Review: The Mugger, by Ed McBain
This is the second book in McBain’s legendary 87th Precinct series, set in a fictionalised (albeit recognisable) New York City. McBain was experimenting with the idea of a whole team as ‘hero’ of the series…
Haunted by Andrey Vyshinsky’s Ghost
Last week I sent out a message to tens of thousands of trade unionists alerting them to two bits of news. The good news, I reported, was that some workers in Poland had won a…
Review: Cop Hater, by Ed McBain
I began reading the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain nearly 40 years ago, having stumbled upon them entirely by accident in a library. McBain (real name Evan Hunter) is widely seen as the inventor…
Review: Kindred, by Octavia Butler
This book is a cross between Jack Finney’s time travel classic Time and Again and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Written in 1979 and set three years earlier, it tells the story of a young African…
Review: Journey to Karabakh, by Aka Morchiladze
This is a very strange — and to me, sad — book. It was Morchiladze’s first novel, published in 1992, and describes the journey of two young men from Tbilisi to Armenia. As Georgia began…
Review: Karl Kautsky, by Dick Geary
British historian Dick Geary, who passed away last year, apologised several times in the course of this short book for not being able to go into any detail. That’s because the book was a part…
Review: The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever, by Peter Ward
Most books I’ve seen about “life extension” and immortality are written by advocates of various ways of living much longer, or even forever. These include Ray Kurzweil, the noted tech guru, and Dave Asprey, the…
Review: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, by V.I. Lenin
It’s said that when he died, Lenin left behind a library in which the largest number of books were written by himself — but the second largest group were books written by Karl Kautsky. Kautsky…
Review: Glucose Revolution: The life-changing power of balancing your blood sugar, by Jessie Inchauspé
I read lots of books about health, obesity, diet and nutrition. I learn something from almost all of them. Even the most useless of them will contain one or two new insights, or sometimes ideas…
Review: Stasi Child, by David Young
I’m probably wrong about this, but I think the trend of writing police procedurals set in totalitarian societies started with Martin Cruz Smith, whose Gorky Park was published back in 1981. Since then there have…