prize winning American author Ellen Gilchrist. The subjects of these stories are intriguing and underpinned with racial and sexual tensions making for at blurb on the back of The love of a good woman by Isabel Miller (Black Swan, £3.95) which talks about 'Milly ... boxed in by the truth of her biology' The second world war years have proved fruitful for their lives are transformed by the new possibilities these years
Gertrude, working outside her home for the first time, is uplifted by the companionship and insight of her fellow workers. Milly, who is a lesbian, applies for a live-in companion when her husband goes to war, and they fall in love. It's a sort of Rosie the
For those of you hooked on feminist thrillers enter Dr Loretta Lawson, English lecturer and reluctant sleuth. A masculine ending by Joan Smith (Faber and Faber, £3.95) is an unusual and uneasy thriller of which the 'heroine' is not a makes mistakes and goes through a process of selfknowledge as the mystery
Snow Storms by Sarah Dunant (Michael Joseph, £10.45) features another woman lecturer, of AngloSaxon history this time. Snore storms is impossible to put down in any sense -compelling, dry and clever. The plot is about the cocaine trade, but much more it is a relationships and the addiction
to wealth and drugs.
Lyn — a story of prostitution by June Levine and Lyn Madden (Women's Press, £4.95) is a nonfictional account of terror. It begins as Lyn watches her lover and pimp throw a fire bomb into the house of her friend Dolores Lynch. Three women die as a result -Dolores, her mother and aunt. Lyn's life story is a testament to survival and banishes forever the myth of the happy DO YOU WANT to catch up on revisionism? Then try The end of organised capitalism by Scott Lash and John Urry (Polity Press, £9.95). Lash and Urry argue that we live in an era of 'disorganised capitalism'.
The world market has broken down nationally organised cartels; the expansion in the number of white collar workers and the decline in the core manual working class has released 'new social movements' for 'the development of a need not be reformist' "post-marxism' some sort of material basis which it lacked in the past. That reminds me ... whatever happened to ...
Yes, it's that man again. Gregory Elliot's political and intellectual biography of Louis Althusser, Althusser: the detour of theory (Verso, £10.95), attempts to put the ideas of the bane of seventies social science students in some sort of historical context.
Althusser's metaphysical gobbledygook is now old hat. His epigones and acolytes have long since superseded the limits on the 'autonomy of ideology' set by his deeply anti-humanist
and constipated structuralist marxism.
More in vogue these days among trendy theorists are notions of 'de-centred discourses of power' propounded by Michel Foucault, a member of the same PCF cell as Althusser in the sixties ('de-centred power', 'disorganised capitalism' — perhaps these characters are on to something).
Those, like me, who would probably find Elliot's account of his thought a mite too
Fittingly for a book on Althusser, Elliot's writing style is inaccessible and it's pretty expensive for a paperback too. Nevertheless, worth a look if you've got the time
Someone who would have no truck with the likes of Althusser or any of those other airy-fairy 'armchair socialists' is Degsy (Inside left, Derek Hatton, Bloomsbury, £3.95). sort of thing to the effete/ feminist, middle class university educated loony left' types in London he so despises. publicity-seeking bigmouth that he so obviously is, but they provide an untaxing read.
Makeba: my story (Miriam Makeba with James Hall, Bloomsbury, £4.95) describes an altogether more substantial life. "The empress of African song', Miriam Makeba has been banned from her homeland since the banning of the ANC in the early sixties when she was on tour abroad.
A bit of a name dropper, Makeba has spent her life in exile living in the west African state of Guinea. A friend of the interested in the ins and outs of politics she is, however, quite clear about her own role in the
ending of racial oppression in the continent of Africa.
'I am not running away from anything but towards something; toward a day when the world realises, through voices like mine, that there is a terrible evil among all people that is dragging us down and must be stopped. I am not a vengeful person, but I know there is a political system tha must answer for the murders o my relatives and ancestors. My message is my concert. American diaspora during the husbands (the first being a black South African policeman who beat her) is the SNCC and Black Panther leader, the egomaniacal Kawme Touré (Stokely Carmichael). He once described his ex-wife as of a petty bourgeois mentality.
Why not make your own judgement by reading this undemanding account of Makeba's often difficult and thing worth reading in The have more sections than news. complete Britain's bourgeois needed (before moving into socialism of course) is a revival of the republican spirit. Off with their heads I say!
Ascherson hates Thatcherism and astutely points out its strong state, free market contradictions. This excellent collection (Games with shadows, Radius, £7.95) brings together Ascherson's essays elsewhere and covers plenty of and west. He is Britain's only rival to Alexander Cockburn in the field of principled left journalism (DP) • SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no7 May/June 1988
REVIEWS 39 SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/June 1988
KEITH WHITE Eyes on the prize — America's civil rights years 1954 - 65, six part documentary, BBC tv, and the companion book of the same title, Juan Williams and the production team, Harrap, £14.95. THE VICTORY of the north in the American civil war brought with it many new rights for southern blacks, including the vote. But this short-lived 'emancipation' ended just 12 years after the end of the war in 1877.
By 1900 segregation and discrimination were codified in the notorious 'Jim Crow' laws depriving blacks of equal rights in voting, jobs, education, social and commercial facilities.
Using a skilful combination of narrative and personal testimony, Eyes on the prize tells the story of the subsequent battle of us blacks for civil rights.
There was no significant progress in this battle until painstaking efforts over many years by black lawyers working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) led in 1954 to an historic supreme court judgement declaring school segregation unconstitutional.
This was the catalyst needed for blacks to organise themselves against the whole 40 'Jim Crow' system — the law
and the constitution was on their side. At the same time the white citizens' council, pledged to resist integration, was formed and grew rapidly throughout the south.
The mass movement was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passanger. Her arrest led to a boycott by 50,000 blacks which lasted a year before the busses were integrated. This victory saw the emergence of Martin Luther King Jnr as a leader. It is also noteworthy in that it illustrates the central role of women in the movement.
In