Politics and society
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...
No Expenses Spared by Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner
It's always struck me as strange that in a period of twelve months which saw Banks collapse, stock markets tumble and house prices slide the public have reserved most of their ire for a relatively small group of people who were not exceptionally well-paid in the first place, but many of whom took the opportunity to make the most of the generous expenses which they could claim. There are only six hundred and forty six Members of Parliament – twelve months ago they were generally respected but many are now pariahs. Full review...
A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary by Alain de Botton
A writer-in-residence at an airport is not as daft an idea as it might first seem. After all, TV programmes, and whole series, have entertained millions with what goes on in front of, and behind the scenes at such places. So this book, which is the fruit of such a residency, could be expected to produce few surprises. Full review...
Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S Thompson by Anita Thompson (Editor)
It is almost 40 years since Dr Hunter S Thompson's seminal work Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas first graced the shelves. His gonzo style, putting himself at the centre of the story, should tell readers as much about the person doing the writing as the event he is describing. If that's the case then what is to be learned from a selection of interviews with the main man himself then? The answer is plenty. Full review...
The Country Formerly Known As Great Britain by Ian Jack
I think I've now managed to master the maxim about not judging books by their covers. I still struggle with the one about not judging them by their titles and I very nearly cam unstuck and missed 'The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain'. Being just about of an age with the author I worried that it might be a treatise about the fact that 'things weren't like this when I was a lad'. I was even more worried that I might agree with him. Full review...
Pocket World in Figures 2010 by The Economist
It's just about a year since I reviewed Pocket World in Figures 2009 and at the time – September 2008 – we were watching in horror as the world financial crisis unfolded before our eyes. Looking back now the surprise is that for most people what happened came out of the blue. The clues were plain to see and all here in this handy little book. There was the worrying state of the Iceland economy and different levels of mortgage lending in various parts of the world. Best of all it was presented as verified figures, without any accompanying narrative and it's consequently free of political spin. Bliss. Full review...
Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Scott Kilman and Roger Thurow
If you have ever wondered why famine is still widespread, so many years after Oxfam started nudging middle-class Britain into consciousness, then read Enough. As a young woman, I donated to Oxfam at the end of the 1960s in the belief that concerted international action through governments plus charities would eliminate hunger within a decade or so. Four decades later, it's impossible to comprehend why children are still dying at much the same rate: one every five seconds. Full review...
Listening to Grasshoppers by Arundhati Roy
Stories can provoke many different reactions in the reader: pleasure, pain, delight, horror. The whole range of emotion is available to the fiction writer to ply and probe. Reactions to non-fiction works can be equally wide-ranging and can sometimes take the reader by surprise.
Like most people I came to Roy via the Booker-prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things, which it transpires, is her only novel to date. In the intervening twelve years Roy has concentrated her undoubted literary abilities in the political arena, engaging with the less attractive side of her native India. Full review...
Take Me to the Source: In Search of Water by Rupert Wright
Whatever you expect from a book about water, Take Me to the Source probably won't provide it. Neither a whimsical aquatic travelogue, nor a polemic about the economics of water, it still manages to produce unexpected insights into the element which is so vital, yet so often taken for granted. Full review...
Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar
Like most avid readers, I don't remember the time before there were books. We were brought up with books. There are family tales of my father as a child eating his breakfast with one hand, while trying to tie his shoelaces with the other and still contriving to read at the same time. They were a poor family, and books weren't just expensive, they were valuable. They were dear, in every sense of the word. Likewise my mother remembers her early school-years when every day ended with a chapter from one of the classics. Full review...
The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham
I'm rather at a loss to describe this book for you, and I'm still uncertain how to categorise it. It's part personal memoir and part analytical. Whether you regard this particular mix as brilliant or irritating is down, I suppose, to personal taste and intellectual curiosity. Full review...
The Broken Compass: How British Politics lost its way by Peter Hitchens
I've long held that there is no difference between the major political parties such that could command you to vote for one or the other. The new Labour party now seems to stand somewhere to the right of what I though of as the old Conservative party and the Lib Dems appear to be a coalition of those who don't fit comfortably into either of the other main parties. My voting patterns have changed radically from supporting a party because of its views to voting against another because of its actions. I was hoping that The Broken Compass might clarify my thoughts. Full review...
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein
Choices are inevitable: from the lunch sandwich to the credit card and internet provider, to the house and car and pension plan, modern humans, particularly those living in technologically developed democracies are blessed (or cursed) with the freedom (and necessity) to choose all the time. Full review...
Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media by Nick Davies
Do you remember a Y2K bug? When the world's computer systems were to melt down in an Armageddon of vital services failure and possible nuclear accidents?
The Y2K panic is a great example of flat-Earth news: something that gets passed on in the media chain from those unsure to those who might have a vested interest in maintaining it as fact to those who are completely ignorant, and in the process gets bigger and bigger and – almost accidentally – assumes a status of orthodox, accepted truth. Full review...
Farewell To The East End by Jennifer Worth
I am interested in social history and, as a mother, the job of midwives fascinates me. Combining these two subjects, Farewell to the East End is a riveting read. The author Jennifer Worth was a midwife and nurse, working with the nuns at Nonnatus House in the East End of London and this volume (her third book on this topic) covers the 1950s. Full review...
Disfigured: A Saudi Woman's Story of Triumph over Violence by Rania Al-Baz
Throughout her life Rania Al-Baz has been an unusual woman. She was married off by her father when she was still at school to a man she hardly knew and was the only married pupil, forced to conform to the Saudi Arabian traditions of putting her husband first in all things but still expected to keep up with her school work. Pregnancy forced her to give up on her schooling but the marriage failed and Rania returned to her father. It might have been expected that she would fade quietly into the home, but in a most unusual step she became the smiling face on a Saudi television programme. No woman had ever been a news anchor before and it was only to be expected that there would be plenty of men wanting to marry her. Full review...
Skeptoid 2: More Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena by Brian Dunning
Brian Dunning is the author responsible for a series of weekly podcasts debunking and analysing a variety of dubious, pseudo-scientific, un-scientific and downright loony ideas, claims and myths common or persistent in the pop (and not so pop) culture. Skeptoid 2 is essentially a written version of those podcasts, a collection of fifty pieces of which many can be also read or listened to at his website. Full review...
Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear by Dan Gardner
Picture a world terrorised by just two words. A civilised, healthy, wealthy world no less, in thrall to and under threat from two words. Not what those two words represent even, just the actual small phrase. It sounds ridiculous, but when I say those two words – bird flu – and you've stopped laughing, you may well remember how the panic started, the non-existent worry was the biggest concern of the western media for some time, and then it went away again. Full review...
Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing by Katherine Ashenburg
Although maybe not the first book you'd be drawn to – a history of personal hygiene perhaps doesn't seem that appealing – but if you had overlooked this excellent book, you would have missed out on an enjoyable and informative book, full of fascinating facts and a jolly good read.
Attitudes towards and rituals of cleanliness have certainly changed over the last two thousand years and this book chronicles many of them, largely in Europe and the US. Cultural differences with regard to cleanliness and body odour (and yes, Napoleon and Josephine do get a mention here, although it transpires that they both took daily baths) are discussed at length, from the Greeks and Romans to the present day. Full review...
The Strategy Of Antelopes: Rwanda After the Genocide by Jean Hatzfeld
Life offers me smiles, and I owe it my gratitude for not having abandoned me in the marshes.
I've known the defilement of a bestial existence.
Who's going to say that word, forgiveness? It's outside of human nature.
So say some of the survivors of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when 800,000 Tutsis were murdered by their fellow Hutu citizens. Jean Hatzfeld talked to both Tutsis and Hutus then, publishing two award-winning books. In The Strategy of Antelopes, he returns to Rwanda to talk to the same people and explore life after genocide. Full review...
War Child: A Boy Soldier's Story by Emmanuel Jal
Emmanuel Jal, internationally successful rap artist, spent his childhood as a solider in his native Sudan. He has written his story in order to help those children who are still fighting, and those who have managed to get away. There are a number of books about the Sudan by western aid workers and journalists, who do, I am sure, write fluently and passionately about the horror of Darfur. This is the first book that I have read which tells the story of war from the point of view of a small boy carrying an AK-47, a gun taller than he is himself. Full review...
Thinking About Almost Everything by Ash Amin and Michael O'Neill
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. Full review...
A View from the Foothills by Chris Mullin
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. Full review...
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report by Iain Sinclair
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. Full review...
The Long and the Short of it: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Aren't in the Industry by John Kay
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. Full review...
Gang Leader For A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh
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. Full review...
Falling Off The Edge: Globalization, World Peace and Other Lies by Alex Perry
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. Full review...
On Kindness by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor
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. Full review...
50 People Who Buggered Up Britain by Quentin Letts
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! Full review...
Dorset Murders (True Crime History) by Nicola Sly
Having examined a number of true crime cases from Bristol in her 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. Full review...
The Wonga Coup by Adam Roberts
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. Full review...
The American Future: A History by Simon Schama
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. Full review...
Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong by Martin Lindstrom
Considering the amount of money spent on advertising and the staggering sizes of corporate marketing budgets, it's astonishing to what extent it's unclear what exactly those huge amounts of money buy. Lord Lever famously said that half of the money spent on advertising is wasted - but he had no way of knowing which half. Full review...
Goodbye Mr Socialism by Antonio Negri and Raf Scelsi
Goodbye, Mr Socialism is a collection of conversations in which Antonio Negri and Raf Scelsi explore what it means to be 'left wing' today and whether the word "socialism" still has a political space. Starting with an analysis of possible reasons for both the monstrosities of Stalinism and the actual collapse of the 'real socialism' in general and the Soviet Union in particular, Negri defines the challenge of the left as finding the answer to the question how development can occur in the future for people who have been liberated from capitalism to then move to discuss the newly re-emerging sense of the bio-political common as distinctly different from both the public (state) and the private. Full review...
The Triumph of Ignorance and Bliss: Pathologies of Public America by James Polk
They still live in suburbs (that is, those who don't live in third-world-like squalor of inner city ghettos), diet and workout obsessively (that is, those who don't stand in food bank queues), buy bigger and shinier objects that consume more and more energy, more interested in celebrity bra sizes and nipple flashes than in who rules the country and for whose benefit. Every so often, especially when the crisis looms, they vote for CHANGE (as they have done just now), but essentially, whether in the ranks of Christian Taliban of the red states, or among Starbucks slurping and therapy-addicted in-crowd of the blue states, Americans are living their lives in a state of deluded ignorance and bliss, while their country is literally falling to pieces around them. Full review...
Pocket World In Figures 2009 by The Economist
We live in a world where every pundit seems to have some figures with which to persuade or possibly bamboozle us. Occasionally the people using the figures don't fully understand what they're saying but that rarely stops them using them with an air of authority. Sometimes statistics are tainted by political spin and for people who need to know the truth it's increasingly difficult to find reliable information – with one exception. The Economist's Pocket World in Figures 2009 has no political axe to grind and offers no narrative to accompany the figures it presents – the statistics speak for themselves. Full review...
Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola by Mark Thomas
I don't drink fizzy drinks, aside from the odd mixer in a rare visit to the pub. There, I said it. I've consigned myself to the dinosaur generation. I drink tea, and - gasp - water. From the tap. So I get to read Mark Thomas's coruscating indictment of the Coca Cola Company with a rather smug smirk on my blameless lips. Full review...
Tic-tac Teddy Bears and Teardrop Tattoos by Justin Scroggie
Signs are everywhere. I wasn't really one of those who thought our roads were littered with too many traffic signs until the day I was driven past a pair of speed regulation signs, positioned at the exit end of a one-way street but facing the illegal way up it. Not all signs, of course, are quite as unnecessary, or indeed as blatantly visible, which is where this pictorial guide to countless coded messages, signifiers and other similar factoids comes in. Full review...
A Field Guide To The British by Sarah Lyall
I have a fascination - one that borders on an unhealthy obsession - with books written about the British: and that fascination is clearly, not just a personal foible of mine as such books are uncannily common: from travelogues to memoirs, hefty historical analyses to short satirical sketches, the subject of Britishness (and Englishness) carries a seemingly endless fascination for natives and foreigners alike. Many of those books, somehow expectedly, are written by Americans as so is The Field Guide by Sarah Lyall, an American journalist who married a Brit and came here for love in the mid/late 90's, exactly like I did, though I am sure that I move in slightly less elevated circles. Full review...
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
Bad science is everywhere. People buy more expensive brand name aspirin than an equal dose in a different packet. Cosmetic adverts are peppered with pseudoscientific breakthroughs and ostensibly positive statistics. Newspapers and TV news (and sadly not just the tabloids) are riddled with scare stories of cannabis being 25 times stronger, or miracle cures that will make everyone and everything fit and healthy immediately. Ben Goldacre (NHS doctor and Guardian columnist) cuts through the bullshit and gives people the tools to spot such nonsense for themselves. Full review...
The Terminal Spy by Alan Cowell
Find Bond bordering on the trivial these days? Think that perhaps Le Carré is a little passé? Spooks' too silly for words?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, I recommend you read The Terminal Spy: the Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko – a true story of espionage, betrayal and murder.
If you think that because the Cold War is over and the Wall has been dismantled, then the Iron Curtain must be rusting away in an untidy heap at the bottom of the Black Sea – think again. That curtain still swishes as well-greased and unseen as ever. The spying game continues unabated. Full review...
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...