Latest News: Author Archive

“What’s a memoir for but settling old scores?” — Len McCluskey’s ALWAYS RED featured in The Times

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“Revenge via memoir is always compelling. Len McCluskey’s doing it at the moment to Keir Starmer.”

Read the full article here.

“A bombshell memoir” — Len McCluskey’s ALWAYS RED featured in The Daily Mail

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“Union firebrand Len McCluskey has launched a blistering attack on Sir Keir Starmer – claiming Labour could ‘go under’ with him at the helm.

In a bombshell memoir – to be published on the same day as Sir Keir’s Labour conference speech – the union baron will accuse him of an ‘anti-democratic crackdown on the Left.'”

Read the full article here.

“Explosive… Exposes highly secretive conversations held with Sir Keir Starmer after Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension” — Len McCluskey’s ALWAYS RED featured in The Express

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“In his memoirs due to be published next month, the hard-left socialist launches a scathing assessment of Sir Keir’s time at the helm, warning Labour’s ship could ‘go under’ under his tenure. The damning book is being published to mark Mr. McCluskey’s retirement as he steps down as Unite general secretary.”

Read the full article here.

“Labour could go under if Sir Keir Starmer takes it too far to the Right, says Len McCluskey” — ALWAYS RED featured in The Telegraph

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“The head of one of the UK’s biggest unions has claimed the Labour Party could ‘go under’ with Sir Keir Starmer as its leader.

Len McCluskey, the outgoing general secretary of Unite, warned that Sir Keir may not win back the ‘Red Wall’ seats claimed by the Conservatives at the 2019 election.

Mr McCluskey made the comments in his new autobiography, due to be published on the day of Sir Keir’s speech to Labour’s annual party conference in September.”

Read the full article here.

“Len McCluskey, outgoing general secretary of Unite, criticises the Labour leader in his new autobiography” — ALWAYS RED featured in BBC News

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“In his book, Always Red, which is published next month, Mr. McCluskey questions whether the current Labour leader is a ‘babe in the woods’ or ‘altogether more calculating.’

The book’s publishers promise ‘explosive revelations about his dealings with Keir Starmer’ and some passages in advance copies have been redacted.”

Read the article here.

“Uncompromising and highly critical” — Len McCluskey’s ALWAYS RED featured in Sky News

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“In hard-hitting memoirs to mark his retirement, the Unite general secretary known as ‘Red Len’ suggests Sir Keir will fail to win back the ‘Red Wall’ seats Labour lost to the Tories in 2019.

Mr McCluskey, still Jeremy Corbyn’s chief union cheerleader, accuses the Labour leader of struggling to inspire the public, ‘vapid New Labour cliches’, and an ‘anti-democratic crackdown on the left.'”

Read the article here.

“The Quislings of Albany” — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan featured in The New York Times

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“As Ross Barkan, author of a new book on Cuomo, wrote in New York magazine, “At every turn, [Melissa] DeRosa and her colleagues enabled Cuomo’s predation.”

Read the article here.

“Andrew Cuomo: When the Prince Has No Armor” — Ross Barkan’s THE PRINCE reviewed by Democratic Left

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“Political reporter Ross Barkan’s new book, The Prince, argues that the governor’s seeming success was always a fraud: Cuomo’s decisions in the early days of the pandemic caused an enormous number of avoidable deaths, and his further mismanagement forced some of his state’s most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of the disease. The book turns a spotlight not only on Cuomo’s incompetence but on his career-long adherence to the interests of moneyed elites. Barkan both corrects Cuomo’s record and illustrates the harm his governing ideology has done.”

Read the article here.

“Andrew Cuomo’s Abuse Was Aided and Abetted Every Step of the Way” — Ross Barkan’s THE PRINCE reviewed by Jacobin

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“[Ross] Barkan’s catalog of media humiliations is among the most maddening content in the book and illustrates one of his principal virtues as an author. He commands a deep expertise refined through a career in the New York press corps but avoids falling victim to the worst habits that afflict so many of his colleagues. Their open contempt for the Left, their reflexive deference to power, their fetish for the aesthetic of managerial competence — this was all fertile ground for Cuomo to cultivate the myth of himself as New York’s savior. That Barkan manages to operate in this hothouse of professional-class neuroses relatively unfazed is an achievement in itself, and it’s how he’s already written an entire book about a truth that many in the press are only now admitting.”

Read the article here.

“A powerful book documenting how racist ideas and practices incapacitated the US’s most historically significant social movements” — RELUCTANT REFORMERS reviewed by Black Perspectives

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“The re-release of Reluctant Reformers is a timely as it is necessary. For the agitators among us, it highlights the importance of historical study to our efforts and highlights the pitfalls of our predecessors. For the historians among us, it reminds us that we have a role in validating critical questions arising from today’s social movements. And for those of us who do both, it is a usable past paragon.”

Read the article here.

“Weeded out of business by a cannabis coup” — Matt Taibbi’s THE BUSINESS SECRETS OF DRUG DEALING reviewed by Morning Star

Tuesday, August 17th, 2021

“A more honest and human-centred approach to the brutishness of business under contemporary capitalism can be found in journalist Matt Taibbi’s account of the code of ethics and practices of ‘Anonymous,’ an African-American marijuana dealer, in The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing.

This well-structured narrative of a dealer who calls himself Huey Carmichael after two black revolutionary icons — Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton and civil rights organiser Stokely Carmichael — recounts how he both builds a thriving business but is also then forced out of it at the moment of drugs legalisation.”

Read the article here.

“Andrew Cuomo Didn’t Act Alone” — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan writes for New York Magazine

Thursday, August 5th, 2021

“[Cuomo’s allies] will seek, at some point, a post-Cuomo future and they will try to justify to themselves and to others why they remained there so long, propping up a governor like Cuomo. Some may try to rebrand or claim, against all evidence, they opposed the worst instincts of their leader. They will hunt for generous private-sector sinecures; given the realities of our unseemly political world, they will probably find them. What they should never receive, though, is the mercy and understanding they never afforded others. Cuomo will leave office in disgrace. They deserve his fate.”

Read the full article here.

“Governor Cuomo’s Woes Will Help Other New York Pols” — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan writes for the Village Voice

Thursday, August 5th, 2021

Unlike in Trump’s D.C., Cuomo has no majority of loyalists waiting in the Senate to save him: New York’s version is a mix of progressive Democrats who revile him and Republicans who would like to see him chased from office.”

Read the full article here.

“Andrew Cuomo Is the New Crown Prince of Denial” — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan writes for The Nation

Thursday, August 5th, 2021

“Any ordinary politician would resign quickly… But Cuomo is not ordinary. He dreams of becoming, like Robert Moses, a titan of New York. He is still enraged that his father, Mario, lost his bid for a fourth term as governor and longs to surpass him. Cuomo does not know humility or discretion. He will fight for his political career till his last last dying breath.”

Read the full article here.

“Reacting to Andrew Cuomo’s Ridiculous Response to Harassment Report” — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan interviewed on the Katie Halper Show

Thursday, August 5th, 2021

“Andrew Cuomo’s Sexual Harassment Investigation” — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan interviewed on Letters and Politics

Thursday, August 5th, 2021

Listen to the full conversation here.

“Andrew Cuomo’s Reign Over New York” — THE PRINCE author Ross Barkan interviewed on the Majority Report

Thursday, August 5th, 2021

“With multiple waves already widespread and deadlier variants hovering globally, [Zizek’s] predictions… have already begun coming true.” — PANDEMIC! reviewed in Dawn

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021

Read the full review here.

“An excellent biography” — SURF, SWEAT AND TEARS featured in Wavelength

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021

“Andy Martin uncovers compelling evidence that [Lord] Ted may have in fact been murdered by local heavies after falling in love with the wrong woman.”

Read the full article here.

“The ‘remedies’ that Gates & Soros use to try to offset evils they’ve caused don’t cure the disease, but prolong it”— HEAVEN IN DISORDER author Slavoj Žižek writes for RT

Friday, July 30th, 2021

“The routine of these billionaires is nothing but a lie: speculative exploitation followed by vacuous humanitarian concerns about the catastrophic consequences that their ruthless capitalism is responsible for in the first place.”

Read the full article here.

“Facing France’s Ghosts” — DECOLONIZE HIPSTERS author Grégory Pierrot interviews Mame-Fatou Niang for the Los Angeles Review of Books

Thursday, July 29th, 2021

This is the third interview in the LARB series “Decolonize | Defund | Abolish,” which engages scholars, artists, and activists in dialogues about structures of colonialism persisting in the world today, and about creative and speculative practices of freedom in response to these structures. In this installment, Grégory Pierrot speaks to Mame-Fatou Niang, associate professor of French at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, author of Identités Françaises: Banlieues, féminités et universalisme (2019) and co-director, with Kaytie Nielsen, of the film Mariannes Noires: Une Mosaïque Afropéenne, a plural portrait of seven Black French women.

Read the interview here.

“Lays bare the link between organised crime, the state and policing” — THE BUSINESS SECRETS OF DRUG DEALING featured in Morning Star

Thursday, July 29th, 2021

Read the full article here.

HATE INC recommended by Matt Damon in the New York Times

Thursday, July 29th, 2021
Read the article here.

“[A] lively, thoughtful and remarkable memoir” — MOVING THE BAR reviewed in Morning Star

Tuesday, July 27th, 2021

[Ratner] lived up to Camus’s dictum that it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

Read the full review here.

“A swift and devastating read. Barkan writes fluently, marshals facts persuasively, and foregrounds the power-obsessed Cuomo’s contempt for the powerless.” — THE PRINCE reviewed in the Nation

Monday, July 26th, 2021

Barkan is especially eloquent on the subject of what Cuomo’s need to assert dominance has cost New Yorkers… Barkan compares Cuomo often and convincingly to Robert Moses, the power-hungry urban planner, noting Cuomo’s own autocratic tendencies and desire for control, particularly over his portrayal in the press. He also compares Cuomo to his supposed nemesis, Donald Trump. Like Trump, Cuomo at first dismissively likened the coronavirus to the flu, cautioned against US dependence on China, and sought to shield nursing homes from liability for failing to protect residents and staff. Like Trump, he faces multiple credible sexual harassment allegations and has been accused of exploiting public resources for personal profit… A damning portrait.

Read the full review here.

“Last Exit to Socialism” — PANDEMIC! 2 author Slavoj Žižek writes for Jacobin

Friday, July 23rd, 2021

“Not only is the pandemic not over (infection numbers are rising again, new lockdowns are awaiting us), other catastrophes are on the horizon… Might socialism be our off-ramp, or is it already too late?”

Read the article here.

“Michael Ratner’s Legacy of Lawyering for the People” — MOVING THE BAR author remembered by Palestine Legal

Friday, July 23rd, 2021

UPCOMING EVENT: MOVING THE BAR author Michael Ratner remembered by the National Lawyers Guild in New York on 07/27/21

Friday, July 23rd, 2021

Full details here.

“My 24 hours in Mexico’s 21st-century migrant prison” — CHECKPOINT ZIPOLITE author Belén Fernández writes for Al Jazeera

Friday, July 23rd, 2021

“On July 11, I found myself imprisoned at Mexico’s infamous Siglo XXI “migration station” in Tapachula – a city in the state of Chiapas near the border with Guatemala – which specialises in detaining US-bound migrants from Central America and beyond.

Mine was a curious predicament, to say the least, for a citizen of the United States, exempt as we usually are from the fallout of border militarisation policies.”

Read the article here.

FULL VIDEO: DECOLONIZE HIPSTERS author Grégory Pierrot in conversation with Chelsea Stieber for the Radical Books Collective

Friday, July 23rd, 2021
Full video here.
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