Jack London

At the tender age of fourteen, Jack London wrote about the lives of those workers, exploited six days a week, fifteen hours a day, for wages that were barely enough to survive on. This daily struggle and the books he consumed at the library (Mark Twain, Karl Marx, Darwin, Tolstoy, Hugo, Zola) helped Jack London to realise the importance of trade unions and socialist ideas. In The Iron Heel, a romantic and political novel, Jack London imagines a tyrannical regime, a blend of capitalism and fascism, to be the ruling class in America. This novel was praised by Leon Trotsky himself in a letter addressed to Jack London’s daughter.

Of all the travel writers Joseph Kessel, born in Argentina to a Lithuanian father and a Russian mother, is certainly the one who travelled the most under different national identities. An insatiable writer, he made numerous trips across different continents to bring back stories that he then published in many forms. The Horsemen - whose action takes place in Afghanistan at a time when this country was synonymous with wide-open spaces and shrouded in mystery - is an inspiring epic novel and an ode to freedom.

Born in Switzerland, Blaise Cendrars left for Russia at the age of sixteen. He started out as a poet whose work included The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Easter in New York. In Planus, Cendrars organises his recollections by port, including Venice, Naples, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Brest and Paris. Eleven harbours which enable him to tell eleven different stories, full of improbable characters, but also to speak of literature "to sing about the departure and openness of others ".

John Reed is an American journalist and communist, who at the turn of the 1910’s took an interest in the Mexican revolution before heading off to Russia and taking part in the October Revolution of 1917. His most famous book Ten Days Which Shook the World is an outstanding first-hand account of the insurrection which, in Petrograd (subsequently Leningrad and now St. Petersburg) caused the fall of the Tsar and the end of the imperialist regime. John Reed died in 1920 from typhus. He is buried beneath the wall of the Kremlin. Warren Beatty, Hollywood’s prodigal son (Bonnie and Clyde), directed Reds  - a long biopic which features Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson.

Jean Hatzfeld joined Liberation newspaper in 1975 and travelled to Rwanda after the massacres that took place there in 1994. He would go on to make many more visits to Rwanda over the next ten years, notably to Nyamata in the marshland regions. Stories from the Rwandan Marshlands brings together accounts from the three books he devoted to this subject: Life Laid Bare (France Culture Prize 2001), Machete Season (Femina Non-Fiction Prize and Joseph Kessel Prize 2004) and The Antelope’s Strategy (Medicis Prize 2007).  A compilation of eyewitness stories and candid accounts. Heart-wrenching.

In 1898, Joris Ivens was quite literally born with a camera in his hand as his father ran a company selling film photography equipment. From the 1930’s onwards, having already directed several experimental short films, he went on to film the struggles of workers and people for their independence. How Yukong Moved The Mountains is a series of 12 films about China in the 1970’s during the last days of the Cultural Revolution. An important documentary (Duration : 11 hours).

In 1915, Corto Maltese headed to San Francisco where he hoped to find his long-time friend, the writer Jack London. But the author of The Call of the Wild had already set sail for Mexico, to discover more about Pancho Villa’s revolution. Yet he left behind a message for Corto, asking him to hand over a letter to a certain Waka Yamada, a former saloon star turned militant opposing the White Slave Trade in Alaska. When it comes to adventure, improbable encounters and lost causes, Corto shares many attributes with Jack London. It is as though Corto is Jack London’s double.

When reading The Dispossessed, one is immediately reminded of Jack London, who, in 1902, walked the squalid streets of London and spent six months in the East End. This experience inspired Jack London to write People of the Abyss. In The Dispossessed Robert McLiam Wilson and photographer Donovan Wylie describe with great attention to detail and empathy the poverty, lack of hope, and absolute desperation of those left behind by Thatcher’s government policies in the cities of London, Glasgow and Belfast.

Stan Laurel, Houdini, Pancho Villa, Leon Trotsky, two journalists who dream of writing a great novel, the director of the CIA, a cocaine trafficker, a Sandinista commander in danger, an old Bulgarian revolutionary, a Spanish anarchist, a Hollywood actor enlisted in the International Brigades, the shadow of Joseph Stalin ... With the disparate pieces of this improbable puzzle, Paco Ignacio Taibo II describes the history of revolutions since the beginning of the century and draws a vivid portrait of those characters behind each revolution not to mention those who were betrayed by them.