ResoluteReader

Jules Romains - Verdun

2012-01-27T13:11:00.001Z

The Battle of Verdun, that took place in early 1916 was one of the most horrific clashes of World War One - well over 700,000 men were killed, wounded or went missing in the war. It was marked by enormous barrages, the first systematic use of flame throwers and like the Battle of the Somme does, it continues to cast its shadow over subsequent generations of Frenchmen and Germans alike. Jules

J. Samuel Walker - Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective

2012-01-24T22:36:00.000Z

For a few brief years following the 1979 incident at the Three Mile Island plant, it was known as the world's worst nuclear accident. The far greater disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 soon rightly took that accolade. Three Mile Island has however gone down in infamy. J. Samuel Walker's account of the event is an attempt both to describe the accident as part of the history of nuclear power and to try

Ralph Darlington & Dave Lyddon - Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain 1972

2012-01-22T14:13:00.002Z

"I was a 22 year old docker, I'd been working in the docks for two years. And I turned up at the World's End massive building site in Chelsea rather sheepishly and knocked on this little wooden door to be greeted by Frank Campbell, one of the IS builders, who said 'Thank God, you're here now'. And I just stood at the door while Frank went inside and shouted 'There's a dockers' picket line,

Richard Gott - Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt

2012-01-17T21:28:00.001Z

If there is one conclusion that can be drawn from Richard Gott's extensive analysis of the resistance to the British Empire, it is that for most of the time those people unfortunate to live on the pink coloured parts of the map, simmered with resentment. Frequently they rebelled, revolted and fought back against British forces. Most of the time they were defeated, sometimes they weren't and on

Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere

2012-01-16T21:44:00.000Z

Rather like his later novel American Gods, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere deals with the seedier underbelly of modern society. Fantastic parallel worlds mark both stories - the reality of Gods in the first, living hidden from human view amongst us is similar in many respects to the alternate world that exists beneath the major cities of human civilisation in the second novel. Neverwhere is set in both

Rosa Luxemburg - Reform or Revolution

2012-01-10T22:29:00.000Z

Rosa Luxemburg's short book Reform or Revolution is often overlooked these days, in favour of her more famous, Mass Strike. Written while in her late twenties, Reform or Revolution demonstrates the keeness of Luxemburg's Marxism and the sharpness of her polemic. The book is a response to a series of articles and an eventual book by Eduard Bernstein. Berstein was an important figure in the German

John Molyneux - Will the Revolution be Televised? A Marxist Analysis of the Media

2012-01-08T20:24:00.000Z

John Molyneux's short book on Anarchism that I reviewed recently is an excellent and fraternal critique of the main threads of Anarchist thought. His book on the media, which came out nearly simultaneously is a very important book, given some of the scandals and issues that arose in 2011, notably the crisis of the Murdoch press following the 'phone hacking scandal. Molyneux sets out to answer a

Edwin Black - IBM and the Holocaust

2012-01-04T20:58:00.001Z

This book is a detailed demolition job. Edwin Black explores in great detail, with solid evidence what IBM, one of the largest, wealthiest and most important multinationals did during World War II. As such, the book also tells us something about the priorities of business. Edwin Black argues that IBM's desire to maximise profits and in particular, the instincts and priorities of Thomas Watson,

George V. Higgins - The Friends of Eddie Coyle

2012-01-01T19:50:00.000Z

Described in the introduction as the "game changing crime novel of the last fifty years" it is difficult to understand the hype that surrounds The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It certainly is a well written novel, a tale told almost entirely through conversations between central characters. But while the conversations certainly allow the author to demonstrate his skills, but this isn't enough to make

Richard Fortey - Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution

2011-12-28T17:46:00.000Z

I used to think that the trilobite was merely one of those instantly recognisable fossils, sort of like an elongated and flattened woodlouse. The sum total of my knowledge of trilobites was, in the style of a foot note to a child's introduction to fossils, that they were distant relations of the modern horseshoe crab. Growing up in Birmingham, I'd never seen a horseshoe crab, though on visits to

Neil Gaiman - American Gods

2011-12-26T16:04:00.001Z

I read the "author's preferred text". I will start this review by making a very clear statement about the book under scrutiny. Neil Gaiman's American Gods is one of the best fantasy novels of the last twenty years. I am sure that most readers of this blog will know the feeling you get when you discover a new author that ticks all of your boxes. From almost the first page of this story I knew

Philip José Farmer - The Dark Design

2011-12-21T18:54:00.001Z

Volume three of Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series is one of those novels were you wonder if the series is about to "jump the shark". The two earlier ones, set as they are, on a baffling and fantastic planet were the vast majority of humans from all epochs of history have been resurrected, are excellent reads. Farmer's orginal idea though, was so vast in scope that there was no way that it

David J. Breeze - The Antonine Wall

2011-12-19T22:45:00.000Z

The northern-most frontier of the Roman Empire, marked out by the Antonine Wall is often overlooked by its more impressive southern cousin built by Hadrian. The history of the Antonine Wall is much shorter, and according to David Breeze, it was likely to have been built by a new Emperor, keen to extend his Imperial boundaries in order to win a triumph. But extending the borders like this didn't

Gitta Sereny - Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

2011-12-15T22:47:00.001Z

Gitta Sereny's detailed and scholarly examination of one of the key figures in Hitler's leadership is also extremely readable and powerful, two qualities rare in biography. At times it is terrible to read, the subject matter by necessity must examine details of the Holocaust and the use of slave labour that is repugnant. There is a compelling fascination though. For anyone who has ever wondered

Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

2011-12-06T20:28:00.001Z

In this challenging book "string theorist" Brian Greene has attempted to being together the most recent understanding of this complex branch of theoretical physics together with the context that it was developed in. He starts, as any explanation of modern physics must, with the inadequacies of our own experience of the universe. We can, to borrow Greene's analogy, understand why a ball might

Alan Moorehead - The Fatal Impact

2011-12-04T19:10:00.000Z

This is a beautifully written book about the terrible legacy of European exploration of the Pacific. Alan Moorehead's classic study of the impact of European arrival in Tahiti, Australia and to a lesser extent Antarctic is a tale of death, destruction and ecological distortion. The story begins with Captain Cook, who arrived in Tahiti in 1769. As many books, films and stories since have told,

Leon Trotsky - On Britain

2011-11-27T15:18:00.002Z

Leon Trotsky is of course, best known for helping lead the Russian Revolution and creating the Red Army to win the Civil War. He was also someone who took great interest in history and current affairs. His belief in the socialist future, and his internationalist outlook contrasted him to the growing clique around Stalin who, after the failure of revolutions in Europe in the early 1920s, turned

Sally Campbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg

2011-11-21T22:31:00.001Z

In this latest addition to the Rebel's Guide series, Sally Campbell points out that many aspects of the modern world would be instantly recognisable to the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. We live in an era of revolution and war, repeated mass strikes have taken place in many countries in the last year. Here in the UK a public sector strike of up to 3 million workers at the end of November may well

Patricia A. McAnany & Norman Yoffee - Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire

2011-11-15T22:22:00.001Z

Jared Diamond's books have become phenomenal bestsellers. Both Guns, Germs and Steel and the more recent Collapse have sold in their thousands and are regularly referenced, quoted and used as academic texts. Diamond has been, and should be praised for his attempts to look at human society and history with a critical eye. Famously he quotes a Papua New Guinean, Yali, in the first book, who

Immanuel Ness & Dario Azzellini (eds) - Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present

2011-11-11T16:00:00.000Z

As I write this review, tens of thousands of people are engaged in Occupy protests and occupations around the world. Most famously in Wall Street, but also on the doorstep of the London Stock Exchange and in a hundred other locations around the globe. Workplace occupations have also been part of the recent struggles - here in the UK, in the last few years at the Visteon and Vestas plants. As this

Eric Simons - Darwin Slept Here

2011-11-10T20:48:00.000Z

While this book will contain little for evolutionary scientists or Darwin scholars, for those who like their travel books to be a little more than stories of visiting unusual places and gawping at them, it is interesting enough. Eric Simon's is travelling in South America when he stumbles across a copy of Charles Darwin's accounts of his own travels around that continent, The Voyage of the Beagle

Terry Pratchett - Snuff

2011-11-07T23:07:00.002Z

Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, Snuff, has become the third fastest selling non-fiction book in history. It deserves this accolade. Pratchett has kept us entertained now for many years, and while his books are always fun and deeper than many critics might imagine, in recent years they haven't quite touched the heights that some of his earlier books did. Snuff is a return to form. I

J.G.Farrell - The Singapore Grip

2011-11-01T18:52:00.001Z

The Singapore Grip is a different novel to the others in J.G.Farrell's Empire trilogy. At just of 675 pages in length it is by far the longest and sadly at times, it has a somewhat bloated feel. But its length is not the only difference. The two earlier novels dealt with the end of the British Empire, through the lens of two moments of Imperial collapse. The first, The Siege of Krishnapaur, deals

Kester Aspden - The Hounding of David Oluwale

2011-10-28T19:47:00.000Z

Rarely do I read a book that leaves me quite so upset and angry. The life of David Oluwale should really have been a footnote in history. Like many Commonwealth citizens in the 1950s and 60s, he came to the UK as an immigrant, firmly believing no doubt, that the mother-country would provide a life and work for him. Oluwale arrived as a stowaway and eventually worked in a succession of different

Henry Mayhew - London Labour and the London Poor

2011-10-22T19:51:00.001Z

Henry Mayhew's classic text, London Labour and the London Poor is a powerful and fascinating study of life on the streets during the later half of the nineteenth century. This new edition comes with a very useful introduction which puts Mayhew's life and work into the context of the times. Victorian attitudes to the poor varied considerably, but the majority opinion seems to be that they were

Philip José Farmer - The Fabulous Riverboat

2011-10-14T19:16:00.000Z

I've previously reviewed the first novel of Philip José Farmer's series set on the fantastic Riverworld, so I won't repeat my descriptions of that amazing planet. Volume two of the series is more action packed and less thoughtful than the first book, but that does not undermine the essential brilliance of the novels. Here we have the most impossible planet, made to feel possible. This volume

David Kynaston - Austerity Britain 1945 - 1951

2011-10-10T20:01:00.000Z

As the Tories and their lickspittle friends the Liberal Democrats try to destroy every last vestige of the welfare state, what better book to read than an account of Britain's greyest hour - the post war years. Austerity Britain is well titled. The sufferings of the war-years, the rationing, the death and destruction rapidly passed into a period of dull greyness. People continued to go hungry, if

V.I. Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky

2011-10-04T19:35:00.002Z

Cover of Russian first edition (1918) The outbreak of World War One was supposed to have been met by mass strikes and protests led by the mass socialist organisations of the Second International. At numerous meetings and conferences, leaders of these organisations had declared the coming war to be an imperialist one. Not in the interest of the proletarians who voted and supported these

John Sheail - Rabbits and their History

2011-09-29T20:40:00.001Z

The history of rabbits in the UK might seem an unusal topic, but there is a surprisingly fascinating and complex story here. Rabbits first arrived on the British Isles at some point after the Norman Conquest. They began as a luxury food for the rich, but soon escaped the boundaries of their warrens and easily adapted to the British countryside. Over time, rabbits rapidly became an important part

Alan Bennett - The Uncommon Reader

2011-09-27T19:18:00.001Z

I love Alan Bennett's writings. His recent article in the London Review of Books, defending libraries in the face of the cuts is a wonderful piece of polemic, that sums up this great writer. So I finally got around to reading The Uncommon Reader, I was excited, ready to be carried away with it. Everyone else has read this short novel, so I won't go into detail. The plot is straightforward but

John Molyneux - Anarchism: A Marxist Criticism

2011-09-23T18:43:00.001Z

Whatever else it is remembered for, 2011 will remain the year that ordinary people once again took to the stage of history. The revolutions that shook Tunisia and then, most inspirationally Egypt have inspired millions of people around the globe. The protests, demonstrations and strikes in Europe this year have all had a little spirit of Egypt about them. Not a few times in recent workplace

Michael Klare - Blood and Oil

2011-09-17T18:32:00.000Z

Subtitled "How America's Thirst for Petrol is Killing Us", Michael Klare's book is an excellent attempt to understand the history of the relationship between the United States and the sources of oil around the world. Unfortunately, the book is somewhat dated. The copy I got from my local library is dated 2004 and thus he was writing only in the earliest days of the Afghanistan and Iraq

Peter J. Reynolds - Ancient Farming

2011-09-10T21:45:00.000Z

This short book is a useful look into what we know about how people in the neolithic, bronze and iron ages, farmed. Beginning with a section on the evidence that archaeologists use to try and piece together the lives of ancient farmers, the book moves on then to look at the development of agriculture and how farming itself took place. The sections on the development of the earliest ploughs are

Colin Tudge - Good Food for Everyone Forever

2011-09-04T18:48:00.000Z

Subtitled "A People's Takeover of the World's Food Supply", Colin Tudge's book is really a manifesto for what he calls, "enlightened farming". While the concept seems onerous, the reality, as the author explains, is much more straightforward. Tudge begins by explaining that the food system we currently have, is dominated by Western corporations driven by their need to make profits, rather than

Isaac Asimov - The Robots of Dawn

2011-09-01T21:17:00.001Z

If I was in the habit of giving my posts titles, I think this one would be called "My Unhappy Return to Isaac Asimov". Sick in bed the other day and needing something light, I decided to re-read some Asimov. When I was 14 or so, Asimov was important to me. I lapped his short-stories up, and delighted in his scientific accuracy. I never liked the Foundation series, of which this novel is a

Eric Richards - The Highland Clearances

2011-08-26T19:02:00.000Z

The Highland Clearances were one of many blots of the development of the modern world. The story of the way that the Highlander crofters were forced from their land is well know. Over a period of around a century, though clearances did occur earlier, tens of thousands of some of the poorest people in Scotland were made to leave the lands that they, and their families had farmed for generations.

James M. McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom

2011-08-18T21:52:00.001Z

In the introduction to this volume, the series editor feels obliged to justify the length of the work itself. He points out that almost every other treatment of the American Civil War requires multiple volumes. James M. McPherson's book is compressed into a single volume, albeit of almost 900 pages and is lauded on the cover as "the best one-volume treatment of its subject". This obsession with

Karl Marx – The Civil War In France

2011-08-14T18:54:00.002Z

Marx's Civil War in France is both an impressive history of the Paris Commune – the short lived, but important moment in working class history, when working people rose up and took control of Paris, and a powerful polemic against the barbarity of the capitalist system and those who stand in its name. There is no doubt, from the various drafts that exist and have been since published that Marx

Steven Mithen - To the Islands

2011-08-13T19:50:00.005Z

Before reviewing this book, I want to mention how I came about it. On holiday just south of Oban on the west coast of Scotland, I visited Kilmartin. This small village is the centre of an enormous concentration of neolithic sites, including several impressive cairns, a few stone circles and not a few standing stones and

Henry Pollack - A World Without Ice

2011-08-04T11:37:00.001Z

If you can ignore the somewhat sycophantic paeans to Al Gore that make up some of this book, and the all too demoralising hopes vested in the election of a Democratic government in the United States, then there is much to get out of this book. The author is a distinguished scientist who has been part of those investigating climate change and its environmental impacts for many years. His

Brian Fagan - Floods, Famines and Emperors - El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations

2011-07-26T20:28:00.002Z

Environmental archaeologist and historian Brian Fagan has written a number of excellent books on the historical links between environmental and climatic change and human history. This early book of his, concentrates on the links between a particular aspect of the Earth's environmental systems and their wider influence on the global climate and thence, human civilisation. El Niño is a

Thomas C. Patterson - Karl Marx, Anthropologist

2011-07-22T19:20:00.000Z

Thomas Patterson sets out to argue that central to Marx's understanding of the world, history and society was what we might now call anthropology. In one sense this should be no surprise - the study of society and how it changes does after all centre upon an understanding on what makes humans tick. Marx was fascinated by human society in all its forms. Both Engels and he devoured contemporary

George MacDonald Fraser - Quartered Safe Out Here

2011-07-10T13:38:00.000Z

George MacDonald Fraser is most famous for his highly entertaining and Flashman novels. At the centre of those stories, which follow the adventures of Flashman through various battles and conflicts of the Victorian era, is a deep sympathy and understanding of the life of a soldier. Fraser's knowledge of soldiering is based on his own active surface in the forgotten war in Burma during World War

Kieran Allen - Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism

2011-07-06T20:23:00.005Z

According to the blurb on the back cover of Kieran Allen's latest book, it "provides a crucial alternative introduction to Marx for undergraduates in sociology and politics". I have no idea what passes for discussion about Marx and Marxism in university departments but I have no doubt that this book will prove useful for anyone trying to get to grips with Marxist ideas for the first time. However

Angus Calder – The People’s War: Britain 1939 – 1945

2011-06-27T20:42:00.004Z

There are many histories of the Second World War. Most of them deal with the battles and military campaigns, or the leaders of armies and nations. Angus Calder’s book though is in some ways a very narrow history, because it looks at the War through the eyes of the people of Britain. The British were told they were fighting a war for democracy and freedom, against tyranny. However for the

Pamela Horn - The Rural World 1780 - 1850 Social Change in the English Countryside

2011-06-24T17:25:00.000Z

The period covered by this work of history is a period which saw an inexorable change to country life. From the late 18th century onwards, Britain moved from being an economy dominated by agriculture, to one where industry and the urban life was the major feature. As late as 1811, agriculture made up a third of British GDP. As population rose dramatically during this period, the agricultural

Nicholas Monsarrat - Three Corvettes

2011-06-21T21:15:00.001Z

Detailing his time in the Royal Navy during World War II, Three Corvettes is actually Monsarrat's embellished diaries. The Corvettes were a small escort ship, used to bolster the limited number of destroyers as fast, offensive ships to help counter the threat from submarines. First published during the war, this is more than a war story. In fact for much of it, we feel the tedium of days at sea,

Gavin Stamp - The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

2011-06-19T19:01:00.002Z

The battle of the Somme defies numerical analysis. Mere military statistics have little meaning when used to describe suffering and death on such a scale. Early on in this book Gavin Stamp sums up the battle with a quote from a military historian "a battle fought from July to November 1916 saw the British and German armies fire thirty million shells at each other and suffer a million casualties

Walden Bello - The Food Wars

2011-06-10T13:26:00.000Z

Much of Walden Bello's Food Wars covers ground discussed in Magdoff and Tokar's book which I reviewed previously here. Indeed Bello contributed a chapter to that volume, with the same title as this book. Nevertheless, there is much of use in Bello's short book, certainly it is very readable. What Bello tries to do is to put the modern agricultural system in the context of capitalism. His

Fred Magdoff & Brian Tokar (eds) - Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal

2011-06-08T21:01:00.001Z

The question of agriculture and food is one of the most pressing issues for society in the early 21st Century. It is inextricably linked to the questions of climate change and the environment, to the distinction between town and country and to issues of health, democracy and governance. This Monthly Review book is thus very important. It brings together some of the most important writers and

Diane Purkiss - The English Civil War, A People's History

2011-06-03T16:46:00.002Z

Given the historical importance of the English Civil War, it is surprisingly little understood. At school we had a rudimentary introduction, which left me with little understanding of anything but a few battles between roundheads and cavaliers and a few place names – Marston Moor and Naseby for instance.My schooling in this crucial juncture of world history was only taken further by Monty Python,

James Hilton - Goodbye, Mr. Chips

2011-05-26T12:45:00.001Z

This is rather an unashamedly sentimental novel. Set in the last decades of the 19th century and progressing into the early quarter of the 20th, Goodbye, Mr. Chips appears to be about the changing world. The end of the Victorian era that represented stability for many, to the uncertainties of the modern world. The Chips of the title is a schoolmaster at a public school called Brookfield.

Matt Perry - Marxism and History

2011-05-24T22:20:00.001Z

This is a useful and readable introduction to the Marxist understanding of history - or Historical Materialism as it is better know. Beginning with a brief explanation of how Marx and Engels understood history and then looking at how they engaged with this in their writing, Matt Perry shows that historical materialism is in no way as complex or difficult as some would argue. However to put these

Francis Pryor - The Making of the British Landscape

2011-05-18T18:45:00.000Z

The British landscape is far from natural. Almost nothing that we see as our cars and trains cross the countryside is natural in a truely historic sense. Trees and hedges have been planted, farms and fields laid out. Roads planned and forests cleared. By arguing that the landscape around the islands of cities on the British Isles is not natural, Francis Pryor is following the lead of Oliver

William Cronon - Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

2011-05-09T20:17:00.001Z

The basis to William Cronon's study of the impact of the arrival of colonists to New England is that the "replacement of Indians by predominately European populations in New England was as much an ecological as a cultural revolution". This is not to say that he downplays the other impacts. He is clearly aware that the destruction of the Native Americans and their way of life was a profound social

Oliver Rackham - The History of the Countryside

2011-04-28T16:16:00.001Z

Oliver Rackham's history of the countryside is a remarkable book. It is also an unusual and slightly odd book. It's oddity stems not from its content, but its style. In essence it boils down to a very detailed and systematic exploration of every feature of the British landscape - from the woodlands, ancient and modern, to the roads, fields and waterways we see around us. It is odd because what we

John Newsinger - The Dredd Phenomenon, Comics and Contemporary Society

2011-04-24T12:02:00.000Z

There is a large part of me that never really got into comics. Partly this was due to a slightly snobish, middle class attitude that my have existed during my early youth. They were not proper books, so they can't have been anything more than simplistic entertainment. Radio 1 to literature's Radio 3. Later on, I discovered 2000AD. It is cynical social comentary made it clear that there was

Leon Trotsky - Lessons of October

2011-04-21T16:15:00.000Z

This short volume by Leon Trotsky is an undisguised polemic. Written in 1924, in the aftermath of a series of failed revolutions across Europe, it was clear that the revolutionary movement that had developed following the First World War was at a turning point. Trotsky's volume is in itself a hard restatement of the need for revolutionary organisation to successfully lead a working class

J.G. Farrell - Troubles

2011-04-19T16:27:00.000Z

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Farrell's book The Siege of Krishnapur and this earlier book of his does not disappoint either. Apparently this is really the first in a trilogy of which Krishnapur is the second, but there are limited links between the stories, so the order doesn't matter. Together with the third in the series, the theme is the end of Empire. Krishnapur appeared to deal with the

Rosemary Hill - Stonehenge

2011-04-16T09:19:00.000Z

It is rare that I express disappointment with a book. Usually I am aware enough of the contents to feel that I know what I am about to read, so it is unusual to find myself criticising one. However, it may be that my own criticisms of this book are misplaced. The Wonders of the World series has been extremely enjoyable and I would encourage others to read these short books. There are links to

E.P. Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class

2011-04-12T21:09:00.003Z

E. P. Thompson's monumental work of history of the development and shaping of the English working class almost defies review. After all, in almost 1000 pages he covers so much ground, in such great detail, that it feels inappropriate to even attempt to mention an section for fear of glossing over something equally important elsewhere. Hundreds of words could also be written about Thompson's

Richard Overy - 1939 Countdown to War

2011-04-03T22:09:00.000Z

The processes that led to the start of the Second World War are ones that have been examined and debated enormously. The battle lines in this debate were set out even before the war ended - Richard Overy points out that the historian Sir Llewellyn Woodward was asked to write an "official survey of British foreign policy before the outbreak of war" later on in the conflict. Woodward seems to have

Iain M. Banks - Surface Detail

2011-04-01T09:39:00.001Z

Iain M Banks' latest culture novels is somewhat of a return to form, though it still suffers somewhat from the bloated feel of his more recent SF novels. At the heart of this novel is the concept of virtual hells. Sufficiently advanced civilisations, Banks postulates, could create virtual environments for minds to be introduced to. If you wanted to, you could introduce them to a horrific

Donny Gluckstein - The Tragedy of Bukharin

2011-03-17T23:13:00.000Z

I first developed an interest in the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin after I read an account of his show trial by Fitzroy Maclean in his autobiography Eastern Approaches. There, Maclean describes how Bukharin runs rings around his prosecutors, who have tried to portray him as an enemy of the revolution, who plotted to assassinate Lenin and Stalin. These accusations were based on nothing.

Marcel Mazoyer & Laurence Roudart - A History of World Agriculture from the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis

2011-03-09T21:32:00.001Z

Depsite how we in the modern world might view agriculture, it is more than simply another branch of industry. For those of us living in the developed world, the vast majority of us have little or nothing to do with the production of food, or indeed other crops. Today, those doing the farming work that feeds us all, comprise, in the developed world at least, somewhere around 5% of the populations.

Siegfried Sassoon - Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

2011-03-06T15:09:00.002Z

Part two of Sassoon's fictionalised autobiographical account of his early life reads much more lifelike than his earlier account of hunting and riding in the English countryside. At the end of his fox hunting memoirs, we left him in the early years of trench warfare on the Western Front. Several of his friends and acquaintances had already died. Volume two begins slightly after the end of the

Greg Bear - Eon

2011-03-05T17:47:00.002Z

Eon - Classic SF "Big Dumb Object" Greg Bear's classic science fiction novel Eon, is seen as one of the all time great novels of that genre. Part of its reputation must rest on the imaginative idea at the heart of the story. Just before the book begins, a large asteroid (which turns out to be an exact copy of Juno which is still orbiting around the sun) appears and enters orbit around Earth.

Siegfried Sassoon - Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man

2011-03-01T20:18:00.004Z

This is a book that really shouldn't work for me. My only experience of horse-riding was one of abject terror followed by a vow to never to get in close proximity to a mule again. I despise the very notion of fox-hunting, mostly because it is a classic case of the ruling class in society thinking they should be allowed to ride rough-shod (literarily in the case) over everyone else and kill out of

Rabab El-Mahdi & Philip Marfleet - Egypt: The Moment of Change

2011-02-23T19:07:00.000Z

Revolutions these days seem two a penny. Mass strikes and protests did for Tunisia's dictator Ben Ali in what seemed like a few days. Egypt's Mubarak held on for longer, but as the mass of people in Cairo's Tahrir Square refused to give up in the face of the state's repressive force and strikes broke out across the country, even he couldn't remain in power. As I write this, Libya's Colonel

Terry Pratchett - Unseen Academicals

2011-02-22T11:35:00.001Z

Capitalism is very adept at taking old traditions, remoulding and repackaging (and occasionally reinventing) them in its own interests. These interests are usual those of short term profit, but they can also be in the interest of propaganda, or the creation of ideas of nation or racial superiority. One of the things that has been adapted and distorted by modern society are the games that

Antony Beevor - D-Day; The Battle For Normandy

2011-02-14T21:37:00.000Z

Antony Beevor's latest book is an excellent addition to his earlier works, particular those on the battles for Stalingrad and Berlin. In some ways for this reader, coming from Britain, it's a book that is closer to home. After all this was a battle fought by Allied soldiers who were either British or invading the continent from Britain. The battles themselves are described in gruesome detail, as

Eleanor Burke Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance

2011-02-08T20:42:00.000Z

Eleanor Burke Leacock's collection of essays, Myths of Male Dominance (Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally) is one of the most important works for those who argue that the way we live our lives today is not the natural order of things. Leacock's articles are a powerful defence of the Marxist notion of "Primitive Communism" - the idea that in humanity's past, our societies were

Edward Vallance - A Radical History of Britain

2011-02-02T00:05:00.003Z

Before anything else is said about this book, the author should be congratulated at the very least, for attempting this monumental task. Anyone trying to get to grips with almost 800 or so years of radical history has set themselves an enormous job. To cover everything, even in 551 pages would be almost impossible, to do what is covered justice would take a historian of some note. What is good

Frederick Engels - The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

2011-01-25T14:20:00.000Z

Frederick Engels' book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was an incredible achievement. It firstly shows Engels' and Marx's fascination by every aspect of human life and history. Engels shows a deep knowledge of his subject, which while dated by today's understanding, must have meant he was at the forefront of contemporary anthropological work. Origin is an attempt to

Keith Miller - St Peter's

2011-01-21T11:17:00.002Z

The church of St Peter's is surely one of the most awe inspiring pieces of architecture in the world. Whether or not you find it beautiful, or whether you yourself inspired into religious excitement by it is a different question. It's a powerful statement of strength by the Catholic Church, perhaps summed up by one visitor, Florence Nightingale who wrote that: "No event in my life except my

J.G. Farrell - The Siege of Krishnapur

2011-01-18T09:50:00.004Z

The Indian Rebellion against British Rule in 1857 has had a number of interesting treatments in novel form, I think in particular of Fraser's Flashman novel, Flashman In the Great Game. Both Fraser's book and this one use the comic form to great effect, though Farrell's book is, it must be said, far better. Concentrating on the fictional town of Krishnapur, Farrell examines the lives of the

Karl Kautsky - The Agrarian Question - Volume 1

2011-01-13T19:49:00.004Z

Karl Kautsky 1854 - 1938 Karl Kautsky was the foremost intellectual leader of the Marxist movement internationally at the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th. His betrayal of the workers movement with his support for the First World War is an important story, rooted in his flawed understanding of the process of social change. That particular tale is out of the remit of

Joseph Choonara & Charlie Kimber - Arguments for Revolution

2011-01-09T20:14:00.001Z

Subtitled, "The Case for the Socialist Workers Party", this is a shamelessly partisan book. It's a book that argues the case for the radical, revolutionary change in society and puts the case that to do so, socialists must be organised into a revolutionary organisation capable of shaping and leading that struggle. Joseph Choonara and Charlie Kimber are both leading activists in the British SWP.

Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Caspak Trilogy

2011-01-06T20:34:00.000Z

The Caspak Trilogy comprises three of Edgar Rice Burroughs less famous novels - The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot and the oddly named Out of Time's Abyss. If I am going to be honest, all of these novels read like spoof 1920s adventure tales. Of course this isn't high literature, this is pulp fiction and that's a particularly generous description. That's not to say that mass

Robert Roberts - A Ragged Schooling

2011-01-04T22:57:00.000Z

Robert Roberts wrote one of the all time great studies of working class life, The Classic Slum, but this short book is a truly wonderful account of his boyhood growing up in the slums of Salford in the early years of the 20th Century. Salford then was a city dominated by industry. Roberts' father works in a light engineering factory, where it turns out he is a leading trade unionist. He also

Elaheh Rostami-Povey - Iran's Influence

2010-12-31T15:48:00.001Z

Despite the rhetoric you hear from many of the leading politicians of the western world, and even from sections of the more liberal establishment, Iran is not the monolithic Islamic state that they would have us believe. Elaheh Rostami-Povey's multi-layered book explores in detail the country's history, its part in the wider economic, political and cultural history of the Middle East as well as

Tim O'Brien - If I Die In A Combat Zone

2010-12-26T22:43:00.000Z

This Vietnam memoir follows Tim O'Brien from his basic training to his time on the front line in Vietnam. It finishes with his time in a safer post, behind the lines working in the administration. By the time he got there, he'd seen several friends killed and injured and dodged sniper fire in the places that became infamous for the massacre at Mai Lai. While the storyline has become a fairly

Jules Verne - Five Weeks in a Balloon

2010-12-24T12:59:00.000Z

Jules Verne was rather a prolific writer. Many of his novels have gone down in history as representing the hopes for a technological future. One in which nothing was beyond the realms of human achievement so long as the technology could be invented. In doing this he created incredible adventures, often populated with tremendous machines and larger than life heroes. Five Weeks in a Balloon was

Hassan Mahamdallie - Crossing The River Of Fire: The Socialism Of William Morris

2010-12-21T12:42:00.002Z

One of the central themes of Hassan Mahamdallie's introducing to the life and politics of William Morris, is that all to often he is reduced to an artist, a poet, or simply a lover of nice things. Even when Morris' politics are considered, they are described as a strange mix of abstract socialism with a hoped for return to some sort of medieval utopia. This no doubt lies behind Tony Blair's

Chris Harman - Marxism and History

2010-12-18T20:29:00.000Z

These two essays from Chris Harman form one of the clearest and most accessible introductions to the question of history in Marxist thought that it's possible to find. The first essay deals with the oft confused concepts of Base and Superstructure that Karl Marx refers to in one of his articles. The base - the economic organisation at the bottom of different societies allows the creation of a

Sheila Rowbotham - Hidden from History

2010-12-13T17:59:00.000Z

This is no doubt one of the classic books of working class history. First published in the early 1970s though, it's groundbreaking aspect was too look at the "hidden history" of the struggle of women for equality and rights, in the context of the broader working class struggles and movement. As such it takes on some uncomfortable truths. Despite the fact that at least on the surface the labour

Barbara W. Tuchman - The Proud Tower, A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890 - 1914

2010-12-02T23:05:00.000Z

The "Proud Tower" of Barbara Tuchman's title, belongs to Edgar Allan Poe, and from it, "Death looks gigantically down". Any writing about the period covered in this work is of course coloured by the knowledge that it ends with the slaughter of the First World War. This understanding colours everything that is described but Tuchman is often at great pains to avoid discussing this. She wants to

Philip Pullman - The Ruby In The Smoke

2010-12-02T15:06:00.000Z

The sheer brilliance of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series for young adults has unjustly hidden his excellent other works. His series of novels about Sally Lockhart, that begins with The Ruby in the Smoke, contains no fantasy, though at times they are fantastical and amazing. Ruby is at times a deeply disconcerting novel, even for the adult reader. The plot begins with Sally trying to

Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

2010-11-28T12:34:00.000Z

Paul Theroux's rail journeys are never less than epic. In this trip from the early 1970s, he leaves London one day, famously stating that he has "seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it". He evokes a desire to see the remote and unusual, to meet new people and explore a world that isn't yours. But, increasingly I found that Theroux's descriptions were less those of an awe inspired

Margaret Dewar - The Quiet Revolutionary

2010-11-14T19:26:00.002Z

People make history but the people who do so are often forgotten. Everyone learns the names of generals or kings in history, or even those of dictators. But their soldiers, subjects and victims remain anonymous. Margaret Dewar played barely a small role in history, yet her life charts some of the greatest events of the 20th century. If it wasn't for this autobiography, she would literally remain

Philip José Farmer - To Your Scattered Bodies Go

2010-11-09T13:55:00.001Z

First published in 1971, this novel must rapidly have become a classic of the Science Fiction genre. Despite some rather clunky dialogue in places, the author has created a strange, fantastical world that allows him to explore a multitude of ideas and experiences. It's also believable, which give the world's nature might sound strange, but the characters and places work well and hang together.

Tony Cliff - Trotsky, The Sword of the Revolution, 1917 - 1923

2010-11-02T20:41:00.006Z

This, the second part of Tony Cliff's four volume biography of Leon Trotsky deals with the period that would be most disputed perhaps by Joseph Stalin and his followers at home and abroad. This is the aftermath of the October revolution - the workers and soldiers have seized power in Russia. Soviet power is a reality across a huge swathe of the globe. The seizure of power itself had be

Karl Marlantes - Matterhorn

2010-10-31T10:11:00.001Z

America's imperialist adventure in Vietnam shaped the world we live in today in many ways. The injustice of the most powerful nation in the world bombing one of the poorest "back to the stone age" led to a radical questioning of the status quo, and put anti-imperialism at the heart of the radical movements of 1968 and beyond. But the internal dynamics of the American system shaped the conflict,

John Berger - Pig Earth

2010-10-27T09:23:00.001Z

I dug this book out, purely on the basis of a review written over at Pechorin's Journal. I concour with everything written there, and in some ways I feel that his comments make my own review superflucous. Pig Earth is a strange novel. Don't pick it up if you're looking for a nice, simply linear narrative. It's a story, but it's also polemic and poetry. The opening chapter is a Marxist explanation

Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

2010-10-25T21:26:00.000Z

The Black Death decimated the population of the medieval world. The epidemic that hit Europe in the 1340s can be argued to have fundamentally changed the world. While on the surface, the social relations that government the peasant dominated societies were similar before and after, beneath the surface, changes that had started before the plague hit, were being accelerated. Ziegler's book is an

Giles Ji Ungpakorn - Thailand's Crisis and the Fight for Democracy

2010-10-17T12:07:00.000Z

The violent street demonstrations that took place in Thailand earlier this year didn't get the coverage in the Western media that they deserved. Partly this is a typical lack of interest from the mainstream for the struggles of ordinary people. It is also, perhaps, a result of Thailand being a "far off country of which we know little". The internal politics of this country were maybe considered

Roland Chambers - The Last Englishman, The double life of Arthur Ransome

2010-10-12T21:10:00.004Z

Those who know Arthur Ransome as the writer of the excellent childrens novels in the Swallows and Amazon's series are often amazed to learn that he had a rather more exciting life than you might imagine from someone whose most famous works concentrate on sailing, fishing and camping. In reality, Ransome's life was dominated by much bigger events, which is why only a few chapters towards the end

CLR James - Beyond A Boundary

2010-10-04T20:56:00.002Z

Rare is the detailed book on sport written by an avowed Marxist. Still less are books about, cricket, perhaps seen as the most establishment of sports - at least here in the UK. But the central tenet of CLR James book is summed up with the famous line, "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know" - you can't understand the sport, without understanding its context. In this sense, the book

Joshua Slocum - Sailing Alone Around the World

2010-09-29T12:19:00.000Z

In his introduction to this famous traveller's tale, Arthur Ransome says that "A school library without this book is incomplete. It should be part of the education of every English or American boy". Times, of course, change, and Joshua Slocum's feat is almost forgotten. There is no doubt though, that he inspired and excited the world when he became the first to sail single handed around the

Tony Cliff - All Power to the Soviets, Lenin 1914 - 1917

2010-09-22T19:28:00.001Z

The second volume of Tony Cliff's biography of Lenin contains perhaps the most important political and historical period for socialist activists. The first volume of the three part series dealt with the early years of the Bolshevik party and Lenin's role in building it up to the point when the First World War broke out. This part has, in my experience been widely read, discussed and debated