Portside

A biography of the iconic Nina Simone. Using rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including talks with her daughter and extracts from Simone's private diaries), this examination of her life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for racial justice, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exiles in Liberia and Paris.

In what reviewer Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar calls a "poignant and beautiful, simple and without frills and from the heart" exposition, Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through seven of the main ideas of physics. These are, Jogalekar writes, not just ideas that have advanced our understanding of science, but they are also ideas that have "expanded our consciousness and connected us to our origins and future."

Branko Milanovic offers us not just a plethora of facts about income inequality but brings them into a sound and rigorous global perspective, showing that what are too often treated as isolated national issues are on a world scale income massively maldistributed. While some nations saw the growth of a middle strata (China, for one) the real increase in world income is owned by the unprecedented 50-percent rise in incomes for the top 1 percent globally.

In Burning Country, journalist Robin Yassin-Kassab and human rights activist Leila Al-Shami make plain that no matter how long the Syrian war rages or how distant a political settlement may appear, the world owes it to the Syrian people to hear their stories and support their cause. The book portrays the opposition as a movement of protest against Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime, something missed abroad amid the factionalism and power politics driving the conflict.

The Noise of Time, the new novel by Julian Barnes, is a fictionalized portrait of Dmitri Shostakovich, perhaps the most famous Russian composer of the Soviet era. Leslie Rieder, in this review, gives us a peek into the "utterly fascinating" tale Barnes has woven.

In David Looseley's take on the iconic French chanteuse Edith Piaf, her notoriously elusive life story is rendered as cultural history, drawing out what Piaf meant - and still means - to France and to her wider audience. Looseley notes that her musical persona was highly and brilliantly constructed. She projected a stage mask of suffering that was all the more affecting because the audience saw there was deprivation behind it. With Piaf, you underwent her.

This new book reconsiders the social and political impact of the energy crisis of the mid 1970s.

Mayer charts the domestic far-right effort to remake the political system through foundations, think tanks, university institutes, paid political commentators and huge campaign contributions by heirs to energy giant Koch Industries. One strategist admitted, "We want to decrease regulations. Why? It's because we can make more profit, okay?" Yet selling that line is hard. So they pose that ameliorative legislation denies the "opportunity for earned success" to the poor.

In Banking on Words, Arjun Appadurai argues that the 2008 financial crisis was, in essence, a failure of language. Narendar Pani finds that argument somewhat overstated, while at the same time acknowledging this book's "path-breaking" analysis of the role language has come to play in the way markets behave and are managed.

In left labor circles, it's been a settled question that the Haymarket martyrs, victims of ruling class justice, were framed, and May Day's radical origins are based on remembering the martyrs. The author of the books under review, using a close reading of the trial record, supports the court finding that the accused anarchists conspired to murder police during the epochal 1886 labor demonstration in Chicago. The reviewer strongly disputes the author's conclusions.