NIBS radical Book reviews
Radicals review newly released books. Find out what other radicals in Australia think of these latest books that are available at NIBS. See how these books match up to the expectations of NIBS lovers.
MISS MAJOR SPEAKS by Miss Major and Toshio Meronek
Review by Joel Keith
“Remember your history,” Major reminds us. It’s an injunction that resonates throughout the book, from Stonewall—“The fags took Stonewall from us before the firefighters could get a hose to put out the fires all throughout the Village”—to the increasing contemporary acceptance of police into Pride parades (hello Midsumma!)—“Police are never not a problem…You can’t let them catch them alone. In New York [during the sixties and seventies], it was simple as ‘Wear a dress—go straight to jail.’” It’s an injunction that might be most notable, though, for the premise it contains: You have a history to remember.”
“FULL SURROGACY NOW” by sophie lewis
reviewed by P.G.
Full Surrogacy Now is a provocative starting point for readers to challenge their assumptions about the family. It adeptly reveals the contradictions in the capitalist ‘nuclear family’ and challenges our stigma towards the workers, like surrogates, who make the family possible at all. It convincingly calls on them - and us - to “seize the means of reproduction” and bring about new collectivist practices of the family, the “gestational commune”.
destroying notions of green capitalism: “exploring degrowth” Vincent Liegey and anitra nelson
reviewed anonymously
Exploring Degrowth simultaneously destroys the notions of green capitalism/growth, so called “sustainable” development and “steady state economics” with ruthless critique that any reader can pick up and engage in with no prior study in political theory and climate science required to follow along.
COMPASSION AND AN UNRELENTING FRUSTRATION: “THE TRANSGENDER ISSUE” BY SHON FAYE
reviewed by Alex Nylén-White
Whilst many trans people will read Shon Faye’s ‘The Transgender Issue’ and find themselves already well acquainted with the issues within, it is the others who need to read this. An honest and sobering account of the contemporary trans experience, in which transgender issues are considered a “lightning rod in a culture war” and topics of trans health, safety and liberty is reduced to cannon fodder.
LITERATURE, LOVE AND FEMINISM: “PASSIONATE FRIENDS” BY SYLVIA MARTIN
reviewed by Karen Throssell
In Passionate Friends, Sylvia Martin describes her project as “exploring how past women who loved women, might have understood their feelings, what narratives were available to them, and how particular women might have taken up some and resisted others, in order to create their own sense of identity.” To do this she examines two important friendships in the life of Australian poet Mary Fullerton.
ASPIRATIONALISM AND ASSIMILATION: “The Melancholia of Class” By cynthia Cruz
reviewed by Lucy Myers
The Melancholia of Class is a biting analysis of the violence which middle class aspirationalism enacts upon the working class. Cynthia Cruz discusses the reducing of the working class subject into a ghost that haunts the bourgeois values of neoliberalism.
STUART MACINTYRE’S “THE PARTY: THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF AUSTRALIA FROM HEYDAY TO RECKONING”
reviewed by James Hogg
Stuart Macintyre’s long-awaited The Party is a masterwork of Australian history that traces the CPA’s meteoric rise during the Second World War and its post-war decline. The work is guided by several key questions including: How deep was the Australian Party’s support for the Soviet Union? How did members navigate the disjuncture between Soviet Policy and local realities?