Venezuelan Revolution by Hugo Chávez

UNDERSTANDING THE VENEZUELAN REVOLUTION
Hugo Chávez Talks to Marta Harnecker
by Hugo Chávez and Marta Harnecker
Translated by Chesa Boudin

Monthly Review Press
ISBN:1-58367-127-7
Paper Back 232 Pages
Price :$15.95

Marta Harnecker’s interviews with Hugo Chávez began soon after one of the most dramatic moments of Chávez’s presidency—the failed coup of April 2002, which ended with Chávez restored to power by a massive movement of protest and resistance. In the aftermath of the failed coup, Chávez talks to Harnecker about the formation of his political ideas, his aspirations for Venezuela, its domestic and international policies, problems of political organization, relations with social movements in other countries, and more, constantly relating these to concrete events and to strategies for change.

The exchange between Harnecker and Chávez—sometimes reflective, sometimes anecdotal, always characterized by their passionate commitment to the struggles of the oppressed—brings to light the process of thought and action behind the public pronouncements and policies of state.

The interviews are supplemented by extracts from Chávez’s most recent pronouncements on the ongoing transformation in Venezuela and Latin America, an analysis by Harnecker on the role of the military, and a chronology.

Hugo Chávez has become a symbol of defiance of U.S. imperialism throughout Latin America. His importance for the future of the region makes this book essential reading.

Viva South America! by Oliver Balch

Viva South America!
Oliver Balch

ISBN: 9780571237036
Paperback 416 Pages
Price :£14.99 Sp.Price :£7.75

Simon Bolívar once inspired a continent to rise from serfdom and throw off the shackles of Spanish rule. With lance and law book, he and his fellow Liberators set the course for independence, freedom and equality. ¡Viva South America! sets out to discover if that dream lives on. Is it fair to describe a land as ‘independent’ while poverty still enslaves millions, where violence lurks in the shadows and where lawlessness gnaws away at progress? Did the Liberators fail? Or are leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales resurrecting those long-ago ideals?Armed with a reporter’s notebook and an open mind, the author hits the road in search of answers. Cutting a path along the highways and byways of the continent, this book lifts the lid on the Liberators’ legacies and sniffs behind their modern-day statues.With the ghost of Bolívar as guide, the quest takes the reader off the tourist trail and into the weird and wonderful worlds of South American culture and society. By stepping into people’s homes and into inmates’ prison cells, by climbing on to dance floors and over road blocks, Oliver Balch unearths untold stories from the front line of South America’s contemporary fight for freedom.

Oliver Balch works as an independent journalist in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he writes regularly for the Guardian. His articles have also appeared in the Financial Times, the Telegraph, the Observer and Fortune magazine. Away from his laptop, he has had jobs as a labourer in Peru, a Bollywood extra in India, a missionary in Bolivia and an English teacher to exiled Tibetan monks. Viva South America! is his first book.

Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligensia

The Philosophy Steamer
Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligensia
Lesley Chamberlain

Atlantic Books
Paperback 432 pages
ISBN: 9781843540939
Price :£9.99 Sp.Price :399.00

In 1922, Lenin personally drew up a list of some 220 ‘undesirable’ intellectuals to be deported from the country in preparation for the creation of the Soviet Union in December of that year. Two ships sailed from Petrograd that autumn, taking around 70 of these eminent men and their families away to what became permanent exile in Berlin, Prague and Paris. Using diaries, letters and memoirs, The Philosophy Steamer tells the story of the philosophers, writers, journalists and scholars thrown out of their homeland and forced to join émigré communities. It also explores the fate of ideas: not just those of Lenin, but also of the men who, though forced to leave their homeland, made unique contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of the twentieth century.

The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky

Stalin's Nemesis
The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
Bertrand Patenaude

Product Details :- Faber and Faber / ISBN: 9780571228751

Hard Cover / Price :£20.00 / Sp.Price :799.00

The story of one of the twentieth century’s most notorious political murders: the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

Synopsis

Trotsky was the charismatic intellectual of the Russian Revolution, and a brilliant writer and orator. He was also a ruthless and authoritarian figure who could have become Lenin’s successor as ruler of the Soviet Union. But by the time of the Second World War, he was a powerless exile in Mexico who had been refused entry to every country in Europe. Living in a villa borrowed from the great artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Trotsky was protected by naive young American acolytes who saw him as the supreme theoretician of world revolution. The hothouse atmosphere of the villa was heightened by emotional turmoil in the relations between Trotsky and Rivera, a volcanically unstable man, and the sexual tension in his relations with the beautiful Frida Kahlo. Trotsky’s wife was restless and jealous. Exotic visitors like the Surrealist poet André Breton came and went. The puritanical Trotsky drove his young followers hard.Outside, the wolves were gathering. Mexican communists, led by the celebrated painter David Siqueiros, tried to storm the house and kill the man they regarded as the supreme traitor to their cause. The Trotskys’ younger son, apolitical and harmless, had been liquidated in Russia, and their older son had died under mysterious circumstances in a Paris clinic, apparently poisoned by Stalin’s assassins. In Moscow, Stalin himself ordered his secret police to kill his fiercest left-wing critic, at any cost. By the summer of 1940, after Trotsky had moved to new quarters, Stalin’s agents had found a man who could penetrate the tight security around their enemy in far-away Mexico.Bertrand Patenaude’s book reconstructs a famous state crime with chilling precision and the page-turning qualities of a true-crime classic. It gives us a humane and panoramic view of Trotsky’s life and of Russia in revolution, as well as a story of deadly rivalry, revolutionary fanaticism and tragic violence and loss.

About The Author

Bertrand M. Patenaude is a lecturer at Stanford University, where he is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. He is the author or editor of several books on Russian and Soviet history, including The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002), which won the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize.