Thanks to writer and activist Nora Loreto’s solid research, journalism and activism, her new book, Take Back the Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age, manages to investigate what has happened to the feminist movement in Canada and beyond, and demonstrate what it will take for it to become a major force in Canadian society. This work could not be more urgent.

We are well trained in our culture not to speak of communism and love in the same breath, or indeed, of any kind of politics and love in the same breath, but Richard Gilman-Opalsky, author of The Communism of Love, defies this taboo; he cuts through the nonsensical idea of love as necessarily apolitical, and is especially against the idea of love as something to be isolated in the tiny ghetto of the romantic-erotic duo.

Andreas Malm’s latest book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline—his second in less than six months from Verso—is a call for rapid escalation by the global climate movement into the realm of sabotage and property destruction. Yet Malm spends no time at all in this text on the very real threats of policing, surveillance, or incarceration. As James Wilt explains, this is an astonishing abdication of responsibility.

Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class may not be a great book, but it is a timely and important one. It reminds the reader that right wing populism only succeeds where the left has failed to understand, engage, and properly represent the working class. As the NDP prepares for the next federal election, it should heed the lessons in Embery’s book, especially the one about not confusing Twitter with Canada.

Despite the limitations that have been imposed upon it from abroad, Cuba has still managed to forge its own path in a post-Soviet world to a greater extent than most people would have thought possible in the early 1990s. Yaffe’s book should prompt readers to wonder what it might achieve without the burden of US intransigence—if the island finally had the opportunity to prosper rather than simply survive.

Boxing, as the historian Gerald Horne argues in his engaging and meticulously researched book, The Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering, and the Political Economy of Boxing, was effectively weaponized by Blacks in the battle against white supremacy. It was vital in demolishing the ugly stereotypes and myths propagated by the white majority about Blacks.

Written by a Montréal physician specializing in children’s emergency care, Fighting for a Hand to Hold begins with a shocking symptom: sick or injured Indigenous children from northern Québec being air-lifted to southern hospitals unaccompanied by a parent or care-giver who speaks their language. The author investigates this outrageous practice to reveal a racist system of medical colonialism.

In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes commits to the idea that resistance to projects of settler colonialism like the Dakota Access Pipeline, “has always been a future-oriented and life-oriented project,” and provides context for Standing Rock by making essential connections between Indigenous resistance in the United States and that of other colonized peoples globally in their struggle against imperialism.

While not a heroic call to arms, Wright’s last book is useful in its analysis and concise in its strategy. His life’s work imagined utopia, and while some may find this manifesto too tame of a project or too naïve to embark upon, it ought to be a great starting point for those who feel stuck in capitalism’s contemporary quagmire and have yet to envision a socialist alternative.

Despite memorable performances from Glenn Close and Amy Adams, Hillbilly Elegy is a shallow portrayal of the decline of the American white working class. While the film does have captivating and engaging moments, it falls flat with its clichés about rugged individualism and ultimately disappoints as a story focused on Appalachian poverty and the erosion of the welfare state.