Book Reviews

Gary Stevenson and the dead end of wealth-tax reformism

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:11:17 GMT

The capitalist state is not a neutral instrument that can be picked up and aimed at the wealthy by a sufficiently determined government. It is an organ of class rule.

Red Dawn over China: An extended exercise in anti-communist propaganda

Mon, 18 May 2026 05:17:00 GMT

Frank Dikötter’s new book is a fundamentally flawed work that makes little pretence of academic objectivity or intellectual honesty.

WSWS interviews Pulitzer Prize winner Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America: “In America right now, a low-wage job … is homelessness waiting to happen”

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:13:44 GMT

The WSWS spoke to Brian Goldstone in 2025 about homelessness in America and about his book.

Jörg Baberowski’s Bypassing the People: Fascism as a revitalisation of democracy

Fri, 08 May 2026 05:22:26 GMT

Jörg Baberowski’s latest treatise, Am Volk vorbei—Zur Krise der liberalen Demokratie (Bypassing the People—On the Crisis of Liberal Democracy), is being hailed and praised in countless media outlets. This can only be understood as a deliberate political campaign to secure the AfD a place in government.

Book review: American Midnight: The Great War, a violent peace, and democracy's forgotten crisis

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 20:45:48 GMT

Adam Hochschild’s vivid, engaging account of the political subordination of the society to the needs of a ruling class waging an imperialist war deserves a wide readership.

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights: Is this all that we can expect?

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:07:02 GMT

The force, the genius, of Emily Brontë’s novel is totally absent, wholly unexplored in this adaptation.

Video: Strong interest in “Where Is America Going? Fascism or Socialism” at the Leipzig Book Fair

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 02:59:16 GMT

The presentation of 'Where Is America Going? Fascism or Socialism', featuring David North at the Leipzig Book Fair, met with strong interest and underscored the growing interest in a socialist perspective against fascism and war.

Say Nothing: Everything essential about the Northern Ireland conflict left unsaid

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:00:34 GMT

A serious artistic appraisal of the Troubles, and serious attempts to understand their effect at a personal level, would have to begin from a historical and political understanding both of British imperialism and the limitations of bourgeois nationalism.

The Artamonov Business (1925): Maxim Gorky and the Russian Revolution

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:39:27 GMT

Gorky’s novel, chronicling the vast social changes and processes that led to the 1917 October Revolution, deserves the widest possible rediscovery and recognition today, a century after being published.

Jochen Hellbeck’s “World Enemy Number 1, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews”

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:31:56 GMT

With great empathy for the Soviet people, the German-American historian Jochen Hellbeck deliberately opposes the efforts to minimize the crimes of Nazism and the decisive contribution of the Red Army and the Soviet people to the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Central to Hellbeck’s analysis is the link between Nazi anti-Semitism and anti-Communism.

National Book Award winner The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:16:28 GMT

The novel takes place in Beirut between 1960 and 2023, its story divided non-chronologically into seven sections.

Grant’s Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:36:45 GMT

Grant’s Enforcer is an important reminder that political reaction is not all-powerful.

The centenary of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 01:51:03 GMT

The most serious artists in the 1920s and early 1930s anticipated or often even assumed that society was proceeding to a new and higher stage.

Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantanamo Bay

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 03:41:38 GMT

Jaber Mohammed, only one among hundreds of prisoners who faced a similar fate, lost five years of his life to a regime of abuse and torture, part of the imperialist reaction to the 9/11 attacks.

Peter Oborne’s Complicit: Britain’s role in the destruction of Gaza

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:35:45 GMT

While Oborne offer a biting and passionate critique of the UK’s support for Israel and complicity in its genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, his disgust and moral outrage is no substitute for explaining its causes.

Interview with Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America: “In America right now, a low-wage job … is homelessness waiting to happen”

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 02:53:27 GMT

Goldstone’s book documents the lives of five families trapped by low-wage work and homelessness in Atlanta.

Two new books on Marx and Marxism

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 22:07:59 GMT

What both books avoid is precisely what Marx insisted upon: that the liberation of humanity requires the political independence of the working class and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Dmitry Barinov’s “Zinoviev, Trotsky, University”: An important contribution to the history of the Left Opposition

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 04:33:30 GMT

Barinov has produced the most extensive account yet of the work of the Opposition in Leningrad, its structure, leading figures and activities among students and the working class.

100 years of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 23:58:37 GMT

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published 100 years ago. What accounts for its continuing popularity and resonance?

Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America: Working class families sliding gradually or dropping suddenly into homelessness

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 00:52:35 GMT

Goldstone constructs a damning brief. Though he limits his condemnation to the American housing system, the evidence he presents belies this limitation and makes an airtight case against capitalism itself.

The Marxist movement and the fight against antisemitism and Zionism

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 04:15:16 GMT

Kessler's books provide irrefutable evidence that the most powerful and consistent critique of both antisemitism and Zionism emanated from the revolutionary internationalist wing in the workers’ movement.

A Different Kind of Power whitewashes Jacinda Ardern’s right-wing, pro-imperialist government

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 02:23:17 GMT

The much-publicised memoir by New Zealand’s former prime minister uses empty platitudes about the importance of “kindness” and “empathy” to cover up the right-wing record of her Labour Party government from 2017 to 2023.

A conversation with Blake Bailey, Philip Roth biographer and author of Canceled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me: “I said ... I’m not going to take this lying down”

Sun, 25 May 2025 23:28:32 GMT

Bailey has decided to fight and set the record straight. This is an entirely welcome and healthy development, a contribution to the cleansing of the cultural atmosphere.

Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat: Sympathy for migrants spiked by misanthropy

Tue, 06 May 2025 17:05:55 GMT

Depicting the November 24, 2021 drowning of 27 migrants in the Channel opens a window onto the crimes committed against migrants all over the world.

Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America, by Garrett Epps

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 04:04:22 GMT

The Fourteenth Amendment was the product of a democratic revolutionary change that sought to put the Constitution on a genuine egalitarian footing.

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television: Lacking the “pathos of distance”

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 02:01:02 GMT

There is promise in Senna’s demonstrating an awareness that there exists a “racial identity-industrial complex” in the contemporary world of art and culture.

A conversation with Joseph McBride about his study of Hollywood film director George Cukor: “There are many flawed people in his films, but Cukor understands human imperfection”—Part 2

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:25:44 GMT

This is the second part of an interview with Joseph McBride, author of George Cukor’s People. The first part was posted January 8.

A conversation with Joseph McBride about his study of Hollywood film director George Cukor: “There are many flawed people in his films, but Cukor understands human imperfection”–Part 1

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 23:39:43 GMT

First part of an interview with film historian, critic and biographer Joseph McBride about his new book George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director, a study of the Hollywood director whose career in feature films lasted half a century, from 1930 to 1981.

Orbital: Samantha Harvey’s award-winning novel about problems of climate and social change

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 01:01:37 GMT

The Booker Prize winner has struck a popular chord in a world poised between the immense potential of scientific advances and the threat of military and ecological catastrophe.

Aidan Beatty’s hackwork: The Israel-Zionist connection

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 01:16:25 GMT

The academic career of prominent DSA member Aidan Beatty, the author of a slanderous trash biography of long-time Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, has been funded by Zionist institutions and Israeli-state sources.

A comment on David North’s review: Biography as demonology: Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:38:28 GMT

The following letter was sent by Steve Long, a former member of the Socialist Labour League/Workers Revolutionary Party who writes for the World Socialist Web Site as Stefan Steinberg.

Biography as demonology: Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 04:27:43 GMT

Aidan Beatty's new book is not a biography, but rather a political diatribe against Gerry Healy and Trotskyism.

Contemporary lessons from the slave power’s plot to overturn the 1860 election

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 23:57:14 GMT

Erik Larson’s new book The Demon of Unrest, published this year by Penguin Random House, contains critical lessons for the fight against Trump and the threat of dictatorship today.

The financialization of higher education and the fight against war

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 02:20:05 GMT

Eaton’s book traces the financialization of higher education from the 1980s through the 2010s, which underlay the subordination of academia to Wall Street and the war machine of US imperialism.

The Disappearance of Émile Zola: Zola, Dreyfus and the struggle against antisemitism

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 23:32:21 GMT

Zola was an eloquent opponent of obscurantism and reaction, and played a major role in the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus and the struggle against antisemitism.

David North’s The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide addresses the disastrous consequences of nationalist political programs

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 03:21:22 GMT

The series of lectures on the historical development of Zionism exposes the bankruptcy of all politics based on nationalism and race—and points the way forward for all those who want to fight against genocide, war and dictatorship.

Nathan Thrall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy–A case study in dehumanization

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 23:24:14 GMT

The bus accident proves to be a major news event with political implications. The accident exposes the fundamental injustices blighting Palestinian life in Israel.

Interview with historian Dan Okrent on the centenary of the Immigration Act of 1924

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 23:16:45 GMT

Okrent’s book The Guarded Gate examines an episode of anti-immigration frenzy that resembles in many ways the current environment in bourgeois politics.

Ghassan Zeineddine’s Dearborn: Short stories about Arab-American life

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 23:51:02 GMT

Zeineddine’s stories concern immigrants who escaped the civil war in Lebanon (1975-90) and their children, who are negotiating their own escapes.

The Best American Short Stories 2023: A step backward

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 23:43:59 GMT

Perhaps half the pieces are coming-of-age stories, that lyrical standby now usually written in a gritty but still rhapsodic voice.

Killing for Country: A Family History—a harrowing but distorted view of the massacres of Australian Aboriginal people

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 02:06:19 GMT

David Marr’s Killing for Country documents many mass killings of indigenous people but falsely blames the entire population, not the ruling class and Australian capitalism.

How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer: A documentary approaches the American novelist with sympathy, but not enough scrutiny

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:43:01 GMT

The documentary follows the writer from his boyhood in the 1930s through his service during World War II and throughout his tumultuous literary, journalistic and personal life.

A comment on the life and death of Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera (1929-2023)

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 03:03:06 GMT

No doubt Kundera bore responsibility for his own art, his own development and his own mistakes. However, the greater, deeper blame for his unhappy trajectory and fate lies above all with Stalinism.

Adolph Reed, Jr.’s The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 01:14:38 GMT

Reed’s The South is unique among memoirs of the Jim Crow era in that it is intertwined with historical and social analysis.

Why have right-wing forces attacked Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail?

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 02:29:02 GMT

After the outbreak of the new Israeli war against Palestinians a number of critics discovered antisemitism in the book and denounced Shibli as a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activist.

Award-winning novelist Arundhati Roy denounces “brazen slaughter” and “crimes against humanity” in Gaza

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 01:59:54 GMT

Roy’s comments speak to the revulsion felt by hundreds of millions at the savagery of the Israeli destruction of Gaza.

The racialist theory of “color blind racism”: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:02:09 GMT

Now in its sixth edition, Racism without Racists has been central to the development and dissemination of the racialist outlook that currently dominates academia, much of the media, and significant sections of the political establishment in the United States.

We Want Them Infected: The integration of pseudoscience into the US pandemic response

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 03:59:37 GMT

The new book by Dr. Jonathan Howard carefully traces how traditional attacks on medical science from the anti-vaccine movement were used by doctors around the Great Barrington Declaration to promote an ongoing political attack on public health.

Palestinian author Adania Shibli “shut down” at the Frankfurt Book Fair

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 02:34:58 GMT

A prominent Palestinian author has been censured and abused at this year’s Frankfurt Book Festival, the world’s largest book fair, which opened its doors on Wednesday.

Die Insel (The Island): A harrowing account of the European Union’s murderous refugee policy

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 01:24:58 GMT

Thanks to her lively depictions and her factual, yet sensitive descriptions, the author brings to life the "hell of Moria".