review Archives - Page 3 of 4

“Alex Nunn’s engaging style makes Corbyn’s journey from jam-making backbencher to leader of the opposition seem both exciting and totally rational.” THE CANDIDATE reviewed in Peace News

Monday, July 23rd, 2018

Alex Nunn’s engaging style makes Corbyn’s journey from jam-making backbencher to leader of the opposition seem both exciting and totally rational.

Last year, The Candidate won the Bread and Roses award for radical publishing. That first edition traced Corbyn’s rise up to the attempted coup by right-wing Labour MPs in mid-2016.

This new edition includes a 100-page(!) chapter covering last June’s snap general election and the incredible surge of support for Labour despite vitriolic attacks on Corbyn from the right-wing media.

Read the full review here.

“Erudite, caustic and hilarious… creative non-fiction writing at its best.” METAPHYSICAL GRAFFITI reviewed in The Morning Star

Wednesday, July 18th, 2018

ERUDITE, caustic and hilarious, Seth Kaufman’s essays in Metaphysical Graffiti are creative non-fiction writing at its best. He uses lists, anecdotes, mock-Socratic dialogues and dramatic pastiche to condemn hype and celebrate authenticity and audacity.

Kaufman takes pains to define “audacity,” citing the smart satire, purposeful virtuosity and musical game-playing of Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick. But 2112 by Rush, a celebration of the “odious anti-collectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand,” self-indulgent and pretentious, is no risk-taker.

Read the full review here.

“Insightful, kaleidoscopic…” DEFINABLE TRACES IN THE ATMOSPHERE reviewed in The Big Issue

Tuesday, July 17th, 2018

Socialism underpins Definable Traces in the Atmosphere (OR Books, £13), a collection by the indefinable Mike Marqusee, the American writer who spent most of his adult life in England before his death in 2015 and so was able to get to grips with cricket, one of his many great loves. See also, in this insightful, kaleidoscopic book, the politics of Bob Dylan, wanderings in the Subcontinent, flamenco and the quest for authenticity, and – poignantly and previously unpublished – a piece completed in December 2014 entitled The Cancer Dance and the Rites of Positivity.

Read the full article in the latest print edition of The Big Issue.

THE SPREAD MIND picked as one of Tim Parks’ smartest books about the brain in The Guardian

Tuesday, July 10th, 2018

Is consciousness internal, readable, even uploadable? Does it exist in the external world? Here are some mind-bending reads that have the answers

Read the full article here.

“Pocket-size but ticks like a bomb.” THE ANIMALS’ VEGAN MANIFESTO in The New York Times

Tuesday, July 10th, 2018

In the East Village in the early 1980s, the British-American artist Sue Coe showed some of the strongest political art of the day, and in the most traditional of media: figurative painting, drawing and printmaking stretching back in its influences to Käthe Kollwitz, José Guadalupe Posada and Chittaprosad Bhattacharya. In such work, reportage, advocacy and emotion are never far apart. And propelling themes — in Ms. Coe’s case, racism, war, capitalism and violence against all animals, including humans — are never in doubt.

Read the full article here.

“Essential reading… a book that instantly informs and leaves a trail to follow to learn more.” MOMENT OF TRUTH reviewed in Middle East Eye

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2018

How does one consider 70 years of conflict that countless UN resolutions, global power brokers and peace activists have been unable to resolve? Through a weighty compilation of analysis from some of the most prominent and informed voices on the issue.

Upon the Nakba’s 70th anniversary, such a considered analysis of Israel and Palestine is quite frankly overdue. That’s what Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions, a book edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner and published by OR Books, aims to provide.

With more than 50 contributors, including such distinguished voices as Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein and Gideon Levy, among many others, the book lays out some of the toughest questions on the conflict and considers the facts on the ground.

Read the full review here.

“Illustrates the ways in which oral folklore empowered thousands of Yazidi women living under the brutality of ISIS.” WITH ASH ON THEIR FACES reviewed in The National

Monday, June 25th, 2018

A sense of foreboding hung in the air on the eve of one of Iraq’s greatest modern tragedies – the killing, displacing and enslaving of tens of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi’s army of terror.

Mosul had fallen in June and they knew an ISIS attack was likely. But it wasn’t until the early hours of August 3, 2014, when vigilant men gripping rusty Kalashnikovs spotted unfamiliar vehicles heading towards them through the desert, that Iraq’s Yazidis came face to face with their killers.

In one swift assault, ISIS fighters armed to the teeth attacked and seized Yazidi towns and villages in Sinjar, north Iraq, where about 500,000 members of the religious minority lived.

In the days that followed they killed thousands and enslaved an estimated 6,383 women and children, devastating and traumatising entire communities in the process. Countless families were shattered by the loss of a mother, a daughter, a sister.

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Read the full review here.

“A dystopian machine gun, firing off dozens of shorter glimpses of thoroughly unpleasant variations on the world to come.” WELCOME TO DYSTOPIA reviewed in the San Franciso Book Review

Monday, June 25th, 2018

Ah, there’s nothing like a good dystopia. They imagine how the world could go to hell, then set likable characters loose inside that pessimistic sandbox. That formula has created an army of iconic protagonists, loathsome villains, and worlds that inspire horror…especially when they seem more likely, given current events.

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Read the full review here.

“Written to further the fight on a number of epic fronts – gender, data privacy and disinformation.” WOMEN, WHISTLEBLOWING, WIKILEAKS reviewed atArts Talk

Monday, June 18th, 2018

The wonderfully alliterative name of this recently published book may be difficult to resist, but don’t let the title fool you. This slim volume has been written to further the fight on a number of epic fronts – gender, data privacy and disinformation. The battlefield is the digital world and its three writers are self-declared digital activists. What do such labels really mean you may wonder and where does Julian Assange fit in?

This book takes the form of a conversation between three dedicated female activists – British journalist and human rights advocate, Sarah Harrison, Renata Avila, a well-known Guatemalan human rights lawyer and digital rights expert and Angela Richter, a Croatian-German theatre director and author. I was party to a similar live conversation between these three women at a recently attended Border Sessions Tech Culture Festival here in the Hague. This is a wide ranging collaboration between Crossing Borders and a variety of local tech-focused initiatives including Impact City, Start-Up Factory and Hack the Planet among others. All three women have close connections with Wikileaks and all are highly sympathetic to the current situation of the organisation’s founder – Julian Assange. Described by him as a ‘a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents’ to which this multi-national media organisation ‘gives asylum’, Assange may well be describing his own situation in the Ecuardorian embassy in London. Founded in 2006, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses including the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary and of course the NSA scandal leaked by Edward Snowden.

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Read the full review here.

“Elegant and accessible stories on a variety of themes by the most distinguished of modern Tibetan writers.” OLD DEMONS, NEW DEITIES reviewed in Scroll.in

Monday, June 18th, 2018

Modern Tibetan literature has been rather hard to find, with the exception of religious and spiritual writings, and some poetry, notably Woeser’s Tibet’s True Heart: Selected Poetry, the only book of modern Tibetan poetry I have come across. Woeser has a short story in this new collection, and was the only Tibetan writer represented that I actually knew by name.

Tenzin Dickie, with a story of her own included, has done a singular service in gathering together these twenty-one stories from Tibetan authors, the first collection of such writings that has been made available to the English-language reader. Quite a few of the writers are from the Tibetan diaspora, notably that in the United States, and a number of them have either been educated abroad or occupy teaching positions there now. Some of them actually write in English..

Read the full review here.

“An impressive collection… becoming subtler and more nuanced with repeated reading.” GRABBING PUSSY reviewed in Tears in the Fence

Friday, June 15th, 2018

Performance Artist and poet, Karen Finley, creates for an adult audience and speaks up for those that are silenced or victimised. Her latest book, Grabbing Pussy, based on a performance piece, Unicorn Gratitude Mystery, combines Language and Beat poetry in a bravura display employing the deeply limited and limiting sexual vocabulary of recent American political discourse.

Read the full review here.

“Whether we ask how or why we wish to optimize ourselves, Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement has plenty to say in response.” – DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement

Thursday, June 7th, 2018

Even for Carl Cederström and André Spicer, professors at leading business schools, their resolution for 2016 was remarkably ambitious. They set out “to understand why people would be spending their lives trying to become better, faster, stronger” – that is, to understand why people make resolutions at all. The resulting book’s twelve chapters correspond to twelve months of self-optimization testing. Each has a set theme: productivity, the body, the brain, relationships, spirituality, sex, pleasure, creativity, money, morality, attention and meaning.”

Read the full review here.

“Tandon makes many valid points about the way in which trade and tariffs hold back the global South” – TRADE IS WAR reviewed in Independent Catholic News

Wednesday, June 6th, 2018

Trade wars and tariffs are in the news, thanks to President Trump’s populist protectionism. However, readers of ICN are probably already well aware of the moral arguments surrounding trade. The wealthy world’s trade policies have had a devastating effect on the developing world. This timely book explains how the US and EU subsidise their agriculture, and then dump their surplus production on poor countries. Through the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and sundry trade agreements, the rich world insists it has access to global markets, while ignoring its own track record of subsidising its industries and agriculture for decades.

Read the full review here.

“The narration in The Candidate has the quality of being told from a front-row seat in this drama… Nunns’ skilled narration reads like a novel” – THE CANDIDATE reviewed in Social Movement Studies

Monday, June 4th, 2018

In his work on ‘post-democracy,’ political sociologist Colin Crouch provides a heuristic image
with which to understand an ideal democratic party. At the centre of this image is the party’s
leadership and its closest advisers, around which in concentric circles follow ‘parliamentary
representatives; then active members [including local government and paid staff]; next,
ordinary members [. . .], then supporters, or loyal voters [. . .]; finally, the largest circle of all,
the wider target audience, which the party seeks to persuade to vote for it.’

Read the full review here.

“Hard-hitting” – TRUMP U reviewed in January Magazine

Tuesday, May 29th, 2018

That Trump is a con man for the ages is the clear conclusion made in Trump U: The Inside Story of Trump University (OR Books). This insider’s exposé was written by Stephen Gilpen, a former employee of the now-defunct, unaccredited Trump University, who is described on the book’s back cover as “a self-taught expert at leveraging properties.” Before he hired on with the Trump Organization’s 2005-2010 foray into pedagogical profiteering, Gilpen had run a mortgage business and had made good money flipping real estate. He writes in Trump U that he thought it was possible to do good things for communities while buying and selling properties.

Read the full review here.

“Greg Shupak’s book resonates with clarity” – THE WRONG STORY reviewed in Middle East Monitor

Monday, May 28th, 2018

“The stories told about Palestine-Israel are as notable for what they exclude as they are for what they include.” This is an apt introduction to the three main narratives discussed in Greg Shupak’s book, “The Wrong Story. Palestine, Israel and the Media” (OR Books, 2018). It is imbued with meanings and not necessarily as straightforward as one would think upon first reading. Exclusion and inclusion, within the mainstream media context, are not juxtaposed against each other. On the contrary, both exclusion and inclusion operate within the parameters of projection; namely the attribution of violence to Palestinians by eliminating the historical and political framework.

Read the full review here.

“The focus group’s distrust of ordinary people, sketched so well in Featherstone’s book, goes some way toward explaining polling’s crisis of 2016 ” – DIVINING DESIRE reviewed in Public Books

Thursday, May 24th, 2018

What can we know of our fellow citizens? The question is at root philosophical or epistemological. In the peculiar climate fostered by the Trump regime, however—not to mention the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal—it has also become a political one. Everything from the trustworthiness of social scientific indicators to the facticity of the news media to the techniques by which candidates reach voters is now subject to suspicion. The means by which we know “the public” is, today, a central public debate.

Read the full review here.

“This scintillating anthology draws on the rich mélange of people who inhabit today’s London” – TALES OF TWO LONDONS reviewed at The London Economic

Monday, May 21st, 2018

Britain has seldom been so divided. There are chasms that exist between the left and the right, gender and age divides and increasingly notable wealth disparities. And if you want a microcosm of that, few places evidence it as potently as London.

London today is embattled as rarely before in peacetime. On one side the city has flourished, cementing its standing as a world leader in business and culture. On the other, poverty remains endemic, homelessness and the privations of low paid work are evident everywhere, gang violence is rampant, and the burnt-out hulk of the Grenfell Tower housing block stands as an ugly reminder that, even in the wealthiest areas, inequality can be so acute as to be murderous.

Read the full interview here.

“Rich in erudite analysis and topical relevance” – THE DIGITAL CRITIC reviewed at The Lifted Brow

Monday, May 7th, 2018

In 2006, I interviewed the British author and journalist Jon Ronson in a North London café as part of my dissertation for an MA in Journalism. At one point, we talked about the critical reaction to his 2001 book Them: Adventures with Extremists, with Ronson expressing his delight that the book was featured as the lead review on the website Salon.

This was the first time I had experienced a notable literary figure celebrating the prestige of an online book review. And I admit that, with this awareness coming in 2006, I may have been a little late to the party (the actual Salon review of Them was published in 2002), but it was thanks to this exchange with Ronson that I began to see online literary criticism as something to be taken seriously and which could offer similar analytical standards, intellectual rigour and stylistic richness to print reviews.

Read the full review here.

“Highly relevant and necessary” – THE WRONG STORY: PALESTINE, ISRAEL, & THE MEDIA reviewed at The New Arab

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018

Greg Shupak is an academic and writer, who’s used to going against the grain, having written for the Electronic Intifada, Jacobin and other alternative media outlets.

It is therefore, no surprise that he seeks to put the record straight on Israel and Palestine and offer an alternative account to the one you might find in the mainstream media.

Shupak says that the story we are fed by the corporate media of today is “the wrong story”, which is exactly what the book, published by OR Books, is called’ ‘The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media’.

Read the full review here.

“Dreamlike peregrinations…” WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT CITIES (AND LOVE) reviewed at Progressive Geographies

Monday, April 30th, 2018

In often dreamlike peregrinations around his home towns of Liverpool, London and New York Andy Merrifield reflects on what cities mean to us and how they shape the way we think. As he wanders, Merrifield’s reveries circle questions: Can we talk about cities in the absolute, discovering their essence beneath the particulars? Is it possible truly to love or hate a city, to experience it carnally or viscerally? Might we find true love in the city?

Read the full review here.

“A mirror and a wondrous window into the fabled rooftop of the world.”: OLD DEMONS, NEW DEITIES reviewed in Frontline

Wednesday, April 25th, 2018

OLD Demons, New Deities was born out of writer-editor Tenzin Dickie’s deep-felt personal need for a collection of modern Tibetan fiction, “the kind that I would have loved to read when I was growing up, the kind of book that may have made me want to become a writer sooner”. In her introduction, Tenzin Dickie, a second-generation exile, articulates the melancholy and the insularity of growing up in “an artistic vacuum”, as it were, imbibing only “the … national fascination with Buddhism—and the attendant demonisation of desire”.

Read the full review here.

“A beautiful, and alarming, book”: HOMELAND SECURITY ATE MY SPEECH reviewed in The Irish Times

Tuesday, April 17th, 2018

One bonus (maybe the only one) of Donald Trump being, ahem, leader of the free world, is the re-invigoration of the American intellectual left of which Ariel Dorfman is an exemplar. Argentinian born, of Eastern European migrant Jewish parents, brought up in Chile, Dorfman was Salvador Allende’s cultural adviser when that democracy was savaged with US “assistance”, with hundreds of thousands of Chileans tortured, “disappeared” and killed.

Read the full review here.

“The best kind of humanist journalism: lucid, transparent, grimly realistic”: WITH ASH ON THEIR FACES reviewed at The Los Angeles Review of Books

Monday, April 16th, 2018

IN THE SUMMER of 2014 — August, the sun hammering all day on prickly wheat fields — the first Islamic State fighters arrived in Sinjar province, close to the Syrian border in northwest Iraq.

Bearded and mostly young, lugging an array of weapons, they came in pickup trucks and cars, as well as Humvees captured from the Iraqi Army in earlier battles. Soon the black-and-white flag of ISIS, the freshest desert nightmare, would fly along roads and atop buildings in places that rarely (or never) make it onto American television: Tel Azer, Kojo, Siba Sheikheder, Tel Banat, Sinjar City. This last place was home of the Yezidis, a religious minority long accustomed to violent persecution.

Read the full review here.

“A worthy anthology”: WELCOME TO DYSTOPIA reviewed in SF Crowsnest

Thursday, April 12th, 2018

Gordon Van Gelder says in his preface to ‘Welcome To Dystopia’ that he wanted lots of short stories for this anthology rather than just a few long ones. He succeeded. There are forty-five tales packed in here and even the most meticulous reviewer isn’t going to cover all of them, though I have read them all. My favourites are listed below in no particular order.

Everyone knows immigrants are the source of all a country’s problems so in the future the crackdown on foreigners, except those needed as cheap labour, will be more severe. The book opens strongly with ‘Sneakers’ by Michael Libling. Two innocent Canadians go south to buy a pair of sneakers, which are cheaper in the United States. Regrettably, things have changed on the border and their situation becomes difficult, even scary. This has a great kick in the tail and may be a warning for those ex-colonials in the savage north. They should have stayed under the rule of good Queen Bess. We Brits would have taken care of them.

Read the full review at here.

“Empowering, demanding, comforting and tragic all at the same time”: WOMEN OF RESISTANCE reviewed at Cultured Vultures

Thursday, April 12th, 2018

Women of Resistance: Poem for a New Feminism is a collection of poems revolving around the subjects of sexism and racism, whether ‘everyday’ or more extreme, and the implications of such attitudes in a wider consideration.

Reading the book, I got the overwhelming impression that each poet is in full support of the other, and that they are all restless for the same cause. There is something profoundly comforting in the knowledge that all these people understand; there is a sense of an army of poets, voices shouting from the pages that things need to change.

Read the full review at Cultured Vultures.

“What’s Yours Is Mine shows how money-making and sharing of common space are ultimately incompatible”: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE reviewed at Real Change

Tuesday, April 10th, 2018

Readers of Real Change are probably well aware of some of the difficulties with the so-called “sharing economy,” best exemplified by Airbnb, Uber and Lyft, which grew exponentially from humble beginnings. Tom Slee’s “What’s Yours Is Mine” is more than a detailing of the negative impacts of these companies; it takes a look at the Silicon Valley philosophy of “open sharing” for profit and shows how money-making and sharing of common space are ultimately incompatible.”

Read the full review at Real Change.

“These stories offer a peek into a forbidden land”: OLD DEMONS reviewed in The Hindu

Monday, April 2nd, 2018

In her Introduction to Old Demons, New Deities: Contemporary Short Stories from Tibet, Tenzin Dickie talks of young Tibetans being “cut off from our historical past, our historical literature and culture” after the Chinese took over Tibet.

Her generation, she says, “were missing the point of departure, the runway from which to lift off.”

Read the full review at The Hindu.

“The time has grown ripe for the kind of theoretical and practical analyses collected in THE DIGITAL CRITIC”: A review in the Times Literary Supplement

Friday, March 23rd, 2018

Read the full review here.

“A history of the capital in all its mixed-up glory”: The London Evening Standard reviews TALES OF TWO LONDONS

Friday, March 23rd, 2018

Tales of Two Londons, edited by the London-born journalist Claire Armitstead, gathers together poetry, reportage and fiction by Ali Smith, Helen Simpson, Iain Sinclair and others to reveal the British capital in all its mixed-race, mixed-up glory. London eating habits are explored, along with the Tudorbethan architecture of Neasden and model boat sailing in Victoria Park.

Read the full review here.

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