It’s a conspiracy theorist’s dream. One nation holds most of the planet’s supply of “rare earths”, the metals and alloys key to building many of the developed world’s must-have items, including mobile phones, computers, cameras and precision missiles. And that country happens to be China: the world’s last great bastion of communism (if you don’t count its basket-case dependent, North Korea) and for centuries the focus of western fear, loathing and grudging admiration. This is the dramatic factual premise behind this febrile but enjoyable first novel by Paul Mason, Newsnight’s economics editor.

A paunchy middle-aged reporter called Brough – “a has-been hack with a Yorkshire accent” reeking of whisky – washes up in deep northwest China in May 2009, to make a documentary about the state of the Chinese environment. He is accompanied by his producer, Georgina, a ruthless blonde alumna of Cheltenham Ladies College desperate to swing a Chinese television distribution deal; by an even more washed-up cameraman called Carstairs; and by Chun-Li, their enigmatic Chinese interpreter. After an afternoon filming townspeople sick from factory pollution, the crew is arrested and barely escapes an assassination attempt by a crazed underling from the local propaganda office.

While Brough fakes his own death and flees into the Gobi Desert, Chun-Li (a freelance spy, we learn) promptly dopes a psychotic Mongolian sex maniac with Russian truth-drug, and discovers the area is ruled by a cartel – half-gangster, half-government – that has enriched itself on illegal mining of rare earths.

Read the full review in the Guardian

Gramsci’s advice to revolutionaries was to maintain “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. For the first decade of the new millennium, however, much of the left seemed to pay heed to only the first part of this injunction. In an editorial to mark the relaunch of New Left Review in 2000, Perry Anderson wrote: “The only starting point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat. Capital has comprehensively beaten back all threats to its rule.”

Near the opening of his account of “the new global revolutions”, Paul Mason launches an impassioned j’accuse against such fatalism. He denounces the “zeitgeist of impotence” that led the left to believe that City banks were no less immutable than Arab dictatorships. Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is a rapid-fire attempt to make some sense of the tumultuous events of the past two years. “This book makes no claim to be a ‘theory of everything’,” Mason writes. “And don’t file it under ’social science’: it’s journalism.” Journalism it is, a finely executed example of what John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, called “intensified history”.

Mason, economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight, has emerged as possibly the most engaged mainstream journalist of our age. He was there when anti-austerity protesters stormed the Greek parliament, when students occupied Millbank Tower and when Cairo cast off the shackles of tyranny. He has reported from the slums of Manila and, retracing the route of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, from the new dust bowl of Oklahoma. Mason draws on all these experiences to support his thesis that several factors – the growth of social media, “the graduate with no future”, the collapse of the neoliberal consensus – have combined to form a global rebellion without parallel.

Read the full article in the New Statesman

Occupy Wall Street is wintering. That’s not to say its seasoned recruits are taking time off, though there surely are equivalents of the “summer soldier and sunshine patriot” that Tom Paine invoked in his address to the Valley Forge winter encampment of the revolutionary Continental Army 236 years ago. But it’s been business as usual at 60 Wall Street, in the cavernous atrium of the Deutsche Bank building, where OWS working groups have been meeting continuously since the early weeks of the occupation. In those well-attended huddles, all sorts of plans are being made for re-occupations in the months to come – an American Spring to rival the Arab one – and the air is thick with proposals for ever bolder actions.

Still, it’s not a bad time to take stock of the early months of the movement. The publication of two books is an occasion either to reminisce about, or catch up with the momentous events that originated in Lower Manhattan just one week after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The respective publishers, Verso and OR Books, are natural allies of the movement, and are to be saluted for delivering the first two book-length treatments – there will be many others in the year ahead.

Read the full review in The Guardian

‘It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are,’ writes Nathanael West in The Day of the Locust (1939), commonly regarded as the best novel ever written about Hollywood, that factory of broken dreams. West’s sad, even pathetic characters yearn for something they can never have—which can’t be had—and their lives spiral into chaos, slipping towards a violence that is beyond them and which no effort can bring under control.

The Great Depression took root in West (1903-1940), an American writer whose wild, sometimes grotesque fantasies have become part of our collective imagination. In this fresh, elegant biography by Joe Woodward—the first in four decades—West comes alive, a strange young man on the prowl, a crazy fool, a fantasist. ‘The dream life of Nathanael West,’ writes Woodward, ‘was surely a vivid one—well-suited for novel writing and less-suited for Hollywood pictures.’ Yet he managed, in thirty-seven years, to assemble a small but permanent body of work, and—like Keats or Rupert Brooke or any writer of immense talent whose vision is cut short—one can only guess where he might have gone.

Read the full review in Literary Review

There’s not much doubt that for the foreseeable future 2011 will be remembered as the ‘Year of Protest’. When a mainstream magazine like Time selects ‘The Protester’ as their cover-story 2011 Person of the Year then something of significance is clearly happening. Though whether the last twelve months will in the long-term come to represent anything as significant as 1989’s fall of the Berlin Wall or 1968’s extraordinary mix of Paris, Prague and Vietnam is probably too early to judge.

However what can be claimed already with a degree of confidence is that the organisational forms of protest in 2011 changed decisively. Certainly if we are making any kind of comparison with those led by a traditional ‘Bolshevikised Left’ these were protests that looked very different in the manner they were organised.

The aspirations of those that had always preferred to organise horizontally and cut out the middle man vanguard party have been realised via a mix of the internet, smartphones, twitter, facebook, flickr and more. This is a culture of dissent that is deeply distrustful of leaders and takes producing a movement that has the evolution of forms that are participative and pre-figurative as one of its founding principles.

This is an approach epitomised in the West by the Occupy Movement, chronicled in the instant journalism of Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America written by the Writers for the 99%. This is activist authorship at its best. Messy, from the frontline, loyal to the ethics of the movement in its form, written up by those who took part almost as soon as the action comes to some sort of an end. The detail is impressive, the basis of the various affinity groups, the spreading of the message across New York, the courage in the face of brutal policing. There is a real sense of a making of community, but also the divisions that would on occasion erupt.

Read the full review in Philosphy Football

Other TV types have been disappointingly slow to respond to the gauntlet thrown down by Kay Burley’s raunchy novel First Ladies last year, but at last a challenger has emerged in the unlikely form of Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason. Mason’s just-published debut novel Rare Earth (“a washed-up TV reporter stumbles on a corruption scandal in China”) has moments that leave the Sky News anchor looking prim, including a standout scene distinctively fusing economics and erotica. In it a character called Khunbish explains a business deal while he and his lover Chun-li try out “tantric position 103″ – she mounts a stuffed horse while he clings head-down to its side. “He began thrusting wildly in the general direction of her chrysanthemum but missing, his paunchy frame shuddering with the effort of remaining rigid and upside down. ‘The cartel, sells, to the global market,’ he panted. ‘The price is inflated because production has been capped!’ She began to pant in unison with him … ‘Cartel evades export controls. Market capitalisation of western miners stays low. Massive, one-way, bet’… He switched to some ancient steppe language as he ejaculated, blubbering and incoherent. Chun-li faked an orgasm, keeping her mind focused on an eighth-century lyric of sadness.” Let’s hope Jeremy Paxman is in too good a mood to tease him.

Read the full article on The Guardian’s Media Monkey

On the last day of 2011, I went for a stroll towards Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. As late as mid-November this clump of off-Broadway public space, usually the preserve of Financial District workers, was a congested tent city teeming with thousands of men and women protesting against an economic system stacked in favour of a plutocratic and often tax-evading minority.

Now, barely six weeks later, it was empty: police had placed barricades all around to make entry difficult; flustered out-of-town shoppers milled about in search of discount department stores, enterprising vendors hawked tatty Occupy Wall Street badges, the smell of cheap muffins wafted from a food truck.

A few defiant protesters remained. One wore a V for Vendetta mask and held up a piece of cardboard with the slogan “Capitalism Has Failed” for tourists to photograph. A woman of pensionable age recited from memory Adrian Mitchell’s “To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam)”. But the passion and rebellion that had been staged here and broadcast all across the world appeared to have been extinguished. By the time I returned home and switched on the television, the evening news was taken up by politicians chundering forth an idiot argot of fudge, cliché and parochial mendacity. Had Occupy Wall Street been just a dream?

A slew of new books offer convincing and often thrilling evidence to the contrary. They include Occupying Wall Street: the Inside Story of an Action That Changed America (OR Books) assembled by a collective made up of dozens of freelance journalists, students and activists, that goes under the name of Writers for the 99 per cent; Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America (Verso, £9.99) edited by Astra Taylor and Keith Gessen and featuring many contributors drawn from savvy New York-based journals such as n+1, Triple Canopy, Dissent and The New Inquiry; This Changes Everything by the staff of YES! magazine that collects speeches and essays by the likes of Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Ralph Nader.

Read the full article in The Daily Telegraph

IN COMPELLING DETAIL, two leading civil rights attorneys — both leaders of the Center for Constitutional Rights (New York) — recount the extraordinary life and deliberate killing of the world’s most popular revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara. Using internal U.S. governmental documentation, only recently released, the authors use their forensic skills to analyze the evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the execution of a war prisoner captured alive.

After a brief summary of Guevara’s life and struggles, they examine the U.S. documents that bear witness to CIA involvement in the tracking down of the Cuban/Argentinian fighter.

Foreign Minister Aleksey Kosygin went to Havana at the end of June 1967, and, in his meeting with Castro, complained that the guerrilla in Bolivia was “playing into the hands of imperialism.” In his answer, the Cuban leader “accused the USSR of having turned its back upon its own revolutionary tradition and of having moved to a point where it would refuse to support any revolutionary movement unless the actions of the latter contributed to the achievement of Soviet objectives, as contrasted to international Communist objectives.” It could almost be a Trotskyst critique of Stalinism…

Read the full review in Against the Current

Sometimes the truth is buried in front of us. That is the case with more than 140,000 pages of government documents relating to the abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces during the “war on terror,” brought to light by the ACLU.

Since 2004, the ACLU has requested and received thousands of documents on the Bush administration’s torture program. The task of extracting a narrative from this intimidating pile of documents was left to Larry Siems, Director of Freedom to Write at the PEN American Center.

First started as an ongoing online report (TheTortureReport.org), Siems’ new book — The Torture Report: What the Documents say about America’s Post 9/11 Torture Program — isnow available in print and online. The book presents an array of eyewitness and first-person reports — by victims, perpetrators, dissenters, and investigators — of the CIA’s White House-orchestrated interrogations in illegal, secret prisons around the world, and of the Pentagon’s “special projects” in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to tell the story of the Bush administration’s torture program.

Read more and listen to the podcast on the ACLU blog.

Chase Madar joins Ted, Maegan and Kristen to preview his new book, “The Passion of Bradley Manning.”

Listen to the podcast on “Wilshire & Washington”.