Literature

By: Hall Greenland The Well-Dressed Revolutionary.The Odyssey of Michel Pablo in the age of uprisings. ISBN: 978-0-902869-10-3 (print)e-ISBN 978-0-902869-07-3 (e-book) RRP: £18, €22, $US25 (print)RRP: £9.99, €14.99, $US17.99 (e-book) 380 pages; 156×234 mm. Publication date: September 2023 Available on backorderAdd to cart Categories: History, International, Paperback, Theory Description About the book Michael Pablo was a twentieth century revolutionary whose life and ideas remain relevant and inspirational in the 21st. He spent his life involved in revolutions around the globe – in Greece, France, Algeria, Chile, Palestine and Portugal, to name the most important – everywhere pursuing a genuinely democratic socialism. He was a ha...

A masterful insight into the mechanisms that hide the US’s constant state of war from its own citizens. Dave Lindorff This Pentagon map shows US military bases in Africa. The USA’s Africa Command (Africom) mission supposedly aims to ‘partner, counter transnational threats and malign actors, strengthen security forces, and respond to crises in order to advance US national interests and promote regional security, stability, and prosperity’. The instability having been created by imperialism in the first place, in order to provide a justification for introducing troops, whose only aim is to support the continued ‘stability’ of imperialist looting. This article is reproduced from Savage Minds, with thanks. ***** Usually when I read a interesting book I’m reviewin...

BY PRABIR PURKAYASTHA Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, with Oppenheimer in 1942 – Public Domain The new blockbuster film on Oppenheimer has brought back the memories of the first nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It has raised complex questions on the nature of the society that permitted such bombs to be developed and used and the stockpiling of nuclear arsenals that can destroy the world many times over. Did the infamous McCarthy era and hunting for reds everywhere have any relationship with the pathology of a society that suppressed its guilt over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, substituting it instead with a belief in its exceptionalism? What explains the transformation of Oppenheimer, who had emerged as the “hero” of the Manhattan Project that b...

BY NICOLE A. COOKE Despite misconceptions and stereotypes – ranging from what librarians Gretchen Keer and Andrew Carlos have described as the “middle-aged, bun-wearing, comfortably shod, shushing librarian” to the “sexy librarian … and the hipster or tattooed librarian” – library professionals are more than book jockeys, and they do more than read at story time. They are experts in classification, pedagogy, data science, social media, disinformation, health sciences, music, art, media literacy and, yes, storytelling. And right now, librarians are taking on an old role. They are defending the rights of readers and writers in the battles raging across the U.S. over censorship, book challenges and book bans. Book challenges are an attempt to rem...

BY VICTOR GROSSMAN Mother Jones with the children of miners. Library of Congress. For decades and decades this elderly lady was loved by American miners from Pennsylvania to Colorado. For them she was “Mother Jones”! And the affection was mutual. Those were her “boys” – whom she fought for and cheered on till the end of her very long life. For the coal-mine bosses, however, above all during a strike, or if one threatened, she was a total nightmare, pure poison! That was because she organized the working men – and very definitely the women – to fight! She had to be kept away at all costs! She wrote a wonderful autobiography, and its recollections are better than what anyone else can write, so I will quote lots of it – like this description of a telephone call in a mining di...

BY MARK STEVEN Cover Art for the book The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner Since class war first appeared in radical thought during the final decades of the eighteenth century, it has continuously evolved through an exchange of ideas between political activity and literary narrative, reframing revolutionary action through military language. My new book, Class War: A Literary History, explores this fusion of politics and literature from the Haitian Revolution through the Black Panthers. But what can be said of class war and its purchase on the literature of revolution right now, in the historical present? Ours is an era into which the story of class war is conveyed by literature, emerging from the revolutionary past into a moment defined by the death of liberal progre...