Anti-Capitalism
eds Emma Bircham and John Charlton
(Bookmarks, £10)

This useful "guide to the movement" is even more topical now thanks to the case of the protester in Genoa who was shot in the head. But, as Emma Bircham writes: "We can't just focus on police violence - we must look at the much greater violence the police are defending", such as the starvation of people in developing nations that are crippled by debt repayments. This book hopes to be a model of the "new consensus", collecting articles by socialists, greens, academics and anarchists. The first half covers "issues", from debt and the environment to pharmaceutical patents and immigration; the second covers "regions", complaining about what free-market reforms are doing to the rural economies of China, for example. There are some hints of the patronising protectionism characteristic of those who want to deny progress to other parts of the world, as if poverty, disease and subsistence farming were some kind of Edenic utopia. But the big problem now seems to be how the movement can avoid infiltration by the moronic riot junkies who grab all the headlines.

Bruce Lee
Simon B Kenny
(Pocket Essentials, £3.99)

So - Bruce Lee. The James Dean of kung fu. Revolutionary martial genius who could have floored Mike Tyson while simultaneously besting Bertrand Russell in philosophical debate? Or fleet-footed ballroom dancer with some Wing Chun training who looked pretty on screen but couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag? Opinions are still polarised, 28 years after his death. As a student of Lee's own martial-arts style, Kenny leans towards the former opinion. He gives too much weight to Lee's "philosophy" - bog-standard diluted taoism - but his film reviews are useful and the story of the "dragon" is well told. If you ask me, though, Lee owes much of his global veneration to the fact that his face was more acceptably aquiline to a western audience than those of modern Asian stars such as Jackie Chan or Jet Li. Plus, of course, there were his ululating kung-fu screams. You can't put a price on those.

Louis Armstrong in His Own Words
Louis Armstrong, ed Thomas Brothers
(Oxford, £14.99)

This glorious collection of letters, notebooks and articles reveals Armstrong to have been an adventurous cat with words as well as with his horn. He appears to have regarded writing as a species of musical improvisation, apologising at one point for using a pen: "And I wanted so badly to swing a lot of Type Writing." Satchmo's reminiscences of Storyville are sensuously marinated in smells, smoke and hot music, and there is much entertainingly eccentric musing on the search for the right herbal laxative and the healing properties of marijuana. Even his sad inability to understand bebop is rendered more sympathetic by the energy of his dismissal: "Screeching at a high note and praying to God that they'd hit it." In any case, you have to admire a man who can begin a sentence: "Regardless of the Genuineness of Asses..."