Philip Taylor and Sian Moore with Robert Byford, Cabin Crew Conflict –The British Airways Dispute 2009-11, Pluto Press, 2019, pp224, £20.00, 9780745339917 Reviewed by Dave Sherry This book is about one of the bitterest industrial disputes in recent times. In 2009, cabin crew, members of British Airways Stewards and Stewardesses Association (BASSA), part of Unite, […]
Gerry Hassan and Simon Barrow (eds.) Scotland the Brave? Twenty Years of Change and the Future of the Nation, 2019, Luath Press £14.99 Reviewed by Gordon Morgan This is a hugely ambitious book to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Scottish Parliament. It consists of forty chapters each written by a diverse set of people […]
Classic recounted: Edwin Muir’s Scottish Journey, Mainstream Publishing, new edition, 1996 Commented on by Rory Green Maggie Chapman reviewed James McEnaney’s A Scottish Journey in Scottish Left Review (Sept/Oct 2019). My eye was drawn to her review as it brought to mind a book of the same name, one briefly referenced but rightly praised by […]
Slavoj Žižek Sex and the Failed Absolute, Bloomsbury, 2019, £20.00 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan Žižek’s first English-language book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, appeared in 1989 and was an immediate sensation, comparable to watching Pulp Fiction when it came to cinemas in 1994, or seeing one of Alexander McQueen’s runway shows a decade later. There […]
Gardner Thompson, Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel, Saqi Books, £20.00, 9780863563614 Reviewed by Sandy Hobbs Sixty years and more ago, when involved in socialist politics, I had many Jewish comrades. When I and other socialists organised the first Glasgow meeting of the Campaign against Racial Discrimination, there was a friendly […]
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Profile Books, 2019, £10.99 Reviewed by Colin Fox Whilst reading this international bestseller by Harvard academic, Shoshana Zuboff, I also happened to watch the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, about the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. Both the paperback and the film exposed a practice that claims human experience […]
Willy Slavin, Life Is Not A Long Quiet River: A Memoir, Birlinn, £12. 99, 9781780275789 Reviewed by Donny O’Rourke I don’t know if Slavin is ‘prole-ier than thou’ but he’s certainly holier than most. This troublesome priest, who will be eighty in January not only takes Jesus seriously – he takes him literally. Father Slavin, […]
The James Connolly Reader, edited by Shaun Harkin, Haymarket Press, 2018, 9781608466467 Reviewed by Dave Sherry Born to Irish immigrants in an Edinburgh slum, Connolly was driven into the army through poverty at fourteen, being sent to serve in Ireland. When he learned his regiment was being transferred to India, he deserted and returned to […]
James McEnaney, A Scottish Journey: Personal Impressions of Modern Scotland, Luath, £9.99, 9781912147427 Reviewed by Maggie Chapman A lot has been written about the democratic foment of the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. This is not a book about that momentous period in our history. But it is firmly located in the Scotland created during […]
Jamie Woodcock, Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, controllers and class struggle, Haymarket, 9781642590142 Reviewed by Gordon Morgan This is a fascinating book, which delves into the video games industry in all its forms. It takes us from the original games developed in the 1950s by the US military, through the popular personal computer (PC) and […]