The latest book by Jeffrey Sachs has much to recommend it, but also some glaring holes and blind spots. Sachs goes fairly deeply into many of the deep-seated problems facing the world, from climate change to dire poverty.

Women and girls in the fictional Northern Mexico city of Santa Teresa are being murdered. Law enforcement officials, riddled with incompetence and corruption, have few clues and do not seem overly concerned.

Nigel Lawson, former British Energy Secretary in the Thatcher government and “Lord Lawson of Blaby,” has written a book that, like some others which minimize global warming, uses partial truths, baldfaced lies, and specious reasoning to make his case.

What do you, the reader, want from a biography? A meticulously assembled heap of information, a clear chronology, a summary of a life – or is it the ideas that are paramount?

"Seeds of Fire" the new, Jon Andersen edited anthology from Smokestack Books is the best collection of political poetry since Lowenfels' "Poets of Today" (1965).

Jane Guskin and David L. Wilson have written an important book on immigrants and immigration policy. Though short, The Politics of Immigration packs quit a punch.

US Attorney General Thomas Gregory persuaded Congress in 1917 to pass the Espionage Act, which contained provisions for government censorship of public discussion of the First World War.

After the cult success of “The Motorcycle Diaries” and an endless assortment of products brandishing the image of iconic revolutionary Che Guevara, what possible biography of the man can live up to his celebrity?

Published as part of a series of books celebrating great revolutionaries, Toussaint L'Ouverture is a selection of notes, letters and memoirs written during the Haitian struggle against slavery and colonialism.

Coca-Cola is the poster child for capitalism. Its brand alone is valued at $65 billion – number one for six years in a row.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General, Thomas Gregory, persuaded Congress to pass the Espionage Act, which contained provisions for government censorship of public discussion of the First World War.

The current meltdown of the world financial system provides a good backdrop for some reflections Alan Greenspan's introduction to his 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence, which is subtitled "Adventures in a New World."

Much has been written about Bob Dylan's life and work, and much of it is very good. From Christopher Ricks' investigation of Dylan's "Visions of Sin" to Mike Marqusee's look at his protest songs in the 1960s and Clinton Heylin's biographical work – not to mention Dylan's own autobiographical "Chronicles" – we have come to learn a great deal more about one of our age's great voices.

Often reading like a murder mystery, Paul Preston's narrative on the Spanish civil war sweeps the reader along with vivid and sympathetic descriptions of his subjects.

Kishore Mahbubani’s new book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, is a sobering text that should be read with three points in mind.

Harper Barnes’ most recent book Never Been A Time tells the story of one of the most bloody race riots in US history – the 1917 East St. Louis race riot. Barnes, a longtime editor and cultural critic for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, outlines the underlying and unique factors that lead to the riot.

The end of the Second World War with Japan is a story of the clashes of three empires – the struggling Soviets, the decline of the Japanese, and the ascendancy of the American. The common media perception is that the use of the atomic bombs ended the war...

The Philippines Communist Party is best known for leading a heroic and successful armed struggle against Japanese occupation between 1941 and 1945 and an equally heroic but ultimately unsuccessful armed resistance to the new US-backed government from 1946.

“A Doctor in Galilee” is a wonderfully descriptive narrative of life and times in Palestine/Israel. Clearly written, with a mix of personal anecdotes, historical tales, and much in the way of a reality based philosophy of a people living under an occupying force that treats them distinctly as a lesser "other."

In just under 350 pages and beginning with her birth in 1979, Halima Bashir describes her journey from a remote tribal village in Sudan, through adolescence to university and to qualification as a doctor of medicine specializing in gynecology and obstetrics.