Newest Politics and Society Reviews
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Politics and society
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All by Christina Thompson
Subtitled an unlikely love story, this was an interesting and inspiring memoir written by an American academic, who met and fell in love with a Maori - and what a beautiful tale it tells! Referred to as a 'contact' encounter (i.e., chance meeting) it sounds almost like a fairy tale, and in part it is - but a fairy tale which includes huge amount of hard work too. Full review...
Bedlam: London and Its Mad by Catharine Arnold
At the very least, this book is a salutary reminder that every time we read or hear anything about mental health issues, or care in the community, our ancestors used to talk about madness and disease – the two often being inseparable. For hundreds of years, even less than a century ago, people suffering from no more than acute depression were treated in a manner which sounds horrific today. Full review...
Shadows Of The Workhouse: The Drama Of Life In Postwar London by Jennifer Worth
The Workhouse. What does that make you think of? Dickens probably. Pictures of grimy people in 1800s unable to fend for themselves, ending up destitute and scared and carted off to the workhouse. The very fact that we use those words carted off implies an inescapable fate. No-one was ever carted to the workhouse. They walked in or crawled. But it did have a ring of finality about it, a fate every bit as terminal as a revolution tumbrel. Full review...
Aid and Other Dirty Business: How Good Intentions Have Failed the World's Poor by Giles Bolton
Africa. It has vast beauty and abundant resources, yet it's the world's poorest continent. More than a third of Africans live on under a dollar a day. Earth's twenty-five poorest countries are in Africa. More mothers die in childbirth than anywhere else in the world. Fewer children make it to their fifth birthdays. AIDS is ravaging the entire continent. But why is this? Full review...
Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus by Tim Hindle
Anyone who has ever found themselves in a meeting where management ideas are thrown around like confetti (…well I believe that zero-based accounting can be offset by a balanced scorecard system particularly in view of the growth share matrix…) needs this book. Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus is an overview of the management ideas which have been in and out of vogue over the last few decades and the gurus who have propounded them. Full review...
Bristol Murders by Nicola Sly
Murder is such a horribly commonplace crime that the annals of any major centre of population must be teeming with cases of violent, often premeditated death over the years. Domestic incidents that went out of control, drunkenness and sheer greed were often the reason. This survey of 30 cases in Bristol between 1741 and 1957 suggests that, no matter what else may have changed over two centuries and more, human nature basically alters but little. Full review...
The Open Road by Pico Iyer
Although subtitled The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama The Open Road is not really about the journey. It's about the road itself, what the road is and where the current Dalai Lama finds himself upon it. Full review...
Prezza: My Story: Pulling No Punches by John Prescott
John Prescott polarises opinion. It seems that people either love or loathe him and I've yet to meet anyone who isn't at least aware of him. Coming from relatively humble beginnings he rose to be the UK's longest-serving Deputy Prime Minister by the time he resigned in June 2007. He's been just about as close to the top of British politics as it's possible to get and his autobiography was expected to be revealing and possibly even tell us where some of the bodies are buried. So, how did it measure up? Full review...
A Place In My Country: In Search Of A Rural Dream by Ian Walthew
At the age of 34 Ian Walthew was the worldwide marketing director of the International Herald Tribune living in various parts of the world and leading a jet-set lifestyle. He was also on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Faced with a move back to London, he resigned and rather than buy a property in London he and his Australian wife bought a cottage in the Cotswolds to give Ian the peace which he needed to recuperate. Full review...
More from Our Own Correspondent by Tony Grant (Editor)
From Our Own Correspondent began in 1955. It's a series of monologue dispatches by BBC foreign correspondents in which they give a personalised and in depth view of an aspect of current events from their posting. It's fascinating. It's educational. It's a national treasure. In this second anthology of broadcasts, More From Our Own Correspondent, these radio essays cover topics ranging from the heady oxygen-light road through Bolivia's mountains, the world's most dangerous thoroughfare, through the Honey-Hunters of Bangladesh to Mr and Mrs Nie in China as the Beijing Olympics approach. Full review...
What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith
Marshall Goldsmith is one of the business world's top five coaches of CEOs and future CEOs according to Forbes, while The Times, only slightly less impressed, named him one of the top fifty most influential management thinkers alive. He has written more than twenty books, worked with more than eighty business leaders. He's clearly doing something right. I'd not heard of him before but then I'm not a CEO (yet), and I also don't tend to read a lot of the industry press. I'm also not really one to read too many management books – if I'm getting on a plane I'd rather pick up a trashy novel than some thick bible on how to seal my next big business deal – but every so often I get intrigued and flick through a couple. Meaning Inc and Gut Feelings both changed the way I treated my job, at least temporarily, and What Got You Here… is the latest read to be added to that pile. Full review...
A Year in Tibet by Sun Shuyun
Tibet is an emotive word these days. Rightly so.
Since long before the dawn of Communism, China has been adept at numbering the rights and wrongs of history, with the three this and the seven that. Sadly, she does not yet see the invasion of Tibet as a wrong. I am in no position to know what the majority of ordinary Chinese know about Tibet, nor what they think of their government's official standpoint on it. Along with many others, I can only hope that one day they will have full and free access to the internet and other media where they will be able to read the many and varied opinions of people from around the world, and will be allowed not only to make up their own mind – but to then debate that standpoint, publicly and freely. Full review...
The Complex by Nick Turse
In 1961 Eisenhower warned about the threat of the 'military-industrial complex,' an ever-expanding corporate cabal bankrolled by the various branches of the armed forces. Today, we consider ourselves a demilitarised society, with little connection between our everyday lives and the war machine still grinding away in Afghanistan and Iraq. The idea that we could be surrounded and influenced on a daily basis by military propaganda seems preposterous – the stuff of conspiracy theory. Full review...
On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries by Richard Reynolds
The term "guerrilla gardening" was first used in New York in 1973 to describe the transformation of a derelict private plot into a garden, although the actual practice is much older. As an environmental movement, guerrilla gardening is a form of direct action in which flowering or food plants are established on an abandoned piece of land, without the owner's permission, saving the land from neglect or misuse and giving it a new purpose. It is also a political stance, challenging issues of land ownership, the misuse of urban land and the deterioration of the urban environment. Full review...
Sex, Science and Profits by Terence Kealey
It's hard for me to think of a book to which I took so long to warm to. A phrase like there is no science, just scientists is going to be bit of an enthusiasm damper for a leftish libertarian, isn't it? But then I actually read the thing and discovered that Sex, Science and Profits has less of a clearly identifiable political angle than one would expect from a quick scan of the blurb, content, title, provocative quotations and some sampling. Full review...
Unveiled: A Woman's Journey Through Politics, Love, and Obedience by Deborah Kanafani
In the early 1980s, Deborah Jacobs was a college student from Long Island, New York. Her great-great-grandmother had arrived in America from Lebanon, following the failure of a marriage, and had become a successful entrepreneur. Deborah's mother had a short marriage to a charismatic, ambitious lawyer, whom Deborah continued to idolise, despite some difficulties. His glamorous and, at times, rather edgy lifestyle contrasted strongly with her simple life with her mother. Full review...
The Second Plane by Martin Amis
Since September 11th 2001 Martin Amis has returned to the subject of the attacks on many occasions. I almost said 'obsessively', but I'm conscious of the impact on my own life, despite the fact that I suffered no direct loss. What went was confidence and certainty to be replaced with a fear that we are at the beginning rather than the end of a dreadful time. There was also a vague sense of guilt about what might have caused the attacks and a shame about what has happened since. Here I'm at odds with Mr. Amis and he's certainly not shy of offering ammunition to those critical of his views. If September 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime ... Full review...
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
There are two types of book that seem to have come on in a big way in recent years. The first is what my local bookstore calls Tragic True Life Stories, in which authors with a tragic past tell their story. The other is collected essays and columns, as it seems that any celebrity writer with a regular newspaper column gets the chance to have them collected together in book form every so often. Unfortunately, Jeremy Clarkson seems to be the front runner in this particular sub-genre. Full review...
Heart of Darfur by Lisa French Blaker
Imagine something went really wrong in this country. Imagine fighting broke out. Imagine government forces lost control in some areas. Imagine one of those areas was your town. Militia men of one force or another are shooting one another in the streets. They're shooting any civilians who venture out of doors too. Rockets are being fired into town. One hit your next door neighbour yesterday. She died. Her little boy is staying with you, because his grandparents live in another town and they're not allowed in to get him. Full review...
Panicology by Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams
In Panicology, two British writers ( with a background in social and natural sciences) attempt to put some sense into the most popular scare stories that have appeared in the media in the recent years. They analyse each of the subjects showing how the wide social factors (including the combined influence of media seeking sensation, political agendas of the government and opposition and changing social trends) contribute to the perception of risks and creation of panics - moral and otherwise. Full review...
Blood River by Tim Butcher
Tim Butcher started working as a journalist in Africa in 2000…15 years after Live Aid gave us all hope that maybe the continent’s problems were solvable…and almost as long since we’d begun to realise that it wasn’t going to be that easy.
Two years into the bloodiest war in the world, the Congo – at the very heart of Africa – was seeing 1,000 deaths a day to the violence. And the world wasn’t even looking. Full review...
