Books & music

Here's this month's radical record round-up, with an emphasis on International Women's Day. It actually features far more than 10 albums (count them). What album, or albums, would you suggest? Comment on Twitter or Facebook. Videos not playing? Try a bigger screen.

Slick Water: Fracking – and One Insider’s Stand Against the World’s Most Powerful Industry Andrew Nikiforuk Greystone Books/David Suzuki Institute 2015, 350 pages The fracturing of rocks to mine more fossil fuels was born with the oil business, writes the Canadian journalist, Andrew Nikiforuk, in Slick Water. During the world’s first oil boom in Pennsylvania in the 1850s, highly volatile nitro-glycerine and other explosives were used on sluggish wells with lethal risk, to turn them into gushers by creating new fractures to channel blocked oil to the surface.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement By Angela Davis Haymarket Books, 2016 180 pages, $15.95. In the summer of 2014, images spread across the world of protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, facing off against police in riot gear, driving tanks and hurling tear gas grenades in the wake of the police shooting of Black teenager Michael Brown.

Joe Solo is a “folk, punk and blues” artist from north Yorkshire, who sings about how it is in working-class Britain, without all the pretence and romance.

From Hell to Hell is the powerful new work of poems and drawings by S Nagaveeran, also known as Ravi. In detention for 33 months in Nauru, Ravi turned to writing and drawing as a way of dealing with the emotion and despair that overwhelmed him.

Economics After Capitalism: A Guide to the Ruins & a Road to the Future By Derek Wall Pluto Press, 2015 Derek Wall, ecosocialist activist and international coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales, has written a primer on the main strands of economic critique of globalised capitalism. It is a short and easily readable book, well suited to someone looking for a starting place. For those already embedded in one of these strands, it provides a welcome introduction to some of the others.

Here's this month's radical record round-up, from Aboriginal desert blues to Saudi Arabian black metal. It actually features far more than 10 albums (count them). What album, or albums, would you suggest? Comment on Twitter or Facebook. 

Punks For West Papua Directed by Anthony Brennan 46 minutes www.punks4westpapua.com A friend's request to film a punk rock concert and a rushed drive across Sydney to do a last-minute interview with West Papuan independence leader Benny Wenda — without even knowing who the twice Nobel Peace Prize-nominated activist was — was the catalyst for filmmaker Anthony “Ash” Brennan to make his award-winning film Punks For West Papua.

Beyoncé's backing dancers display a "Justice for Mario Woods" sign. In the San Francisco Bay Area in California, where tent cities are slowly re-forming under bridges after being swept away in a “cleansing” of the homeless ahead of the February 7 NFL Super Bowl, there is still a palpable buzz about Beyoncé's performance in the Super Bowl half-time show (sorry, Coldplay). In fact, it is a topic with far more currency than the actual dud of a game — and for good reason.

Unfinished Leninism By Paul Le Blanc Haymarket Books, 2014 237 pp., $23.00 This collection of 12 essays rests comfortably alongside Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered and Canadian socialist John Riddell’s huge work in translating the proceedings of the first four congresses of the Comintern, the international organisation set up by the Bolsheviks in 1919. These works are part of the renewed interest in the “real” Lenin — separate from the mausoleum that Stalinism built and pro-capitalist commentators’ slander.

Full Scale Revolution (formerly known as Full Scale Deflection and then just Full Scale) are an Australian alternative metal band that formed in Perth in 1998, before relocating to Melbourne in 2001. Fronted by Ezekiel Ox, a frequent performer at protests, Full Scale are an intense live experience. As Full Scale Deflection, the band released their debut album, Symptoms of Chaos in 2000. As Full Scale, they released in 2003, two EPs — Black Arrows and White Arrows — and a self-titled album in 2005.

PKMM rally, 1946. Radicals: Resistance & Protest in Colonial Malaya By Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied Northern Illinois University Press (NUI), 2015 228 pages On a night in 2010, a crowd of onlookers gathered to watch the demolition of a 300 metre wall of the century-old Purdu prison in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital.