GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Thrilling confessional candour about the time of the Panthers
ANGUS REID highly recommends a memoir of high literary merit written in concise, finely crafted and fast-moving prose
Elaine Brown, second from right, and other BPP members taken from FBI file Los Angeles, Classification - Civil Unrest
[National Archives/public domain]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
A Taste of Power
by Elaine Brown
Penguin Modern Classics £10.99
WHEN the revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara launched the Black Institute in 1986 in Burkina Faso, he did so with the words: “Black people must take responsibility for their own history and contribute to universal civilisation.”
Elaine Brown’s memoir A Taste of Power, newly reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, takes the lead from a black woman’s perspective within the US.
Brown joined the Black Panther Party in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King. In 1974, when founder, chairman and “minister of defence” Huey Newton went into exile in Cuba he made her the leader, a position she maintained for three years, from 1974 to 1977.
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