ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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‘Stabilising the human relation to the earth’
RICHARD CLARKE recommends a book that shows how pervasive the ideas of Marx and Engels have been in the parallel development of ecological science and of socialist theory and practice
DEATH WISH: A 2008 view of the fly ash spill from the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant outside Kingston, Tennessee - testing showed significantly elevated levels of arsenic, copper, barium, cadmium. The pile of ash is 20-25 feet high, and stretches for two miles and empties into the Emory River
[Brian Stansberry/CC]
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
Capitalism in the Anthropocene; Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
by J B Foster
Monthly Review Press £25
“ANTHROPOCENE” is a scientific term (awaiting ratification by the International Commission on Stratigraphy) increasingly used to designate the last 75 years or so as a geological epoch in which biological, chemical and geological processes on the Earth’s surface have been dominated by the consequences of human activity.
It has its own stratigraphic markers including radionuclides from hundreds of nuclear tests (and two bombings), plastics and petrochemicals, food-chain accumulants and, increasingly, the deposits from floods, droughts and fires consequent on climate change.
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Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
MARTIN GRAHAM welcomes, with reservations, a scholarly addition to the unfinished business of understanding how capital works on a world scale
The selection, analysis and interpretation of historical ‘facts’ always takes place within a paradigm, a model of how the world works. That’s why history is always a battleground, declares the Marx Memorial Library
From hunting rare pamphlets at book sales to online panels and courses on trade unionism and class politics, the MML continues connecting archive treasures with the movements fighting for a better world, writes director MEIRIAN JUMP