In April 1915, in the midst of a stalled military campaign on the Western Front, Britain and its allies attacked Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula in an attempt to gain control of the Dardanelles Straits and take German-allied Turkey out of World War I.
This impressively researched volume, which relies extensively on unpublished first-hand accounts from soldiers of all sides of the conflict, is a detailed account of this “doomed” and “pointless” campaign.
Alex Miller
If it is Your Life
By James Kelman, Penguin Books 2010
280 pages, hardback
£18.99
This is Scottish author James Kelman’s first collection of short stories since The Good Times in 1998.
Right from the very first sentence you know you are back in the distinctive world of Kelman’s fiction: “When I presented myself at the Emergency section of the Social Security Office I knew things could go wrong but I was not expecting a leg amputated.”
Review: The Imperial Controversy: Challenging the Empire Apologists
By Andrew Murray, Foreword by George Galloway
Manifesto Press, 152 pages, paperback £12.95
In the past decade or so, politicians, journalists and academics have attempted to rehabilitate the notions of empire and imperialism. For example, in 2009 then-British PM Gordon Brown told the Daily Mail newspaper: “The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over. We should move forward. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.”
A Short Border Handbook
By Gazmend Kapllani
Portobello Books 2009
159 pages
Review by Alex Miller
This book, which the author describes as “part autobiography, part fiction”, is hard to assess. Each chapter is divided into two parts. The first part tells the story of a man (presumably Kapllani himself) who crosses into Greece from Albania when the border between those two countries opened in 1991. The second part consists of “philosophical” ruminations on issues raised by the story of the first part.
The Idea of Communism
By Tariq Ali
Seagull Press 2009, 126 pages
This short book is the first in a series called “What Was Communism”, which aims to explore the practice of Communism in the 20th century.
Tariq Ali’s main thesis is that “The failure of official Communism in the 20th century and the restoration of capitalism in Russia and China … far from negating some of the premises that underlined the project in the first place, emphasises their continuing importance”.
‘Perish the Privileged Orders’: A Socialist History of the Chartist Movement
By Mark O’Brien
New Clarion Press Revised Edition 2009, 119 pages
Review by Alex Miller
If you believed the corporate media, you might think that the greatest threats to parliamentary democracy in a country like Britain have come from Kaiser Wilhelm’s armies in World War I or — today — from Al Qaeda and Islamic jihadists. In fact, the greatest enemies of representative democracy in Britain over the centuries have been the British ruling classes themselves.
Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
By Bertrand Patenaude
Faber and Faber, 2009
340 pages, $50 (pb)
The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
By Tristram Hunt
Penguin, 2009
443 pages, $59.95 (hb)
The Declarations of Havana
By Fidel Castro, with an introduction by Tariq Ali
Verso, 2008
138 pages, $26.95 (pb)
By Fidel Castro, with an introduction by Tariq Ali
Verso, 2008
138 pages, $26.95 (pb)
Pages
