Cinders v Charming documents Cristina Wed's experience of living in an abusive relationship; how it impacted on her self-esteem and sense of identity, making it difficult to leave. Following her escape from the violent relationship with her four children, she has described their resulting homelessness and the obstacles they had to surmount to regain the family home. The court battles began a month after escaping from the relationship and continued for the next seven and a half years, so that they were never free from the abusive relationship they had tried to leave behind. The book is based on Cristina's years of experience of the family court system, in a case that involved around 70 court hearings, more than 20 judges, and hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of private capital and public money. It is an argument for greater openness and accountability in the family courts, which have traditionally been closed to the public. Cristina's argument is that the current approach to domestic abuse by many professionals and the judiciary is as abusive as the perpetrator it purports to deal with, and that the family courts fail to protect women and children, consistently denying children in families which have suffered domestic violence a voice and favouring fathers' rights to contact over children's safety. Reviewing the 70 hearings, the book demonstrates the virtual impossibility of holding any professional in the system to account, even when they fail to live up to their own published guidelines and standards of practice. Cristina concludes the account of their ordeals in the legal arena with suggestions for how the family courts could be improved to give greater protection and security to women and children.

The roots of the present ecological crisis, John Bellamy Foster argues in The Ecological Revolution, lie in capital’s rapacious expansion, which has now achieved unprecedented heights of irrationality across the globe. Foster compellingly demonstrates that the only possible answer for humanity is an ecological revolution: a struggle to make peace with the planet. Foster details the beginnings of such a revolution in human relations with the environment which can now be found throughout the globe, especially in the periphery of the world system, where the most ambitious experiments are taking place.

Our world is in the grips of the most calamitous economic crisis since the Great Depression - and its epicentre is the imperial United States. In this groundbreaking analysis of the meltdown, renowned radical political economists Albo, Gindin and Panitch lay bare the roots of the crisis, which they locate in the dynamic expansion of capital on a global scale over the 25 years - and in the inner logic of capitalism itself. This groundbreaking work stands to be the enduring critique of the crisis and an indispensable springboard for a renewed Left.