An impassioned manifesto from the author of Booker-winner God of Small Things, one of the most vocal campaigners in the world. India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product. The rest of the population are ghosts within a system beyond their control. This includes the millions that live on less than $2 a day; or the hundreds of thousands of farmers who ...
School violence has fallen steadily for twenty years. Yet in schools throughout the United States, Annette Fuentes finds metal detectors and drug tests for aspirin, police profiling of students with no records, arbitrary expulsions, armed teachers, increased policing, and all-seeing electronic surveillance. This climate of fear has permitted the imposition of unprecedented restrictions on young people’s rights, dignity, and educational freedoms. ...
Blistering and timely interrogation of the politics and motives of an infamous ex-leftist. Irascible and forthright, Christopher Hitchens stood out as a man determined to do just that. In his younger years, a career-minded socialist, he emerged from the smoke of 9/11 a neoconservative “Marxist,” an advocate of America’s invasion of Iraq filled with passionate intensity. Throughout his life, he played the role of universal gadfly, whose commitme ...
The story of the struggle for Britain’s schools, and a passionate call for education as a public good. School Wars tells the story of the struggle for Britain’s education system. Established during the 1960s and based on the progressive ideal of good schools for all, the comprehensive system has over the past decades come under sustained attack from successive governments. From the poorest comprehensives to the most well-resourced independent s ...
Debunking the bluster of New York Times columnist and capitalist apologist Thomas Friedman, as part of Verso’s new “Counterblasts” series. Factual errors, ham-fisted analysis, and contradictory assertions—compounded by a penchant for mixed metaphors and name-dropping—distinguish the work of Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman. The Imperial Messenger reveals the true value of this media darling, a ris ...
First-hand report on the largest migration inhuman history. Each year, 200 million workers from China’s vast rural interior travel between cities and provinces in search of employment: the largest human migration in history. This indispensable army of labour accounts for half of China’s GDP, but is an unorganized workforce—“scattered sand,” in Chinese parlance—and the most marginalized ...
The first no-holds-barred expose of the exploitative world of internships. Millions of young people—and increasingly some not-so-young people—now work as interns. They famously shuttle coffee in a thousand magazine offices, legislative backrooms, and Hollywood studios, but they also deliver aid in Afghanistan, map the human genome, and pick up garbage. Intern Nation is the first expose of the exploitative world of internships. In this witty, ...
A revealing account of the leader at the forefront of Latin America’s socialist revolution. The authoritative first-hand account of contemporary Venezuela, Hugo Chavez places the country’s controversial and charismatic president in historical perspective, and examines his plans and programs. Welcomed in 1999 by the inhabitants of the teeming shanty towns of Caracas as their potential savior, and greeted by Washington with considerable alarm, th ...
First-hand accounts of the largest pro-labor mass mobilization in modern American history. In the spring of 2011, Wisconsinites took to the streets in what became the largest and liveliest labor demonstrations in modern American history. Protesters in the Middle East sent greetings—and pizzas—to the thousands occupying the Capitol building in Madison, and 150,000 demonstrators converged on the city. In a year that has seen a revival of protest ...
