Difference between revisions of "Newest Politics and Society Reviews"
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| + | |summary=In the mid 1990s journalist and author Geert Mak returned to his native Friesland and took up residence in the village of Jorwert. His aim was to investigate the quiet revolution going on in the agrarian communities not just of Holland but of the whole of Europe. | ||
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| + | This wasn't going to be an outsider's view. Mak grew up in the northern Dutch province; he spoke the language; he knew the games and understood the people. In a very real sense Mak was going home… and finding that it scarcely existed any more. | ||
| + | |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099546868</amazonuk> | ||
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|author=Mark Oaten | |author=Mark Oaten | ||
Revision as of 14:08, 26 September 2010
Politics and society
An Island in Time: The Biography of a Village by Geert Mak
In the mid 1990s journalist and author Geert Mak returned to his native Friesland and took up residence in the village of Jorwert. His aim was to investigate the quiet revolution going on in the agrarian communities not just of Holland but of the whole of Europe.
This wasn't going to be an outsider's view. Mak grew up in the northern Dutch province; he spoke the language; he knew the games and understood the people. In a very real sense Mak was going home… and finding that it scarcely existed any more. Full review...
Screwing Up by Mark Oaten
Like John Profumo and others, Mark Oaten will probably be remembered for the wrong reasons. It was the episode which made him for a while the country's No. 1 paparazzi target, and which as he recounts in his Prologue, when his 'world was crashing down' and it hardly needs recounting in detail. Yet when all is said and done, this is a very lively, readable, sometimes quite poignant memoir from one of the men whose career at Westminster began and ended with the Blair and Brown years. Throughout there is an admirable absence of self-pity. Full review...
School Blues by Daniel Pennac
Daniel Pennac's book discusses the issue of children who struggle at school, and offers some ideas on how teachers can and should help them. It is not a dry textbook on educational theory. He writes from personal experience, as a teacher and novelist who was once 'un cancre', translated here as a dunce or a bad student. Full review...
The Kid: A True Story by Kevin Lewis
Kevin Lewis grew up on a poverty-stricken London council estate in the sort of home that the neighbours complain about. His mother – inadequate by any measure – hated him more than most of her six children and he was beaten and starved by both of his parents. You might think that Social Services would have stepped in and removed him, but any relief was to be short-lived. Eventually he was put into care but even then the support was inadequate and Kevin found himself caught up in a criminal underworld where he was known simply as 'The Kid'. Full review...
Decline and Fall: Diaries 2005 to 2010 by Chris Mullin
At the end of A View from the Foothills we left Chris Mullin wondering why he was no longer Tony Blair's Africa minister at the Foreign Office. He was never to get a definitive answer to this, but was later told that Blair handed out the junior ministerial appointments rather like sweets, with few worries about how people would feel if they were missed out or sacked. In Decline and Fall we see Chris come down from the foothills of politics and return to the backbenches. He might no longer be in a position of power, but he's still in the thick of it. Perhaps though, some of the enjoyment is draining away from the job as he sees himself with years more of doing nothing very important. Full review...
Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out by Malalai Joya
Forget entertainment – this is a book to read if you have any interest in the war in Afghanistan. My particular view has developed from a British armchair, comprising part emotional reaction, a smidgeon of history and an over-reliance on British media sources. In a war zone where truth has been a casualty throughout, this book gives the general reader an authentic view of conditions in Afghanistan over the past twenty five years of continual warfare. Written by a young and hot-headed, wildly patriotic 'ordinary' woman, this is no more reliable than any other partisan view, but its value is to help put official news sources into their proper context. I found it educative in several senses. Full review...
Sucking Eggs: What Your Wartime Granny Could Teach You About Diet, Thrift and Going Green by Patricia Nicol
In the current economy, lots of people are trying to make ends meet in their own ways. Not since the days of Brownie badges has the word thrift been bandied around so much, but now it's not so much about saving money as it is about surviving. Actually, maybe it always was, but the Guiding Association thought a jolly piggy bank was a more appropriate badge emblem than a depressed family collapsed in front of their Sky TV with their supermarket-own curry struggling to fill the void left by a regular take away. What we all need is a return to the good old days, when life was simpler and people happier, the days when you didn't need to clear half an hour in your diary to navigate the olive aisle of the supermarket, and when you ate what was fresh and local, not because it was cheap or you were in the mood, but because it was all they had. Full review...
On Balance by Adam Phillips
Essential for a tightrope walker, prized as an intellectual objective, balance is generally considered something to which we can aspire. We praise someone who makes a balanced decision, we envy people who have a 'good work/life balance' we offer an opinion 'on balance' to demonstrate that we have considered various arguments and options. Full review...
And The Land Lay Still by James Robertson
The novel starts ... at the end. We see the fictional character, photographer Mike Pendreich collating many, many photographs which his late father took with his trusty camera. His father is generally acknowledged as the better of the two at the craft; he simply had the knack. And what his son is now in charge of are black and white photographs charting a social history at that time. And we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words. Full review...
Murder in the High Himalaya by Jonathan Green
The Himalayan mountains mean many things to different people. To the people of Tibet, trapped under the atheist occupiers from China, who ran the Dalai Lama out in the 1950s in their consuming urge for lebensraum and mineral mining, they are a near-impenetrable barrier, protecting their country from history's prior ravages, but keeping people who want out, very much in. To rich Westerners, they are a sparkling challenge - a task of the highest order, a box to tick on the way to self-fulfilment - something to be climbed, because they're there. Full review...
Dear Mr Bigelow: A Transatlantic Friendship by Frances Woodsford
Meet Mister Bigelow. He's elderly, living alone on Long Island, New York, with some health problems but more than enough family and friends to get him by, and still a very active interest in yachting, regattas and more. Meet, too, Frances Woodsford. She's reaching middle-age, living with her brother and mum in Bournemouth, and working for the local baths as organiser of events, office lackey and more. I suggest you do meet them, although neither ever met the other. Despite this they kept up a brisk and lively conversation about all aspects of life, from the late 1940s until his death at the beginning of the 60s. And as a result comes this book, of heavily edited highlights, which opens up a world of social history and entertaining diary-style comment. Full review...
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
In John Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, in October 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a mother of five children, died of cervical cancer at the age of 31. However, a sample of her cancer cells taken the same year lived on, grew and reproduced. Often referred to as HeLa cells, cells with their origins in the original sample are still being used in medical and scientific research today, nearly sixty years on. Many of the scientific breakthroughs that have been made using HeLa cells are hugely profitable. But her children have spent their lives in low waged jobs and on welfare, unable to afford basic health insurance. Understandably they feel a lot of anger at this injustice. Full review...
The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want by Garrett Keizer
What is noise? Do we count birdsong at sunrise as noise? And if so, what different term would we use to describe a jet aircraft taking off? Why do we respond so differently to the two? Even more intriguingly, would our response change if the birdsong woke us from an exhausted sleep but the aircraft was taking off to jet us on a long awaited holiday? Full review...
Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back by Douglas Rushkoff
The author of this book was mugged outside his apartment one Christmas Eve. He posted a note online to warn his neighbours to be extra careful, and was promptly berated for doing something so public that could potentially damage property values in his local area. This is a thought-provoking snippet, and if the whole book was like this, I'm sure I would have been gripped. Full review...
The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict by Peter Beaumont
Peter Beaumont is the Foreign Affairs editor at The Observer. He joined the paper in 1989 and has spent much of the intervening time dealing with the kind of 'foreign affairs' that is better described as 'war reporting'. 'The Secret Life of War' is a distillation of his years in the field. It is a book ill-served by both its title and its cover, except maybe insofar as both might serve to sneak it onto the bookshelves of those who really need to read it, but probably wouldn't choose to do so were it more accurately wrapped. Full review...
Who Are We - And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge
Journalist Gary Younge’s book draws heavily on his articles for the Guardian newspaper, as he mentions in his acknowledgements, but it isn’t just a collection of his journalism. Who Are We? is partly a memoir and partly a thoughtful and incisive exploration of the politics and political impact of identity, including race, gender, language groups, religion, sexuality in various countries around the world. He sets out to explore 'To what extent can our various identities be mobilized to accentuate our universal humanity as opposed to separating us off into various, antagonistic camps?' Full review...
Guilt About the Past by Bernhard Schlink
Consider, if you will, guilt. You might have it tainting you, as 'beyond the perpetrators, every person who stands in solidarity with them and maintains solidarity after the fact becomes entangled'. The link might not strictly be a legal one, but concern 'norms of religion and morals, etiquette and custom as well as day-to-day communications and interactions'. Hence a collective guilt like no other - that witnessed in Germany. 'The assumption that membership to a people engenders solidarity is something Germans of my generation do not easily like to accept', we read. However difficult it might have been back then in its day, Germany had to physically renounce anything to do with Nazism, to actively 'opt-out' of connections to avoid the solidarity seen connecting the whole nation like a toxic spider web. And since then it's linked in all the children, in a bequeathal of guilt. Full review...
The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch by Michael Wolff
There can be few people who are unaware of the name of Rupert Murdoch. Over four decades he's built News International into a seventy billion dollar corporation from its original Australian base. His position in the UK media is such that he's courted by politicians and has what many believe to be an excessive amount of power for someone who is not elected and is not even a UK citizen. He's now expanding into Southeast Asia and in his eightieth year it's still difficult to imagine when – or where – he will stop. Full review...
The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday by Neil MacFarquhar
What are the chances of change in the Middle East? is the question central to this book. Since Neil MacFarquhar spent thirteen years wandering the length and breadth of the Islamic stronghold of the Middle East, I feel inclined to believe his in-depth assessment. In descriptive and reasoned terms, he identifies conservative forces which predominate in the region, primarily the religious and political machinery which condemns liberalization and modernization. This discussion of attempts to promote change, for example by individual dissidents or the media, is strengthened in the second half of the book by detailed case studies of six nations with particular reference to their readiness and motivation for change. Full review...
Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped The World by David Aaronovitch
What shape is a conspiracy theory? Unusual question, I know, but I think on this evidence it is round. A conspiracy theory is lumpen, ragged, full of holes, and has a huge circular gap where the obvious and sensible has dropped through, leaving the believer or theorist with the implausible skeleton of what they choose to think instead. They certainly have a habit of coming round in circles - if I mentioned a heinous crime caused by a western leader that killed hundreds or more people, purely to get their way and get a war started, I could be referring to Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor, Maggie Thatcher and the General Belgrano, or Bush etc and 9/11. Full review...
The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers
Author Douglas Rogers is a Zimbabwean who moved away from the country many years ago, but has never been able to persuade his parents – two white farmers, Lyn and Roz – to follow him out of their homeland, despite the resettlement policies of Robert Mugabe, the hyper-inflation, and the corruption in the country. Instead, the pair just wanted to stay on the farm welcoming people to Drifters, their backpackers' lodge. Full review...
The Rise and Fall of Communism by Archie Brown
'A source of hope for a radiant future or…the greatest threat on the face of the earth'.
Whichever of these descriptions you would apply to Communism you will find Archie Brown's detailed and largely objective study enlightening and engrossing. On one level, this is a chronological description of how a political force grew to dominate a third of the world's population then virtually disappeared within a period of less than a century. Full review...
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
Flicking through the channels on the TV the other night I stumbled across an interview with George Bush's former Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove. After witnessing an especially cringe making hip hop turn at the Washington Correspondents' Dinner (if you haven't seen it take a look at here. It really is jaw droppingly awful) attention turned to weightier matters, most notably Guantanamo Bay and the war on terror and the Bush administrations response to Hurricane Katrina. Full review...
A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy by Martin Bell
I've long thought it strange that of all the ills that have befallen the country over the last few years it was not really the bankers' follies or the swine flu that never really got off the ground but the venality of our MPs which caught the public's attention. Compared to the amounts required to bail out a bank the sums involved were minute, but moats, floating duck houses and flipping houses caught the imagination and our elected representatives became just a little wary of admitting what they did for a living. Full review...
A Rainbow in the Night by Dominique Lapierre
A book integrating otherwise piecemeal news stories picked up over the past forty years into a coherent explanation is always welcome. This book explores South Africa's history and development, from the earliest Dutch arrivals in 1652 to the first racially integrated elections in 1994. Full review...
Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over The World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy by Marina Hyde
I have what is perhaps a regular-sized interest in A and B-list celebrities. I can name the off-spring of many an actress, tell you who the spokespeople for certain brands are, write a list of celebs with publicly declared devotions to certain religions, even win the odd pub quiz thanks to knowing the birth names of various performers. I know all sorts of things about this rather small subset of society, but I know the what more than the why, and that's exactly the problem, according to this book. After all, if more of us sat down to wonder about what it actually is that the likes of Geri Halliwell and Nicole Kidman bring to the UN, we might seriously question how and why they ever got involved in the first place. Full review...
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms 1981 - 1991 by Salman Rushdie
We read some authors because we know we're going to enjoy them. Others, we feel somehow obliged to read. If we consider ourselves readers, and certainly if we have any pretensions (I use the word advisedly) to being well-read, then there are some books and more particularly some authors with whom we are required to become familiar. Full review...
Struggle or Starve by Carole White and Sian Williams
Struggle or Starve is a collection of autobiographical writings about girls' and women's lives in South Wales between the wars. This is a new edition of a book first published in 1998 by Honno, an independent publisher set up to encourage Welsh women writers. Most of the contributors in this book came from miners' families and grew up in real poverty and economic insecurity. Full review...
The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better For Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
If you asked people why it is (or might be) a good idea to reduce inequality in a society, many people would assume that reducing inequality works by making the life of the poorest better: that the poor are the ones who benefit from reduction of inequality. Full review...
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields
'The Novel is Dead' is not really what a novelist wants to read first on picking up a new book – but I persevered with Shields' manifesto and I'm glad I did. This is a thought-provoking wake-up call that any artist, writer or book-lover will enjoy. Full review...
The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
This book is a collection of autobiographical essays by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, whose best known work is the novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. Topics covered include Nigerian, Biafran and Igbo history and culture, African literature and the legacy of colonialism in his country and the rest of Africa. Some of the essays are taken from guest lectures at universities around the world and conference papers, and others are written for this book, particularly many of the more personal pieces about Achebe's family. Full review...
Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin by Norah Vincent
Voluntary Madness is journalist Norah Vincent's account of her visits to three mental health facilities in America. The first is an urban, public hospital that houses mainly homeless, psychotic patients, many of whom are addicted to drugs. In this hospital, the doctors are overworked and jaded and medication is always the answer. Soon, the author finds that her latent depression (which led her to do the book in the first place) is returning. The process of being institutionalised breaks her sense of self-worth down astonishingly fast. Indeed, she suggests that it is the lack of autonomy in institutional life, even for those patients who voluntarily commit themselves, that makes it so hard for them to rebuild independent lives when they finally leave the institution. Full review...
Direct Red by Gabriel Weston
Few people have the ability to convey the minutiae of their profession in ways which engage the reader, answer your unspoken questions and talk in such a way that you're neither patronised nor overburdened with jargon. Gabriel Weston is one such – and Direct Red held me as though I was hypnotised for several hours. She's a surgeon and we're pulled into the intricacies of her world without the need to don mask and gown. Full review...
Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don't Get Why Men Don't Get Them by Jean Hannah Edelstein
Men aren't Martian and women don't hail from Venus. We're all Earthlings apparently; which seems like progress of a sort. Even so we still have trouble understanding each other because we speak different languages – Himglish and Femalese. Luckily Jean Hannah Edelstein is fluent in both and has written this light hearted volume to define the problem and translate. Full review...
The Tall Man: Life and Death on Palm Island by Chloe Hooper
Cameron Doomadgee – Mulrunji – was just thirty six years old when he was arrested on Palm Island. Quite why he was arrested was never clear. He wasn't drunk, although he had been drinking beer – and was walking along the road singing Who Let the Dogs Out? Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley felt that there was reason to arrest Mulrunji for creating as public nuisance and he was taken to the police station. What happened next was to be the subject of intense media speculation and legal proceedings over the coming years, but within forty five minutes Mulrunji was dead. Full review...
How Could She? by Dana Fowley
From the age of five Dana Fowley was subjected to unimaginable sexual abuse and before long her sister would be subjected to more of the same. She was raped by her mother's partner and taken to the homes of her grandparents where she was abused by them and others. At other times she was forced to go to the homes of other men where she was raped and abused. Did her mother not know what was going on? Did she turn a blind eye? It was neither of those.
Her mother was a willing participant in the abuse and organised much of it. Full review...
Climb the Green Ladder: Make Your Company and Career More Sustainable by Amy V Fetzer and Shari Aaron
With the abject failure of the Denmark Climate Change Conference fresh in our minds, it is perhaps time to turn away from the politicians and look back toward what we can do.
The Conference may have finally got the likes of the USA, India and China to acknowledge that they have to join in if we are going to save the planet as a benevolent place for our species to live, but there is still too much posturing and not enough commitment.
Clearly our governments and 'leaders' are not going to do this for us; we have to do it for ourselves. Full review...
A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How We Can Save the World and Create Prosperity by Nicholas Stern
The hardback edition of 'A Blueprint for a Safer Planet' was published early in 2009 as an update to the 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change. Now here is the paperback edition, published too early to critique Copenhagen, but nonetheless an interesting read. Stern is an expert witness who presents his evidence understandably for the layman; he is unemotional and very convincing. Full review...
Guilt Trip: From Fear to Guilt on the Green Bandwagon by Alex Hesz and Bambos Neophytou
Did you know that Horlicks, that great sleep aid, is sold in India as a start-the-day energy boost? Not another concoction under the same brand, but the Exact Same Product. Full review...
Wasted: Why Education Isn't Educating by Frank Furedi
It seems the more problems the school-aged generation pose to society, the more responsibility schools have to take, teaching not simply English and Maths, but Personal Thinking and Learning Skills, Happiness Classes, and Emotional Education. The duty to raise a child well is taken out of the apparently 'incompetent' hands of parents, and given over to the education system, where values can be regulated and controlled. Full review...
Reversing Global Warming For Profit by Bill Butterworth
There aren't many climate change deniers left, are there? We all know it's there. We all know, too, that the world's population growth is on a collision course with the dwindling of its resources. The world's going to get hotter, its weather more extreme. Fossil fuels are going to run out. More and more people will compete for fewer and fewer of civilisation's luxuries. We're all worried. Full review...
They've Got Your Number by Stephen Baker
If you are in the slightest bit paranoid, worry that Big Brother is always watching or like to believe that you are not a number, but a free man (or woman), then this may not be the book for you, as it will do nothing to dispel any of those worries. If, on the other hand, you think 'the mathematical modelling of humanity' sounds like one of the sexiest things ever, and are chomping at the bit to learn more about it, then you might well be interested in what Business Week journalist Baker has to say. Full review...
Is it Just Me or Has the Shit Hit the Fan?: Your Hilarious New Guide to Unremitting Global Misery by Steven Lowe and Alan McArthur
The banks fell over like fat Labradors running over a wet kitchen floor. Surely that is the wackiest, most inappropriate simile for the credit crunch and all it has done for the world. You won't get any such namby-pamby animal likenesses from these authors, instead with quite a potty mouth on them they will lambast the modern world, the entire banking system, all those who failed to see it coming, and those millions just seemingly waiting for us all to revert to high-interest, high-risk, high-lending capitalism, so they can get back on the expenses train, and back up the rich lists. Full review...
