Culture

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World’s Favorite Soft Drink By Michael Blanding Avery/Penguin, 2012 375 pages, $19.95 (pb) The Truth About Ikea: The Secret Behind the World’s Fifth Richest Man and the Success of the Swedish Flatpack Giant By Johan Stenebo Gibson Square, 2011 256 pages, $22.99 (pb) Sleeping With The Enemy: Coco Chanel, Nazi Agent By Hal Vaughan Chatto & Windus, 2011 279 pages, $32.95 (pb)

Pages From a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader Edited by Stephen M. Ward, Wayne State University Press, 2011 401 pp, $US27.95 The Italian Marxist leader Antonio Gramsci coined the term “organic intellectual” to describe workers who educated themselves in advanced economic and social theory. Such people are essential to the task of the working-class understanding its historical role in changing society, he believed.

When you're representing a culture that has lasted 60,000 years, it doesn't matter that your debut album has taken a mere 18. "We've always prided ourselves on coming from a culture that's been a song and dance culture for millennia, you know," says C-Roc, whose rap group, Native Ryme, are only just releasing an album a generation after he formed the band in 1994.

I spoke with the Coup’s Boots Riley at an auspicious time. Right before calling him, I’d returned from a downtown rally of thousands of striking Chicago teachers and their supporters.

Warhol to Picasso: Fourteen Modern Artists Art Gallery of Western Australia Until December 3 This exhibition brings together 120 of some of the 20th century’s most important art works that catalogue some critical attempts to break through the bourgeois encirclement of human existence and point towards liberation. Using Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and American Andy Warhol as the convenient gateposts, it allows us to read the rise and fall of the century’s revolutionary sentiment.

The Sacrifice By Bruce Mutard Allen & Unwin, 2012 Paperback, 252 pages I don't know about you, but Australia's World War II years are obscured in my mind by a melange of family reminiscences and ad hoc snippets of history. My parents were of the generation caught up in the war effort locally and offshore, so the family album began life with pics of folk in khaki. Us baby boomers were delayed sprogs of them days. But as far as I was concerned, and those of my generation, them days were their's not mine.

Fallout From Fukushima By Richard Broinowski Scribe, 2012 273 pages , $27.95 (pb) The Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan last year was no accident, says Richard Broinowski in Fallout from Fukushima. Sitting a nuclear reactor on an “active geological fault line where two of the earth’s tectonic plates collide” was courting catastrophe from an earthquake and tsunami like the one that duly hit the Pacific in March last year.

Operation 8: Deep in the Forest Directed by Errol Wright & Abi King-Jones CutCutCut Films www.cutcutcut.com Operation 8 is an emotive, shocking, disturbing, informative and captivating documentary on the 2007 “anti-terror” raids that took place across in New Zealand targetting Maori activists. The film is essential viewing for indigenous peoples fighting for sovereignty, their supporters and activists in general.

It’s midnight in midwest Sydney and Izzy n The Profit are whipping a crowd into a full-blown frenzy. The audience is tiny, but the rappers are leaping around the Rooty Hill RSL like they’re ripping the roof off a stadium.

November marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Rage Against the Machine's self-titled debut album. For two decades, the US band has helped activists all over the world ruin their stereo speakers by giving them something truly worthy of cranking up.

I deplore his politics, yet cannot help admiring his fiction. Are there two Mario Vargas Llosas out there? Will the real one please stand up? Like the conflicted characters who populate his novels, the Peruvian novelist, 2010 Nobel laureate and one-time Peruvian presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa embodies contradictory tendencies that make him difficult to dismiss entirely as a rightist reactionary (though it is certainly tempting at times).

Fanaticism, On the Uses of an Idea Alberto Toscano, Verso 2010 269 pages, $43.00 Review by Barry Healy “Nothing great has been accomplished in history without fanaticism,” Leon Trotsky wrote in 1938. Certainly, the great turning points in human history, such as the Anabaptist peasant revolt in Central Europe or the Russian Revolution, required their participants to set aside their normal dispositions and assume a single-minded dedication to a cause greater than the self.