Verso Books

Book SynopsisJewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishland, a vast expanse of Eastern Europe that, before the Holocaust, ran from the Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and incorporated hundreds of Jewish communities with a combined population of some 11 million people. Within this territory, revolutionaries arose from the Jewish misery of Eastern and Central Europe; they were raised in the fear of God and taught to respect religious tradition, but were caught up in the great current of revolutionary utopian thinking. Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals, they embodied the multifarious activity and radicalism of a Jewish working class that glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag.Today, the world from which they came has disappeared, dismantled and destroyed by the Nazi genocide. After this irremediable break, there remain only survivors, and the work of memory for red Yiddishland. This book traces the struggles of these militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions-a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the twentieth century.Trade ReviewIts impact on me was immense. I devoured it; my political horizons radically expanded. Not only, I came to realise, was there no contradiction between Judaism, socialism and internationalism, but, until the Nazi genocide, they existed in a profoundly interrelated way. -- Sai Englert * Salvage *An eye-opening oral history. -- Gabriel Levy, author of Judaic Technologies of the WorldA haunting, inspiring and often tragic book, Revolutionary Yiddishland uses first-hand interviews, deep archival research and sharp analysis to bring to life a complex landscape of factory workers, partisans, poets, party leaders, refugees, ghetto fighters and movement intellectuals. -- Ben Lorber * In These Times *This rich and poignant and often enthralling record traces the Yiddishland revolutionaries from their East European roots through the years of hope and struggle and hideous crimes to the heroic anti-Nazi resistance and beyond, with fascinating asides on Spain and Palestine. There are many lessons for today, not least the significance ofthe lively interaction of revolutionary intellectuals and workers and the efforts to integrate the commitment to radical social and economic change with the formation of a Jewish identity that would break sharply from the stultifying tradition and open the way to the aspirations of the Jewish workers' movement that was at the forefront of revolutionary struggle from its earliest days. -- Noam ChomskyCould there have been a future for pre-war Jewry in which Israel did not exist and Jews were gathered in a nation state within a federated Soviet Union? This is one of the questions brought up in Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg's book. There is hope for the spirit and aims behind the stories this book tells. Jewish radicalism did not die out in 1942 with the Final Solution. It now expresses itself without Yiddish. -- Clive Bloom * Times Higher Educational Supplement *A fascinating window onto a lost world. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex relationship between the Jewish left, the general left, and Zionism. The gripping testimonies collected in these pages give the lie to the idea that Jews in the Shoah went like sheep to the slaughter. Brossat and Klingberg do not try to iron out the wrinkles of the past. Their insightful commentary illuminates the passions, paradoxes, triumphs and defeats of the witnesses who populate their book. -- Brian Klug, author of Being Jewish and Doing JusticeNowadays we know more and more about the Nazi Genocide. Unfortunately, we have much less knowledge about the everyday life which preceded the horror and was so brutally terminated. For opening up this world we must praise Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klinberg for their vital new book, Revolutionary Yiddishland. Here, life is given priority over death, and the struggles of so many in the Yiddishland allow us to see past the catastrophes. -- Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish PeoplePraiseworthy * Jewish Currents *Brossat and Klingberg's book is a memorial to a missing world. As an aesthetic composition, it is beautiful. -- Max Ajl * Mondoweiss *Altogether, Revolutionary Yiddishland is a thoroughly engaging read. It's an important historical document preserving the memory of this radical period of Jewish and European history. -- JP O'Malley * Haaretz *

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Book SynopsisPolitics is no longer the art of the possible, but of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way that it is perceived. In Storytelling Christian Salmon looks at the twenty-first century hijacking of creative imagination, anatomizing the timeless human desire for narrative form, and how this desire is abused by the marketing mechanisms that bolster politicians and their products: luxury brands trade on embellished histories, managers tell stories to motivate employees, soldiers in Iraq train on Hollywood-conceived computer games, and spin doctors construct political lives as if they were a folk epic. This "storytelling machine" is masterfully unveiled by Salmon, and is shown to be more effective and insidious as a means of oppression than anything dreamed up by Orwell.Trade ReviewA compelling and very readable polemic. * Financial Times *French writer Salmon here treats us to the useful spectacle of a relentless polemic against a ubiquitous idea widely held to provoke only positive feelings. As used by branders or politicians, 'storytelling' is, on his argument, a sedative, suppressing the desire for truth in favour of satisfying narrative form. -- Steven Poole * Guardian *Fascinating ... intellectually satisfying ... Salmon's insights are thought-provoking and have ramifications beyond the world of advertising. * Washington Post *Salmon draws together his arguments into a coherent and chilling whole. * Independent *Salmon makes a riveting case for how public relations (or more euphemistically, storytelling) has come to dominate statecraft and business in the West. * Publishers Weekly *This book, which is both concise and clearly written . guides us through these texts which are largely unknown and now very influential. * Le Monde *There are certain books that make you feel less stupid after reading them than before . It is a fascinating and never jargon-heavy book. * Le Progrès *

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Book SynopsisIt is clear that the right is on the rise, but after Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the spike in popularity of extreme-right parties across Europe, the question on everyone's minds is: how did this happen?An expansive investigation of the ways in which a newly-configured right interconnects with anti-democratic and illiberal forces at the level of the state, Europe's Fault Lines provides much-needed answers, revealing some uncomfortable truths.What appear to be "blind spots" about far-right extremism on the part of the state, are shown to constitute collusion-as police, intelligence agencies and the military embark on practices of covert policing that bring them into direct or indirect contact with the far right, in ways that bring to mind the darkest days of Europe's authoritarian past.Old racisms may be structured deep in European thought, but they have been revitalized and spun in new ways: the war on terror, the cultural revolution from the right, and the migration-linked demonization of the destitute "scrounger." Drawing on her work for the Institute of Race Relations over thirty years, Liz Fekete exposes the fundamental fault lines of racism and authoritarianism in contemporary Europe.Trade ReviewFor the twenty-five years I have known Liz Fekete she has been a tireless anti-racist and anti-fascist fighter, as well as a people's intellectual and a political inspiration. Fekete brings that cumulative experience, insight and commitment to her brilliant new book, Europe's Fault Lines, which maps the shifting terrain of racism and right wing populism in Europe, as well as continued forms of resistance. This book not only paints a gut-wrenching portrait of the vulgarity and violence of Neoliberalism, but through her clarity of analysis, Fekete gives us sustenance for the struggles that lay ahead. -- Barbara Ransby, author of Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs Paul RobesonRacism, for Liz Fekete, is the breeding ground of fascism, and her struggle to combat both-on the ground and in her writings-has earned her the reputation of being an intrepid organiser, an inspirational speaker and an organic intellectual. -- A. Sivanandan, Director Emiritus of the Institute of Race RelationsFor twenty-five years, Fekete relentlessly monitored Europe's far right while the continent's leaders preferred to look away. With right-wing extremism finally recognised by the mainstream as a fundamental threat to Europe's future, her indictment of those who enabled, amplified, and aided the rise of the hard right is an essential contribution to the defense of democratic values. -- Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are ComingIn Europe's Fault Lines, Liz Fekete has not only written an excellent study of how racism is once again being normalised but how, in turn, it is acting as cloak under which fascism is resurgent. -- Nicolas Lalaguna * Morning Star *A relatively brief book, but it makes important points that are often left out of the discussion. -- Daniel Trilling * Prospect *[Europe's Fault Lines] provokes a range of emotional responses, from rage to helplessness, but closes leaving the reader equipped with an intellectual arsenal to begin resisting fascism in all its guises. * Peace News *Fekete provides an accessible and stimulating discussion on the roles of the state, intellectuals, the media, and uneven development in the triumph of the right in our age of crisis and rage ... Europe's Fault Lines is a wealth of resource on one of the most disturbing aspects of our age of rage. * The Bullet *A perspicacious enquiry into the 'fomenting of a reactionary cultural revolution' over the last few decades ... provid[ing] the reader with a clear picture of the state of political play in Europe. * Counterfire *

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Book SynopsisAnthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In this rigorous study, Maurice Godelier traces the evolution of his thought. Focusing primarily on Lévi-Strauss's analysis of kinship and myth, Godelier provides an assessment of his intellectual achievements and legacy. Meticulously researched, Lévi-Strauss is written in a clear and accessible style. The culmination of decades of engagement with Lévi-Strauss's work, this book will prove indispensible to students of his thought and structural anthropology more generally.Trade ReviewPraise for The Metamorphoses of KinshipThis is a blockbuster of a book. Nothing like it has been written since Lévi-Strauss's Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) or Meyer Fortes's Kinship and the Social Order (1969). Yet in the sweep of its evidence and argument, Godelier's summa is more ambitious and far-reaching than either of these. It is at once a major intervention in the discipline of anthropology, and a work of the widest human interest. Kinship has the reputation of being the most technical department of anthropology, the least accessible to a general public. But while Métamorphoses synthesizes a huge range of complex materials, it is written in an unfailingly lucid style that makes no assumptions of professional familiarity with terms and debates about kinship, but always takes care to explain them in language anyone can understand. The book is both a monument of scholarship and agripping set of reflections on universal experience. It is certain to be read and discussed for years to come. -- Jack Goody * New Left Review *Praise for The Metamorphoses of KinshipGodelier has reasserted the value of our rich tradition of discussions of kinship matters. He has also shown how the category has metamorphosed as it has drawn in new issues of pressing current importance in modern life and made his case that, far from being genuinely in decline, the study of kinship is central to our understanding of what it means to be human. -- Robert H. Barnes * Comparative Studies in Society and History *Praise for The Metamorphoses of KinshipIt is this constellation of world views and ways of being that we meet in Maurice Godelier's powerful and often provocative new book, The Metamorphoses of Kinship. In this timely and challenging study, Godelier heralds the revival of kinship studies within the discipline of anthropology. In striking and elucidating prose, Godelier writes both for the trained anthropologist and for the general public. This is a book that aims to introduce the merits of anthropology to a broader readership.With singular conviction and remarkable depth, Godelier traces anthropology's long courtship with kinship studies.a hopeful and compelling read. -- Fiona Murphy * Irish Times *Praise for The Metamorphoses of KinshipA truly monumental work * Times Higher Education Supplement *Praise forThe Mental and the MaterialEngaging and intriguing - Anthropology, it would seem, may yet return from the graveyard of structuralism to stir up some debate in the social sciences. * New Statesman *Praise for The Enigma of the GiftThis book restores one's faith in the anthropological project and will, I hope, mark the beginning of a new era of anthropological argumentation. one marvels at the clarity of Godelier's thought. He does not mask his central propositions in obscurantist post-modern prose. His use of abstruse concepts such as the 'real', the 'imaginary', and the 'symbolic' is not obtuse. He knows what he wants to say and his persuasive rhetoric is captivating... his use of the criticalmethod sets new standards for scholarly disputation. Godelier does not dismiss. He carefully criticises, modifies and transcends. The argument is forceful but always intellectually generous. But what really sets him apart is that the 'native point of view' is just as much the raw material for critique as is the point of view of fellow academics. As such, there is enough in this book to upset just about everybody.This provocative book is of interest not only to anthropologists and Pacific specialists, but also to historians, political scientists, religious studies specialists. Indeed, it should be read and debated by all scholars concerned with developing a critical stance on the human condition. -- Chris Gregory * Journal of Pacific History *Today, in his authoritative and unrivalled study, Maurice Godelier returns to Lévi-Strauss, the theoretician. Laying out his production in chronological order and examining it, Lévi-Strauss' former assistant at the Collège de France, and acclaimed anthropologist in his own right, Maurice Godelier has less appreciation for his style than his contemporaries: "The formulas are superb, but they are literally meaningless." At least the reader is forewarned. We are not here to chat. The book is divided in two parts: "Kinship" and "The myths". It is the first time the entire corpus of Lévi-Strauss' work has been presented in chronological order, by topic, and compared with recent research. Step by step, Godelier retraces sixty years of scholarship: we watch his thinking emerge and change, a laborer not content with a disorderly series of phenomena but who seeks the underlying rule, anonymous and silent - the rule of exchange, of marriage, of mind processes. In passing, Godelier clarifies the famous but misunderstood universality of the incest taboo and gives us access to little-known studies such as those concerning the notion of "house". But more than producing an inventory, Godelier takes stock. Against a background of unfailing admiration, Godelier points out Lévi-Strauss' deliberate omissions, his denial of the role of descent in the analysis of kinship systems, the absence of the political and religious domains in his understanding of the myths. But instead of eroding the monument, the criticism picks out its bone structure, reveals its formidable coherence and provides a better understanding of its singularity, of what makes this body of work seem such a stubborn undertaking, sometimes so sure of itself: the desire to make anthropology into a hard science that carries its reasoning through to its logical conclusions. -- Philippe Chevallier * L’Express *One would dream of seeing a study devoted to Godelier's production the likes of the one he himself has just published on Lévi-Strauss, whose assistant he was at the Collège de France after having first worked under Fernand Braudel. Godelier's Lévi-Strauss is like a Bourdieu that might have been written by Michel Foucault, a Jankelevitch by Emmanuel Lévinas or a Dumézil by Jean-Pierre Vernant: two minds viewing each other in a "mirror", the one illuminating the other. Godelier devotes himself to the most modest, attentive and insightful of critical readings (and clearly the best equipped from a scholarly standpoint). He runs Lévi-Strauss work through a veritable IRM, terming it "immense, multiple, uncommonly creative",a work that has "fecundated" the entire field of the human and social sciences. He shows its unity, its delicate architecture, the possible rebounds and developments - and also the dead-ends, the "omissions" and sometimes the errors. Maurice Godelier's book is not a homage to Lévi-Strauss; it is a homage to the scholarship, to the knowledge for which Lévi-Strauss laid the cornerstone. -- Robert Maggiori * Libération *

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Book SynopsisThe remarkable run of self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" Bernie Sanders for president of the United States has prompted-for the first time in decades and to the shock of many-a national conversation about socialism. A New York Times poll in late November found that a majority of Democrats had a favorable view of socialism, and in New Hampshire in February, more than half of Democratic voters under 35 told the Boston Globe they call themselves socialists. It's unclear exactly what socialism means to this generation, but couple with the ascendancy of longtime leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party in the UK, it's clear there's a historic, generational shift underway.This book steps into this moment to offer a clear, accessible, informative, and irreverent guide to socialism for the uninitiated. Written by young writers from the dynamic magazine Jacobin, alongside several distinguished scholars, The ABCs of Socialism answers basic questions, including ones that many want to know but might be afraid to ask ("Doesn't socialism always end up in dictatorship?", "Will socialists take my Kenny Loggins records?"). Disarming and pitched to a general readership without sacrificing intellectual depth, this will be the best introduction an idea whose time seems to have come again.Table of ContentsBhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin magazine.

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Book SynopsisSixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, an exiled Jew deprived of her German citizenship, observed that before people can enjoy any of the "inalienable" Rights of Man-before there can be any specific rights to education, work, voting, and so on-there must first be such a thing as "the right to have rights". The concept received little attention at the time, but in our age of mass deportations, Muslim bans, refugee crises, and extra-state war, the phrase has become the centre of a crucial and lively debate. Here five leading thinkers from varied disciplines-including history, law, politics, and literary studies-discuss the critical basis of rights and the meaning of radical democratic politics today.Trade ReviewVerso has published an elegant little book of essays by four academics who endeavored not only to unpack the phrase but also to find interpretations that can inform and inspire resistance to the current worldwide assault on human rights. -- Masha Gessen * The New Yorker *

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Book SynopsisFive hundred years since its first publication, Thomas More's Utopia remains astonishingly radical and provocative. More imagines an island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and property is communal. In a text hovering between fantasy, satire, blueprint and game, More explores the theories and realities behind war, political conflicts, social tensions and redistribution, and imagines the day-to-day lives of a citizenry living free from fear, oppression, violence and suffering.But there has always been a shadow at the heart of Utopia. If this is a depiction of the perfect state, why, as well as wonder, does it provoke a growing unease?In this quincentenary edition, published in conjunction with Somerset House, More's text is introduced by multi-award-winning author China Miéville and accompanied by four essays from Ursula K. Le Guin, today's most distinguished utopian writer and thinker.Trade ReviewWe can't do without this book. We are all and have always been Thomas More's children. -- China MiévilleI am offered the Grand Inquisitor's choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think, is: No. -- Ursula K. Le Guin

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Book SynopsisEvery one of us will need care at some point in life: social care, healthcare, childcare, eldercare. In the shadow of COVID-19, care has become the most urgent topic of our times. But our care systems are in crisis. Concern for the most vulnerable has been overtaken by an obsession with profits and productivity. How did we end up here? In an era of economic turmoil, lower birth rates and increased life expectancy mean a larger proportion of the population than ever before is of retirement age. As a result, more people need care, and their numbers are rising. Yet, despite the demand, public services continue to be cut and sold off. Those most in need are left to fend for themselves. In this groundbreaking book, Emma Dowling charts the multifaceted nature of the care crisis. Telling the stories of those on the frontlines through conversations with paid and unpaid carers, doctors, social workers, parents, and eldercare workers, she exposes the devastating impact of financialisation and austerity. The Care Crisis reveals a system that places profits before people and shows that privatisation has been key to producing a state of disarray.Dowling maps the new economy of abandonment, raising the unavoidable question: how do we end the crisis?Trade ReviewEmma Dowling has written a book for our times: a meditation on care, its burdens and its possibilities. Dowling deftly weaves together theories of care with empirical interviews in order to understand how and why we care and the ways in which care can be the basis for radical politics in this time of crisis. * Akwugo Emejulu *The Care Crisis is unique in threading together the many different sites across society where paid and unpaid caring takes place. The book demonstrates how a long-standing subjugation of caring bodies and feelings is entering a new phase. With a focus on the UK context and with relevance to debates beyond it, Emma Dowling offers a powerful analysis of the politics and economics of care, making evident the urgent need to transform the material conditions of our lives. -- Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the WitchA compelling tour de force of the ways our lives are underpinned by radical inequalities in care and caring: from care as wealth extraction to commodified cuddling. This is a highly readable book about how our whole economy is organised, how we are all drawn into fixing widespread system failure, yet only manage to displace problems even further. -- Beverley Skeggs, Distinguished Professor, Centre for Alternatives to Social InequalityEmma Dowling brilliantly combines theory, statistics and on-the-ground experience to argue that contemporary British culture is using inadequate and destructive capitalist 'care fixes' to solve its social problems - social problems which have themselves emerged from the systematic erosion of our socialised care infrastructures. It is a lucid and eye-opening account which will be extremely useful for lay readers, policymakers, academics and activists. -- Jo Littler, co-author of Against MeritocracyAn absolutely brilliant if devastating analysis of our current care crisis and the grotesquely inadequate "care fixes" presently on offer. In precise and accessible language, Emma Dowling expertly details the economic and political forces that have converged to produce such an uncaring state. This book is an urgent clarion call for a radically transformed society, where care not profit is placed front and center and where human thriving is prioritized. An essential read for everyone committed to envisioning a better, more caring future -- Catherine Rottenberg, author of The Rise of Neoliberal FeminismDowling presents an astute insight on what our capitalist economy looks like from the perspective of care, brilliantly piecing together the many facets of the current crisis. Emma Dowling reveals what happens when a society's capacities for care are eroded, and issues an electrifying warning against false solutions. -- Paul Mason, author of PostcapitalismLays bare the current crisis in care and the wages of austerity, Emma Dowling's work shows us just how far we still have to go. A brave call to arms. -- Danny Dorling, author of Inequality and the 1%This book provides a compelling and compassionate analysis of the care deficits engulfing the United Kingdom-and the global economy in general-even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Emma Dowling's detailed critique of the financialization of adult social care deserves attention from activists and policymakers around the world. -- Nancy Folbre, author of The Invisible HeartHealth care policymakers and medical consumers alike will find [Downling's] arguments urgent-and in dire need of solution. * Kirkus Reviews *This is a sharp and incisive book on one of the most pressing issues of our time - care work and its organization. Through a close examination of the material conditions that shape this work, and through engagement with the workers providing it, Dowling has produced a vital study of the dynamics of care after austerity. I highly recommend it. -- Helen Hester, author of XenofeminismA lucid and alarming picture of how political decisions have created roadblocks to better care. ... [A] passionate and persuasive call for reform. * Publishers Weekly *Accessible, rigorous, and thoughtful. [The Care Crisis] seamlessly weaves theory, statistics and on-the-ground experiences in order to generate a convincing analysis of how and why care has been devalued and increasingly exploited in contemporary Britain. -- Catherine Rottenberg * Sociological Review *

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Book SynopsisVladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the October 1917 uprising, is one of the most misunderstood leaders of the twentieth century. In his own time, there were many, even among his enemies, who acknowledged the full magnitude of his intellectual and political achievements. But his legacy has been lost in misinterpretation; he is worshipped but rarely read.Tariq Ali explores the two major influences on Lenin's thought - the turbulent history of Tsarist Russia and the birth of the international labour movement - and explains how Lenin confronted dilemmas that still cast a shadow over the present. Is terrorism ever a viable strategy? Is support for imperial wars ever justified? Can politics be made without a party? Was the seizure of power in 1917 morally justified? Should he have parted company from his wife and lived with his lover?In The Dilemmas of Lenin, Ali provides an insightful portrait of Lenin's deepest preoccupations and underlines the clarity and vigour of his theoretical and political formulations. He concludes with an affecting account of Lenin's last two years, when he realized that "we knew nothing" and insisted that the revolution had to be renewed lest it wither and die.Trade ReviewReading this book on your vacation will make your life better and your mind broader. -- Branko Milanovic, * author of Global Inequalities *Ali encourages the reader to take a fresh look at Lenin's choices in the context of a repressive autocracy, the poverty and misery of the bulk of the population under tsarism and the industrialised slaughter of the first world war. What underpins his book is the view that October was an "innocent and utopian birth" that was subsequently "twisted" into Stalinism by three devastating years of civil war. -- Daniel Beer * Guardian *A powerful tool for those wanting to understand the real Lenin and therefore the real politics behind those revolutionaries who fought so hard but ultimately failed in their goal. -- Lindsey German * Counterfire *

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Book SynopsisSeen as a key figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions of identity. This volume collects his recent and new work implicitly and explicitly challenging such a view. In his historical studies of the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and slavery, in his major essay (with Elizabeth Esch) on race and the management of labour, in his detailing of the origins of critical studies of whiteness within Marxism, and in his reflections on the history of solidarity, Roediger argues that racial division is part of not only of the history of capitalism but also of the logic of capital.Trade ReviewDavid Roediger's work is always as learned as it is profoundly engaged with the pursuit of social justice. From his signature study of The Wages of Whiteness, to the analysis of links between settler colonial dispossession, gendered social reproduction, plantation management, and immigrant labor in the making of modern racial capitalism - Roediger's bold commitments to demonstrating the historical and ongoing imbrications of race and class in the United States are timely, and more necessary than ever. -- Lisa Lowe, author of The Intimacies of Four ContinentsOn Wages of Whiteness:The Celestine Prophecy of whiteness studies. * SPIN *On Wages of Whiteness:An extremely important and insightful book. * The Nation *On Seizing Freedom:Seizing Freedom persuasively documents theself-emancipation of the enslaved Black folk of the American South. A meticulously researched book, it offers close readings of verbal and visualtexts, unfailingly attentive to issues of race, gender, and labor coming together and falling apart. It brilliantly brings together disability studies, race in the Civil War, and the disappearance of the gold standard. A worthy supplement to Du Bois's Black Reconstruction. -- Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakOn Seizing Freedom:This sparkling book does more than merely restore and underscore the agency of bold worker-slaves in attempts to make the US democratic and free. It aims artfully at the underlying mechanisms of revolutionary transformation: imagination and solidarity, time, labor and the human body, gender, class and race. In Roediger's hands, these are neither dry nor overly abstract categories. The insurgent history of abolition gets resuscitated and used vividly to address a host of stalled contemporary debates and ossified styles of thought. -- Paul GilroyOn How Race Survived US History:A pithy little book ... Remind[s] us that whiteness was built over centuries on a foundation of deceit and confusion and disguised political imperatives. -- Kelefa Sanneh * The New Yorker * On How Race Survived US History:Starred Review. This rousing, thought-provoking history illuminates the enveloping 400-year-old history of race in America, and the issues [Roediger] raises are as relevant as ever. * Publishers Weekly *Excellent * Counterpunch *A wealth of interesting historical insights and a breath of fresh air for anyone who feels there is a space to be found between the caricatures that "Tumblr social justice warriors" and "old white men of the left" paint of each other. -- Nathan Akehurst * Morning Star *David Roediger wades into the fray with refreshing nuance and generosity. * In These Times *Roediger's book couldn't have appeared at a more timely moment. * Brooklyn Rail *A scintillating compilation...Roediger's book explains exactly why even the most sickening atavisms of racism are fully compatible with the capitalist order, with ramifications into the 21st century. -- Alan Wald * Against the Current *Roediger addresses the challenges that class and race continue to present for U.S. radicals ... should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the era of Trumpian politics. This is an important book, with lessons that some way wish to ignore, but at their peril. -- Working Class Studies Association C.L.R. James Award"Studying, understanding, struggling against, and ultimately replacing this centuries-old, foundational, and deep societal reality remains essential, as Roediger, a consistently pathbreaking historian, makes clear in these insightful essays." -- Monthly Review"Amid the cacophony of competing perspectives, David Roediger's Class, Race and Marxismnot only expertly evaluates the historical, theoretical, and political stakes of contemporary debates on race and class, but also significantly contributes to scholarship that "refus[es] to place race outside of the logic of capital"." -- The Black Scholar Journal

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Book SynopsisMuch has been written about Britain's trailblazing post-1970s privatization program, but the biggest privatization of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatization of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land- for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing - has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.Trade ReviewThe biggest privatisation of all isn't housing, railways, or utilities, but the oldest source of oligarchic power - land. In this clear, readable, accessible and maddening book, Brett Christophers makes clear the massive mismanagement, waste, opacity and centralisation of wealth that has resulted. Necessary reading for anyone who wants to know where ruling class power comes from, and how to take it back. -- Owen HatherleyThe detailed case for an English Land Commission, and the need for so many other new radical ideas not yet even first thought of. Why don't we surround London and fill the Home Counties with National Parks where the landowner has to look after the footpaths and cycle paths and over which we all have a right to roam? The New Enclosure raises, but does not yet answer the question of from where the new commons will arise. -- Danny Dorling (don't use on cover)This book forcefully explains how land ownership matters today. The New Enclosure combines a systematic analysis of the role of land and landownership in capitalist society with a compelling critique of neoliberalism in Britain. Christophers demonstrates that recent decades have seen a massive transfer of public land into private control. He documents the overwhelmingly negative and unjust consequences of this new process of enclosure and demolishes the ideology of privatization upon which it is based. No one who cares about the politics of land can ignore this powerful argument. -- David MaddenBritish taxpayers have been robbed blind by the recent fire sale of £400 pounds of public land. Like Henry VIII's destruction of the monasteries, Thatcher's privatisation frenzy has led to the destruction of public assets unprecedented amongst leading economies, and to the enrichment of landowners and financiers. In this comprehensive and rigorously researched book, Brett Christophers opens up a field of study - public land - largely buried by academia, landowners and no doubt, by financiers. A must-read. -- Ann PettiforWith his carefully crafted and meticulously researched study, he has made an essential contribution to our understanding of politics and government in modern Britain. -- Adam Tooze * Financial Times *If you're someone who's interested in Britain - and I mean Britain tout court: the whole 80,823 square miles of its physical existence - then this is a book you must read -- Will Self * Guardian *Brett Christophers' new book The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Land in Neoliberal Britain is eye-opening. Or perhaps jaw dropping. Its subject is the privatization of publicly-owned land in Britain since the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher. Christophers, a professor of economic geography at the University of Uppsala is a consistently interesting thinker. -- Diane Coyle * The Enlightened Economist *Brett Christophers's The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain towers with empirical and argumentative force. -- Steven Stoll * Orion Magazine *A stunning work of scholarship. * Orion Magazine *If you're interested in Britain, you must read this painstaking survey of land privatisation since the Thatcher era. -- Will Self * Guardian *Christophers is writing in the tradition of great historians such as R. H. Tawney and E. P. Thompson... -- Martin Daunton * Journal of Modern History *

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Book SynopsisDemolishing the Blairite opposition in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn saw off an attempted coup against his leadership under the banner of the "soft left" one year on. This unassuming antiwar socialist now leads Labour with a huge mandate. For the first time in decades, socialism is back on the agenda-and for the first time in Labour's history, it defines the leadership.This book tells the story of how Corbyn's rise was made possible by the long decline of Labour and a deep crisis in British democracy. It surveys the makeshift coalition of trade unionists, young and precarious workers, and students who rallied to Corbyn. It shows how a novel social media campaign turned the media's "Project Fear" on its head, making a virtue of every accusation thrown at him. And finally it asks, with all the artillery that is still ranged against Corbyn, given the crisis-ridden Labour Party that he has inherited, the devastating impact of the coup attempt and the fall-out from Brexit, what it would mean for him to succeed.Trade ReviewRichard Seymour has a brilliant mind and a compelling style. Everything he writes is worth reading. -- Gary YoungeOne of our most astute political analysts turns his attention to Corbyn, and the result is predictably essential: not just to make sense of how we got to this unlikely situation, but for his thoughts on what the left might do next. -- China MiévilleSeymour is an essential voice on the left, and this book is a necessary intervention, explaining this daunting political moment and bringing the focus back to strategy. Not so much a call to arms as a call to brains. -- Laurie PennyNo one writes about politics the way Richard Seymour does. He takes a very British story of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, with all its peculiarities and details, and turns it into a revelation of the international crisis of parliamentary democracy. Whether you love Corbyn -- or Sanders or Podemos or Syriza -- or loathe him (and them), you'll find here the most sophisticated diagnosis of why men and women across the globe are turning to the left and why their aspirations are so continuously being frustrated. Seymour is a magnificent explainer: pointed without being pedantic, funny with out being flip, and always insisting that we take in the whole. -- Corey RobinThe Anglophone left has been cheered by the surprising rise of Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. Richard Seymour's elegantly written book is a reminder of all the obstacles facing Corbyn. Even if you're not as pessimistic as Seymour about his prospects, you really need to pay attention to this critique. It will make you a better fighter of the necessary class war. -- Doug Henwood, author of My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the PresidencyLong after the Labour left was thought to be dead, Jeremy Corbyn's emergence has inspired millions. There is no one better positioned than Richard Seymour to take a look at his emergence and whether Corbyn can actually turn Labour into a force for radical change. -- Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of JacobinCorbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics is the fullest and fairest account of Jeremy Corbyn's rise released to date. In avoiding much of the rhetoric espoused in similar accounts focusing on Corbyn's early career this book provides a frank account of how the unlikely leader took charge of the Labour party. It is a very readable account too. Richard Seymour writes plainly but effectively and his writing is both accessible and incredibly informative. -- Liam Young * New Statesman *Laser-sharp analysis of British 'Labourism' and its contradictions... This book is terrifically astute -- Jamie Maxwell * The National *Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics is the first serious analysis of Jeremy Corbyn's unexpected ascent. -- Yohann Koshy * Vice *A must-read for militants inside and outside the Labour Party. * rs21 *Corbyn is not about Corbyn in much the same way that Richard Seymour's earlier and much shorter book, The Meaning of David Cameron, wasn't really about its eponymous anti-hero. Rather it is an analysis - and an astute one - of the socio-political conditions which have given rise to Corbynism, its future prospects and the substantial obstacles it will inevitably face. -- Tom Mills * Ceasefire *The best, and the definitive, account of what Corbyn's victory the first time round meant. One year on the essential summer 2016 read. * Philosophy Football *A brilliant and incisive analysis by a long-term watcher of the party. -- Asa Winstanley * Middle East Monitor *It is a point of contention whether the politics represented by Jeremy Corbyn offers a pathway out of the crisis or we are instead witnessing the last hurrah of Britain's harried and diminished workers' movement. That is one of the questions Richard Seymour tries to answer in his excellent new book.Seymour's analysis remains indispensable -- Alex Doherty * New Statesman *The finest study of Corbyn yet written -- Stephen Bush * New Statesman *Seymour provides a rich narrative of the Labour Party's history, including its early socialism, its post-WWII achievements, and the long period of its stagnation and decline. -- Norman Markowitz * Socialism and Democracy *

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Book SynopsisElizabeth Martínez's unique Chicana voice arises from over thirty years of experience in the movements for civil rights, women's liberation, and Latina/o empowerment. In De Colores Means All of Us, Martínez presents a radical Latina perspective on race, liberation, and identity. In these essays, Martínez describes the provocative ideas and new movements created by the rapidly expanding U.S. Latina/o community as it confronts intensified exploitation and racism. With sections on women's organizing, struggles for economic justice and immigrant rights, and the Latina/o youth movement, this book will appeal to readers and activists seeking to organize for the future and build new movements for social change. With a foreword from Angela Y. Davis.Trade ReviewElizabeth Martínez's work comprises one of themost important living histories of progressive activism in the contemporaryera. . . . [Martínez is] inimitable. . .irrepressible. . .indefatigable. -- Angela Y. DavisPlease do yourself a favor and read this essay collection by Elizabeth Martínez! Share it with your friends, students, neighbors. Free yourself from the onslaught of misinformation and ignorance regarding racism in the United States and Latino politics. It is an up-to-date news flash on what is going on regarding Mexicans on both sides of the border. 'Betita' (to those of us who know her, love her, and continue to learn from her) is a veteran activist and Chicana pundit of the highest order. -- Ana Castillo, author, Massacre of the DreamersElizabeth Martínez has played a unique and extraordinary role as chronicler of Chicana-Chicano history, and De Colores beautifully captures her passion, her intelligence, her powerful commitment to universal human values. I am very happy this volume exists, and hope it will be widely read. -- Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United StatesThis is one of the most important books to be published as we prepare to continue our struggle for a multiracial democracy in the twenty-first century. . . . Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez embodies the courage and tenacity exemplified by Latina activists, and women of color generally, who have been the backbone of our movements for social justice. -- Prof. Carlos Muñoz, Jr., Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley; author, Youth, Identity, Power:The Chicano MovementThough published nearly twenty years ago, the new Verso reprint of De Colores Means All of Us contains many urgent messages for the current moment. Part history and part philosophy, De Colores Mean All of Us is a vital key to untangling the messy social structures of race, class, and gender in a specifically Borderlander US context. -- Kevin Lentz * Latinx Spaces *

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Book SynopsisRobespierre's defense of the French Revolution remains one of the most powerful and unnerving justifications for political violence ever written, and has extraordinary resonance in a world obsessed with terrorism and appalled by the language of its proponents. Yet today, the French Revolution is celebrated as the event which gave birth to a nation built on the principles of Enlightenment. So how should a contemporary audience approach Robespierre's vindication of revolutionary terror? Zizek takes a helter-skelter route through these contradictions, marshaling all the breadth of analogy for which he is famous.

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Book SynopsisThe Eurozone crisis since 2010 has instilled political disunity and generated a long period of economic stagnation. The cyclical recovery enjoyed in 2017 is no cause for complacency. It should act as an impetus to undertake long-overdue reforms, which require a change in perspective to develop a medium-term orientation for the next decade. There is no future for those incapable of investing. There is no stimulus for innovative investment in countries that have been converted to the hegemony of finance at the expense of productive investment. Europe must confront the challenges of the 21st century by recovering its ideological autonomy in the community spirit of its origins,which can be summed up as social progress.This book demonstrates the need for a long-term vision with two goals: reconstructing a social contract based on an entrepreneurial partnership and investing in the ecological transition. This political vision will restore to citizens of the member-states a sense of belonging to a wider community. To attain this, argues Michel Aglietta, one of the most important heterodox economists today, we must strengthen European institutions at the financial and fiscal levels. This involves making the euro a full currency, endowed with democratic legitimacy.Trade ReviewA survival manual for the Eurozone * Le Monde *

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Book SynopsisOn the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf, and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Feminist Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists and online warriors that is prompting an unprecedented awakening among China's urban, educated women. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest threat to China's authoritarian regime today.Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the challenges they face and their "joy of betraying Big Brother." Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness through online campaigns resembling #MeToo, and describing how the Communist regime has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.Trade ReviewFeatured in The Washington Post and Times Higher Education * The Washington Post and Times Higher Education *

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Book SynopsisOn the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf, and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Feminist Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists and online warriors that is prompting an unprecedented awakening among China's urban, educated women. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest threat to China's authoritarian regime today.Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the challenges they face and their "joy of betraying Big Brother." Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness through online campaigns resembling #MeToo, and describing how the Communist regime has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.Trade ReviewFincher focuses on the history of a small group of female activists known as the Feminist Five, who have been hounded by the authorities for innocuous acts such as trying to hand out stickers on International Women's Day. She argues persuasively that the activism the five awakened is already challenging the authoritarian state, with more and more women taking control of their bodies and rejecting 'China's patriarchal institutions of compulsory marriage and child-rearing.' -- Keith B. Richburg * The Washington Post *In Hong Fincher's estimation, the official hostility toward feminists in China as part of a global rise of authoritarianism and backsliding of democracy will affect not only China's women but its economic future and will have worldwide repercussions. This is a fascinating and earnest book. * Publisher's Weekly *Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China shows how the [feminist] movement has risen on social media and taken root abroad and in cities like Guangzhou. Hong Fincher argues that the Chinese Communist Party relies on patriarchal crackdowns for its post-Soviet survival-and, further, that "anyone concerned about rising authoritarianism globally needs to pay attention to what is happening in China. * Harvard Magazine *In Betraying Big Brother, journalist Leta Hong Fincher examines the feminist movement that's rising in mainland China, and explores how the Feminist Five continue to covertly educate other women to confront and resist the country's sexist policies. -- Evette Dionne * Bitch Media *In Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China...Hong Fincher explains that far from a small movement on the fringes of Chinese society, feminism is on the rise, from the burgeoning and ongoing #MeToo movement, to increasing calls for protections for survivors of domestic violence... to protests against workplace discrimination. -- Esther Wang * Jezebel *In her sprawling and detailed recent book, "Betraying Big Brother", Fincher aims to tell the story of the women's rights movement in China through their saga. Fincher bases her narrative on interviews with [the Feminist Five] and their allies, while supporting their stories with deep research into the roots of the government's crackdown on feminism. * Bookforum *The book brings the clash between China's grassroots women's movement and the state's manipulation of women to life. Hong Fincher explores the struggles of young feminist activists who are detained and vilified for seemingly innocuous campaigns - handing out stickers warning against sexual harassment on public transport, or parading through the streets in soiled wedding dresses to protest domestic violence..This book is a pertinent primer for anyone who wants to understand the aftermath of China's one-child policy, and the country's fledgling feminist movement. -- Katrina Hamlin * Reuters *Through interviews with China's famous Feminist Five, arrested in 2015 on orders of the Chinese government, and other leading Chinese activists Hong Fincher draws a portrait of the modern Chinese feminist movement and its pushback against interpersonal, governmental and digital control over their lives. * Autostraddle *A deeply affecting book.... Hong Fincher's vivid, blow-by-blow account of the women's experiences is a valuable work of journalism, and she offers interesting evidence of a wider feminist awakening. -- Susan Greenhalgh and Xiying Wang * Foreign Affairs *A compelling piece of original research...Leta Hong Fincher, an American journalist-turned-academic, argues that the same party that pushed through the elevation of women's status in the 1950s is now trying to engineer their return to the kitchen. [for Leftover Women] * The Economist *Important and interesting...gender relations, in many ways so much more advanced in China than in India, are going backwards as traditions that were seemingly flattened by Mao re-emerge. [for Leftover Women] * Financial Times *Leftover Women should carry a health warning: this book will severely raise your blood pressure. Leta Hong Fincher's subject - researched through statistical analysis, sociological surveys and extensive first-hand interviewing - is the toxic vitality of sexism in China today. [for Leftover Women] * The Guardian *A chilling account of the pressures on Chinese strivers ... One hopes that Leftover Women will soon be translated into Chinese, as it is likely to resonate deeply with urban educated women. It seems the party has forgotten the Mao-era dictum: 'Women Hold Up Half the Sky' [for Leftover Women] * New York Times *In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher convincingly argues that an orchestrated state campaign co-opts women to marry and buy marital homes, often to the detriment of their careers and financial independence. [for Leftover Women] * Wall Street Journal *In clear, concise chapters, Fincher, whose previous books include Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, lays out the origins of the movement and its exponential growth, as well as the Chinese government's violent attempts to extinguish it. The U.S. president may be walloping China via trade war, but Leta Hong Fincher argues that the most existential threat to Xi Jinping's regime comes from within. -- Claire Landsbaum * Vanity Fair *A necessary read to understand the role of women in Chinese society and why the feminist movement may be one of the few social movements to overcome the Chinese government's persecution. -- Elizabeth M. Lynch * China Law and Policy *

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Book SynopsisBy the end of the nineteenth century, the general Western conception of work had been reduced to simply gainful employment. But this limited perspective contrasted sharply with the personal experience of most people in the world-whether in colonies, developing countries or in the industrializing world. Moreover, from a feminist perspective, reducing work and the production of value to remunerated employment has never been convincing.Andrea Komlosy argues in this important intervention that, when we examine it closely, work changes its meanings according to different historical and regional contexts. Globalizing labour history from the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries, she sheds light on the complex coexistence of multiple forms of labour (paid/unpaid, free/ unfree, with various forms of legal regulation and social protection and so on) on the local and the world levels. Combining this global approach with a gender perspective opens our eyes to the varieties of work and labour and their combination in households and commodity chains across the planet-processes that enable capital accumulation not only by extracting surplus value from wage-labour, but also through other forms of value transfer, realized by tapping into households' subsistence production, informal occupation and makeshift employment. As the debate about work and its supposed disappearance intensifies, Komlosy's book provides a crucial shift in the angle of vision.Trade ReviewAs Andrea Komlosy argues in Work: The Last 1,000 Years, our conception of what constitutes work has changed markedly over time. The professor of social history at the University of Vienna writes that our commonly accepted definitions are too narrow, too European, too male and too modern -- John Thornhill * Financial Times *Komlosy's book is deeply researched, lucid and persuasive. -- Joe Moran * Times Literary Supplement *Komlosy's analysis is a helpful reminder that our familiar understanding of work is narrow and historically exceptional. The hierarchy we have established in the industrialized West, placing permanent, full-time, legally contracted wage work at the top of a pyramid of social good, is deeply flawed-denigrating not only those millions who work outside its confines, but also devaluing and neglecting the kinds of nonwork activities that enrich and give meaning to human lives. By showing that "work" may exist without wages, a boss or a workplace outside the home, Komlosy's analysis allows us to think more broadly about what we value, and whether we want to continue to separate work and life. -- Joanna Scutts * In These Times *Andrea Komlosy has written an important book on the global history of work during the past 800 years. Looking at particular moments (1250, 1500, 1700, 1800, 1900, 2010), she charts how understandings of work and work practices have shifted-from household focused subsistence labor to the widespread commodification of labor in various forms. Her two most important contributions are that she thinks about labor on a global scale, thus overcoming a deep Eurocentric bias in much of the labor history as it exists, and that she brings feminist conversations on labor into an analysis of virtually all aspects of labor history. Her book is unique, I am not aware of any other such volume. -- Sven BeckertThis is a book teeming with insights, from the contempt for manual labour in ancient Greece to the historical tendency for all kinds of subsistence tasks to be "housewife-ized" into unpaid domestic labour. -- Barbara Kiser * Nature *Written in well-defined thematic sections that give the reader a thorough understanding of how labour as well as labour profiles have changed over the ages. * Down To Earth *The theoretical and historical scope of the book is impressive. * Insight Turkey *In Work, Komlosy, an economic and social history professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, provides a sweeping overview of how ideas and definitions about work have evolved over the last 1,000 years, calling out the very limited conception of work offered by traditional labor studies and Marxist perspectives.Komlosy's book is ambitious in its brevity: she condenses a millennium of global history into just 225 pages, justifying her far-reaching geographic and historical scope as necessary for avoiding the Eurocentric and patriarchal biases in traditional conceptions of work. -- Lauren Kaori Gurley * Indypendent *Capturing this churn [in both work itself and our ideas about it] is the difficult task that historian Andrea Komlosy attempts in her new book Work: The Last 1,000 Years..Komlosy attempts the monumental task of writing a large-scale global history of labor adequate to the growing instability in how we define and participate in work. -- Gabriel Winant * The Nation *A fascinating book -- Laurie Taylor * Thinking Allowed *

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Book SynopsisThe biography of Carlos Slim, one of the richest people of all time, is not just the tale of the first man from a developing country to ever reach the top of the Forbes list of billionaires. It is the story of a character who represents the neoliberal mentality of our times, who mistrusts politicians, believes that the market is the most efficient mechanism for everything (even to combat corruption), and sees philanthropy as a social investment with businesses as the exclusive form of collective wealth.In this new book, produced through years of thorough investigation, Osorno examines this symbol of twenty-first-century capitalism and of Mexico. Similar surreal dimensions lead Osorno to openly ask whether a man as rich as him can also be a good person.Trade Review“One of the world’s best reporters tells the story of Carlos Slim, Mexico’s richest person, and the first from a developing country to make it to the top of the Forbes list. Osorno tells a remarkable tale of how the child of Lebanese immigrants slowly put together an empire that stretches from airlines to telecoms and health care.” —John Freeman, Editor of Freeman’s and author of The Undoing “Piercing the veil of secrecy surrounding one of world’s richest and most private businessmen was never going to be straightforward. In the end it took eight years, more than one hundred interviews, four hundred rejections, and oodles of patience to write the most comprehensive biography of Carlos Slim to date.”—Nina Lakhani, Guardian “After years of investigative journalism with access to confidential files and more than a hundred interviews, Diego Osorno condenses all the details of life that made Carlos Slim the richest billionaire in the world … This book includes the truth about the political, social and historical influence of the entrepreneur with his direct testimony and anecdotes about his peculiar financial maneuvers.” —Vice News “Sophisticated in some things, simple in others, proactive in certain subjects and puerile elsewhere, cosmopolitan and also deeply provincial—a multifaceted portrait emerges from this unforgettable book. Throughout the book, Diego Osorno does not condemn nor glorify but he does expose … This book will lead to an essential discussion about how Mexico creates Slim-style billionaires, about inequality, about influence, about business ethics. And about the legacy of a man with a fortune of $77.1 billion.” —Denise Dresser, La Reforma

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Book SynopsisFor many progressives, racial identities are the engine of American history, and by extension, contemporary politics. They, in short, want to separate race from class. While policymakers and pundits find an almost metaphysical racism, or the survival of an ancient and primordial tribalism at the heart of American life, these inequities are better understood when traced to more comprehensible forces: to the contradictions in access to New Deal era welfare programs, to the blinders imposed by the Cold War, to Ronald Reagan's neoliberal assault on the half-century long Keynesian consensus. As Touré Reed argues in this rigorously constructed book, the road to a more just society for African Americans and everyone else, the fate of poor and working-class African Americans is inextricably linked to that of other poor and working-class Americans.Trade ReviewPraise for Not Alms but Opportunity A first-rate treatment of its subject.--Journal of American HistoryReed succeeds in making sense of the ideological and class perspectives that shaped the initiatives of the Urban League. . . . He also makes a compelling argument for a more holistic approach to any project designed to 'uplift the race.'--Journal of American Ethnic History [An] excellent study of the National Urban League. . . . What distinguishes Reed's study from previous scholarship is not his critique of the economic and cultural biases of racial uplift but, rather, his detailed analysis of their effects.--U.S. Intellectual-HistoryNot Alms but Opportunity is at once a solid institutional history of the early decades of the National Urban League as well as a nuanced exploration of the very complicated politics of racial uplift. It is refreshing to see the ways that Reed gives the organization flesh and blood. In his hands the Urban League is seen as a totally human invention--altruistic in its determination to make a better way for black Americans while simultaneously riven by class distinctions and confining notions of 'proper behavior.'--Jonathan Holloway, author of Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 * journal of american history *Reed's brilliantly argued and accessible book does not just marshal an impressive array of historicalevidence in building the brief against race reductionism. It offers a most timely analytical intervention that can give us much neededperspective on the Sanders primary debacle of 2020. -- Roger Lancaster * New Labor Forum *A forceful critique of race reductionism -- Preston H. Smith II * Catalyst *An intricate account of the conservative drift in liberal thinking and policy from the Great Depression to the current moment. Throughout, Reed examines how antiracist demands were continuously isolated from broader demands for economic reforms that would coalesce the interests of working-class Americans to endanger capital. -- J.J. Charlesworth * ArtReview *Reed's study provides a compelling explanation for why successive governments have failed to address a durable racial inequality in the late 20th and 21st century. -- Preston H. Smith II * Journal of Urban Affairs *

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Book SynopsisJust as Donald Trump's victorious campaign for the US presidency shocked liberal Americans, the seemingly sudden national prominence of white supremacists, xenophobes, militia leaders, and mysterious "Alt-Right" leaders mystifies many. But the extreme Right has been growing steadily in the US since the 1990s, with the rise of Patriot militias; following 9/11, when conspiracy theorists found fresh life; and in virulent reaction to the first black president of the country. Nurtured by a powerful right-wing media sector in radio, TV, and online, the Far Right, Tea Party movement conservatives, and Republican activists found common ground in "Producerist" ideology and "constitutionalist" interpretations of US law-an alternative America that is resurgent, even as it has been ignored by the political establishment and mainstream media.Investigative reporter David Neiwert has been tracking extremists for more than two decades, and here he provides a deeply reported and authoritative report on the background, mindset, and growth on the ground of Far Right movements across the country. The product of years of reportage, and including the most in-depth investigation of Trump's ties to Far Right figures, this is a crucial book about one of the most disturbing sides of the US.Trade ReviewThe seemingly sudden reemergence of the far right in America has left many in a state of panic and bewilderment. Alt-America will be essential in helping us to comprehend the depth of its foundations in national life. -- Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-RightNeiwert looks beyond conservative schisms, left-wing failings and online subcultures to pinpoint the experiences and beliefs that bind the alt-right together, and he calls the world he finds "Alt-America". * Washington Post *An alarming, well-researched account of how the far-right extremist underground became empowered in the era of Trump... A prescient discussion of one of the darkest issues facing America today. * Kirkus *Offers the most comprehensive account of the United States' renewed extremist cultures . Alt-America excites in its ability to connect the seemingly extraordinary alt-right to the broader culture of wing-nut conservatism, drawing white nationalism, 4chan, Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Fox News together into a wonky negaverse version of political life. -- John Semley * The Globe and Mail *Neiwert has not only earned his investigative chops over the past decade or so by exploring the dangerous side of right-wing extremism-he's proven himself to be one of the more lyrical and elegant writers on the beat. * Daily Kos *Tracing the ebbs and flows of this far-right extremism in the United States over the last 20 years, Neiwert argues that white nationalist activity in the age of Trump is simply the latest flare-up of what he calls 'Alt-America,' or the segment of the American population that has fed on conspiracy theories, racist misinformation, and deep distrust of federal institutions for decades. -- J.C. Pan * New Republic *

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Book SynopsisRevolution in the Air is the definitive study of how radicals from the sixties movements embraced twentieth-century Marxism, and what movements of dissent today can learn from the legacies of Lenin, Mao and Che.Trade ReviewIt should be required reading for those interested in the modern history of social movements and for radicals of my generation who are trying to find out what went wrong. * Los Angeles Times *The breadth of Elbaum's knowledge ... marks this book as an absolutely first-rate work of political scholarship. * Village Voice *Truly a superb work of scholarship that raises all the right questions ... * Radical History *If you still believe sixties radicalism was nothing more than youthful middle-class confusion or parochial identity politics, then open these pages and dig. -- Robin D. G. KelleyYou can disagree with almost everything Elbaum writes ... and still value the clarity with which he poses the questions relevant to an effective anti-racist, feminist and class-conscious revolutionary movement in the 21st century. * Marx & Philosophy *

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Book SynopsisToday 13 million people are living in poverty in the UK. According to a 2017 report, 1 in 5 children live below the poverty line. The new poor, however, are an even larger group than these official figures suggest. They are more often than not in work, living precariously and betrayed by austerity policies that make affordable good quality housing, good health and secure employment increasingly unimaginable. In The New Poverty investigative journalist Stephen Armstrong travels across Britain to tell the stories of those who are most vulnerable. It is the story of an unreported Britain, abandoned by politicians and betrayed by the retreat of the welfare state. As benefit cuts continue and in-work poverty soars, he asks what long-term impact this will have on post-Brexit Britain and - on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1942 Beveridge report - what we can do to stop the destruction of our welfare state.Trade Reviewa hard hitting expose of the problems and suffering of people who are at the lower end of the pay scale and therefore at the mercy of those who wish to take advantage. This book is very much in the mould of George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier and makes for uneasy, but essential reading. -- Richard Blair, Patron of the Orwell Society'A visceral experience, punching through the layers of rationalisation, ignorance and self-interest separating those who live comfortably from those who don't. . . The outstanding feature of The New Poverty is Armstrong's persistent effort to connect local experience and action the systematic context in which poverty is not only thriving but also taking increasingly sinister forms' * London Review of Books *With singleness of purpose, Armstrong constructs a story of the new poverty around impeccable data, attention to lived experience, and heartening examples of resilience. -- Carol-Anne Hudson * Alternate Routes *

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Book SynopsisAs a boy, Miguel Ángel Tobar fled a small town in El Salvador torn apart by warring guerrillas and US-backed death squads. As a teen in Los Angeles, he fought discrimination and beatings by joining a gang, MS-13. By the time the US deported him to San Salvador, the Hollywood Kid joined a wave of US-bred gangsters, whose violence-in concert with corrupt offiicals-have in turn helped propel new waves of refugees.The incomparable Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martinez got to know the Hollywood Kid and met with him as he first turned on MS-13, killing gang members, and then in turn was assassinated by other gang members. In intensely vivid scenes, Martínez and his anthropologist brother Juan tell the story of a violent life and death-and of the geopolitical forces that propelled a country into becoming one of the most violent on earth.Trade Review(El Niño de Hollywood) is a revelation. As they track a single tragic life, Los Hermanos Martínez delve deep into El Salvador's tortured labyrinth, into the macabre working of the Mara Salvatruches, into the sinister consequence of failed US policies, and in the process recover what Neil Smith called the lost history of the American Empire. This is reportage made literature, darkness made light, and one of the most important books of investigative journalism I've read in years. -- Junot DiazAs the poet William Blake famously put it, 'general forms have their vitality in particulars, and every particular is a Man'. The Martinez D'Aubuisson brothers' beautifully written account of the life and death of the feared gangster El Niño de Hollywood, based on hours and hours of interviews with him and those close to him, starkly reveals the underlying dynamics of the Central American gang phenomenon in vivid and insightful detail. -- Dennis Rodgers, author of Global GangsThe graceful, incisive writing lifts The Beast from being merely an impressive feat of reportage into the realm of literature. Mr. Martínez has produced something that is an honorable successor to enduring works like George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier or Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives. -- Larry Rohter * New York Times *Martínez dives into the underworld of his subjects, navigating barrios that police won't enter, spending days and nights with gang members. His methods resemble war reporting and his prose is cinematic . The collection's strength lies in his ability to write the hell out of his material. Like Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family, it skimps on statistics and analysis, instead relying on description alone to create a world that captures the reader and doesn't let her go. One of the stories, 'El Niño Hollywood's Death Foretold,' evokes Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Like the beloved Colombian writer, Martínez pens scenes that are suspenseful, moving, and vivid. -- Sarah Esther Maslin * New Republic *Óscar Martínez deserves praise not only for his efforts, and for what he writes about, but because he writes so very well. * New Yorker *Martínez's credentials for writing about this ignored human tide are impeccable: his first book, The Beast, drew on eight trips clinging to the roof of the infamous migrants' train through Mexico, chronicling their desperation in grippingly graphic detail. His new book, A History of Violence, takes a step back to explore what the migrants heading to the US are running away from the unflinching cameos it paints offer a chilling portrait of corruption, unimaginable brutality and impunity. * Financial Times *A powerful storyteller and his approach to investigative journalism is closer to anthropological immersion. * Columbia Journalism Review *One of the bravest writers in Latin America, if not the world. He's also one of the best * Dazed and Confused *Masterfully told. -- Belen Fernandez * NACLA *The Hollywood Kid is a gripping read, thoroughly researched and dramatically conveyed. -- Hilary Goodfriend * Jacobin *The Martínez brothers' book tells the story of an MS-13 hitman known as the Hollywood Kid. He was recruited to the gang in El Salvador by a twenty-year-old former member of the National Police, escaped the civil war to California, was deported in 1994, then began his own clica (clique, or gang chapter) in Salvadoran coffee country. -- Rachel Nolan * NYRB *

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Book SynopsisThe Fearless Benjamin Lay chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man-a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theatre to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labour, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life.Trade ReviewBenjamin Lay was a Quaker, a philosopher, a sailor, a commoner and a revolutionary abolitionist. Crossing the seas from Colchester to Philadelphia and beyond he spoke truth to power and, as a little person, waged a politics of the body in his everyday life. His antinomian radicalism has been wonderfully excavated by Marcus Rediker in this eloquent testament. -- Catherine Hall, author of Legacies of British Slave-Ownership and Civilising SubjectsAdmirers of Marcus Rediker’s splendid The Slave Ship will be delighted by this historian’s new book. Sailor, pioneer of guerrilla theater, and a man who would stop at nothing to make his fellow human beings share his passionate outrage against slavery, Benjamin Lay has long needed a modern biographer worthy of him, and now he has one. -- Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost

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Book SynopsisHara Hotel chronicles everyday life in a makeshift refugee camp on the forecourt of a petrol station in northern Greece. In the first two months of 2016, more than 100,000 refugees arrived in Greece. Half of them were fleeing war-torn Syria, seeking a safe haven in Europe. As the numbers seeking refuge soared, many were stranded in temporary camps, staffed by volunteers. Hara Hotel tells some of their stories.Teresa Thornhill arrived in Greece in April 2016 as a volunteer. She met one refugee, a young Syrian Kurd called Juwan, who left his home and family in November 2011 to avoid being summoned for military service by the Assad regime. Interweaving memoir with Juwan's story, and with the recent history of the failed revolution in Syria, and the horror of the ensuing civil war, Hara Hotel paints a vivid picture of the lives of the people trapped between civil war and Europe's borders.Trade ReviewThe intimate, deeply felt account of a volunteer who worked with Syrians during the years they were stranded in Greece, which, unlike so many stories of the refugee crisis, does not shy away from speaking about the forces that tore those refugees from their homes. -- Molly CrabappleHara Hotel is a vivid first-hand account of Europe's failure to protect the refugees at its borders, and a tale of solidarity that points to how things could be different in future. -- Daniel Trilling, author of Bloody Nasty PeopleHara Hotel is an eminently readable first-hand account of a British volunteer who travelled to support Syrian refugees in Greece and then Austria in 2016-17. The author's humanity jumps out on every page. She tells both the very human stories of individual refugees, and through them, the story of the disintegration of Syria that has led them to flee. Strongly recommended! -- Professor Richard Black, Pro-Director (Research & Enterprise), SOASThornhill overlays the wrenching refugee sagas with her personal quest to understand why Syria began its alarming unraveling in 2011. What she learned ... will certainly enlighten casual followers of that nation's bloodshed. A brave, affecting book about a continuing humanitarian crisis. * Kirkus Reviews *

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Book SynopsisKarl Marx has fascinated and inspired generations of radicals in the past 200 years. In this new, definitive biography, Sven-Eric Liebman makes his work live once more for a new generation. Despite 200 years having passed since his birth, his burning condemnation of capitalism remains of immediate interest.Now, more than ever before, Marx's texts can be read for what they truly are. In addition to providing a living picture of Marx the man, his life, and his family and friends - as well as his lifelong collaboration with Friedrich Engels - Sweden's leading intellectual historian Sven-Eric Liedman, in this major new biography, shows what Karl Marx the thinker and researcher really wrote, demonstrating that this giant of the nineteenth century can still exert a powerful attraction for the inhabitants of the twenty-first.Trade ReviewLiedman's strength is as a political philosopher and he is superbly well-equipped to take us on a tour of Marx's intellectual workshop. As Sven-Eric Liedman shows in his landmark anniversary biography, A World to Win, the quest to understand contemporary reality by way of the forces of production, class relations, and the structures of politics, law and culture built on them would occupy Marx for the rest of his life. As Liedman shows, from the 1840s, these were the threads that Marx followed into "the labyrinths of the age he lived in". -- Adam Tooze * Financial Times *A lucid, scholarly guide. Those searching for a truly detailed discussion of Marx should turn here. -- Andrew Stuttaford * Wall Street Journal *A World to Win is well worth consulting by those who want to understand Marx. It provides a clear and scholarly analysis, which can be read with pleasure even by those unsympathetic to its main argument. -- Vernon Bogdanor * Jewish Chronicle *Sven-Eric Liedman's new biography of Karl Marx aims to provide the reader with a nuanced and detailed account of the intellectual giant's life and thought. The book's greatest achievement lies in its compelling demonstration of the continued relevance of Marx's critique of capitalism. In a post-Soviet era, where capitalist liberalism is supposed to have triumphed once and for?all and where bourgeois economists and politicians routinely label Marxism as obscure and antiquated, Liedman is able to show that the contradictions of capitalism identified by Marx are as present as ever. -- Carlos Martinez * Morning Star *Liedman's book has a lot to recommend it. Genuinely original and enlightening. -- David McLellan * Marx and Philosophy Society *Neoliberalism is increasingly exposed as a failed experiment and many people are now exploring the tradition of radical politics for solutions to the challenges we now face. This book brings to life the early history of the socialist tradition. -- John McDonnell, MP Shadow Chancellor of the ExchequerMakes clear that Marx's ideas, going on two centuries old, still have meaning in the present. Outstanding. A book to turn to for reference and deeper insight. * Kirkus (starred review) *Liedman is convinced that we live in a period of striking similarity to Marx's own, and therefore his analysis of society and history are still appropriate. Unlike many other biographies of Marx, the present volume combines in-depth personality narrative and significant comments on Marx's own works. This analysis not only looks at the social and political context of the early industrial revolution Europe, but also takes into consideration the intellectual environment of the time, German philosophy, and socialist and liberal ideas. Highly recommended. * Choice *

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Book SynopsisPrisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the reelection of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.Trade ReviewImpressive - a perceptive and rigorous structural analysis. -- David Montgomery * The Nation *One of the most uncompromising books about American political economy ever written - brilliant, provocative, and exhaustively researched. * Village Voice *One of the most trenchant and original analyses of American politics. * Socialist Review *Prisoners of the American Dream established [Davis's] record of candidly examining the prospects for progressive social change and the dismal fate of organized labor in the United States, with its lack of a party or power. -- Micah Uetricht * The Nation *

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Book SynopsisIntroduction by Neal AschersonIn our globalised but increasingly polarised age, Kapuscinski shows how the Other remains one of the most compelling ideas of our times.In this reflection on a lifetime of travel, the renown travel writer takes a fresh look at the Western idea of the Other: the non-European or non-American. Looking at this concept through the lens of his own encounters in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Kapuscinski traces how the West has understood the Other from classical times to colonialism, from the Age of Enlightenment to the postmodern global village.Trade Review' He has given the truest, least partial, most comprehensive and vivid account of what life is like on our planet . . .A great imaginative writer, he goes way beyond the material he is processing. -- Geoff Dyer * Guardian *Kapuscinski trascends the limitations of journalism and writes with the narrative power of a Conrad or Kipling or Orwell -- Blake MorrisonThe 20th century's most telling spokesman for the millions of ordinary people who are trapped in the vagaries of authoritarian regimes * Independent *The true master of journalism -- Gabriel Garcia MarquezKapuscinski saw more, and more clearly, if not always perfectly, than nearly any writer one can think to name. Few have written more beautifully of unspeakable things. Few have had his courage, almost none his talent. His books changed the way many of us think about nonfiction -- Tom Bissel * New York Times Book Review *In this short, simple, extraordinarily intelligent book, Kapuscinksi explores what it is to be European, to be non-European, to be colonised, to be the coloniser, to have or to impose an identity. -- Jason Burke * Observer *Intelligently written. * Guardian *A powerful, quasi-religious, meditation on the power of humbling oneself in the face of the unknown. * Independent *

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Book SynopsisCounterpointing Los Angeles's central role in America's fantasy life - the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 - with its wanton denial of its own real history, Mike Davis creates a revelatory kaleidoscope of American fact, imagery, and sensibility. Drawing upon a vast array of sources, Ecology of Fear meticulously captures the nation's violent malaise and desperate social unease in an era of climate change and social change. With savagely entertaining wit and compassionate rage, this book conducts a devastating reconnaissance of our all-too-likely urban future.With a new 2021 afterword taking stock of LA's 21st century.Trade ReviewGraced with a bold political and environmental vision, much splendid phrasemaking and a multitude of facts...A truly eccentric contribution. * New York Times Book Review *

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Book SynopsisOur cities are changing. Global real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, 36 times the value of all the gold ever mined. It makes up 60 percent of the world's assets, and the most powerful person in the world - the president of the United States - made his name as a landlord and real estate developer. As Samuel Stein makes clear in this tightly argued book, its through seemingly innocuous profession of city planners that we can best understand the transformations underway. Planners provide a window into the practical dynamics of urban change: the way the state uses and is used by organized capital, and the power of landlords and developers at every level of government. But crucially, planners also possess some of the powers we must leverage if we ever wish to reclaim our cities from real estate capital.Trade ReviewStein's lucid explanation for how we got to where we're at shines urgent light on the origins and development of what he incisively calls "the Real Estate State." Capital City places gentrification in a structurally extensive and intensive urban geography of dispossession. All who struggle for the right to the city should read this book, and realize afresh how capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism must provoke our political imagination. -- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden GulagCapital City casts a cold and brilliant light on the underlying political dynamics of global cities and rightly concludes that real estate and finance are in charge. This sobering book has to be part of our toolkit as we try to find the moorings for a powerful democratic pushback in local political struggles. -- Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Poor People’s MovementsWant to know why the rent's so high? Samuel Stein meticulously documents and analyzes the rise of the rip-off "real estate state," the instruments of its power, the invidious "plansplaining" arguments of its defenders, and, above all, its accelerating ethnic and class cleansing of American cities, gentrification-frenzied New York in the van. With the sleaziest of real estate developers now the rent-subsidized tenant of the White House bent on engorging his crony kin and kith by doubling down on the corrupt system of "geobribe" giveaways, backroom deals, and public theft that underwrites their ravages, this superbly succinct and incisive book couldn't be more timely or urgent. -- Michael Sorkin, author of All Over the MapSamuel Stein has written a book for those tired of merely describing gentrification and displacement, who are looking for explanations as well as new programs for action to do more. Capital City is a place that puts it all together, the theory and the practices of urban transformation, with a timely and urgent appeal. This is a lively user's guide to thechanging landscape of the American city. -- Peter Marcuse, co-author of In Defense of Housing[Capital City] alternates a panoptic view with one that looks more closely, from the ground up, at what reckless development does to lives and livelihoods...Explicit in Stein's narrative is the idea that a different, more democratic kind of planning might lead us to more democratic kinds of cities. -- Nikil Saval * The New Yorker *Samuel Stein's Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State is a radical view into the heart of the processes [urban planners] oversee -- Andrea Gibbons * New Labor Forum *Capital City deserves attention from urban historians for its nuanced analysis of neoliberal urban policy and specific measures that generate inequality and may be also used in service of justice. This book will be a useful tool for a broad swath of people seeking a greater understanding of the urgency of this political moment which grows with every demolition. -- Amanda Boston * The Metropole *Vital and devastating ... [Capital City is] unabashed in its advocacy of a more equitable distribution of land and housing. ... A powerful companion to studies of the global rise of informal cities such as Mike Davis' Planet of Slums, the racist history of housing in Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law, [and] the horrid effects of losing one's home in Matthew Desmond's Evicted. -- Joshua Barnett * New York Labor History Association *

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Book SynopsisFrom line managers, corporate CEOs, urban designers, teachers, politicians, mayors, advertisers and even our friends and family, the message is 'be creative'. Creativity is heralded as the driving force of our contemporary society; celebrated as agile, progressive and liberating. It is the spring of the knowledge economy and shapes the cities we inhabit. It even defines our politics. What could possibly be wrong with this?In this brilliant, counter intuitive blast Oli Mould demands that we rethink the story we are being sold. Behind the novelty, he shows that creativity is a barely hidden form of neoliberal appropriation. It is a regime that prioritizes individual success over collective flourishing. It refuses to recognise anything - job, place, person - that is not profitable. And it impacts on everything around us: the places where we work, the way we are managed, how we spend our leisure time.Trade ReviewProvocative and often brilliant book. -- Steve Poole * Guardian *For the past 20 years, creativity has been ubiquitous, an essential part of designs for office interiors, inner-city makeovers, and boosterish attempts by governments to redescribe precarious parts of their economies. It needs to be taken seriously--but it also, arguably, needs to be taken down. In this provocative, and often funny book, Oli Mould points up the absurdities of the creative economy, and some ways we might think beyond creativity. -- Richard J Williams, author of Sex and BuildingThere are few personal and collective traits that are prized more highly in neoliberal societies than 'creativity.' In this powerful and well-aimed critique, Oli Mould lifts the veil on this ideology, to reveal a set of economic and political forces, pushing all of us to bend to the needs of capital. -- Will Davies, author of Nervous StatesMixes personal experience and sharp sociological analysis in a highly entertaining takedown of one of today's most important ideological tropes: creativity. Oli Mould takes the reader on a rather intimate tour behind the flashy scene of creative work, creative people, creative politics, creative technology and, of course, the creative city. Fortunately, he doesn't leave us in the real dystopia we discover along the way but shows us that a truly creative world is possible. -- Sebastian Olma, author of In Defence of SerendipitySuperb, thought-provoking. Mould turns the notion of the 'creative worker' on its head. * Pop Matters *Inherently fascinating, impressively thoughtful and thought-provoking, Against Creativity is a unique, extraordinary, iconoclastic, and unreservedly recommended addition to both community and academic library Humanist Philosophy, Political Science, and Contemporary Psychology collections and supplemental studies lists -- Jack Mason * Midwest Book Review *

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Book SynopsisIt is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xenophobia. Among his first acts on taking office was to issue an executive order blocking Muslim immigrants from entering the United States. But although his actions may often seem unprecedented, they are not as unusual as many people believe. This story doesn't begin with Trump. For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have employed xenophobic ideas and policies, declaring time and again that "illegal immigration" is a threat to the nation's security, wellbeing, and future. The profound forces of all-American nativism have, in fact, been pushing politics so far to the right over the last forty years that, for many people, Trump began to look reasonable. As Daniel Denvir argues, issues as diverse as austerity economics, free trade, mass incarceration, the drug war, the contours of the post 9/11 security state, and, yes, Donald Trump and the Alt-Right movement are united by the ideology of nativism, which binds together assorted anxieties and concerns into a ruthless political project. All-American Nativism provides a powerful and impressively researched account of the long but often forgotten history that gave us Donald Trump.Trade ReviewDaniel Denvir's All-American Nativism is the book we need, a searing work of scholarship that explains how we entered the current hellscape of American politics and what we have to do to get out. The roots of white nativism are deep, as Denvir's book makes clear, but like all roots can be pulled up and killed. All-American Nativism will help us do so. -- Greg Grandin, author of The End of the MythAll-American Nativism powerfully explores the deep roots of nativism in national life as well as how Trump's agenda is itself the culmination of the policies and the logic pursued for decades by both major parties. In the process, Daniel Denvir masterfully demonstrates the relationship between today's debates over immigration and ongoing struggles against neoliberal austerity, mass incarceration, and the violence of the security state. In this way, the book not only offers a diagnosis of the present, but also a stirring vision of solidarity and change. This is an essential and profound work, providing critical insights about the American experience and where to go from here. -- Aziz Rana, author of The Two Faces of American FreedomIn this timely book, Daniel Denvir tackles am important question: what is old and what is new in Trump's nativism? Denvir helps us understand both the historical roots and the more recent routes by which "build the wall" came to be the central rallying cry of racial-nationalism. A must-read for anyone who wants to know how we got here. -- Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects, Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern AmericaAs Daniel Denvir's exceptional book shows, the history of US immigration politics is central to understanding how our many crises have converged in this moment. It's precisely the kind of analysis our movements need to pry open the fissures of the current order, and join in common struggle for a better world. -- Naomi Klein, author of No is Not EnoughDaniel Denvir's All American Nativism excavates the history of anti-immigrant politics in the United States and reveals a difficult truth: Donald Trump is the symptom, and not the cause, of a bipartisan consensus underlying the current war on immigrants. In this sense, Denvir's book is an invaluable tool for organizers and activists who subscribe to what Paulo Freire meant by praxis, where reflection and action are required to bring about transformative change. -- Pablo Alvarado, National Day Laborer Organizing NetworkTraces the development of anti-immigrant sentiment -- Cora Currier * The Intercept *Shimmers with frustration and rage -- Brendan O'Connor * The Baffler *

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Book SynopsisHailed as a Southeast Asian Gabriel García Márquez for the exuberant beauty of his prose and the darkly comic surrealism of his stories, Eka Kurniawan is the first Indonesian writer to be nominated for a Man Booker International Prize. Here is his first collection of short stories to be translated into English.A man captures a caronang, a strange, intelligent dog that walks upright, and brings it home, only to provoke an all-too-human outcome. A girl plots against a witch doctor whose crimes against her are, infuriatingly, like any other man's. Stories explore the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, a perpetual student, victims of anti-communist genocide, an elephant, a stone. Dark, sexual, scatalogical, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics.Trade ReviewBrash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be South-East Asia's most ambitious writer in a generation... * Economist *Kurniawan creates a vivid sense of poverty and rural isolation and weaves magic realism into his narratives to terrific effect. It's easy to see why he is being compared to Gabriel García Márquez and hailed as one of the leading lights of contemporary Indonesian fiction. * Financial Times *Kurniawan's writing demonstrates an affinity with literary heavyweights such as, yes, García Márquez and Dostoevsky, as well as Indonesia's own social-realist master Pramoedya Ananta Toer, to whom domestic fans have dubbed him an heir. Most intriguing, though, is the influence of the home-grown pulp fiction that was popular when he was growing up in West Java * Guardian *Many have deemed Kurniawan the next Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an acclaimed pioneer of socialist realism. The observation is inevitable, given the paucity of well-known Indonesian literary voices. But, unlike Pramoedya, Kurniawan eschews political conviction for a knowing ambivalence. * New Yorker *Indonesia's most original living writer of novels and short stories, and its most unexpected meteorite. Who could predict the arrival of Sophocles, Virgil, Lady Murasaki, Cervantes, Melville, Lu Hsün, Shakespeare, Proust, Gogol, Ibsen, Márquez, or Joyce? -- Benedict Anderson * New Left Review *These stories are blasphemous, perverse, and shocking! But so are you, if you're a human being. With exceptional fervor, wit, and bite, Kurniawan faces the truth. Can you? -- James Hannaham, author of Delicious FoodsThese short, spiky tales are a joy to read. * New Internationalist *Scintillating and often darkly humorous, Kitchen Curse by Eka Kurniawan is masterful take on the vicissitudes of life for contemporary Indonesians. * Asian Review of Books *Like Beauty Is a Wound, Man Tiger is a tale of generations bound by tragedy and burdened by unspeakable histories. But it also reveals the banality of violence that has turned routine. Kurniawan suggested to an audience at the Melbourne festival that unpredictable outbreaks of violence were part of the fabric of Indonesian life. As a teenager, he saw a mob set two men on fire after the men tried to steal a guitar from a minibus. * New Yorker *Tight, focused and thrilling... Like a good crime novel, Man Tiger works best when read in a single sitting, and its propulsive suspense is all the more remarkable because Kurniawan reveals both victim and murderer in the first sentence. * New York Times *Sex, violence, and betrayal loom large throughout, as in Kurniawan's award-winning previous novels. * Library Journal *Erupting with awareness and dark wit, this work puts Kurniawan in league with Hassan Blasim, Witold Gombrowicz, and Daniil Kharms. * Publishers Weekly *These stories are sites of bold experimentation ... They provide ways of looking at Indonesia's politics, history, and culture through the lens of the everyday and the marginal: the world of the outcasts. -- Intan Paramaditha * Singapore Unbound *

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Book SynopsisThe conflict in Northern Ireland was one of the most devastating in post-war Europe, claiming the lives of 3,500 people and injuring many more. This book is a riveting new history of the radical politics that drove a unique insurgency that emerged from the crucible of 1968. Based on extensive archival research, One Man's Terrorist explores the relationship between the IRA, a clandestine army described as 'one of the most ruthless and capable insurgent forces in modern history', and the political movement that developed alongside it to challenge British rule. From Wilson and Heath to Thatcher and Blair, a generation of British politicians had to face an unprecedented subversive threat whose reach extended from West Belfast to Westminster. Finn shows how Republicans fought a war on several fronts, making use of every weapon available to achieve their goal of a united Ireland, from car bombs to election campaigns, street marches to hunger strikes. Though driven by an uncompromising revolutionary politics that blended militant nationalism with left-wing ideology, their movement was never monolithic, its history punctuated by splits and internal conflicts. The IRA's war ultimately ended in stalemate, with the peace process of the 1990s and the Good Friday Agreement that has maintained an uneasy balance ever since.Trade ReviewProvides us with one of the best analyses available of the politics that motivated and drove different currents within insurrectionary Irish republicanism over the past 60 years. Well researched and scrupulously objective, the author is ever academically critical. Nevertheless, he does not suffer from the endemic hostility to his subject that mars so many other works in this genre. -- Tommy McKearney, author of The Provisional IRAThere are numerous current treatments of the modern IRA, its rivals, and its allies. Daniel Finn's stands out for its concise clarity, and because, free of jargon, it is written from the left. -- Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, University of PennsylvaniaA fine, subtle analysis of the Provisional IRA's armed campaign and the movement's political development over three decades. Daniel Finn provides sharp insights into the leadership's strategic thinking as it manoeuvred towards a ceasefire in the 1990s. He shows how this militant Republican movement transformed itself into an electorally successful left-wing political party in Ireland North and South. -- Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway[Finn is] studious in his research and solid in his writing * Irish Times *A concise yet detailed discussion of the modern Irish Republican movement. -- Ron Jacobs * CounterPunch *This book's account of how Sinn Fein's leaders played an instrumental role in making this possible is an indispensable guide to understanding how this template can - and cannot - be applied to resolving other terrorist conflicts, as well. -- Joshua Sinai * Washington Times *This slim volume packs a resonant, intelligent power. * RTÉ Guide *Given the outpouring of academic books and articles on the Northern Ireland conflict that has occurred since the 1960s...Does Daniel Finn's book represent an oasis in this intellectual and moral desert? The judgement has to be a qualified affirmative. * Dublin Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisMany societies have imagined going to live in space. What they want to do once they get up there - whether conquering the unknown, establishing space "colonies," privatising the moon's resources - reveals more than expected. In this fascinating radical history of space exploration, Fred Scharmen shows that often science and fiction have combined in the imagined dreams of life in outer space, but these visions have real implications for life back on earth.For the Russian Cosmists of the 1890s space was a place to pursue human perfection away from the Earth. For others, such as Wernher Von Braun, it was an engineering task that combined, in the Space Race, the Cold War, and during World War II, with destructive geopolitics. Arthur C Clark in his speculative books offered an alternative vision of wonder that is indifferent to human interaction. Meanwhile NASA planned and managed the space station like an earthbound corporation. Today, the market has arrived into outer space and exploration is the plaything of superrich technology billionaires, who plan to privatise the mineral wealth for themselves. Are other worlds really possible?Bringing these figures and ideas together reveals a completely different story of our relationship with outer space, as well as the dangers of our current direction of extractive capitalism and colonisation.Trade ReviewIntricately dissects seven foundational visions of humanity's future in space, from some of the most well-known and prolific engineers, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and science fiction writers in history. Scharmen's keen eye for structures and systems lets him tease out the common threads of conquest, domination, hope, and fear that drive us towards the stars. -- Erika Nesvold, Co-founder of JustSpace AllianceAn episodic history of space exploration through the eyes of an architect focusing, not in the concept of conquer and dominion, but in the flawed yet captivating desire to reinvent life anew. Fred Scharmen brilliantly navigates through stories of inventing worlds, multidimensional and a-hierarchical, lingering between reality and fiction -- Lydia Kallipoliti, Author of The Architecture of Closed WorldsAs if from a vantage point somewhere in the endangered atmosphere, Space Force reflects back a sense of what humans are so far by telling stories about their dreams of space travel. Mixed with their eccentric curiosities is their desire to make colonized property out of everything, their racist depravity, their clanking apparatus of national sovereignty, their extractivist hoarding, and their feverish dreams of capital accumulation. These are the little heroes of this little planet busy pursuing their rational plans to dominate it and those who might repair it -- Keller Easterling, author of Medium DesignIn this season of billionaires fleeing, however briefly, up the gravity well, we desperately need a knowledgeable guide to the human exploration of space, the choices it confronts us with, and what it portends for those of us left behind. Fred Scharmen is that guide. His brilliant new Space Forces makes it clear that if space is the place, it's not one that's different from Earth, and if and when we venture there for keeps, it's ourselves that we'll find there. -- Adam Greenfield, author of Radical TechnologiesWhenever I get to read something by Fred Scharmen, I know I'm in for a weird and fascinating ride. Space Forces is no exception. -- Ingrid Burrington, author of Networks of New YorkThe inhabitants of the red planet zoom around in a hyperloop and their leader is called - yes, really - The Elon. This, along with an insane amount of other brilliant nuggets, features in Scharmen's lively history of space exploration as a colonial and, ultimately, architectural project. -- Edwin Heathcote * Financial Times *Scharmen pulls off the delicate balancing act between the specific and the general with a skill that never lets the reader see the effort that goes into it. -- Rick Cousins * Science Fiction Studies *By touching on the development of contrasting views of how practical space flight was developed across seven distinct time periods, Scharmen lays the threads of how we got here out in perfect clarity. -- Jonathan Hilburg * Architect's Newspaper *

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