Books

We encourage our readers to submit book reviews for our Book Review page and possible publication in our magazine Relay – info@socialistproject.ca.

Latest Reviews

• Review of: Renewing Socialism by Leo Panitch
  Leo Panitch has stood out in recent years as one of the socialist intellectuals most fully engaged with political questions, analysing the problems faced by left-wing parties, trade unions and other social movements with great clarity. The Canadian academic has followed in the tradition of Ralph Miliband, whose work made the case for a non-Communist radical left that would avoid the mistakes of social democracy. Panitch and Colin Leys took over as editors of the Socialist Register after Miliband’s death, and extended his critique of the British Labour Party in an essential book, The End of Parliamentary Socialism (published in the immediate wake of Blair’s 1997 triumph, it should be the first port of call for anyone bewildered by the collapse of the New Labour project).
  — review by Ed Walsh. (Preview on Google books.)
  
  
  
  
• Review of: The Great Financial Crisis by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff
  EVERYONE NOW recognizes that we are in the most severe crisis to hit the capitalist system in generations. The chief of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, recently declared that we are already in a depression. The so-called "maestro" of markets, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, warns that we have been hit by a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami."
  — review by Ashley Smith.
  
  
  
• Review of: The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James
  This year marks the seventieth anniversary of C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins: Touissaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. This classic account of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803 is one of the greatest books in the twentieth century. Its title refers to the Jacobins, the most radical element within the French Revolution who propagated, says the Oxford English Dictionary, "extreme democracy and absolute equality" – principles fully embraced by the slaves who made history's first and only successful slave revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which afterwards they renamed Haiti.
  — review by Manuel Yang.
  
  
  
  

• Review of: Coming to Terms with Nature - Socialist Register 2007
  IN THEIR PREFACE to the 43rd volume of the Socialist Register, Coming to Terms with Nature, editors Leo Panitch and Colin Leys admit that this edition “has been one of the most challenging to put together.”
  While socialist activism has a deep and heroic tradition of theorizing and organizing against many of the deadly contradictions of capitalism — from the daily exploitation of the working class to imperialist wars — the present generation is faced with a global environmental crisis “so severe as to potentially threaten the continuation of anything that might be considered tolerable human life.” — review by John McGough.
  
  
  
  
• Review of: Water, Inc. by Varda Burstyn
  Water, Inc. is the first novel by Canadian writer and activist Varda Burstyn (Women Against Censorship; The Rites of Men). The initial premise of this work of fiction is an awful truth: the world is really running out of fresh water. Recently, the UN Millennium Task Force on Water and Sanitation warned that 60 percent of the world’s ecological services are stressed beyond the level of replenishment. Of these resources, water fares worst of all. — review by Matt Fodor and Samantha Fodor (Relay #7). (Preview on Google books.)
  
  
• Review of: Hydro: The Decline and Fall of Ontario’s Electric Empire by Keith Stewart and Jamie Swift
  Informative, critical and daring, Hydro: The Decline and Fall of Ontario’s Electric Empire offers readers an in depth analysis of one of this provinces most contentious policy issues. The authors, Jamie Swift and Keith Stewart limit themselves to no small task, “…the need to produce a volume that, we hope, will inform a democratic debate and help strive after an electricity that will not poison the planet”. — review by Sheldon Macgillivray (Relay #5).
  
  

• Review of: Rebuilding The Left by Marta Harnecker
  "THE left's strategic task is to unite the growing but scattered social opposition into one vast column, one torrent, and to transform it into a force able to deal a decisive blow to the ruling system." How often have you heard words to that effect? It's pretty much all we talk about in the Star office. But is it possible?
  Marta Harnecker, who has closely observed democratic revolutions from Chile to Venezuela, shows the way in this DIY-guide to movement-building.
  — review by Charley Allan (Morning Star website). (Preview on Google books.)
  
  







• Review of: Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic lllusion of an Islamic State by Tarek Fatah
  Tarek personally asked me to review his book, Chasing a Mirage: the tragic illusion of an Islamic State (CM). It has been reviewed very favorably indeed in the Canadian media, especially the Asper-family owned newspapers. The right-wing National Post published long excerpts from the book in serial form, and frequently runs op-eds by Tarek. His basic thesis is that religion and politics should be separated in Islam. Although it has major flaws, it also has many attributes of interest and will be thought-provoking on the relationship between religion and politics, and between Islam and the West.
  — review by Justin Podur.
  
  
  
  
• Review of: Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment by Peter Hallward
  Peter Hallward meticulously explains how, on February 29 of 2004, the U.S. managed to "topple one of the most popular governments in Latin America but it managed to topple it in a manner that wasn't widely criticized or even recognized as a coup at all." Imperial powers do not reinvent the wheel when it comes to undermining democracy in poor countries. Hallward identifies valuable lessons for people who wish to limit the damage that powerful countries inflict on the weak. — review by Joe Emersberger (MR Zine).
  
  
  
  
• Review of: Latin America at the Crossroads by Roberto Regalado
  This compact book by Roberto Regalado, a veteran member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, strongly reaffirms the need for revolution in Latin America and beyond.
  Regalado, a section chief in the Cuban CP’s Department of International Relations, is anything but dogmatic. He is attentive to recent new trends in Latin American economics and politics and respectful toward the diverse currents of socialist opinion. He stresses the importance of the new features of Latin American social struggles: the role of peasants, the landless, indigenous peoples, women, environmentalists, and others. — review by John Riddell (Socialist Voice).
  
  
  
  
• Review of: An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President by Randall Robinson
  Randall Robinson has written the story of a great tragedy of recent times – the violent overthrow of Haiti’s elected president and government on February 29, 2004. An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President gives a blow by blow account of the events surrounding that tragedy. — review by Roger Annis (Socialist Voice).
  
  
  
  
  
• Review of: Development After Globalization: Theory and Practice for the Embattled South in a New Imperial Age by John S. Saul
  One thing that distinguishes good scholars from exceptional ones is an ability to raise penetrating questions that not only force a reader to take serious pause and reflect on the rationale for complex global problems and inequities, but more importantly to raise questions that directly challenge readers to confront their own personal biases and assumptions. — review by Christopher Gore (Relay #17).
  
  
  
  
• Review of: The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy in Sourthern Africa by John Saul
  While we were subjected to the lackluster debate of the federal election of 2006, I remembered the exhilaration of when Nelson Mandela first came to Canada in the early 1990s after his release from Robben Island and he gave a speech at Queen’s Park in Toronto. The lawn was covered with people and the mood was full of celebration for what had been accomplished in the fight against apartheid and what was possible in the future when the African National Congress (ANC) would come to power in South Africa. — review by David Kidd (Relay #10).
  
  
  
• Review of: Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India by Vivek Chibber
  Given the dominance of neoliberalism today, it is an assumption in most quarters that state intervention in the economies of the post-war era was an utter fiasco. This argument is taken as even more self-evident in the case of the countries of the capitalist periphery or “Third World”.
  — review by Raghu Krishnan (Relay #6). (Preview on Google books.)
  
  
• Review of: Incoherent Empire by Michael Mann and The New Imperialism by David Harvey
  ‘Empire’ is once again on the lips of its supporters and remains a sour taste in the mouth of its opponents. Vaulted from academic obscurity to the front page of London and New York’s book reviews, historian Niall Ferguson has made an industry out of empire, as the Empire makes industry out of the world. — review by Simon J. Black (Relay #11).
  
  

• Review of: Solidarity Divided by Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Fernando Gapasin
  Provoked by the continuing crisis of organized labor after the departure of the Change to Win coalition of unions from the AFL-CIO in 2005, Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Fernando Gapasin have produced a new book, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path toward Social Justice. Hopefully the text will inspire debate, both within the labor movement and the Left. Solidarity Divided compliments Kim Moody's US Labor in Trouble and Transition, also produced after the split. — review by Steven Sherman.
  
  
  Interview with Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Fernando Gapasin (mp3 audio)
  
  
  
  
• Dec 17: Solidarity Divided by Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin
  The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice
  A NEW DIRECTION FOR LABOR BY TWO OF ITS LEADING ACTIVIST INTELLECTUALS
  
  Candid, incisive, and accessible, Solidarity Divided is a critical examination of labor’s current crisis and a plan for a bold new way forward into the twenty-first century. Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin offer a remarkable mix of vivid history and probing analysis. They chart changes in U.S. manufacturing, examine the onslaught of globalization, consider the influence of the environment on labor, and provide the first broad analysis of the fallout from the 2000 and 2004 elections on the U.S. labor movement. (FORTHCOMING IN JUNE 2008)

• Review of: After Socialism: Reconstructing Critical Social Thought by Gabriel Kolko
  Radical critics of United States imperialism owe Gabriel Kolko a considerable debt. Of the ‘revisionist’ historians that emerged in North America in the second half of the 20th century, Kolko produced one of the most sustained and coherent accounts of the material basis of America’s dash to globalism, and indeed explained why the 20th century was the ‘century of war’.
  — review by Phil Hearse.
  
  
  
  
• Review of: Build it Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century by Michael A. Lebowitz
  The crisis of capitalism could not be more overt and exposed, but the instruments of survival at its disposal - both material and ideological - are also very effective with growing financialisation, commodification and consumerism. There are stark similarities in the way the welfarist face of the State has been on wane, along with its increased instrumentalisation in favour of global capital, in the so-called developed world and the inappropriately coined euphemistic developing world. At the level of movements too, if at one moment and place we hear sagas of popular and sustained confrontation against the global capital, the next we see a fragmented and weakened struggle against capital. — review by Ravi Kumar (Radical Notes website).
  
  
  
  
• Review of: Build it Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century by Michael A. Lebowitz
  One of the political highlights of summer, 2007 in Toronto, was the visit to the city by author Michael Lebowitz. His packed out talk introduced a Toronto audience not just to recent developments in the revolutionary process underway in Venezuela, but to the rethinking of socialism accompanying that process. — review by Paul Kellogg (Socialist Voice website).
  
  
  
  
• Review of: Canadian Marxists and the Search for a Third Way by Peter Campbell
  The impasse of socialist politics across the West has yielded a number of important reflections on the course of working class politics over the 20th century. The most notable of these, Donald Sassoon's One Hundred Years of Socialism, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys's The End of Parliamentary Socialism, and Gerassimos Moschonas's In the Name of Social Democracy, have each had their own take on the end of the Leninism of the communist movement and the accommodation of the parliamentarism of the social democratic movement to neoliberalism and globalization. — review by Gregory Albo.
  
  
  
• Review of: Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
  I have always considered Mao Zedong’s statement, “To be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing,” to be among his most valuable. Not only did it alter my conception of struggle, but it encapsulated perhaps more succinctly than any other of his sayings, the dialectical character of his thinking and strategy. It was this quality that allowed Mao to exploit the contradictions among the enemy, to “overcome all difficulties,” and to repeatedly turn defeat into victory.
  — review by Robert Weil (SD Online).
  
  
  
• Review of: Paradigm Shift: Globalization and the Canadian State by Stephen McBride
  Neoliberalism came on to the political scene as a project of the New Right and major corporate interests with the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s. Neoliberalism today represents an ideological discourse, administrative and regulatory practices, a system of inter-state relations, and social form of political power across the advanced capitalist countries and, indeed, the vast majority of the world.
  — review by Gregory Albo.
  
  
• Review of: Ruling Canada: Corporate Cohesion and Democracy by Jamie Brownlee
  For a discipline explicitly engaged in the study of power, particularly as exercised in liberal democracies, it is striking how little Canadian political science has actually examined the concentration of private economic power, the political organization of the business classes and the extension of that power into the political realm. Indeed, Canadian political science has been principally pre-occupied with power insofar as it pertains to the constitutional distribution of power and the relative access to political power of the multinational and multicultural constituent groups comprising Canada.
  — review by Greg Albo (Relay #15).
  
  
• Review of: The Soviet Century by Moshe Lewin
  Moshe Lewin has contributed much to the understanding of the experience of the Soviet period in Russian history. Taking a critical approach to traditional ways of looking at the USSR and basing himself on detailed social-historical research, his work has helped to place the period of communism in historical perspective.
  — review by Herman Rosenfeld (Relay #20). (Preview on Google books.)
  
  
  
  
  
• Review of: Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy by Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur
  We develop critical understandings of the world through teachers and their teachings. A radical consciousness, which is to say, a working knowledge of the disconcerting machinations of global capitalism and a never-ending drive to understand the roots of this system is not simply derived from thin air. — review by Andrew Michael Lee (Relay #12).
  
  

• Review of: The Age of Oprah, Cultural Icon For the Neoliberal Era by Janice Peck
  If you work hard enough, if you prepare long enough, if you visualize astutely and pray on it resolutely, it really can happen for you. At least that's the way it works in the world of Oprah Winfrey. In the Age of Oprah, author Janice Peck explains, there's no such thing as collective problem-solving; there are only individual, market-driven and spirit-centered solutions. Water polluted? Buy it bottled. Dissatisfied with your kids' school? Find a private one or home school. Dead-end job with no respect and no benefits? Polish that resume and assume an attitude of gratitude, or get ready to start your own business. House falling down? Maybe you can qualify for an extreme makeover. Is the world view of Oprah really uplifting after all? Or does it disempower individuals and disarm communities?
  — Bruce Dixon interviews Janice Peck.
  
  
  
  
• Review of: The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century by Robert McChesney.
  That the major U.S. news media uncritically reproduced the Bush Administration’s ideological rationale for the invasion and occupation of Iraq (Saddam has and is ready to deploy deadly ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ thus, we must defend our national security with a ‘preemptive’ strike; — review by Tanner Mirrlees (Relay #2).
  
  

• Review of: Planet of Slums by Mike Davis.
  The persistent spread of slums over the last two decades has forced both policy makers and academics to address the causes and factors underlying this expansion. Explanations for slums have often framed the problem in terms of uncontrolled demographic increases, rural-urban migration, the absence of private property rights and wrong government policies. — review by Angela Joya (Relay #13). (Preview on Google books.)
  
  
  
• Review of: Planet of Slums by Mike Davis.
  If read from a place of willingness to hear its message, Planet of Slums will inflame a fierce hatred of capitalism in your heart. It is an analysis of neoliberalism through the prism of urban space around the globe, and it is a relentless, pounding indictment of the organizing of billions of lives into poverty and suffering by capital. — review by Scott Neigh.
  
  
  
• Review of: uTOpia: Towards A New Toronto edited by Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox.
  Over the past several years, Toronto has been undergoing a revitalization – a new opera house, the never-ending development of condos and lofts, and new innovative architecture, including the new OCAD building and additions to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum. — review by Yen Chu (Relay #11).
  
  

• Left Eye on Books: taking a critical look at the latest publications from a left perspective.
• Marxists Internet Archive: is an all volunteer, non-profit public library. MIA contains the writings of 592 authors representing a complete spectrum of political, philosophical, and scientific thought, generally spanning the past 200 years.