The pictures arrive at first in the sad multi-tones of greys, the ever-present grey concrete walls of the narrow alleys of the refugee camp, the shadows and lines on faces, the abstract shadows of wire and fence on concrete, and the loom of the Wall that separates the camp from its outlying fields.

An excellent work, Muqtada ends off right where current events pick up with the recent Iraqi army attacks ordered by Nuri al-Maliki in southern Iraq, Basra in particular.

We waited breathless. Breathing heavily was hazardous under these somewhat exceptional circumstances. The army, my father often advised, was sensitive to the slightest movements or sounds, including a whisper, a cough, or God forbid, a sneeze.

Shortly after Richard Wright's passing in 1960, Julia Wright found hidden in her father's papers the manuscript for A Father's Law, the last unfinished novel by the iconic American novelist.

Isabel Allende's first and most famous novel, The House of the Spirits, is a family saga that also conveys an atmosphere of workers' struggle against the tyranny of the Chilean landowners.

The concept of empire has been discussed quite rigorously by various authors since the advent of the Bush administration, with views ranging from neocon jingoism through more academic apologists to those berating empire for the ills of the world.

Historian and contributing editor of Political Affairs, Gerald Horne has a new book titled Blows Against Empire, a series of nine powerful essays on contemporary crisis of U.S. imperialism as it confronts the world.

Unsurprisingly, author Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA veteran responsible for drafting the notorious US rendition program, frequently quotes Machiavelli in his devastating predictions of the chaotic road to US suicide.

“Ordinary” racism distinguishes several races within the human race, and affirms the superiority of one of them (usually the white race) over the others. This racism has been used to “justify” social inequalities and colonial domination.

Every now and then a "prize" of a book comes along that includes all the elements of good writing. Bad Samaritans is one of them. Using straightforward language that generally avoids using the lexicon of economists, and explains it well when it is used, Ha-Joon Chang writes a strong narrative about the ills of the capitalist world.

I was disappointed that Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for "There Will Be Blood," not because he's not a great actor (he is), but because the movie was such a betrayal of the book on which it was based.

April 29th of this year will mark the 25th anniversary of the inauguration of Harold Washington as Chicago's first African American mayor. That extraordinary moment in the life of Chicago is being celebrated with the beautiful and powerfully written book of photographs titled Harold!: Photographs from the Harold Washington Years

In this wonderfully written work, Jonathan Schell reviews the history of the doomsday weapons that have affected all our lives to a significant degree whether we realize it or not.

It is an adventure story, the kind one imagines young boys pour through and reenact on boring summer afternoons. Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, an enormous departure from his previous books, follows the exploits and travels of two companions in Middle Ages Central Asia.

It's not often that you get the chance to review a book about which nothing really negative can be said, but this is definitely the case with Michael Parenti's recently published collection of essays Contrary Notions.

Have you ever thought that there may be a direct connection between increasing obesity in the industrialized countries and poverty and starvation in the rest of the world?

In 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected, he published A People's History of the United States, which has been read over the last 25 years by more people than the combined collected works of the academic establishment writers who have either ignored or attacked him over the years.

Canadian Peter Pigott is alarmed at reports showing waning support for “the troops” in Afghanistan. So Canada in Afghanistan: the war so far was penned to help public opinion to rebound — in a properly hawkish direction — after the author helps Canadians learn some history.

It has been almost twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the German Democratic Republic. Since then a lot has been written about the former socialist state.

I am not a reader of biographies and I am not a fan of learning history by studying the lives of “great men.” Having said that, I believe that ¡Hugo!: The Hugo Chavez Story From Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution by Bart Jones is one of the most important books of 2007.