Reviews

Tom Unterrainer reviews Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume V: War and Revolution by Hal Draper This is the fifth volume of Hal Draper’s mammoth project to organise the political ideas developed by Marx and Engels on a coherent, closely argued and contextualised basis. It is something Marx managed for himself in his economic writing, but never with the diffuse array of journalism, essays and correspondence that constitutes his directly political writing. For Draper, this project wasn’t a mere academic exercise — though his lack of political activity during the period of writing leads some...

The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories By Christopher Booker (Continuum) As the giant ape climbs to his doom in Peter Jackson’s new King Kong, a friend who doesn’t normally cry at movies was sobbing his heart out beside me. And he wasn’t the only one. What is it about this story that has touched audiences for seventy years? Is there something, moreover, which echoes other, older stories? I can imagine – probably there is, somewhere – a cod-Marxist reading: Kong represents the proletariat, its exploitation highlighted by the Depression, murdered by capitalist greed. But I don’t think that...

David Broder reviews ‘Is it just me or is everything shit?’, by Steve Lowe and former solidarity deputy editor Alan McArthur The culture of ridiculously overblown praise, as embodied in the title, is merely one of the elements of modern society that Is it just me or is everything shit? lambasts. The book is an “encyclopedia of modern life” — an A-Z of attacks on subjects as diverse as Robert Kilroy-Silk, Che Guevara merchandise and “Fast food chains marketing themselves as ‘healthy’ (and feminist)”. Before reading the book, I’d thought that books/programmes/articles being cynical about modern...

Rosalind Robson reviews Insurgent Iraq, Al Zarqawi and the new generation The politics of Loretta Napoleoni in this book are a bit hard to pin down. A (perhaps syndicated) article by her in a recent issue of Socialist Worker tended to suggest that she was sympathetic to al Zarqawi, or at least understood him to be a product of repression and brutality (in Jordan). The implied line was that we have to understand the sinner more and condemn him less. Her approach to research (also evident in her book Terror Inc.) is to document and detail the facts about Islamist jihadist groups without much...

Paul Hampton reviews Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution by Richard Gott (Verso, 2005) Richard Gott the journalist is like a courtier who rides round in a stretch limo to visit the poor before returning as a “privileged visitor” to the presidential palace. And for Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, he has nothing but admiration. There is nothing Gott’s book about workers’ factory occupations or about the “co-management” schemes in some workplaces. Despite dramatic changes in the Venezuelan labour movement over the last five years — including the involvement of the old union federation...

Dan Katz reviews Bangkok 8 and the recently published Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett Just at the point when I become sick to death of standardised, dull US detective stories and their badly-written British counterparts something comes along to cheer me up: Sonchai Jitleecheep, a Thai detective who is also a flawed and extremely ambivalent character The important thing about noir crime is to put a person who already has lots of problems into a situation where they have little room for manoeuvre. Squeeze them and see what happens. Sonchai has a lot to contend with. For a start he is a Buddhist...

Amina Saddiq reviews Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Those who haven’t read the last few Harry Potter books will probably laugh when I say that the latest instalment is not only the most interesting, but the most political of the series. I’ll try and explain. Each book starts with a new academic year at Harry’s school, Hogwarts: when the series began Harry was ten but he is now almost seventeen, and Rowling has changed both the tone and subject matter accordingly. There is still some of the earlier over-the-top jolliness, but the tone is now much darker. This is a book for older...