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
Neil Faulkner, Rome: Empire of the Eagles (Pearson, 2008), £21.99 Neil Faulkner’s new book should be a welcome publication for the readers of this journal, following his earlier articles here (for example in International Socialism 109 and 116). 1 Its… Continue Reading
Boris Kagarlitsky, Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System, (Pluto, 2008), £40 Boris Kagarlitsky is a prolific commentator on modern Russia who has also written on wider trends in global capitalism. It is impossible to read a book… Continue Reading
Gerry Mooney and Alex Law (eds), New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance inside the Welfare Industry (Policy Press, 2007), £22.99 This book arrives at a time when the bewildering doublespeak beloved of New Labour reaches ever giddier heights. Who knew… Continue Reading
George Paizis, Marcel Martinet: Poet of the Revolution (Francis Boutle, 2007), £12.50 Marcel Martinet was born in France in 1887. In his lifetime he would witness huge social transformations. Technological advances around the turn of the century meant big changes… Continue Reading
Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2007), £14.99 After three decades of debates on human evolution dominated by Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, it is a great relief to read a… Continue Reading
Bob Jessop, State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach (Polity, 2008), £17.99. State Power presents the most recent developments in Bob Jessop’s three decades long research project on state theory. Inspired by his reading of Marxism, Jessop has become one of the… Continue Reading