IF I COULD BUT SEE IT: A Graphic Biography of William Morris, by socialist and artist Nick Thorkelson

IF I COULD BUT SEE IT: A Graphic Biography of William Morris
NICK THORKELSON
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid, full-colour graphic biography of the celebrated 19th-century designer and socialist William Morris (1834–1896), the celebrated designer, driven polymath and radical socialist.

Acclaimed cartoonist Nick Thorkelson moves through the events of Morris’s life weaving a rich tapestry of the major artistic, social and political questions which animated him.

He explores Morris’s politics and art, and how his hatred of class tyranny and love of humanity shaped his poetry, design and relationships.

The book brings to life the tension of Morris’s efforts to democratise art while creating pieces for the wealthy, his critique of Britain’s Empire, and his central place in socialist culture and propaganda.

Thorkelson’s striking and idiosyncratic drawings chime with the Arts and Crafts movement’s emphasis on the humanising power of the handmade.

The book also features fourteen pages of immersive and dazzling illustrations by Sharon Rudahl, pioneer of women’s comics, honouring the literary work for which William Morris was best known during his lifetime.

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My Review: If there has ever been an illustrated biography of socialist artist, poet, and capitalism-fleecer William Morris, I did not hear about it. Now that I have it's hard for me to see why this is the first one (if it is). Morris's role in reviving and revamping Gothic architecture in the newly rich Victorian era, using the English hunger to memorialize their ill-got gains to redistribute huge sums of money from the kleptocrats to honest craftworkers.

Like Josiah Wedgwood a century earlier, Morris used the design and manufacture of gorgeous luxury goods to redress the income imbalance he saw plaguing and ruining his society as it turned from the United Kingdom into the British Empire.

a graphic synopsis

chapter opening art in the Master's style

In a clear and concise telling of the events and the beliefs that animated the events of his life, Author Thorkelson does something I both enjoy and admire: he uses the technique of Morris's métier to give we-the-reader extra, surprising insight into the forces Morris was so contemptuous of and adept at harnessing to the economic betterment of the craftworkers he employed, and the aesthetic improvement of the people who paid for it all.

Morris thinking and scheming and designing

It's only 128pp so you know how very much heavy lifting the illustrations are doing. Much time is saved, in a sense, by leaving us to look in the corners and backgrounds for the rest of the story. In a time where sequential-art storytelling is so very prevalent, finding it deployed well on a major culture-shaping visual artist and designer of built living environments is deeply refreshing.

Morris out in his world

And lo, behold! Morris made over a world that was not heading anywhere beautiful into a world that included public and private spaces with gravitas and grandeur...handcrafted by well-paid workers in an increasingly mass-produced, uninspired, enslaved by machines ethos. He made it possible for aesthetics to last into our own age.

It might not be to your personal taste but it for sure and certain could not have been created by a LLM.

HOW TO SELL A GENOCIDE: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza

HOW TO SELL A GENOCIDE: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza
ADAM H. JOHNSON
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 2023, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world, and openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of horrors to come. But the US media was quick to downplay, obscure, and repackage an emerging campaign of extermination into a slick “war on terror” framework.

How to Sell a Genocide is a thorough indictment of US corporate media's role in enabling—and, at times, directly inciting—one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in modern memory. Johnson unpacks how major news outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC systematically sanitised Israel's war crimes, hid the US’s central role, and dehumanised the Palestinian people.

Drawing from deep, original data-driven analysis, Johnson dissects the mechanics of propaganda, from the selective empathy, strategic omissions, overt racism and repetition of state-sanctioned falsehoods, to the demonisation of humanitarian workers and dishonest coverage of campus protests. With clarity and moral force, Johnson argues that the genocide could not have been sustained without the active, sustained complicity of the US media.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: When I read "deep, original data-driven analysis" in the book's synopsis, I realized the read was going to be tendentious, probably ill-sourced, and reflective of the need to marshal supporters of anti-war, pro-Palestine leanings into willingness to take action. That's exactly what I got.

Since I am all those things I find it hard to fault this read for being what it's supposed to be. If you are not all those things, or are anti-all those things, you'll be very unpset by this read. I myownself think you might should read it anyway.

War crimes are committed when there are wars. Both sides commit them. But do not lose sight of the fact that one side started this war. They're looking for you to believe they didn't start it, the other side did by doing something terrible. That terrible something did not suddenly occur in an otherwise peaceful and ordinary world, though. And that terrible something did not involve bombing runs by sophisticated jet aircraft, advanced anti-personnel drone attacks, destruction of thousands of homes, missile attacks on hospitals...in other words, we're being fed false equivalences to disguise a long-term and intentional act of ethnic cleansing, perhaps rising to the standard of genocide set after the Holocaust. I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak authoritatively on that. I'll say that my reading of the bloviations from each side of the conflict leads me to think there is a case to answer and a darn compelling body of evidence to compel the case to be brought in the court of public opinion.

That's why this book exists. It's a highly emotional read. It's a highly emotional subject. It's part of an effort to break through the saturation-bombing of the pro-Israel lobby's PR firms.

Are there angels in this conflict, the pure and unsullied victims of hateful demonic criminals?

No.

There are only ordinary human beings who need, but don't have, the basics you and I walk outside our intact homes to access: streets we can use easily, food stores with the planet's abundance piled up for us to choose from, water pipes to quench our thirst, sewer pipes to take our waste away to keep us healthy, hospitals to care for frail bodies' failure points, living parents and children and loved ones who, when they leave our sight, are statistically likely return to us alive and as well as they left.

War is wrong. Always and eternally wrong. It is war that created this oongoing crisis. War is a decision, a set of decisions, made by people who want *something* so much they're willing to trade your life for it. Never theirs, or the wars would be short.

I don't think for a single second that Humankind will ever be free of war. If reading words could stop war there wouldn't still be any of them.

Reading words is a slow process, thinking about them slower still. Changing minds, firing up action in people who don't like doing hard things, that kind of thing that words *can* do, all has to start somewhere.

I ask you, please, for the sake of people you have never met and will never meet: Start the process in yourself now. Pay it forward, to the best of your ability, and know from the beginning that you won't "win" or "succeed" or "finish the job" because the work is never, can never be, complete as long as there are human beings.

But let's make sure the greatest possible number of people live out their "one wild and precious life" as poet Mary Oliver taught us to think of it.

MOTHER OF CAPITAL: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity, necessary reading

MOTHER OF CAPITAL: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity
MATTHEW COSTA
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$31.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five, because of the learning curve involved

The Publisher Says: Rent, or unearned income, is a pervasive concept in contemporary economics. Economists of all stripes see today’s global economy as riddled with harmful rents, but most deny these are intrinsic to capitalism, and insist they can be eliminated with the right policies. It begs the question, why is rent theory so critical of the present but so optimistic about the future?

In Mother of Capital, Matthew Costa delves into the intellectual and social history of rent to solve this puzzle. Centring rent as the engine of capitalism’s historical emergence in medieval Europe, he offers a groundbreaking, systematic history of rent and rent theory. The book also traces the history of resistance to rent from below, and unearths a neglected body of critical rent theory.

Weaving complex strands of social and intellectual history into a vivid, lively, and original explanation of how the society we live in came to be, Costa makes a bold intervention into contemporary debates about the origins and future of capitalism, the nature of social change, and of history itself.

Matthew Costa is an Australian political economist. He has been a sessional lecturer and honorary associate in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is currently a Director at New South Wales Treasury, and was previously an economic policy advisor in Australia’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you're willing to put in the work, this is a good way to understand how capitalism got organized around the concept of extraction. Author Costa is an academic. It shows. You'll need your dictionary handy. The concepts he's explaining in these sophisticated words are, once you've familiarized yourself with the vocabulary, strikingly simple to assimilate. The end result of the read is to make available to the reader a different, probably new, angle of viewing and interpreting the modern world.

Ideological principles that go unchallenged in spite of their deleterious effects on humanity appear in stark relief when this angle of viewing is assumed. It is an angle I encourage you to investigate for yourself...don't trust me, or anyone else, to give you from On High the One True Vision of the world. Acquire a bit of knowledge from a lot of sources. This source is one whose angle of view you won't find in the huge mass of economic-discussion sources in the mainstream. Once you get your head around the light this book sheds on the system we all live within, you will understand why.

It's worth making the effort. It *is* an effort. I encourage you to fight the innerer Schweinehund, get off your mental pillow, and learn something new as painlessly as is possible. The value of the perspective this book offers you on the world as it is can't be overstated.

RADICAL ANTIQUITY: Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates, and Ancient Uprisings, always good to learn our ancestors had problems with authoritarians too

RADICAL ANTIQUITY: Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates, and Ancient Uprisings
CHRISTOPHER B. ZEICHMANN
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$20.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A groundbreaking history of radically democratic societies in antiquity

When you think of Ancient Greece and Rome, what do you imagine? The Acropolis and the Colosseum? Perhaps the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and the rule of the Caesars? This well-trodden history of great thinkers, military leaders, and early state formation in the classical world enthralls us still, but it tells only half the story…

Radical Antiquity takes you on a journey in search of anarchy, statelessness, and social experimentation in the Graeco-Roman world. Sweeping across the Mediterranean from the time of the first Olympic Games until the emergence of Islam, Christopher B. Zeichmann tells the stories of escaped slaves, pirates, and religious sects—all of whom sought a more egalitarian way of life. This history from below brings the experiences of common and marginal people out of obscurity and radically expands our understanding of social and political life in the classical world.

“Unearthing the ancient world’s anarchist cultures, Zeichmann presents a compelling argument that authority may itself have always been the real aberration. Highly recommended” - Alan Moore, writer, activist, performer

“An inspirational masterpiece … Will transform the way you think about history, and the possibilities for human liberty”—William Arnal, Professor, University of Regina

“Wonderfully informative and a pleasure to read” - Uri Gordon, editor, Freedom

Christoper B. Zeichmann is a professor of history and religious studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is the author of The Roman Army and the New Testament and Queer Readings of the Centurion at Capernaum.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A book by an academic and a leftist and an historian that does not require a twelve-cylinder brain concentration-turbocharged to 1000 horsepower to comprehend.

Honest.

It's examining the records we have from an interpretive point of view that does not assume all meaning is on the surface, or even near it; we know, as internet-savvy information consumers, the "just the facts" approaches used in days of yore made the immense leap of faith that the ancient writers cared about or could reliably discern only "facts" from such data as they received on a given subject. We know better than to accept one version of events as the only truth. It's something that this book contends with, that recovery of more complete data by accounting for bias in recording and further distorting bias in later preservation of the information about ancient peoples.

As this exercise of judgment and evaluation is literally the author's day job, I'm inclined to believe he is doing it in as much honest and fair evaluation of what's there as is possible. In other words I feel satisfied he is not just making shit up as he goes along.

It is very enjoyable to have data that suggests we-the-people have always been ready to ignore, co-opt, or simply pretend to obey our governing class when it has suite our needs. This lesson is very useful at any time; it is, however, particularly timely now.

Partake of Author Zeichmann's amusing prose detailing supremely timely reminders that the consent of the governed can always be revoked.

KLAXON READS: DAY OF RECKONING: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy, & THE COURT V. THE VOTERS: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights

THE COURT V. THE VOTERS: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights
JOSHUA A. DOUGLAS
Beacon Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An urgent and gripping look at the erosion of voting rights and its implications for democracy, told through the stories of 9 Supreme Court decisions—and the next looming case

In The Court v. The Voters, law professor Joshua Douglas takes us behind the scenes of significant cases in voting rights—some surprising and unknown, some familiar—to investigate the historic crossroads that have irrevocably changed our elections and the nation. In crisp and accessible prose, Douglas tells the story of each case, sheds light on the intractable election problems we face as a result, and highlights the unique role the highest court has played in producing a broken electoral system.

Douglas charts infamous cases like:

Bush v. Gore, which opened the door to many election law claims

Citizens United, which contributed to skewed representation—but perhaps not in the way you might think

Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the vital protections of the Voting Rights Act

Crawford v. Marion County Elections Board, which allowed states to enforce voter ID laws and make it harder for people to vote

The Court v. The Voters powerfully reminds us of the tangible, real-world effects from the Court’s voting rights decisions. While we can—and should—lament the democracy that might have been, Douglas argues that we can—and should—double down in our efforts to protect the right to vote.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I share the author's concerns over the ugliness our current Court has enabled to flourish and entrench itself in our country.

But the remedy, the true solution to the problem, lies in your control, not the Court's. You vote for the president of the United States of America, who nominates the Justices; you vote for the Senators who advise on and consent to the appointment of them. If you do not like the current Court, it is down to you and your (non-)votes.

There are enforcements of rules contra the Justices and their brazen flouting of even the most basic norms of judicial conduct not happening now that could happen if there is enough public pressure on Congress to act. The hideous horror of the 2024 election cycle is a very convenient smokescreen behind which inactivity's awful price is coming due. There are calls to expand the Supreme Court, as was done a hundred years ago, to match the number of Justices to the number of districts...thirteen, up from nine in 1891...in the Federal justice system. Right-wingers are *desperate* to prevent this. It would almost guarantee a liberal or moderate majority on the Court. But the single most important change needed is eliminating lifetime appointments for all Federal judges, which will require a Constitutional Amendment. That will be HUGELY difficult, no matter when we do it. It is another thing the current roiling atmosphere of hatred and distrust virtually guarantees that the status quo will remain, as long as the democratic institutions remain active.

All of which is just to touch on some of the immense stakes in this election.

Vote against the further degradation of the citizen's only remaining lever to use against the fascist billionaires and their economic pals of the Nerd Reich: hold your nose if you must, violate your principles if that's what it takes, but take the affirmative action of going to your designated polling place and casting your vote against Donald Trump and JD Vance. Love Harris or loathe her, she will not enable a furtherance of the coup enshrining the fascists into power.

It really is your last chance to vote.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


DAY OF RECKONING: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy
MIKE WENDLING
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The United States has become an almost unrecognizable country—with millions in thrall to conspiracy theories, toxic populism, and the far right edging closer to total power—a dire threat to civil society and democratic institutions.

While the MAGA movement was in remission due to Donald Trump's defeat in 2020, the fascist fringes have not just survived but have continued to thrive and burrow into the mainstream. The January 6th Capitol Riot prosecutions have done little to curb their enthusiasm for mayhem. Trump's base in the Republican Party is committed to their candidate like never before. The institutionalization of racist voting suppression and the outdated logic behind the Electoral College means he could take back the White House. Apocalyptic messaging ensures the alt-right, anti-government, anti-LGBT, and white nationalist groups see the next election as a life or death struggle and are uniting to back the one person they can all agree on—guaranteeing another chaotic election.

In this chilling exposé, Wendling encounters Capital rioters, Covid deniers, QAnon supporters, and Proud Boys and uncovers the roots of a movement that threatens to shatter the foundations of democracy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Told in tendentious, apocalyptic tones, this aptly labeled exposé of the late-stage progress of the fascist-billionaire/Nerd Reich's long-running, carefully coordinated reversion of the US to conditions prevailing a century-plus ago presents a very persuasive case...if you're not looking for academic rigor. That is not the remit of this book.

What you'll get here is primary sources telling their stories of regretted participation (Mrs. Alex Jones), and stories with legs about the perpetrators of the media rejiggering of our cultural norms...stuff that makes a positive difference to know, and to see synthesized in one place, but that is meant to inform you and awake you from denial. If you want a dissertation-level, fact-checked, peer-reviewed tome, seek elsewhere.

Well aimed at a suddenly jolted aware, smart layperson, this is a short and easy read. Not many words will send one to the dictionary. Few ideas here are going to be hard to grasp, and the few you'll run into that aren't geberally already familiar are researchable on Wikipedia with solidly reliable results. (Yes, I did it myself to be certain.)

Is your second cousin showing signs of coming out from the anesthesia of outrage dripped into them by red-meat right outlets? Here's a very good source of opening of the eyes. I can but hope that I know enough people with a spare twenty and some needy recipients in their orbit to get this to some young men the scum are targeting, in order to arrest his slide into fascism.

Before the election is better, but any time is good.

PRIVATE WORLDS: Growing Up Gay in Post-War Britain, elegy for a life spent without

PRIVATE WORLDS: Growing Up Gay in Post-War Britain
JEREMY SEABROOK
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1950s suburban England, a friendship bloomed between Jeremy Seabrook and Michael O’Neill—two gay men coming of age at a time when homosexuality was still a crime. Their relationship was inflected by secrecy and fear; the shadows that had distorted their adolescent years were never wholly dispelled, long into their adult life. Lyrical, candid and poignant, this is a tale of sexual identity, working-class history and family drama. A memoir of unparalleled authenticity, Private Worlds is an elegy for a doomed friendship.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The US class system impacted me far less than the UK version did young Seabrook, thank all the nonexistent gods. The possession or absence of a "posh" accent is greatly deterministic of one's future; the comparable thing here is the Southern twang, which (no matter where the business is centered) will keep one in the lower ranks. I, being gay and really unwilling to pretend otherwise, felt the sting of exclusion, so that reality was shared by the author and me. His eventual success has been built on being a self not supported by the world he came from; escape by jettisoning the weight of his class identity. Seabrook and O'Neill each accomplished this by being bolshie leftists in an England that was convulsing from the wounds of Empire, birthing today's hideous US-style fascist plutocratic class system.

That doomed, deep love, found and lost early, was part of my life as well. The friendship blighted by the need to dissemble; the deeper connection denied by the caustic effects of powerlessness, of the absence of role models for doing the open and honest thing by each other, was all too painfully relatable to me. It's shocking to me, looking back, that my life was not more blighted by this distorting pressure to be someone I was not and, moreover, did not ever want to be...his life, from my outsider point of view, was more so than mine.

That story is not mine to tell. Author Seabrook and O'Neill have a longstanding public connection, and have each analyzed the way their milieu had them jointly "fail{ing} to grow up together"...a phrase, and an idea behind it, I'd like to pay honor to by saying I wish to hell I'd said that first. The class system's role in this failure was, probably because I'm from the US, not as real as was the way the precocious thwarted-single-mother-raised boy was forced to dissemble. His friendship with O'Neill, ostensibly the focus of this book, feels more like a well-polished lens for him to examine himself and his failed world-beating dreams.

Seabrook and O'Neill (born and raised a Londoner, a key component of his identity as an outsider in the English North) affected a caustic ironical distance from their neighbors. An intellectual pose of studying these Others, who in their turn Othered these bumptious boys for being queer, froze into an outsider identity, an observer stance, that would enable them to "overcome" their background only by treating it as fodder, material for their real life's work in sociological study. Dealing with this really unappealing trait now, Author Seabrook seems paralyzed by his recognition of its cruelty. That this is cruelty returned for cruelty given is not, to my surprise, part of his path to self-forgviness. The ironic separation has an inevitable distancing effect between the friends...how could it not...and that gets his focus. I was surprised by how bitterly he seems to regret the dark space left by O'Neill's separate personhood, and how little kindness he seems to extend to that early Seabrook boy. Judging one's earlier self is easy. Forgiving them is, apparently, not.

A fascinating dive into an intelligent man's past love for his intellectual equal and emotional opposite. I'm sure anyone who's read and liked Édouard Louis or Jon Fosse as tellers of personal and immutable truth will batten on this book.

BRIGADISTES: Lives for Liberty, heartening and inspiring reminder that fighting for your principles is a worthy endeavor

BRIGADISTES: Lives for Liberty
JORDI MARTÍ-RUEDA (foreword by Jordi Borràs; tr. Mary Ann Newman)
Pluto Press
$17.95 trade paper, $10 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: 'A real treasure that we can't stop exploring'—La Republica (Barcelona)

Fanny Schoonhey was said to be the bravest woman in Barcelona. Felicia Browne decided it was time to put down her paintbrushes and pick up a rifle. The Nielsen brothers took three bicycles and pedalled from Copenhagen to the Pyrenees...

In 1936 something extraordinary happened. As the threat of fascism swept across the Iberian peninsula, thousands of people from all over the world left their families and jobs to heed the call—No Pasarán! History has never seen a wave of solidarity like it. The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with the Republic crushed, but the revolutionary dream of the International Brigades has never burnt out.

Through these 60 illustrated profiles, Brigadistes embroiders an epic story of political struggle with the everyday bravery, sorrow and love of those who lived it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read the following in The New York Times's "The Morning" newsletter:

Many factors have contributed to this {present political} turmoil. Decades of stagnant living standards have caused voter frustration. Social media, along with the rise of a cable television network willing to promote falsehoods, has inflamed discourse. The decline of institutions — churches, labor unions, once-dominant local employers — has left Americans feeling unmoored. And aging political leaders have failed to groom strong successors.

But the single largest source of the chaos is the Republican Party. {...} The Republican Party...is both fractured and increasingly extreme. Tens of millions of Republican voters have embraced beliefs that are simply wrong: that Obama was born in Kenya, that Donald Trump was cheated out of re-election, that Covid vaccines don’t work, that human beings aren’t causing climate change. A crowd of Republican-aligned protesters violently attacked the Capitol in 2021, assaulting police officers and causing several deaths. Prominent Republican politicians, including Trump, have spoken positively about that attack and more generally about political violence.

Kevin McCarthy’s downfall as speaker is the latest sign of the party’s drift toward radicalism. He lost his job because a group of hard-right House members was furious with him for conducting policy negotiations that are inherent to democratic governance. “The ouster captures the degraded state of the Republican Party in this era of rage,” wrote The Wall Street Journal editorial board, a reliable voice of conservatism.— ©David Leonhardt

There's no more mainstream voice than the Times. They sort-of define mainstream in US media, whatever you might think of their editorial bias. It is a mainstream outlet, therefore, sounding the alarm about extremism taking over a once-mainstream political party with the support of tens of millions of angry people.

If this isn't ringing every alarm bell you possess, you're not paying attention. Ignoring the very real threat to the entire flawed, screwed-up, but still HUGELY better than dictatorship, electoral representative democracy we're constantly arguing about and trying to improve is unacceptable.

In the 1930s, capitalism failed. The immiseration of millions led to radical action against the banksters and rentiers running the casino economy. They didn't like that. Their response was to beat back reform everywhere they could, and Spain was the test case. Much of the tactical expertise deployed by the Nazis at the start of World War II was honed in their support role during the Spanish Civil War. Fascism's victory there was resisted by fractured, in-fighting groups of very idealistic people. The stories of the thousands of Brigadistes, youthful (usually) volunteer fighters determined to resist the ugliness and viciousness of fascism already on display in Italy and Germany, come into soft focus in this illustrated series of biographical sketches. Because the young people weren't famous, or interesting in and of themselves, they usually left little public trail...barring outliers like Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly. The authors don't, then, rely on the usual biographical resources to tell their stories. The journals and letters and scraps of stories here presented are all the more effective for it.

These young people, my parents' ages more or less, believed in their cause of resisting the hegemonic and totalitarian agenda that defines fascism, enough to go and stake their lives on a foreign country's future. They believed, correctly, that one battle won was one too many in an existential war for freedom, however flawed, versus repression, however seductive its illusion of security.

Young people today are inspiringly angry at their elders again...are vocally angry about our generational failure to confront climate change and economic injustice, and the other manifold disasters we've left them to clean up. This book should remind all the older folk to review their consciences in the face of the crises facing us, remember our moral principles and shun our anger-clouded impulses towards cruelty and, at long last, start doing the right thing.

For younger people, this is your proof that this is a fight worth fighting. Your Great-grandparents fought and lost. You see around you the consequences of that loss. Do not give in to despair! The battle needs fighting, the penalty for inaction is hideous.

SECRET POWER: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies, investigative journalism from the other side of the WikiLeaks issue

SECRET POWER: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies
STEFANIA MAURIZI (tr. Lesli Cavanaugh-Bardelli), Foreword by Ken Loach
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An uncovering of the terrifying depths of authoritarian power that hide behind the infamous story of WikiLeaks.

*Winner of the European Award for Investigative And Judicial Journalism in 2021 and Premio Alessandro Leogrande Award 2022*

'I want to live in a society where secret power is accountable to the law and to public opinion for its atrocities, where it is the war criminals who go to jail, not those who have the conscience and courage to expose them.'

It is 2008, and Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist with a growing interest in cryptography, starts looking into the little-known organisation WikiLeaks. Through hushed meetings, encrypted files and explosive documents, what she discovers sets her on a life-long journey that takes her deep into the realm of secret power.

Working closely with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange and his organisation for her newspaper, Maurizi has spent over a decade investigating state criminality protected by thick layers of secrecy, while also embarking on a solitary trench warfare to unearth the facts underpinning the cruel persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks.

With complex and disturbing insights, Maurizi's tireless journalism exposes atrocities, the shameful treatment of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, on up to the present persecution of WikiLeaks: a terrifying web of impunity and cover-ups.

At the heart of the book is the brutality of secret power and the unbearable price paid by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and truthtellers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I dislike what I know of Julian Assange as a human being. That doesn't make what's been happening to him acceptable, still less justifiable. WikiLeaks has been a force internationally for sixteen years now; it's got a pretty spotty record, but that's not a huge surprise given its antipathy to Authority...that kind of puritanism leads the best-intentioned and most honestly passionate defenders of individual liberty down some deep, dark rabbit holes. This is not accidental, or without outside baiting. The use of agents provocateurs and disinformation is an old, effective means to hide actual, factual embarrassments in loud, distracting noise (see: the lives and work of Paul Linebarger and Edward Bernays).

The author is an established investigative journalist. She's won major European awards for her work in this often thankless, always risky role. All this as well as her undeniable personal drive to take on Power on behalf of the ordinary person's right to dictate what they will and won't tolerate from their governing institutions is what made this retelling of the events surrounding the scandals they've caused trustworthy to me. The mass media have, at best, glossed over and/or slanted their coverage uniformly negatively against Assange and WikiLeaks. Books like this are welcome correctives to that kind of Authority-supporting heavily biased coverage.

What matters in the world at large is that people like Assange and Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner are punished, not for being bad people, but for refusing to be silent and complicit in crimes committed by terrible people for vile aims and in service of reprehensible purposes. Author Maurizi makes this crystal clear, which is why the book appeared via Pluto Press not, eg, Random House. Big Business and Big Government are symbiotes.

I still think Assange, the man, is a creep. After eading this book, I am more convinced than ever that he will be made to pay and pay and pay for daring to reveal what the blandly evil rulers are really getting up to. As will, eventually, Author Maurizi and Bill Browder and Jessikka Aro the other people who hold the powerful's crimes up for the public to see clearly and judge.