One man's odyssey through the world of books
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Almost all of Ivan Doig's novels are, like Doig himself, rooted in Montana - even when they stray out of the state. Prairie Nocturne takes as its jumping off point the communities of Two Medicine County, the fictional area of Montana based upon the ranching and farming area were Doig grew up. Earlier novels set here followed the lives of two intertwined families and they feuded over land and
The gameshow format exploded in popularity in the US in the late 1950s. The promises of instant wealth and exotic prizes combined with flamboyant hosts became a global phenomena, that has never really ended, merely changed. By the mid-1960s, when Stephen King began writing, they were a central part of US culture and had been exported globally. It is no surprise then that they offered a fertile
Bill McGuire is a respected geologist and climate scientist. His new book presents climate science, viewed through the prism of historical geological processes, to a non-academic audience. Reading it in the middle of a summer of unprecedented heatwaves it is both prescient and terrifying. McGuire's argument is quite striking. He shows how the processes that have taken place in deep geological
Emmanuel Terray was a French political activist and Marxist anthropologist whose work was enormously important in the development of anthropological ideas. This short book is a collection of two seminal pieces, translated from French, wherein Terray grapples with the relevance of Marxism to anthropology. He does this by exploring the work of two other influential figures. The first of these is
In the early 1930s, as fascism in Germany grew from strength to strength, the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote a series of pamphlets and articles to explain the nature of fascism and to argue for a working class strategy that could defeat it. These articles, several of the most important of which are collected here, remain some of the best studies of German fascism and Hitler's rise
In 1938 George Clare, then aged 17 and an Austrian Jew, fled Vienna where he had grown up to escape the Nazi annexation of the country. Clare's parents would eventually die in the Holocaust, but in those pre-war years they initially ended up in Berlin where they expected to get passes to travel to France. Somewhat surprisingly, given the political situation, Clare fell in love with Berlin. Though
Well they always say you shouldn't be afraid to try new things. I was unsure I would like M. John Harrison's latest book The End of Everything after I read the Guardian review here. As quite a literal reader I am uncomfortable with stories that aren't particularly clear on what's happening, or layer meaning upon meaning. Nonetheless I decided to give it ago, not least because I very much like end
As Socialist Worker editor Tomáš Tengely-Evans has had to cover more than their share of imperialist conflict and the threat of such conflict. In the last few years we've seen war in the Middle East, genocide in Palestine, a bloody proxy-war between Nato and Russia over Ukraine and Trump's aggression against countries as varied as Greenland, Canada and Venezula. Understanding the tendency
From the end of World War One through to the 1950s Eastern Europe's peasant societies were engaged in a new continuous "Peasant War". It is a struggle that is rarely acknowledged, except perhaps by those looking to understand the dynamics between workers and peasants during the Russian Revolution. Those who do study these events tend to seem the separately, as struggles around particular events,
Despite my love of Iain M. Banks' science fiction novels I have never read Feersum Endjinn. When I first attempted it soon after it's first publication in the mid 1990s, I was put of by the "difficult" chapters. These are written phonetically, and I found them impenetrable. Today, after nearly three decades of text speak, I was less challenged by them. Perhaps younger audiences will find them
