We are going through the sixth wave of mass extinction in the 3.8 billion year history of life on earth. Some 25 to 40 percent of all species are expected to disappear by 2050. And, like the more widely discussed global warming crisis, these extinctions are caused by human activity.
Extinction: A Radical History is a short, useful and welcome introduction to the subject for non-specialists.
David Madden and Peter Marcuse have successfully done three important things.
First, as the title suggests, they’ve made a clear case for housing to be higher up the mainstream political agenda. Second, they relate housing to wider theoretical debates, including Marxist analyses of its place in capitalist society. Third — and unusually for a book written by academics — they have given space to the many campaigns and activists challenging the neoliberal dominance of housing policy. As one housing campaigner said to me, “We needed this book”.
Laura Beers’ biography of Ellen Wilkinson, a prominent socialist in the early 20th century, is packed with detail. It is written in a lively style and gives a real sense of her as a person.
Ellen was born into a working class family in Manchester in 1891. She joined the Independent Labour Party at the age of 16. She was excited and inspired by the Russian Revolution and later had dual membership of the Labour Party and the Communist Party (which was permitted under Labour Party rules of the time).
Gary Younge is one of the few fearless journalists who regularly cut against the grain in the mainstream media. He has recently returned to Britain, the country of his birth, after living and writing for The Guardian in the United States for over a decade. Another Day in the Death of America is his parting response to this experience.
John Parrington’s engaging and thoughtful book explains the science behind recent rapid advances in genetic engineering that mean it is increasingly possible to enact precise changes at a molecular level.
Genetic engineering tends to evoke images of glow in the dark bunnies, super tomatoes, or for me, the vast, rectangular football player in the novel Red Dwarf who has been engineered to be the exact size of the goal. But genetic engineering has been responsible for medical treatments that are now commonplace.
W E B Du Bois was a pioneer of the civil rights movement in the US and helped to found the National Association for the Advancement Colored People. He was the author of many works on the real experience of black people in the US, most notably his seminal Marxist-influenced work, Black Reconstruction in America.
Nothing demonstrates the importance of Ian Cobain’s new book better than the secrecy that surrounds British involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen today. Not only will we never be told the truth by our masters but the records that could have exposed the truth to the light of day will almost certainly be destroyed to prevent any such eventuality. And this, as Cobain shows, is as it has always been.
The best part of this year’s Rio de Janeiro Olympics took place several days before the opening ceremony. On 27 July the Olympic torch relay was held up by a demonstration at Angra dos Reis, near Rio. Teachers, who had not been paid for months, blocked the road and one protester extinguished the flame.
Barbara C Allen’s important biography has opened an exciting, and long overdue, new line of enquiry into the dynamics of the Russian Revolution, well-timed for its centenary in 2017.
It has become fashionable in academia recently to see the Russian Revolution as only one part of a “continuum of crises” that engulfed the Tsarist Empire and the early years of the Soviet Union. This new history follows suit, rejecting the dominant view that the Civil War lasted from the summer of 1918 to 1921 in favour of ten years from 1916 to 1926.
Why 1916? Because that year saw a revolt in Turkestan against conscription to the Tsarist war machine fighting in the First World War.