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Heather L. Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014)

Gerd Callesen and Svetlana Gavril’čenko, eds., Friedrich Engels: Briefwechsel Oktober 1889 bis November 1890.  Vol. 30 of Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels: Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013).

Samir Amin, Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory. (Monthly Review Press, 2013);
Samir Amin, The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2013)

In these two works Amin characterizes the current state of the global economy as generalized monopoly capitalism. This regime, in his view, began after 1975 and was fully in place by 2000. He gives a compelling description of it.

Stephen Eric Bronner, Modernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia (Columbia University Press, 2012)

One of the crucial features of Modernism is that artistic, literary, and intellectual producers began to see themselves as the vanguard of a completely new era in human history. Indeed, to be “avant-garde” meant that aesthetic production should be put to the purpose of reshaping social reality. This was part of the vanguardist sensibility that defined movements like Russian Futurism and French Surrealism.

John Tully, Silvertown: The lost story of a strike that shook London and helped launch the modern Labor Movement (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014)

Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting without Production: How Finance Exploits Us All (London: Verso, 2013)

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014)

Marc Frank, Cuban Revelations: Behind the Scenes in Havana (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013)

Roderick D. Bush, The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).

In The End of White World Supremacy, Rod Bush engages readers in a rich intellectual conversation, creating a quilt where each panel contains a story, a point, an example of its own, yet when one stands back, broader themes emerge. To benefit from the book, one needs to consider both the specifics of each conversation as well as the perspective of the whole discussion.