==Politics and society==
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Marina Hyde
|title=Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over The World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy
|rating=3.5
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099532050</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Salman Rushdie
|summary=A wonderful digest of ideas spawned by ongoing work at Durham University. The cross discplinary broad brush strokes give insight into the past, the present, and the future, and inspire personal and critical thinking.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668188X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chris Mullin
|title=A View from the Foothills
|rating=5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Chris Mullin's diaries cover the period from July 1999 to May 2005 during which time he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, for the Department for International Development and after a period on the back benches also at the Foreign Office. As he says, there will be no shortage of memoirs from those who have occupied the Olympian Heights. In A View from the Foothills he offers a refreshingly different perspective – that of a man at the lowest levels of government who's party to what's happening further up the hillside and down on the plains.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846682231</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Iain Sinclair
|title=Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=''Documentary fiction'' is what Iain Sinclair oxymoronically calls this book. It's a lot of other things too: autobiography, history, psychogeography to name but three. His ''Hackney book'' as he self-referentially calls it throughout, is a dense collage of reportage and ''inaccurate and inventive'' transcriptions of interviews, peopled by film-makers, novelists, politicians and painters, not to mention booksellers, barbers and bus drivers.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241142164</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Kay
|title=The Long and the Short of it: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Aren't in the Industry
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Sometimes I wonder if authors set out to stop people reading their books, strange as this might seem. John Kay is an excellent example. He tells us that he expects his readers to be erudite and to be readers of popular science. They'll never knowingly have dealt with Goldman Sachs and will pay tax at the 40% rate. At the other end of the scale they'll not be bad credit risks and just to cut out anyone hoping for a quick buck, they'll not be tempted to make a living from Stock Market speculation. If you don't qualify on all points there's not even a hint of a pass mark which might allow you to sneak into the checkout queue.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0954809327</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sudhir Venkatesh
|title=Gang Leader For A Day
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=If you've ever wondered why young people join gangs, and what it's like to bring up a family surrounded by armed drug dealers, you'll find ''Gang Leader For The Day'' fascinating. Sociology student Sudhir Venkatesh wanted to learn by observing the poor, baulking at the abstract, mathematical research methods used by his professors in the University of Chicago. In 1989, armed with a clipboard and a questionnaire, he visited the Robert Taylor Homes, a notorious housing project. Instead of neatly answering his carefully-prepared questions - ''How does it feel to be black and poor?'' by selecting from ''very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good'', he finds himself held hostage overnight by members of the Black Kings, a crack-dealing gang, at the behest of its charismatic local leader, J.T.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141030917</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alex Perry
|title=Falling Off The Edge: Globalization, World Peace and Other Lies
|rating=3.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=From Russia to a devastated sub-Saharan Africa, economic collapse and consequent protest in reaction threaten the established order. Globalisation, is putting the survival of populations in the world's poorest countries at risk.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230706886</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor
|title=On Kindness
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=As a title, ''On Kindness'' doesn't pack quite the same punch as Adam Phillip's earlier: 'On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored'. It put me in mind of an eighteenth century treatise, and, give or take a couple of centuries, that is exactly what the book provides: a thought-provoking exposition on a currently unfashionable virtue.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241144337</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Quentin Letts
|title=50 People Who Buggered Up Britain
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=In a rather less permissive age, 20 or 30 years ago, I suspect that the author might have been at the top of some people's list of culprits for using that naughty b-word. Good grief, man, you can't possibly have that in a book title, what!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845298551</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nicola Sly
|title=Dorset Murders (True Crime History)
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Having examined a number of true crime cases from Bristol in her [[Bristol Murders by Nicola Sly|last book]], the author now does the same for largely rural yet not always idyllic Dorset. Twenty two murders, committed between 1818 and 1946, come under the microscope in these pages.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0750951079</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Adam Roberts
|title=The Wonga Coup
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=The chances are that you've never heard of Macias Nguema. You probably don't know his nephew, Obiang Nguema either. They're certainly up there in the Premier League of killing and disappearance, alongside the likes of Pol Pot and modern day tyrants like Robert Mugabe. The fact that the Nguemas are dictators from the tiny west African state of Equatorial Guinea meant they largely slipped off the radar of western consciousness.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846682347</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Schama
|title=The American Future: A History
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=After 9/11 America had the sympathy of most people. Whether or not you agreed with what the country stood for was immaterial – the horror of what happened left few unmoved. How then has the country descended into being vilified around much of the world and suspected even where it is not guilty? Simon Sharma has lived half his life in the States and he looks at four areas – War, Religion, the American identity and Economics in an attempt to understand how the country has reached this point when it seemed, at least until the 2008 election, that many Americans did not even like themselves.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847920004</amazonuk>
}}
