One hundred years later, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution is still the most compelling narrative of that world-shaking event.
Posts in: culture & reviews
Book review: How England’s “waste people” became “white trash” in the US
White trash, redneck, clay eater, cracker. This is only a partial list of all the sneering names developed over hundreds of years to stigmatize poor white people in the United States. In her new book White Trash: The 400-Year History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg traces the evolution of language, perception and public policy… Read more »
Secondhand Time: socialist hopes and Stalinist tragedies
“A time full of hope has been replaced by a time of fear. The era has turned around and headed back in time. The time we live in now is second-hand….”
Freedom Socialist Guest Book Review — Between the World and Me: Whose life matters, and why?
In his courageous book Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his 15-year-old son, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains to him the “justifiable” verdict in the killing of Michael Brown, a black teenager who was shot eight times by a white police officer and then left in the streets. This fatal shooting came on… Read more »
Review of Hardly War — Memories of the “Forgotten War”
Hardly War, by Don Mee Choi / Wave Books, 2016 / Illustrated; 97 pages Don Mee Choi is a South Korean poet, translator and anti-militarist now living in the U.S. Through a startling, kaleidoscopic collection of prose, poems, and photographs in her new book, Hardly War, she makes a powerful case against the U.S. justification… Read more »
Television Review: Sting like a “Bee” — the piercing satire of “Full Frontal”
There’s a ferocious new wit in town. Her name is Samantha Bee and her late-night cable show, Full Frontal, is passionate, outraged, straight-forward, and honest. Bee spares nobody and nothing in politics or public life: “There’s a lot of shame to go around.” The Canada-born comic appeared for a decade as a correspondent on The… Read more »
Movie Review — Edward Snowden: from patriotic geek to NSA whistleblower
Oliver Stone’s Snowden is a gripping dramatization of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s journey through the totalitarian madness of the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA). Commenting on the film, the director and co-writer blew a little whistle of his own. “They say we have freedom of expression; but thought is financed, and thought is controlled, and… Read more »
Blood at the Root book review: Forsyth County, Georgia — a saga of racial cleansing
Southern trees bear strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Using these lyrics from a poem by Abel Meeropol, immortalized in Billie Holliday’s song about lynching, author Patrick Phillips opens his tale of terror, theft and racial apartheid in one Georgia county, USA. Following a brutal assault on a white… Read more »
The art of Black working-class life
After last year’s hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, it’s refreshing to see two fine films about African American working people. Loving’s true story shows a brave couple persevering with their 9-year Supreme Court case that finally struck down laws against inter-racial marriage in 1967. Fences, by playwright August Wilson, delves into the strengths and tensions of a Black… Read more »
BOOK REVIEW — Eleanor Marx: spotlight on a socialist feminist pioneer
Read Rachel Holmes’ sensitive and absorbing biography of Eleanor Marx and you’ll fall in love with a radical heroine. In Eleanor Marx: A Life (Bloomsbury Press, 2015), the Karl Marx family and the 19th century socialist movement are vividly portrayed. Eleanor Marx is revealed as an important political leader, whom Holmes credits with being the… Read more »
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