WhatsOn brings the book selection for the week. Divulge yourself in the books from the list and increase the bibliophile inside yourself. Cherish yourself with the new books in the house and entertain yourself throughout the week!
Falling Down by Phil Burton-Cartledge***
This tipping point has been a long time coming and Burton-Cartledge offers a critical analysis of this narrative. Since the era of Thatcherism, the Tories have struggled to find a popular vision for the United Kingdom. At the same time, their members have become increasingly old. Their values have not been adopted by the younger voters. The coalition between the countryside and the City interests is under pressure, and the latter is split by Brexit. The Tories are locked into a declinist spiral, and with their voters not replacing themselves the party is more dependent on a split opposition—putting into question their continued viability as the favoured vehicle of the British capital.
Making the Revolution Global by Theo Williams ****
Making the Revolution Global shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. African and Caribbean activist intellectuals came to Britain during the 1930s and 1940s and intervened in debates about capitalism, imperialism, fascism and war. They consistently argued that any path towards international socialism must have colonial liberation at its heart. Theo Williams casts new light on responses to the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress, and a wealth of other events and phenomena.
Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution by Yasmin El-Rifae****
Journalist Yasmin El-Rifae was one of Opantish’s organizers, and this is her evocative, aching account of their work, as they raced to develop new tactics, struggled with a revolution bleeding into counter-revolution, and dealt with the long aftermath of assault and devastation. Told in a daring, hybrid narrative style drawn from years of interviews and her own, intimate experience, it is a story of overlapping circles: the circles of male attackers activists had to break through, the ways sexual violence can be circled off as “irrelevant” to political struggle, and the endless repetitive loops of living with trauma.
Organize, Fight, Win by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean***
The first collection of its kind, Organize, Fight, Win brings together three decades of Black Communist women’s political writings. In doing so, it highlights the link between Communism and Black liberation. Likewise, it makes clear how Black women fundamentally shaped and were shaped by, Communist praxis in the twentieth century.
