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Colin Barker

In Brief

(May 1973)


From International Socialism (1st series), No.58, May 1973, p.26.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).


A reader asks, ‘Why are most of the books you review so expensive?’ A fair question, to which the only fair answer can be ‘capitalism’. Till that small problem is overcome, more comrades might note the existence of the public libraries. Most of these will obtain any book for you, if you press them.

A new publisher, Wildwood House, has an interesting list, including a paperback edition of Moshe Lewin’s excellent account of Lenin’s Last Struggle against Stalin (April, £1.30). Wildwood House handle a slice of the American paperback publisher, Vintage Books, and are promising Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? (April, 90p), which gave Lenin his title for that much-quoted and often ill-comprehended little pamphlet; Sartre’s Search for a Method (75p) which Chris Harman reviewed in this journal several years ago, as well as several useful titles on American history and politics. In June, they promise a paperback of Gabriel Kolko’s Politics of War at £1.50; Raymond Challinor enthused about this in a review article in IS 44 on The Origins of the Cold War.

Bill Jordan of the Claimants’ Union is going into print with Paupers: the Making of the New Claiming Class (1.60/80p, Routledge), while our very own Jim Kincaid pops up in Penguin in May with a book on inequality in Britain.

Even the most improverished reader should not be without two new IS publications: Roger Kline’s Anti-Freeze (2p), a sharp handbook for trade unionist on Phases One and Two, and the new Socialist Worker Rents Special (2p). Both obtainable from IS Books. There are various promises, too: Paul Foot (whose Fall and Fall of Reginald Maudling should appear in the summer, writs permitting) on racialism; Granville Williams on reform or revolution; pamphlets on Ireland and on China; and a pamphlet edition of the recent Socialist Worker series on strikers and social security.


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Last updated: 29.6.2008