Book Review: The Wild Girls
by Ursula Le Guin ISBN: 978-1-60486-403-8 PP: 112 Publisher: PM Press £9.99
With an epic author like Le Guin, I couldn’t help but go straight to her interview with Bisson. It’s solid. The more interviews I read from Bisson in the Outspoken Author series, the more I want to read. Tangent: I hope he and PM Press put an anthology together, and that they include this interview with… Continue reading
Book Review: Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety
by Julius Deutsch, edited & translated by Gabriel Kuhn ISBN: 978-1-62963-154-7 PP: 128 Publisher: PM Press £11.99
This book is too short. All the content is of high and tight quality. Read Kuhn’s introduction and mini-bio of Deutsch and you’ll want to know much, much more about Red Vienna. It’s a crack incisive introduction to the vital, visceral intersectionality of anti-fascism, sports, and sobriety.
Kuhn’s volume offers a… Continue reading
Book Review: Marge Piercy’s My Life, My Body
Author: Marge Piercy Publisher: PM Press/Outspoken Authors ISBN: 978-1-62963-105-9 Pages: 128
This is a highly enjoyable collection of very readable “essays, poems, memoirs, reviews, rants, and railleries.” Mostly non-fiction, it’s strong and political throughout many of the works. I found it refreshing and energising without tedious polemic or finger pointing — the way good politicised critique ought to be.
Powerful: “Gentrification and Its Discontents.” offers a grounded experience and… Continue reading
Double book analysis: Peter Davison on George Orwell
In this review and analysis piece, Raymond S. Solomon discusses works by George Orwell and annotations by Peter Davison in two of the Orwell expert’s books, exploring the turbulent 1930s including issues around Palestine, the Spanish revolution, and the beating of Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists.
BOOKS REVIEWED
- Davison, Peter (ed.) (2013) George Orwell: A Life In Letters, Selected and Annotated. New York, London. Liveright Publishing… Continue reading
Book Review: Donald Rooum’s Anarchist Wildcat Comics
PM Press, 2016 ISBN: 978-1-62963-127-1 PP: 128 Publisher: PM Press
As it should be, Rooum’s playful illustrations dominate this volume.
Anarchist Wildcat Comics has three parts. The first 40 or so pages are Rooum’s introduction and discussion of his personal history as an anarchist during the middle to late decades of 20th century Britain. Most of the writing centres around the 1960s and his role in exposing police frame-ups of… Continue reading
New guides to a smarter activism
Several new guides to help activists be safer, more effective (and just know your stuff) have been released recently, so below is a brief roundup:
Squatting (Britain)
The Advisory Service for Squatters’ new handbook, brought out over the weekend, which is the first new release since the government made squatting empty residential buildings illegal. The guide is already available from Freedom Bookshop (it will be more widely available soon)… Continue reading
Book Review: Roses and Revolutionists
ISBN: 978-1-910170-17-5 Price: £6.99 Pages: 106 Publisher: Five Leaves Books
Nominally a work of history, Nigel Todd’s book on the founding, growth and eventual collapse of the Clousden Hill anarchist co-operative feels as though it could be written now with only a few technological twists. For anyone with more than a passing interest in the libertarian co-op scene, largely organised through Radical Routes these days, the internal tensions… Continue reading
So tell me again how the bus service is going to be run: a review of Inventing the Future
By Roger of Radical Think Tank, and Radical Assembly Education group
Some time back in the analogue days of the 1980s I was sitting in a room with three other nerdy, design-obsessive anarchists, working out the founding principles of the worker and housing co-op federation Radical Routes. While I was a staunch pacifist, Russ opposite me was a militant class war man. We were at daggers drawn most of the… Continue reading
Rescuing Galbraith from the conventional wisdom
Rescuing Galbraith from the conventional wisdom
Colin Ward
John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society is the only modern book on economics to become a best-seller. Comparisons have been made with Tawney’s Acquisitive Society and with Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and praise has been lavished on the book from the political right, left and centre. The Financial Times found it “a stringent and stimulating piece of social analysis”, the Daily Telegraph thought it might provide the ‘sixties with “the popular tools of thought for handling the unfamiliar problems of our already rich society”. Even the warring factions in the Labour Party were united in praise of it, from Mr. Crosland who declared that “I am wholeheartedly a Galbraith man” to Mr. Crossman, who believed it to be “the most entertaining and profound exposure of post-war Western society that has yet been published”, and Tribune which saw in it a “magnificently iconoclastic assault on economic illusions”. It even has its admirers on the other side of the iron curtain, where Galbraith himself is the only leading Western economist to have lectured on the economics of capitalism, and one of the only ones to seek an exchange of professional and personal views with his opposite numbers in Moscow, Warsaw and Belgrade. Continue reading
Book Spotlight: Abolish Restaurants
Abolish Restaurants cover: prole.info
Author: prole.info
Originally published:2006
Anyone who has ever worked in the food service industry know that restaurants are, generally, dens of misery. Abolish Restaurants doesn’t shy away from this. The short book is riddled with personal experience and it is the uncompromising vision it presents which makes its arguments so compelling. The work is split in two, the first half dealing with the operation of the… Continue reading
