The Arab Awakening: Islam and the New Middle East
Tariq Ramadan
Allen Lane, PB, 9781846146503
Tariq Ramadan is one of the most acclaimed figures in the analysis of Islam and its political dimensions today. In "The Arab Awakening" he explores the opportunities and challenges across North Africa and the Middle East, as they look to create new, more open societies. He asks: Can Muslim countries bring together Islam, pluralism and democracy without betraying their identity? Will ... More/Buy
Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague
Marc Perelman
Verso, PB, 9781844678594
Marc Perelman pulls no punches in this succinct and searing essay against the global phenomenon of sport, which he describes as both a “recent form of savagery” and “the opium of the people.” The charges leveled against sport are damning and numerous: sport is an instrument for racism and the bolstering of repression, with global events such as the Olympics used ... More/Buy
The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India
Siddhartha Deb
Penguin, PB, 9780141033341
India is a country where you take a nap and someone has stolen your job, where you buy a BMW but still have to idle for cows crossing your path. In his dazzling new book Siddhartha Deb leads us into the new India through the lives of an unforgettable group of Indians: a Gatsby-like mogul in Delhi whose hobby is producing ... More/Buy
The Big Handout: How US subsidies and corporate welfare corrupt the world we live in and wreak havoc on our food bills
Thomas Kostigen
Scribe Publications, PB, 9781921844737
Just reading the word 'subsidies' may cause many people's eyes to glaze over. We don't think it affects us directly, so we tune out. But it turns out that this complicated-sounding issue has an enormous impact on all of us. The Big Handout is about bad fiscal, environmental, agricultural, water, energy, health, and foreign policies. And it's a story about just ... More/Buy
Capitalism Papers: Six Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System
Jerry Mander
Counterpoint Press, HB, 9781582437170
Social critic Jerry Mander researches, discusses, and exposes the momentous and unsolvable environmental and social problems of capitalism. Mander argues that capitalism is no longer a viable system. Capitalism, utterly dependent on never-ending economic growth, is an impossible absurdity on a finite planet with limited resources. Climate change, together with global food, water, and resource shortages, is only the ... More/Buy
The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality is Essential for Recovery
Stewart Lansley
Gibson Square Books, PB, 9781908096296
How are we to regain economic growth? In this seminal new book based on 60 years of data, economist Stewart Lansley shows that economic equality is necessary for economic growth. Like a tumour, the economy for the rich has grown at least 10-fold in countries like Britain and the US, sucking in ever-increasing quantities of money away from circulating in the ... More/Buy
Criminalization of Abortion in the West: Its Origins in Medieval Law
Wolfgang P Muller
Cornell University Press, HB, 9780801450891
Anyone who wants to understand how abortion has been treated historically in the western legal tradition must first come to terms with two quite different but interrelated historical trajectories. On one hand, there is the ancient Judeo-Christian condemnation of prenatal homicide as a wrong warranting retribution; on the other, there is the juristic definition of "crime" in the modern sense of ... More/Buy
Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West
Edward Lucas
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408830192
From the capture of Sidney Reilly, the 'Ace of Spies', by Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1925, to the deportation from the USA of Anna Chapman, the 'Redhead under the Bed', in 2010, Kremlin and Western spymasters have battled for supremacy for nearly a century. In Deception Edward Lucas uncovers the real story of Chapman and her colleagues in Britain and America, unveiling ... More/Buy
Democracy in What State?
Giorgio Agamben et al
Columbia University Press, PB, 9780231152990
'Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?' In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. ... More/Buy
The Expo Files: Articles by the Crusading Journalist
Stieg Larsson
Maclehose Press, PB, 9780857051349
Now almost exclusively known as the author of the bestselling Millennium Trilogy, as a professional journalist Stieg Larsson was an untiring crusader for democracy and equality. As a reporter and editor-in-chief on the journal Expo he researched the extreme right both in Sweden and at an international level. Collected here for the first time are essays and articles on right-wing extremism ... More/Buy
From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland
Tadeusz Kowalik
Monthly Review Press, PB, 9781583672969
In the 1980s and 90s, renowned Polish economist Tadeusz Kowalik played a leading role in the Solidarity movement, struggling alongside workers for an alternative to 'really-existing socialism' that was co-operative and controlled by the workers themselves. In the ensuing two decades, 'really-existing' socialism has collapsed, capitalism has been restored, and Poland is now among the most unequal countries in the world. ... More/Buy
Going South: Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014
Dan Atkinson
Palgrave, PB, 9780230392540
With a second recession looming, Britain is facing a moment of truth. This book examines how the leader of the industrial revolution came to exhibit the features of a 'developing country'; chronic debt, volatile growth and vulnerability to external events. Going South explains how this has happened, arguing that the time for quick fixes is ... More/Buy
Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation
Eyal Weizman
Verso, PB, 9781844678686
In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and the transformation of the Occupied Territories into an artifice in which all natural and built features function as the instruments of occupation. Weizman identifies the ideas behind this phenomenon and traces their development, from the ... More/Buy
Inside Job: The Financiers Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century
Charles Ferguson
OneWorld, PB, 9781851689156
Based on explosive interviews conducted by Ferguson, as well as documents buried in court records and archives, Inside Job the book traces how the financial industry and its enablers went rogue. With clarity, toughness, and stunning freshness, he offers an unrivalled accounting of our political and economic leadership — and what they must do now to ensure our ... More/Buy
Marx and the Politics of Abstraction
Paul Paolucci
Haymarket, PB, 9781608462094
Many scholars see science and politics as mutually exclusive, where the latter's influence contaminates the former's purity. Karl Marx's detractors often criticize him on these grounds. Paolucci shows that through his method of critique, Marx incorporates the relations of knowledge and power into abstractions and traces their historical movement. This corrective more readily lays bare capitalist society’s exploitative ... More/Buy
Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
Christopher Hitchens
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781743311929
In a frank expose of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish is to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answer any higher purpose than the need of the world's privileged ... More/Buy
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Christopher Hitchens
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781743311936
Clintonism' is not an idea, or a program; still less is it a principle. It represents what might be termed-were it not for its murk-the distilled essence of consensus politics. Unremarkable in its constituent elements, which are a mixture of opportunist statecraft, crony capitalism, 'divide and rule' identity politics, and populist manipulation, Clintonism has nonetheless raised these ordinary practices to the ... More/Buy
Pakistan: A Hard Country
Anatol Lieven
Penguin, PB, 9780141038247
Pakistan is viewed by many as the most dangerous place in the world, a failing state racked by insurgence and instability. In this remarkable book Anatol Lieven, who lived and worked in Pakistan for many years, overturns the familiar image. Using hundreds of interviews with people whose views are rarely consulted - from soldiers and intelligence officers to village mullahs and ... More/Buy
Political Writings
Simone de Beauvoir
University of Illinois Press, HB, 9780252036941
The writings in this volume range from Beauvoir's surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic eighteenth-century pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to a co-written 1974 documentary film, transcribed here for the first time, which draws on Beauvoir's analysis of how socioeconomic privilege shapes the biological reality of aging. The volume traces nearly three decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement, from exposés of ... More/Buy
Reflections on Anti-Semitism
Alain Badiou, Eric Hazan, Ivan Segre
Verso, PB, 9781844678778
Since the beginning of the 'War on Terror,' Israel has become increasingly salient to imperial strategy and ever more aggressive in its policies toward the Palestinians. In this context, a key ideological weapon is the cynical accusation of 'anti-Semitism.' For historical reasons, this has been deployed most forcefully in France, and Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan caustically demolish the 'anti-Semitism is ... More/Buy
The Return of the Public: Democracy, Power and the Case for Media Reform
Dan Hind
Verso, PB, 9781844678631
Politicians and those who control the private economy claim to act in the public interest. Yet as the debates these groups conduct about policy grow increasingly absurd, it is imperative, argues Dan Hind, that the public takes the reins. The Return of the Public addresses today's bleak state of affairs with a vision for a new participatory politics based on the ... More/Buy
State Capitalism, Contentious Politics and Large-Scale Socia l Change
Vincent K Pollard
Haymarket, PB, 9781608462087
State capitalism is a normal form of capitalist development. Its extremes vary but it has been, and remains, central to understanding modern capitalism. This is especially the case in the so called Communist worlds of Russia and China, and for alternative economies like that of India and the Philippines, which are the focus of this timely and challenging ... More/Buy
Strategies for the Future
Xanana Gusmao
Longueville Books, PB, 9781920681784
Selected from speeches given over the period 2007-2011, this volume is defined by those relating to the Prime Minister's Strategic Development Plan for Timor-Leste - a plan that sets a vision for the next two decades and begins a new stage of bold national development for this young and promising country. The book also provides a view of the country's current ... More/Buy
The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Faultline Between Christianity and Islam
Eliza Griswold
Penguin, PB, 9780241952238
The tenth parallel - the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator - is the front line where Christianity and Islam collide. Here, from Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia to Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, both religions are experiencing huge and sometimes violent reawakenings. Award-winning journalist Eliza Griswold has spent the past seven years travelling this area and meeting ... More/Buy
That Used To Be Us: What Went Wrong with America - and How It Can Come Back
Michael Mandelbaum, Thomas Friedman
Abacus, PB, 9780349000091
America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends and it is failing to meet them. In THAT USED TO BE US, Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum analyse those challenges - globalisation, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits and its pattern of energy consumption - and spell out what needs to ... More/Buy
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Christopher Hitchens
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781743311912
Drawing on first-hand testimony, previously unpublished documentation and broad sweeps through material released under the Freedom of Information Act, Christopher Hitchens mounts a devastating indictment of a man whose ambition and ruthlessness, he alleges, have directly resulted in both individual murders and widespread, indiscriminate ... More/Buy
Watergate - The hidden history: Nixon, the Mafia, and the CIA
Waldron Lamar
Scribe Publications, PB, 9781921844843
While Richard Nixon's culpability for Watergate has long been established - most recently by PBS in 2003 - what's truly remarkable that after almost forty years, conventional accounts of the scandal still don't address Nixon's motive. Why was President Nixon willing to risk his reelection with so many repeated burglaries at the Watergate - and other Washington offices - in just ... More/Buy
Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us
John Quiggin
Black Inc, PB, 9781863955690
The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism — the theory that markets always know best, regardless of the problem. For decades, its advocates had dominated economics, helping to create an unthinking faith in markets, in which speculative investments were seen as fundamentally safe. The crisis seemed to kill off such ideas, but they still live ... More/Buy