This book is the result of the slow but eventual workings of the US Freedom of Information Act. In 1997, the authors made a request for documents on the US government’s monitoring of Che Guevara, and the material they received became their 1997 book, Che Guevara and the FBI: The US Political Police Dossier on the Latin American Revolutionary. Then in 2007, ten years after the initial request, another package of documents arrived. They are published here with an introduction which summarises Che’s life but which concentrates on the main question on which they shed new light; his death.

Che Guevara was Fidel Castro’s second-in-command in the successful Cuban revolution. He left Cuba in 1965 first for the Congo and then Bolivia, where he organised a guerrilla movement against the government army of US-trained officers, which had overthrown the previous government in a coup in 1964. The expedition to Bolivia was in many ways a test of the idea that Cuba could export its revolution to other countries in Latin America, and its importance was clearly appreciated not just by the Cubans but also by the US.

Read the full review in Counterfire

When Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion landed on shelves in January 2011, the media was abuzz with word of a ‘Twitter revolution’. Tunisian activists, having spent years fighting Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s iron rule, had managed to effect more change in a few short weeks than they had previously in two decades, greatly enabled by their use of social media. Egyptian activists had begun to take to the streets to protest the 20-year rule of Hosni Mubarak.

Although, as Ahdaf Soueif warns in the foreword of Tweets from Tahrir, a fascinating and uplifting compilation of Twitter messages sent from the now-famous Cairene square, “the causes were many, deep-rooted, and long-seated’, the long-time activist nonetheless states: I think we’re agreed: Without the new media the Egyptian Revolution could not have happened in the way that it did.”

There is no more perfect example of the problem Morozov describes than that of WikiLeaks, the embattled site that in 2010 was denied service by several prominent companies, among them Amazon, PayPal and Visa, after calls from US Senator Joseph Lieberman to terminate services. In WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, Sifry states that the ‘battle over WikiLeaks’ has “delivered a wake-up call to everyone who thought the free and open Internet was already a fact … [While] the Internet has drastically lowered the barriers to entry into the public sphere, it has not eliminated them.”

WikiLeaks has brought the problem into the public eye, but the case studies Morozov references, such as the removal from Facebook of a Moroccan atheist activist group for unknown reasons, round out the issue for those who might be dismissive of the connection.

Read the full review in Survival: Global Politics and Strategy

It’s fair to say that 2011 has been something of a global cluster-fuddle. If you’re a murderous Arab dictator, a Greek civil servant or a London student, it’s been a total mare. For Paul Mason, however, it has been a year to celebrate. As others have struggled to make sense of the global upheavals, the Newsnight economics editor has communed with protesters at Tahrir Square, smelt the tear gas in Athens, debated situationist theory at Occupy. He has become the Robert Peston of revolution.

It was his blog post, 20 Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, that set the tone. Written one night in February as an attempt to link all the upheaval, it went viral. It has been retweeted hundreds of thousands of times, studied and critiqued by protesters and remains required reading.

Since then, Mason has stood on the BBC picket line during the pensions walk-out, sold out literary festivals, and even been insulted by Nicolas Sarkozy at the G20, for daring to ask (in French) whether he intended to help install any more unelected leaders in European democracies.

Read the full article in the London Evening Standard