Books

In the late 1980s author Philip Kerr had the inspired idea of taking the architype of the private-eye as developed by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett — the loner trying to deliver justice in a morally corrupt bourgeois world — and placed it in the morally putrid world of pre-war Nazi Germany.

His Bernie Gunther was as hardboiled and full of wisecracks as Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade but he was investigating crime in a society whose leaders were committing “the crime of the millennium.”

Richard Evans’s biography of the late, great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm rightly recognises his subject’s towering intellect and brilliance as a scholar and teacher. It is full of fascinating, rich and often amusing vignettes, and Hobsbawm’s life and work is in general brilliantly contextualised, as one would expect given Evans’s honed skills as a social historian of modern Europe.

Germany dominates Europe, so news in April that German business confidence had fallen for a seventh month in eight and that the government had halved its growth forecast for 2019 to 0.5 percent suggests there is more than Brexit weighing on Europe’s economic prospects.

The German working class remains Europe’s most powerful. Yet Germany’s equivalent of the Labour Party, the SPD, is in spectacular decline after entering one coalition after another with conservative chancellor Merkel and, between time, making a wholesale attack on welfare provision.

The decades of the music press described in this book are a world away from what we get now — the whim of a click and unified by nothing but competition. The book derives from discussions and interviews provoked by a conference convened by Mark Sinker entitled Underground/Overground: the Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing 1968-85.

1919 saw the world in turmoil. Emerging exhausted from the slaughter of the First World War, ordinary people across the globe were questioning how society was organised and working class people, inspired by the flaming light of the Russian Revolution of 1917, were not just demanding fundamental change; they were determined to fight for it.

From Italy to Egypt and from Berlin to Limerick working people were willing to topple regimes and rulers who would not deliver change. Britain was no exception.

In many ways, America is an exciting place to be a socialist at the moment. This is not just due to the fact that Bernie Sanders has announced his candidacy for president in 2020, and will enter the race as one of the most popular politicians in the US. Nor is it just down to the huge popularity of other socialist politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar. As welcome as these developments are, it is on the ground where the most exciting openings are taking place.

Michael D Yates, author of Why Unions Matter (1998), dedicated most of his academic and professional career to studying labour and social movements in the US. Through his latest work, Yates contends that the working class must change the world or humanity will succumb to the barbarity of capitalism. His warning must be taken seriously because we live in a world prone to wars and global economic crises, among other evils.

I read this book of 19 essays by the prominent Turkish author, essayist and journalist, in one sitting. All the essays were smuggled out of his 9 x 4 metre cell, shared with two others in the Silivri prison about 200km from Istanbul.

I could not put it down, as I was drawn inside the mind and imagination of a 68 year old man who was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in 2016, following the attempted coup against the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

According to French writer and sociologist Didier Eribon, “If you write about the working class you have left it,” though he also said, “You can never escape your social class, even if you believe you have.” This anthology of memoirs, essays and poems by working class writers has a lot to say about that conundrum.

The authors have tried to produce an accessible introduction to the life of the US’s most renowned socialist from the early 20th century.

The format of the book is very odd. Each chapter starts with a straight prose introduction to the following pages of graphics. The prose sequences are highly partisan written as they are (in part) by Steve Max, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).