Book reviews and essays
October 1, 2023
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reviews Bloodbath Nation, a poignant exploration of the painful, studiously ignored truths about gun culture in the U.S. To grapple with the epidemic of gun violence, she writes, requires confronting deeper truths about white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and the U.S. history of enslavement.
April 1, 2023
Toby Terrar reviews I Was a Red Priest, the memoir of Marxist clergy member and activist Father Jean Boulier, finding lessons for today's antiwar Christians.
February 1, 2023
Tomás Mac Sheoin reviews Road to Repeal, which documents the struggle for abortion rights in Ireland, from its constitutional prohibition to the ban's repeal in 2018.
November 1, 2022
Mariko Frame reviews The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to the World Beyond Capitalism, by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan (Verso, 2022) and its explorations of the policies, vision, and strategies for social change required for the burgeoning movement.
September 1, 2022
Recent scholarship suggests that the widespread perception of Soviet states as uniquely ecologically disastrous is, at best, exaggerated, and that these environmental legacies must be re-examined.
June 1, 2022
Increasing numbers of left-wing activists around the world are turning to Vincent Bevins's The Jakarta Method to learn more about the horrific atrocities committed by the United States against peoples' struggles for the right to self-determination in the so-called postcolonial era. In particular, the book describes how imperialist expansion destroyed revolutionary struggles in the third world.
May 1, 2022
The term racial capitalism is a bit of a shibboleth. Those who invoke the phrase draw from a longstanding tradition of radical scholarship that brings attention to the material force of racialism in systems of capitalist domination. There is, however, a mounting critique that questions the term's usefulness, casting doubt on the scholarly project initiated by Cedric Robinson. In the face of such concerns, Histories of Racial Capitalism is a much needed contribution.
February 1, 2022
Free City! is a book for organizers, by organizers. Written from inside the struggle, it is a history of the five-year campaign to save San Francisco's community college system from being shuttered by a highly politicized accreditation agency. The movement went on to win support and funding for the country's most inclusive free college measure.
December 1, 2021
There are a thousand ways to be a radical lawyer. Michael Ratner's magnificent Moving the Bar gives a tantalizing taste of how one person, with his increasing band of colleagues, defended movements for social justice and revolution during his lifetime.
November 1, 2021
The reissuing of Reluctant Reformers can inform our attempts to grapple with how the unity of the oppressed can be forged in such a way that the interests of the historically marginalized do not continue to get…well, marginalized.
