Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, Arundhati Roy, Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2009, pp. 256, paperback, $26, ISBN978-0-670-06398-7 ‘Listening to Grasshoppers’ is a collection of essays and lectures, written and delivered by Arundhati Roy between 2001 and 2008, amidst global and domestic turmoil. The essays and lectures themselves stand as
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A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, Alfred W. McCoy, Metropolitan Books, 2006, pp. 290, $33.95, ISBN 0-8050-8041-4 McCoy’s A Question of Torture is a part of The American Empire Project, which seeks to examine the origins of US imperial aspirations and
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Europe’s Last Chance: Why the European States Must Form a More Perfect Union, Guy Verhofstadt, Basic Books, 2017, pp.304, $36.50, ISBN 978-0-465-09685-5 Verhofstadt might have been the Prime Minister of Belgium for 9 years, crowning his long-time involvement in politics, but he is first and foremost European, as he does
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The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, Andreas Malm, Verso, 2018, pp. 248, $33, ISBN 978-1-78663-415-3 Everywhere we go there is concrete; mirrors. Signs of modernity creep into the countryside and turn farmers into wage laborers, farms into ‘infrastructure developments’, thereby obliterating the difference between
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Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System, Ian Angus, Monthly Review Press, 2016, pp. 280, $19 paperback, ISBN 978- 1 – 5836760 – 9 – 7 Ian Angus, the editor of the influential Climate & Capitalism ecosocialist journal, has written a masterful analysis of the
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The Value of Nothing: Why Everything Costs so Much More Than We Think, Raj Patel, HarperCollins Publishers, 2009, 250 pp. paperback, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-55468-622-3 Raj Patel’s ‘The Value of Nothing’ claims that we have been beguiled by markets. He asserts that we have been led to believe that the price
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The Cuban Drumbeat, Piero Gleijeses, Seagull Books, 2009, 96pp. , $34.47 hardcover, ISBN 9781906497378 Gleijeses’ “The Cuban Drumbeat” is the second installment in Seagull’s series “What is Communism?”, edited by Tariq Ali with the aim of analyzing “what went wrong?” in the practice of 20th-century communism. The pamphlet could be
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The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Amitav Ghosh. Penguin Random House India. 275pp. ₹399. 2016. ISBN 9780670089130 When the Swedish astronomer Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin put a thermometer outside his window in January 1756 to begin measuring average monthly temperatures, he began one of the world’s longest observation series.
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Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement, Rahul Pandita. Tranquebar Press. 2011. 202. ₹295. ISBN 978-93-8065-34-6 Rahul Pandita, a journalist and an author based in Delhi, whose previous book Our Moon Has Blood Clots on the plight of Pandits in the valley of Kashmir at the hands of
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