Alex Mitchell: Trotskyist with some stories to tell
Come the Revolution: A memoir
By Alex Mitchell, NewSouth Publishing $39.95
Solidarity reviews books, mags, movies, gigs, exhibitions…
The Mad Square: Revolution and reaction in Weimar Germany
Mad Square
Modernity in German Art 1910-1937, formerly at Melbourne NGV
Rebuilding fighting unions: Lessons from the US
The Civil wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old?
By Steve Early, Haymarket Books, $24.95
Weekend: Honest depiction of homophobia in everyday life
Weekend
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Out now, selected release
The need for an anatomy of the trade union bureaucracy
Review: We Built This Country
By Humphrey McQueen, Ginninderra Press, $30
Marxism and anarchism
Anarchist and autonomist ideas have influenced many recent movements, including Occupy. Lachlan Marshall takes a look at a new booklet that weighs up their merits.
Dissecting Murdoch’s hold on the news
Review: Quarterly Essay 43 “Bad News”, by Robert Manne, Black Inc, $19.95
Tony Cliff: a revolutionary thinker
Tony Cliff
A Marxist For His Time
Bookmarks, $30, available from Solidarity
Telling glimpse into Tamil Tigers’ doomed route to national liberation
Tamil Tigress
By Niromi de Soyza
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Nationalist myths of Australia’s war in the Pacific
Australia’s Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth
By Tom O’Lincoln, Interventions $20.00
Nagasaki bombing: a war crime to boost US power
Nagasaki: the massacre of the innocent and unknowing, by Craig Collie, Allen and Unwin, $32.99
Sexism, psychology and pseudo-science
Review: Delusions of Gender By Cordelia Fine, Allen and Unwin, $29.99
Smoke bombs, sit-ins and sixties’ student radicalism at Monash
Review: All Along the Watchtower, by Michael Hyde, The Vulgar Press, $32.95.
Exploring Stephen Jay Gould’s ideas on science and evolution
The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould
By Richard York and Brett Clark, Monthly Review Press $16.95
A proud history of Aboriginal struggle on display
From Little Things Big Things Grow
Exhibtion developed by National Museum of Australia, touring nationally see website for details
Immigration Nation: Probing Australia’s racist roots
Mark Goudkamp takes a look at the SBS series Immigration Nation and its history of the White Australia policy
Percy Brookfield: MP who used parliament to agitate and organise
The Best Hated Man in Australia: The Life and Death of Percy Brookfield 1875-1921
By Paul Robert Adams, Puncher and Wattmann, $34
Asking why Labor stands for nothing
Review article: Power Crisis, by Rodney Cavalier, Cambridge University Press, $34.99 and
All That’s Left: What Labor Should Stand For, Edited by Nick Dyrenfurth and Tim Soutphommasane UNSW Press, $29.95
Competition, sexism and rich kids rule in Facebook film
Review: The Social Network
Directed by David Fincher, in cinemas now
The Pacific Solution: never again!
Review: The Pacific Solution
By Susan Metcalfe, Australian Scholarly Publishing, $24.95
Exposing raunch culture and the new sexism
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism
By Natasha Walter
Virago, $35
Equal love, equal rights: rediscovering the red in the rainbow
Amy Thomas reviews Hannah Dee’s The Red in the Rainbow, an essential look at why fighting homophobia means fighting the system
Working class heroes were made in Dagenham
Review: Made in Dagenham, directed by Nigel Cole
In cinemas October 28
Goodbye to all that?
Review: Goodbye to all that: The failure of neoliberalism and the urgency of change
Edited by David McKnight and Robert Manne, Black Inc, $32.95
Anzac—a new front in the history wars
Review: What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History
Edited byMarilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, University of New South Wales Press, $29.95
Refugee policy is the real crime
Review: Border Crimes
By Michael Grewcock, The Federation Press, $49.95
Glorifying life as a US solider in occupied Iraq
Review: The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, In cinemas now
Defending Stalin does socialism no favours
Review: The Idea of Communism
By Tariq Ali, University of Chicago Press, $22.95
Invaluable guide to climate science, but not solutions
Review: Storms of my grandchildren
By James Hansen, Bloomsbury, $35
Pearson’s Radical Hope: Assimilation
Conservative Indigenous leader Noel Pearson uses his new essay Radical Hope to argue for a neo-liberal agenda in Aboriginal education, argues Shannon Price
Academic gloss for the new assimilation
Review: The Politics of Suffering
By Peter Sutton, Melbourne University Press, $34.95
Moore’s condemnation of capitalism falls flat
Review: Capitalism: A love story
Directed by Michael Moore, In cinemas now
The Brisbane Bolshevik and the Russian Revolution
Review: The People’s Train
By Tom Keneally, Vintage Books, $32.95
Film points finger at Australian complicity over deaths in Balibo
Balibo
Directed by Robert Connolly, In cinemas now
Bosses build their profits on toll of workers’ lives
Review: Framework of Flesh
By Humphrey McQueen, Ginninderra Press, $30
A frock-coated communist: rediscovering Friedrich Engels
Review: The frock-coated communist By Tristram Hunt
Allen Lane $59.95
Guide for climate campaigners reflects movement’s weak points
Review:Climate action By Mark Diesendorf
UNSW Press, $34.95
Confronting the myths used to justify dispossession
Review: Possession
By Bain Atwood, Melbourne University Press, $54.99
Bruno: A homophobic and tedious failure of a film
Review: Bruno
Directed by Larry Charles, in cinemas now
The Red Army Faction—flawed product of 1960s radicalism
Review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex Directed by Uli Edel
In selected cinemas now
Cannes winner an indictment of Australian racism
Review: Samson and Delilah, Directed by Warwick Thornton
In selected cinemas now
Illzilla’s political hip hop a flower in the wasteland
Review: Wasteland
Illzilla, Out now through Shock
Excusing responsibility for the Holocaust?
Review: The Reader
Directed by Stephen Daldry, In cinemas now
Raw challenge to the realities of racism
Review: The Combination
Directed by David Field, In cinemas now
Former insider exposes carbon lobby deception
Review: Quarterly Essay “Quarry Vision: coal, climate change and the end of the resource boom”
By Guy Pearse, Black Inc, $16.95
Milk
I was born in 1970 in small town New Zealand. I grew up in the 80s in country NSW. I was in a closet inside a closet. I came out in 1995 in Sydney. My family coped. Nearly all my friends stayed friends. I can be open at work. I owe a lot to the previous generations of sexuality and gender rights activists for making my life so easy.
Labor goes missing in The Howard Years
We survived the Howard years, and now you want us to watch it on Monday night prime time!
1949 coal strike: How Chifley lost Labor’s supporters
Infamous Victory: Ben Chifley’s Battle For Coal
ABC1, November 6
Watch online at www.abc.net.au/tv/iview
Solutions to global warming but no way to get there
Review: “Now or never”, Quarterly Essay 31
By Tim Flannery
Black Inc, $15.95
How ordinary people paid for the boom
Review: The Land of Plenty
By Mark Davis
Melbourne University Publishing, $36.95
The politics of Rudd’s ‘family values’
Review: The Henson Case
By David Marr
Text Publishing, $24.95
Jonathan Neale’s Stop Global Warming: Change The World
Review
Bookmarks, 2008, $30.00 from Solidarity
A graphic and haunting soldier’s tale
Review: Waltz With Bashir
Directed by Ari Folman, Limited cinema release
A fresh look at America’s urban decay
Review: The Wire
WHEN US presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked his favourite TV show and character, his answers were The Wire and Omar Little (more on him later).
Australian atrocities at war
Review: Australians At War: A Pictorial History
By A. K. MacDougall, The Five Mile Press, RRP $39.95, 2008 edition
Greer’s rage no answer to the NT intervention
Review: On Rage
By Germaine Greer, Melbourne University Press, $19.95
Persepolis: Iran through a rebel’s eyes
Directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, Now showing
Inside Kevin 07: Danger signs right from the start
By Christine Jackman, Melbourne University Press, $34.95
A history that’s on our side
Review: A People’s History of the World
By Chris Harman, Palgrave Macmillan $39.95
Greenpeace Energy [r]evolution report
AUSTRALIA’S ENERGY [R]evolution is a useful tool for the climate movement. Greenpeace researchers have drawn together the best science and technology to build a concrete and achievable vision of a viable transition to a low-emission society.
The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island
By Chloe Hooper, Hamish Hamilton, $32.95
CHLOE HOOPER, a novelist whose first book won international praise, recently released The Tall Man, a book on the Palm Island inquest into the death in police custody of Cameron Doomadgee.
Inside the Al Sadr movement
Review: Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn, Allen and Unwin $29.95
Military mayhem
Review: A Military History of Australia
Jeffrey Grey, Cambridge University Press, RRP $39.95
Salute - “I’m not talking about the 200 metres, I’m talking about the human race.”
Who is Australia’s fastest sprinter ever? At which Olympic Games did he win the silver medal? Why is he a hero for many US track athletes? Don’t know, don’t care? Well watch Salute and you will.
Last Drinks: Toohey’s racist diatribe
THE WIDESPREAD acclaim for The Australian journalist Paul Toohey’s Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention (Quarterly Essay 30, June 2008), demonstrates just how deeply racist attitudes to Aboriginal people are embedded in Australian politics and culture.
Let them in, but never mind the neo-liberalism
Review of Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders
Jason L. Riley, Penguin USA
Shopping, sex and the city
Review of Sex and the City, directed by Michael Patrick King
Coming to DVD
‘The torture word’
IN LATE February Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
1968–the year the world revolted
Of all the articles, features, memoirs and books devoted to 1968, “The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After”, by Chris Harman, the editor of International Socialism journal, is still, by some distance, the best.
Oil–an American obsession
ONE HUNDRED years ago the United States was the biggest oil producer in the world. California alone accounted for 22 per cent of global output.
