When Skateboards Will Be Free: My Reluctant Political Childhood
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
Hamish Hamilton,
287pp, £14.99

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s first book is a lovely memoir. Born to an Iranian father and Jewish-American mother who believe that America “is destined to be engulfed in a socialist revolution”, he recounts his upbringing through the prism of their left-wing ideology. Sayrafiezadeh is at his best when he returns to his childhood. For instance, his account of his enforced participation in the 1970s grape boycott (thanks to his mother’s solidarity with the fruit farmers) is a gem of comic timing. The restraint in his prose is also impressive: the horror of his description of the actions of a “comrade” given free bed and board by his mother lies largely in its understatement. At times, the structure is a little haphazard. If he had kept a tighter focus, his perspective on the social simmerings of 1970s America would be easier to follow, and his thoughtful book all the more compelling.
Tom Lewis


Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
Bertrand M Patenaude
Faber & Faber, 352pp, £20

As an intellectual, orator and internationalist, Leon Trotsky was superior to all his Russian contemporaries. As a politician, however, he was easily outmanoeuvred by Stalin, who told him the wrong date for Lenin’s funeral and later expelled him from both the Communist Party and the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s Nemesis documents the final years of Trotsky’s desperate rearguard action against the man he denounced as the “gravedigger of the revolution”. After being hounded from country to country by agents of the NKVD, Trotsky settled in Mexico, where he conducted a clandestine affair with the artist Frida Kahlo. The American historian Bertrand Patenaude has written a book that is sensitive to the tragedy of Trotsky’s end, but alive, too, to the drama of his time in Mexico City. A tale of assassinations and poisonings, Patenaude’s account owes more to the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese than it does to the works of Karl Marx. Trotsky’s haunting work on the rise of Hitler is also recalled.

As Stalin’s posthumous approval ratings continue to rise in Russia, this book provides a melancholic reminder of his greatest enemy’s moral clarity.
George Eaton