Portside

May 19 is the birthday of Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary that led the Vietnamese people through victorious war and revolution from the 1920s to his death in 1969. This 20-year old review is of the best biography of Ho available in English.

A biography of protean intellectual Edward Said situates the advocate for Palestinian statehood as a deep political thinker and skeptic of identity politics would both excoriate the crimes of Israel and the US and denounce Arab despotism.

The fact cannot be stressed enough that in the 19th Century, the anti-slavery and women's rights campaigns were interrelated and interlocking movements. This book shines further light on this history.

With plagues, political dysfunction and near-Dickensian economic differences rampant, a Mother Jones editor charts the lives of the super rich, showing the fascinating, otherworldly realm they inhabit—and the insidious ways this realm harms us all.

This book offers an examination of how the language of imperialism portrays anti-imperialism and rebellion as infection and pestilence, and how that language is "central to the management of empire and neoimperial formation."

A systemic look at the evolving intellectual career of New York Times economics writer and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in his shift from herald of neoliberal globalism to an emphasis on class and the public policies that address social inequities.

White supremacy , a founding U.S. principle, remains prevalent today. This reading list was compiled shortly after the January 6 D.C. white insurrection and attempted seizure of the capital building. Follow the links for full reviews of each book.

The full extent of the African American participation in the left wing, working class, and progressive movements has yet to be fully documented. This book makes a worthy contribution to increasing our knowledge of this history.

Eric Hobsbawm, among the most pre-eminent and valued Marxist historians of the late twentieth century, frequently reviewed for the London Review of Books. Here, a prominent British author does a dig into some of Hobsbawm’s many signal LRB essays.

This book, writes reviewer Harvey, seeks "to provide an account of the nature and extent of the unemployment problem in the United States since the beginning of the industrial era following the end of the Civil War."