Books for the beach

From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Summer holidays are an ideal time to catch up on reading. Review writers and readers recommend some of their favourites for those of you lucky enough to be heading for the beach or who have some time off work.

Leon Trotsky’s The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany is a must for anyone who has been active in the fight against the Nazis. Written with clarity and passion, it combines a brilliant analysis of fascism with an alarm bell warning of the failure to unite to beat the Nazis. Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business contains an essential analysis of the base of Nazi support and how we can rip it apart.

And anyone wanting to understand the nature of fascism could do no better than to read Ignazio Silone’s inspiring novel Fontamara. Silone tells of the effects of fascism on the people of a small Italian village and their strategies of resistance. Also try and seek out a copy of Silone’s second novel, Bread and Wine, a story where faith, love and comradeship are tested to the limits of endurance by fascist oppression and Stalinist betrayal.

Anyone trying to make sense of what is happening in Italy today has to read Paul Ginsborg’s excellent History of Contemporary Italy. Ginsborg’s scholarship and his eye for telling detail allow understanding of the most complex events – from the liberation from Mussolini’s fascist regime by the Italian resistance through to the huge strikes and upheavals of the 1970s and the collapse of the Christian Democrats two years ago. His account is weakest when it comes to recent years, but well worth reading.

War might not seem the best theme for holiday reading, but the D-Day anniversary celebrations which have dominated our television screens lately need a good antidote. Angus Calder’s The People’s War provides one of the best. It is a detailed history of both the war and the class war on the home front.

The Fall of Berlin by Antony Reed and David Fisher is a fascinating account of the rise and fall of Hitler and the Nazis – and the heroic resistance to them. It ends with an account of the siege of Berlin by the Red Army – a reminder that D-Day was not the most important battle of the war.

Lynn McDonald’s books – Somme, 1914 and They Called it Paschendaele – provide a look at war through the soldier’s eye, in interviews, letters and diaries.

Steven Rose is one of the best science writers around. He is also a committed socialist. His latest book, The Making of Memory, is a brilliant account of the workings of the mind. Also recommended if you want to get to grips with science are Stephen Jay Gould’s latest collection of writings out in paperback, Eight Little Piggies, and Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick.

But R.C. Lewontin’s The Doctrine of DNA is top of our science list. This short book manages to be both an informative account of debates raging about genetics and a marvellous advocacy of socialism.

Don’t know where to start with the writings of Marx and Engels? You could do a lot worse than dip into the Penguin collections, The Revolutions of 1848, Surveys from Exile and The First International and After. They all have detailed and fairly accessible introductions which fill you in with the history, and they contain both some of the famous writings such as The Communist Manifesto, The Civil War in France and lots of shorter articles.

Whatever you may think of Eric Hobsbawm he is a brilliant historian and writer. His The Age of Empire 1875–1914 covers the period when capitalism became a world system and imposed a rigid hierarchy of nations. If you want to understand why the world seems to be cracking up this is a good starting point.

C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins is history at its best. James tells the dramatic and inspiring story of the successful slave revolt in Haiti. Also well worth a read is James Walvin’s brilliant account of the resistance to slavery in Black Ivory. Race by Studs Terkel is a lighter holiday read. Terkel draws together hundreds of interviews – from the white trade unionist to the committed black activist – to create a comprehensive portrait of attitudes to race and racism in the US.

Working class women have often been written out of history. Try and get hold of a copy of Philip Foner’s Women and the American Labour Movement. It is a vast, detailed and exciting account of women’s involvement in class struggles in the US.

Randy Shilts’s journalistic account of the US government’s wilful neglect of Aids research, And the Band Played On, reads as compellingly as a detective novel and will make you howl with rage. Nor should you miss Shilts’s The Mayor of Castro Street: the Life and Times of Harvey Milk – the true story of a gay man’s life from the closet in the 1950s to being the first gay councillor in San Francisco.

John McCarthy and Jill Morrell’s Some Other Rainbow may be a surprising choice. The book sold an amazing 500,000 copies in hardback and is compelling reading. It is also very political – both on the Middle East and on the stallings of the Tory government.

The image of British justice is deservedly in the dumps. If you need any further ammunition then Gerry Conlon’s Proved Innocent will provide it. It is a damning account of the wrongful imprisonment of the Guildford Four.

Woody Guthrie: a Life by Joe Klein is the story of the American dustbowl singer who influenced generations of others, including Bob Dylan. Guthrie’s life mirrored that of millions of poor whites in the depression. His most famous song, This Land is our Land, was written deliberately as an antidote to the patriotic God Bless America. His Communism was deeply felt and he used his songs to support left wing causes. Also don’t miss Alan Lomax’s history of the blues, The Land Where Blues Began.

Holidays are a brilliant chance to catch up on those novels you’ve always meant to read but never got around to. Novels can also be a great, accessible way of illuminating historical events. A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel is a very long but very readable novel about the French Revolution. It brings alive all the main players – Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins – from childhood to the guillotine, and although its style verges on the Mills and Boon at times you learn a lot about the people and the revolution.

Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina might also seem a bit daunting in its size. Don’t let that put you off. It is a great read, exposing the hypocrisy of the Russian aristocracy in the last century and centring on one of the all time great heroines.

Balzac’s Old Goriot is a classic novel by a defender of the old order. It fuses a powerful description of a new social type – greedy and narrowly materialistic. Balzac’s characters spring to life both as individual characters and as representatives of the emerging capitalist class, dedicated to their own self interest. Also worth turning to is Dickens’s classic Bleak House, a brilliant exposé of the workings of the law.

The novelist B. Traven has always been a mystery man, but it seems he was active in the German Revolution after the First World War and then went to Central America. His most famous novel is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre but his best are the ‘jungle novels’ tales of the terrible conditions of the Mexican Indians in the mahogany camps. A new one, Trozas, has just been published in English. It is not his best (for that try The March to Caobaland or The Rebellion of the Hanged) but it gives a feel for the near slave conditions in which the workers there lived and how they eventually organised to fight back.

George Lamming’s Season of Adventure is perhaps the greatest political novel of the Caribbean. It is a gripping universal tale of a girl searching for her roots in a society riven by class and race. Cathedral of the August Heat is a beautiful and terrifying story set in the slums of Port au Prince. Haitian writer Pierre Clitandre captures the lives and struggles of his people with enormous insight.

Perhaps not the most appropriate title for a holiday read, but nevertheless entrancing, is Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine. This is the story of three generations of the Kilmartin family, set in the great Irish famine of the 1840s. Passion, tragedy and resistance give this novel that essential holiday ingredient – it is unputdownable. So too is Thomas Keneally’s book about the French landing in Ireland in 1798, Year of the French.

For a more contemporary glimpse of Irish life try the novels of Dermot Bolger. The Journey Home is perhaps the best known, but also read Nightshift, his story about a young couple barely out of school. She is pregnant and he works on the nightshift so they can survive. Bolger brilliantly captures the alienated worlds of work and love.

Also on an Irish theme sample The Heather Blazing, Colm Tóibín’s novel of sweeping changes in Irish society and Patrick McCabe’s Butcher Boy, a shocking novel that lays open the attitudes of Irish society to a disturbed child. And not to be missed is Roddy Doyle’s prizewinner, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

Salman Rushdie also won a special ‘Booker of Bookers’ prize this year for Midnight’s Children – his brilliant novel of the dawn of Indian independence. Trying to Grow is Firdus Kanga’s story about Brit – so named by his sister because of his brittle bones – a funny and sad story about growing up in Bombay. Time off work will also give you a chance to tackle Vikram Seth’s vast novel about Indian life after independence, A Suitable Boy – engrossing!

Michael Ondaatje’s superb The English Patient is now in paperback. Beautifully written, it tells the story of four people overcoming the trauma of the Second World War – complete with spies, deserts, thieves, bomb disposal and mistaken identity. Possibly even better is his In the Skin of the Lion about the building of Toronto in the 1930s.

A Scot’s Quair is Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s unmissable masterpiece. Not quite as good, but definitely worth tracking down, is Spartacus, Gibbon’s account of the life of Karl Marx’s favourite historical character.

Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian is one of the strangest and most beautiful modern French novels – an idyllic love story which turns to tragedy in a book which combines great poetry with a satire on a society driven by consumerism. By the same author, Heartsnatcher is a more savage work on the same theme.

John Irving’s Cider House Rules, set in 1920s America, is about a doctor who runs an orphanage and performs abortions on the side. A great read, which reinforces the importance of a woman’s right to choose. Also with the theme of oppression is Billy French’s moving novel, Billy, about a young black boy accused of raping a white girl.

There have been several film adaptations this year. Turn to the books – they can often be more satisfying. This is certainly true of Isabel Allende’s magical realist novel of a brutal South American dictatorship, The House of the Spirits. Why not also have a read of Emile Zola’s Germinal or perhaps Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence?

Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s historical novel The Leopard is every bit as good as the film. He brilliantly tells the tale of the decline of the Italian aristocracy and the battle for Italian unification.

Detective stories are unbeatable reading if you’re stuck for a few hours at the airport. We recommend Scott Turow’s latest, Pleading Guilty and John Grisham’s The Client (both just out in paperback). Or why not try Manchester’s answer to Sara Paretsky – Val McDermid. Deadbeat and Kickback both feature an intrepid woman investigator. And if you want a more literary mystery, then Donna Tartt’s A Secret History will be a treat.

Most of the above books are available from Bookmarks, 265 Seven Sisters Road, London N4. 081 802 6145.

Top of page

Socialist Review Index | ETOL Main Page

Last updated: 8 May 2017