Arundhati Roy, Walking with the Comrades

Arundhati Roy, Walking with the Comrades, Penguin, 2011.

Brave and beautifully written, this is an exceptional account of her travels and meetings with the Maoists fighting state and corporate development within the remote Dandakaranya Forest. She dissects how the insurgents are demonized in a “war of perception” as a rationale for the massive deployment of India’s armed forces. Parallels with the war-on-terrorism model seep through the story telling. 

Bill Zimmerman, Troublemaker

Bill Zimmerman, Troublemaker, Doubleday, 2010.

Vivid stories and sharp analysis of an odyssey from the Sixties, from French barricades to Mississippi country roads, to a bombed Hanoi hospital, to flying supplies to Wounded Knee, to Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign in Chicago... And how a longtime radical strategist threw himself into the 2008 Obama campaign. Zimmerman was my campaign manager in 1976 and has been in the forefront of the medical marijuana movement and many other ballot initiatives. Stories that must be known, strategies that have to be shared. 

Hector Tobar, The Barbarian Nurserie

Hector Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries, Farrar, Strauss, 2011.

A former student activist at UC Santa Cruz and current Los Angeles Times columnist, Tobar is one of the finest writers about the transformation of America into a multi-racial society led by immigrants from Mexico and Central America. A previous suspenseful novel, The Tattooed Soldier (1998) followed Salvadoran immigrants into the cauldron of racial unrest in Los Angeles In Barbarian Nurseries he portrays the courageous and invisible life of a Mexican housekeeper caught in the center of the current drama about immigration in Los Angeles. As she wanders across the city from drama to drama, we are reminded of Joyce’s depiction of Dublin in Ulysses. This is the new literature of a new Los Angeles.

Henry Kissinger, On China

Henry Kissinger, On China, Penguin, 2011.

After more than 70 visits over 40 years, Kissinger has written a 580-book that should convince the right-wing that he has become the leading apologist for Chinese Communism. Kissinger always seems to know which way the wind blows, and here describes China’s coming hegemony, in which Confucius blends into Machiavelli. Kissinger doesn’t reveal what arrangements, if any, he has made on behalf of supplicant American corporations he represents. A must-read for anyone interested in great power theories of history.

Thomas Ponniah, The Revolution in Venezuela

Thomas Ponniah, The Revolution in Venezuela, Harvard, 2011.

I recently heard Ponniah speak and can say this is one of the most illuminating accounts of the history and ideology underlying the transition going on in Venezuela. Ponniah has an exceptional grasp of how participatory democracy and centralized leadership coexist, at least for now, in Venezuela.