The New Statesman’s “Red Reads“ – why are they all so old?

Here's an alternative top ten from the past two decades

Our ‘Red Reads’ feature in this week’s magazine – the top fifty left-wing, liberal and progressive books “guaranteed to inspire” – caused much debate and discussion here in the New Statesman offices. Should C.L.R. James be number 1? Is Tom Paine a lefty? How high should the New Testament be? And my own personal, unanswered question: why are there so few contemporary classics included in the list? There are hardly any books from the nineties and the noughties: only six books (“What a Carve Up” (49), “How We Should Rule Ourselves” (48), “Tom and Clem” (43), “No Logo” (23), “Persepolis” (26), Mi Revalueshanary Fren (11)) from these two decades and none of them make the top 10.

So what contemporary classis of left-wing thinking, polemicizing, analysing and writing might be missing from our – by definition – subjective list? Here are ten books, off the top of my head, and in no particular order, from the past twenty years that didn’t make it into the “Red Reads”:

Naomi Klein/“The Shock Doctrine” (2007)
Read the review here

Barack Obama/“Dreams from my Father” (1995)
Read the review here

John Pilger/“Hidden Agendas” (1998)
Read the review here

Paul Krugman/“The Conscience of a Liberal”(2007)
Read the review here

Mark Curtis/“Web of Deceit” (2003)
Read the review here

Give a gift subscription to the New Statesman this Christmas from just £49

Subscribe

Tariq Ali/“The Clash of Fundamentalisms” (2003)
Read the review here

Christopher Hitchens/“No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton” (1999)
Read the review here

Will Hutton/“The State We’re In” (1995)
Read the review here

Joseph Stiglitz /“Globalization and its Discontents” (2002)
Read the review here

Seymour Hersh/“Chain of Command” (2005)
Read the review here