012), £18.99 Paul Clark is a professor in Modern Chinese Popular Culture at the University of Auckland, so there is no doubt this book will end up on the essential reading… Continue Reading
Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), £34.50 This work is a very useful if perhaps overly ambitious introduction to what Minkah Makalani calls “the history… Continue Reading
Motsomi Ndala Marobela, Political Economy of Botswana Public Sector Management: From Imperialism to Neoliberalism (VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, 2010), £68 Motsomi Marobela provides a comprehensive review of the suite of reforms that have dominated the public sector in sub-Saharan Africa… Continue Reading
Review of Peter Brown (2012) Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of the Christian West: 350–550 (Princeton University Press, 2012), £27.95 How did Christians come to be intensely relaxed about people being… Continue Reading
Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma (Fourth Estate, 2012), £13.99 The threat to our NHS is something we all know about, but Bad Pharma exposes another crisis in medicine: the power of the pharmaceutical industry, “Pharma”, to protect its private interests. Ben… Continue Reading
Kevin B Anderson, Marx at the Margins (University of Chicago Press, 2010), £15.00 Frederick Engels used to remark that the struggle for socialism occurs on the political, economic and ideological plains. Marx at the Margins is a valuable contribution to… Continue Reading