Reviews

Published a few weeks before the EU referendum, Richard Seymour’s latest book is an important and timely intervention into Labour party – and national – politics.

Seymour, a former member of the Socialist Workers Party, is known as one of the sharpest intellects on the Left, and his sympathetic analysis of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership doesn’t disappoint.

There is a welcome recap of the heady days of summer 2015, when the unassuming MP for North Islington – backed by grassroots activists, enthusiastic…

It is 2041 and atmospheric CO2 levels have passed 600 parts per million, leading to the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and a three-metre rise in sea levels. Florida is underwater and world population has passed 10 billion. A few billion are stateless refugees. ‘A few billion more [are] indentured or imprisoned.’

Every cultivated acre on Earth is planted with sterile genetically-engineered varieties whose terminator genes have been implanted to protect corporate profits. ‘There [isn’t] a live food plant left anywhere on…

As the title suggests, boats of all kinds – inflatables, wooden fishing boats and vessels whose leaking engine fumes poison their passengers – are a central theme of this book. Another is the poignant list of items that refugees carry with them: handbags, hair gel, babies’ nappies, a box of soap powder.

With these details Patrick Kingsley brings together some of the many personal stories of refugees themselves, as they travel to Europe from sub-Saharan Africa, Syria, and Afghanistan.

In the first part of the book, we…

What has a classical economist’s dinner, prepared by his mother centuries ago, got to do with the peace movement? Well, if you want to introduce someone to a different way of looking at the world – challenging unspoken, yet dominant , assumptions about how we should live together in peace on this planet – then this little book would make an excellent gift.

Pithy and fact-filled, it’s a tale of the dominance of ‘economic man’, with Swedish author Katrine Marçal taking the reader on a whirlwind tour of the major economic theories…

Reviewing Noam Chomsky’s first book in 1969, Robert Sklar wrote in The Nation that the importance of American Power and the New Mandarins lay in its power ‘to free our minds from old perspectives, to stimulate new efforts at historical, political and social thought’.

Chomsky’s latest book, Who Rules the World? is at least as powerful in ‘freeing our minds’. Chomsky is not a sloganeer – in his very first sentence he admits that ‘The question raised by the title of this book cannot have a simple and definite…

There can’t be many books reviewed in PN that have been compared to the writings of James Joyce and also need the help of www.urbandictionary.com to explain their vocabulary. But please don’t let either of these facts put you off reading this beautifully-written coming of age story!

The book opens with a map of Baltimore in the 1980s, annotated with the contemporary version of ‘Here be Dragons’ (‘Leakin Park – body dump for those taken by murder most foul’), followed…

As a call for collective liberation against systemic forms of oppression, solidarity remains one of the left’s most powerful and enduring ideas. However, while the notion has been mobilised by a wide range of activist struggles over the centuries, this has often occurred without a clear articulation of what it means in practice.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of critiques and studies examining what it means to be an ally and how one goes about effective solidarity work. This book places itself squarely within this…

In 1936, not long after Franco launched his fascist coup against Spain’s elected government, the legendary US pacifist Dave Dellinger, then in his early 20s, travelled to the embattled republic as part of a delegation of students.

‘For an agonising 24 hours,’ he later wrote, ‘I wrestled with the urge to pick up the gun in the anti-fascist cause. In the background, as I paced the streets of Madrid were the sounds of the battle, a few miles away. Spanish friends I had come to love and admire were on their way to the front, some of…

Comprised of four long articles previously published in the London Review of Books, the latest book from legendary American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh critically examines the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

Citing senior – often unnamed – government, intelligence and military sources (there are no footnotes), Hersh’s version of events is significantly different from the official narrative pushed by Western governments and a supportive corporate media.

Though it gives its name to the…

Seeing Power is a thought-provoking manifesto on the artist’s position within a system where making money is inextricably linked to producing culture. Setting out to critique the 21st-century culture industry, Thompson demonstrates how it ‘plucks the fruit of art and activism’s labors, ingests it, and regurgitates a new substance for a voracious and growing nest of consumers.’

Thompson asks: can art function outside the capitalist system? Is there such a thing as activist art? He approaches these questions by…

Spanning the century from 1910 to 2010, this engaging social history shows how a group of people without wealth or power (the working class) were able to gain some measure of control over their lives before losing it again.

In 1910, competent servants had a place for life, but they had to ‘know their place’, accepting decisions made for them by their ‘betters’ ‘in their best interests’.

Todd shows how assertiveness replaced deference as domestic staff entered factories, gaining better wages and conditions.

…

Before its use in the context of war and peace, the term ‘conscientious objector’ referred to someone who refused vaccination.

In 1853, Britain’s Vaccination Act made the vaccination of infants compulsory. Despite fines, imprisonment and the seizure of their property, vaccination was widely resisted by working-class people, who sometimes likened their predicament to slavery. Their resistance finally led to the introduction of a ‘conscience clause’ in 1898.

Early vaccine refusers were also ‘among the first to…

Renting from an unscrupulous private landlord can mean cold rooms, damage to your health and lack of privacy. Worst of all is the insecurity of a ‘no fault’ eviction, legal under Section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act, making it difficult for tenants to make long-term plans, or for their children to settle in school.

Drawing on their own careful research and one author’s personal experience of eviction, this book exposes the realities of living in privately-rented accommodation in the UK.

Through interviews with landlords…

Despite its title this is not a book about whales, or even a book about whale research itself. Rather it focuses on the politics of the international whale research effort and on the gradual dawning of awareness regarding whales and dolphins (collectively known as cetaceans) in a human population, most of whom had never seen any of the great sea mammals.

Burnett traces whale research from the earliest days of the twentieth century, when a British researcher, Sydney Harmer, tried to use the limited scientific data of his day to…

This is one of those rare books that transforms the way you think about a well-worn topic. Written mainly for those with an interest in process and the ways in which organisations function, it presents readers with a new organisational model with the potential to completely alter the way we structure our groups, businesses, schools, hospitals and indeed any organisation of any kind.

Author Frederic Laloux conducted research with people working in organisations across a wide range of sectors, all of which have forgone traditional…