Our ‘Red Reads’ feature in this week’s magazine – the top fifty left-wing, liberal and progressive books “guaranteed to inspire” – caused much debate and discussion here in the New Statesman offices. Should C.L.R. James be number 1? Is Tom Paine a lefty? How high should the New Testament be? And my own personal, unanswered question: why are there so few contemporary classics included in the list? There are hardly any books from the nineties and the noughties: only six books (“What a Carve Up” (49), “How We Should Rule Ourselves” (48), “Tom and Clem” (43), “No Logo” (23), “Persepolis” (26), Mi Revalueshanary Fren (11)) from these two decades and none of them make the top 10.
So what contemporary classis of left-wing thinking, polemicizing, analysing and writing might be missing from our – by definition – subjective list? Here are ten books, off the top of my head, and in no particular order, from the past twenty years that didn’t make it into the “Red Reads”:
Naomi Klein/“The Shock Doctrine” (2007)
Read the review hereBarack Obama/“Dreams from my Father” (1995)
Read the review hereJohn Pilger/“Hidden Agendas” (1998)
Read the review herePaul Krugman/“The Conscience of a Liberal”(2007)
Read the review hereMark Curtis/“Web of Deceit” (2003)
Read the review hereTariq Ali/“The Clash of Fundamentalisms” (2003)
Read the review hereChristopher Hitchens/“No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton” (1999)
Read the review hereWill Hutton/“The State We’re In” (1995)
Read the review hereJoseph Stiglitz /“Globalization and its Discontents” (2002)
Read the review hereSeymour Hersh/“Chain of Command” (2005)
Read the review here
Have you got any quibbles with my list? Feel free to comment below.
If you would like to suggest your own list to the New Statesman, you can do so here.
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