Our writers suggest Christmas reading and Paul Foot says there's only one place to buy the books
If ever there was a tragic hero worthy of a Shakespeare play, it is Michael Collins. Failing that, Tim Pat Coogan's biography, Michael Collins, is the next best thing. It portrays the drama of the struggle for a free Ireland but at the same time conveys the personality and the spirit of a revolutionary leader who was trapped into betraying his cause.
Henrietta Leyser's Medieval Women covers everything from Anglo-Saxon grave sites to property rights and inheritance in the 14th century, but is easily accessible to the non-specialist. Inevitably the focus tends to be on the more educated and well to do, but the book provides fascinating evidence of how the role and the social and legal status of women changed with economic and political circumstances. If you think the debate about abortion rights is a recent development you're in for a shock.
The weakness of the nationalist cause in Wales as compared to Scotland is rooted in the Middle Ages, with the defeat of the last great Welsh uprising. The rebellion lasted for nearly ten years, and even when it was finally strangled, in 1409, the English armies never penetrated the Welsh strongholds and never captured their leader Glyn Dwr. In one sense the revolt was backward looking, but it also marked a crucial stage in the decline of the feudal system. Very little is known about Glyn Dwr but The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr by Rees Davies is by far the best account so far.
Two extraordinary novels have transformed my understanding of the Indian subcontinent this year. When Memory Dies by A Sivanandan describes the rise of intercommunal violence that has torn Sri Lanka apart in recent years. But, charting the lives of people who come from different political traditions, it shows how the left failed to organise resistance when it had the chance, and how nationalists fed off the despair.
The main characters in A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry show the strength of the human spirit in the face of the most appalling hardship.
The novel describes the impact of India's state of emergency in the mid-1970s on a diverse group of people. It is beautifully written and offers an exceptional insight into life in rural and urban India. Both books are haunting and distressing, yet avoid leaving you full of despair.
870 pages! Phew! Every time someone recommended Hilary Mantel's 1992 novel about the French Revolution A Place of Greater Safety I picked it up and put it down again, realising it was unreadable in less than a week's solid reading.
At last this year I took it on holiday, and was lost in admiration from the start. It is a truly wonderful novel which gives a much clearer picture of the characters at the centre of the French Revolution than any standard history. Robespierre, Danton, Camille Desmoulins and especially his wife, Lucille, emerge as real people, suddenly sympathetic and comprehensible where in the history books they are monsters or larger than life heroes. Few SR readers will agree with Mantel's interpretation of the ebb and flow of the revolution, but many fewer can fail to enjoy the story.
For a real understanding of China's history read Harold Isaacs' The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. It tells of the events of 1925 to 1927 when China's workers fought to the death for their revolution against the hateful imperialist carve up of their country and the cowardly behaviour of their own rulers. The book opens with a wonderful description of combined and uneven development in China and continues with a brilliant analysis of what went wrong crucially that China's Communists, influenced by Stalin in Russia, put their faith and future into the hands of the right wing nationalists with disastrous consequences. Internationally it proved a blow to revolution everywhere. When Mao eventually achieved success more than 20 years later, his revolution ushered in state capitalism not the workers' power and socialism which was on the agenda in the 1920s.
My other book of the year is Liberty Against the Law by Christopher Hill which draws on influences from Robin Hood to the Beggar's Opera to show how there has always been resistance to our rulers' laws and how important this was to struggle at the birth of capitalism.
Annie Proulx's three novels, Postcards, The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes, have been my favourite reads this year. If I'm forced to choose I will take Postcards.
Loyal Blood commits an unspeakable crime, flees the family farm in Vermont and is forced to wander in search of a rest that can never come. He sends postcards home, unaware of the changes and catastrophes that befall those he left behind.
The novel spans 40 years from 1944. Loyal's journey across the landscape of the American West takes him from the farmlands to the uranium mines. Loyal's odyssey is the story of the land itself ancient, relentless, on which the work of man turns to so much dust.
It is a powerful, fearsome story, but is at the same time filled with ironic humour. Events and anecdotes that seem to come straight out of the pages of local newspapers are woven into the story.
There are two books I read this year which I have no hesitation in recommending. The first, Darwin, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, is a biography of one of the greatest thinkers of the 19th century. With amazing success they weave the life and ideas of Charles Darwin into a social history of the time. We find an individual who through his research and intellect is able to develop an understanding of the world which clashed with some of the 'respectable' ideas of the day.
The release of the Bridgewater Three this year was another setback for the British establishment. Paul Foot's Murder at the Farm, written more than ten years ago, and re-released this year, is a brilliant exposé of injustice. What makes this book so compelling, however, is the way in which Paul sifts through all the evidence and presents a case which conclusively proves the innocence of the four men jailed.
Revolution in Danger by Victor Serge is an eyewitness account from Petrograd when the Russian Revolution was threatened by reaction from all sides. This book angered me because it reminded me how willing the capitalist class will be to drown our hopes and aspirations in blood. It inspired me because it shows the extent to which revolutionary workers will go to defend these hopes.
I am just discovering the superb novels of Jose Saramago, the left wing Portuguese writer. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ mixes gritty realism and allegory in this fresh look at Jesus's life. It is not surprising the Catholic Church wanted this banned. The account is set against the backdrop of the Jewish resistance to Roman occupation. Jesus is a sympathetic figure but no saint. He challenges conventional morality by choosing to cohabit with Mary Magdalene. Most controversial of all, both the devil and Jesus are shown to be merely pawns in the hands of a god portrayed here as a scheming, bloodthirsty tyrant. Only on the cross does Jesus realise he has been set up the ultimate sell out!
One very short book and one very long book were my favourites of this year. Terry Eagleton's Marx in Phoenix Press's 'Great Philosophers' series is admirable for its brevity and lucidity. Even more praiseworthy is Eagleton's skill in presenting
Marx's key philosophical concepts without indulging either of the fashionable evils of recent writing on the subject postmodernism and analytical Marxism.
Instead we get, a return to the classical account of historical materialism, last revived in the late 1960s and 1970s, but in eclipse since then.
The massive Oxford History of the American West (edited by CA Milner II, CA O'Connor and MA Sandweiss) is a collaborative work composed of 23 chapters and running to over 800 pages. Inevitably unevenness in quality and interest results. But at their best Richard Maxwell Brown on 'Violence', Carlos Schwartes on 'Wage Earners and Wealth Makers' or F Ross Peterson on 'Politics and Protest' they give a vital sense of the way in which capitalism and its opponents have shaped the American West. An invaluable companion (and alternative) to all those horse operas that will return to our television screens over the coming weeks.
Annie Proulx's novel The Shipping News is the story of the journey of Quoyle, a hack New York journalist, to 'the land of his forefathers' in a remote corner of Newfoundland. Quoyle's life is in tatters when his unfaithful, insecure wife is killed in a car accident, leaving him with custody of their two daughters.
Together with Quoyle's aunt, they arrive in Killick-Claw, a small fishing village with a freight terminal, and start a new life. Quoyle gets a job as a journalist on the local paper, editing the shipping column. Gradually they rebuild their lives, integrating into the local community, rediscovering humanity in its benign values and in their new relationships. The novel is in that tradition of American literature that contrasts the corruption of the city with the honesty and simplicity of the countryside. It is written with great affection in a style often poetic in its economy and evocative of the detail of landscape, life and work of the village.
For the first time in many years a socialist bookshop has opened in central London. Those of us who spent happy hours browsing at Colletts in the Charing Cross Road upstairs new books and leftish periodicals of every description; downstairs a secondhand stock gleaned and replenished from the libraries of old Communists will be the first to rejoice.
Colletts' closure was one of the sadder consequences of the demise of the Communist Party as a fighting force, and was followed all too quickly by the closure of Central Books in Gray's Inn Road.
For some years now, the socialist bookshop Bookmarks has been fretting in isolation and cramped premises in gloomy Finsbury Park. Two years ago a campaign was started to raise money in the labour movement for a switch to central London. Perfect premises became available at the corner of New Oxford Street and Bloomsbury Street right at the heart of the bookshop world which surrounds the British Museum. The move was an expensive proposition. The campaign was greatly assisted by the endorsement of the TUC, which has been impressed by the Bookmarks bookstalls at union conferences. In all, £40,000 was raised from trade union branches and donations. The new shop has been elegantly fitted out, and the stock, which includes a secondhand section, is far more varied and accessible than in Finsbury Park.
An absurd but strangely common cliché is that in the age of television books are increasingly redundant. All the evidence suggests on the contrary that television leads people to the books which inspire the programmes. For socialists and trade unionists books are especially indispensable. Watching television is determined by the pace of the programme and the diktat of the producers. You can read at your own pace, with no one to distort or interpret for you.
None of us were born socialists. The intellectual pressures of capitalist society discourage anyone who is inclined to swim against the stream. On the other hand, pretty well all good literature challenges the suppositions of class society. Every survey ever done on socialists' habits comes up with a common characteristic 'books in the house'.
Books are the best present. Readers of Socialist Review who go Christmas shopping in central London now have a wonderful opportunity to achieve a double: to buy worthwhile presents and at the same time help sustain the trade union and socialist movement. Any socialist who buys a book in London from any other shop will never recover from the shame and disgrace.