MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Bay Area Reds
PAUL BUHLE recommends a thorough and necessary history of communist organisation and the difficulties it faced in California
(L) Manzanar Relocation Center, California, May 29 1942. A group of Block Leaders who are drawing up the Constitution for this War Relocation Authority center - front row (L to R) Karl Yoneda [communist], H. Inouye; back row, (L to R) Bill Kito, Ted Akahoshi, Tom Yamazaki, and Harry Nakamura; (R) Dorothy Healey, chair of the CPUSA in Southern California, standing before jail cell in Los Angeles, California, June 29 1949
[Francis Stewart/War Relocation Authority/Public domain; Los Angeles Daily News/Los Angeles Times photographic archive UCLA Library/Public domain] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958
Robert W. Cherny, University of Illinois Press £22.05
THE story of the US left has been pretty much ups and downs, something hardly surprising in world capitalism’s leading nation with a working class historically divided by race and ethnicity.
Among the most startling cases is surely the California Story.
The California Socialist Party of pre-1920 days elected mayors, guided at least some craft unions, had quite a following among displaced Yankees and a scattering of ethnic groups. The rough conditions of what would one day become known as the Left Coast meanwhile prompted IWW-like, semi-anarchist labour activism.
Similar stories
ZOLTAN ZIGEDY reflects on the lessons from two books looking at the US labour movement and the recent history of spontaneous mass uprisings – and finds two pernicious ideologies working against the interests of the people
HELEN MERCER welcomes an account of how US labour leadership collaborated with the state and betrayed their membership
PAUL BUHLE recommends an exhaustive guide to the grand ambition of bringing revolutionary workers together in a global unitary body
JOHN GREEN marvels at the rediscovery of a radical US photographer who took the black civil rights movement to her heart