Politics and society
It Could Have Been Yours: The enlightened person's guide to the year's most desirable things by Jolyon Fenwick and Marcus Husselby
In a world of diamond-encrusted skulls, gold-leafed iPhones and luxury yachts ten a penny, of blingy shit (or should that be shitty bling?) it's a relief to know people are still spending money on unique one-offs that are more worthwhile. The records for costliest photo, artwork, musical instrument and manuscript have all been broken in the twenty four months leading up to this book's release. Our collators have scoured the press for those and other, similarly noteworthy auctions, and found what other people paid for what you didn't know you would have wanted given the money. Full review...
Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently by John L Locke
Locke's subtitle Why Men and Women Talk So Differently might lead you to think that this is just another self-help Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus tome. It's not. Rather than focussing upon what we all know from experience – that men and women do not communicate very well because of some fundamental difference in their respective approach to verbal expression – the New York City University Professor of Linguistics sets out to explain WHY that might be. Full review...
On Tolerance: The Life Style Wars: A Defence of Moral Independence by Frank Furedi
Furedi is a Professor of Sociology at a UK university so he'll know his subject matter inside out. The short preface tells us that 'tolerance has been emptied of its moral and intellectual meaning.' This publication's aim is to argue the case for tolerance in society. How its meaning has changed over the centuries until today's rather fuzzy and watered-down meaning. Professor Furedi was spurred on to writing this book because he firmly believes that tolerance has been lost somehow, to be almost invisible in some areas of public and private life. Full review...
A Walk-on Part: Diaries 1994 - 1999 by Chris Mullin
We tend to remember where we were and how we heard about the deaths of people like John F Kennedy, Elvis Presley and Princess Diana, but I'd add another person to the list: John Smith. I remember sitting in my office and a colleague coming in to tell me. She added 'I suppose we'll have that dreary Gordon Brown as leader now'. We'd many angst-ridden miles to go before that came about but Smith's death is the opening entry in this, the third volume (but first chronologically) of Chris Mullin's Diaries. This book covers the first period of 'New Labour', from Smith's death until Mullin's assumption into government in July 1999. Full review...
Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World by Tina Rosenberg
Teenagers in South Carolina have become involved in the anti-smoking movement, passing out information encouraging their peers to educate themselves about the ways big tobacco companies try to get them hooked. There are youngsters in South Africa who’ve refused to have sex without a condom because of the danger of HIV and AIDS. Minority students in Texas have challenged data going back years by succeeding at calculus where traditionally students of their race have struggled. Why? Because other people have done the same thing, and they want to fit in. Full review...
A Broken Childhood: A True Story of Abuse by Lydia Ola Taiwo
Mojisola – known to everyone as Ola – was born to a Nigerian couple in London in 1964 and spent the first five years of her life in a foster home in Brighton. Here she was loved, looked after and lived her life in a genuinely good family. This wasn't an unusual arrangement as it allowed the biological parents to earn money without worrying about childcare – and Ola was happy. It was all the more cruel when her biological father arrived to take her 'home' for the weekend – a weekend which would stretch into seven years of abuse and neglect. Full review...
The Doctor Will See You Now by Max Pemberton
The NHS is one of those things that everyone seems to have an opinion about, and this of course includes those of us who work for said organisation (the world's 3rd largest employer, don'tcha know). Max Pemberton is one of those people: a doctor, though despite what you might assume from the title, not a GP but a hospital medic. This is his third book on the subject of life (and death) within the walls of a hospital, plus the odd excursion to rather misnamed Care Homes, and it's not a bad read. Full review...
The Golden Cage: Three Brothers, Three Choices, One Destiny by Shirin Ebadi
Dr Ebadi is currently living in exile, fearing for her safety, should she return to Iran in the foreseeable future. Her Prologue describes a violent and bloody reaction to what was a peaceful situation involving wives, mothers and sisters. Boulders and large stones were thrown at elderly, defenseless women without a moment's hesitation. A taste of things to come? Full review...
American Caesars: Lives of the US Presidents, from Franklin D Roosevelt to George W Bush by Nigel Hamilton
The Premise is simple: take twelve men (and unfortunately they are all men, but that's not the author's fault) who have achieved high office and look at each of them. Firstly, take a look at the road to the high office, then how they performed once they reached their goal and finally a look at their private life. Suetonius did it first when he wrote The Twelve Caesars and now Nigel Hamilton has taken the same journey with American Caesars, a remarkably in-depth look at twelve consecutive American presidents from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, starting with Franklin D Roosevelt and finishing with George W Bush. Full review...
Off Message: The Complete Antidote to Political Humbug by Bob Marshall-Andrews
Bob Marshall-Andrews entered Parliament in 1997, rather too late to be a career politician (he was already an established QC) and with a profound distrust of authority. He had no aspirations towards office, which was perhaps as well for all concerned as he would become best known for being a dissident. I occasionally enquired as to which party held his allegiance and eventually concluded that he went with his conscience. The last three Labour administrations have spawned more political memoirs than any other – and I did wonder if this would be just one more to add to the pile. Full review...
Out Of Africa by Karen Blixen
It's more than a quarter of a century since I first saw the film Out of Africa and it's one of the few that have stayed with me over the intervening years. It wasn't just the story, but the personality of Karen Blixen and the wonderful landscape of the Ngong Hills, south of Nairobi, in Kenya's Rift Valley. I remember looking for this book at the time, but being unable to find it, so the opportunity to read it now was too good to miss. Full review...
Ashes and Sparks: Essays On Law and Justice by Stephen Sedley
Some books are hard to read, and even harder to review. This is particularly true of what are essentially academic or "professional" books and you come to them as a lay reader. This then is my starting position on Ashes and Sparks. Full review...
The Authentic Tawney: A New Interpretation of the Political Thought of R. H. Tawney by Gary Armstrong and Tim Gray
The Authentic Tawney takes a fresh look at the political writing of R H Tawney, a left wing academic whose works were a big influence on the huge program of postwar reform engineered by the Labour Party, particularly the provision of universal secondary education. The authors assert that Tawney's ideas changed markedly through the course of his life and that they lack the consistency that other interpreters have erroneously attributed to them. They reject the notion that his writings have an essential unity, which is philosophically interesting - don't we tend to assume that an intellectual's life's work will contain a central 'core' of ideas? Discussion of an important pioneer in democratic socialism also seems relevant at a time when Labour has 'lost its way' and evolved into a watered down version of the Conservatives. Full review...
The Sarkozy Phenomenon by Nick Hewlett
The old saying is that 'cometh the hour, cometh the man' and whether or not it's the electorate's ability to pick the man or whether he was only seen as the right man in retrospect is a moot point. There are, though, some surprising people at the head of European countries at the moment – with Silvio Berlusconi and Nicholas Sarkozy at the head of my personal list. My last attempt to find out more about Sarkozy proved to be too light-weight for my tastes, but this time I've gone to the opposite end of the scale with a book from Nick Hewlett, Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick and published by Imprint Academic. I mention those points because there is no attempt to present this as populist writing: it's scholarly from beginning to end. Full review...
The Future History of the Arctic: How climate, resources and geopolitics are reshaping the north, and why it matters to the world by Charles Emmerson
Charles Emmerson examines the past history of Arctic exploration, economic exploitation and development and the policies of governments of countries which include Arctic territory (and others), with the aim of understanding the present and predicting the future better. He explains the apparently contradictory title in some detail in the Introduction. While history is about the past, 'ideas about the future have changed over time'. Also, the future of the Arctic will be shaped by its history. Full review...
Across Many Mountains: Three Daughters of Tibet by Yangzom Brauen and Katy Darbyshire
Fleeing your home can never be easy but when you are six, your only shoes are roughly hand-sewn and stuffed with hay, and your route is over the world's highest mountain range then it must be particularly challenging. This was the journey that Yangzom Brauen's mother took with her parents when they fled Tibet after the Chinese invasion of 1959. They were leaving behind all that they knew and travelling to India in the hope that they could find sanctuary in the country where the Dalai Lama was in exile. 'Across Many Mountains' is their story. Full review...
How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly And the Stark Choices Ahead by Dambisa Moyo
Moyo's first book, Dead Aid was a well regarded and oft discussed title when I worked in Development. In a country where it was hard to find any book at all, somehow every ex-pat household seemed to have at least one copy of this, and I followed the sheep and had a read. It was a great, insightful book that we could all identify with, and I was eager to read her second, if somewhat unrelated work. Full review...
The Big Short by Michael Lewis
So. The subprime mortgage crisis, the worldwide financial crisis, people losing their jobs, their money, their houses, their security. Unregulated greed, that went on and on and on. And the people who caused it all got rich during and after, very few felt any sort of consequences, and millions of other people worldwide suffered greatly. Strip away all the intentionally confusing terminology and it all amounts to bets with unbelievable amounts of money. How did it all come about and how did it play out? Michael Lewis explains the mess as only he can. Just as his earlier excellent work Liar's Poker encapsulated the excesses of Wall Street in the 1980s, so does The Big Short perfectly tell the tale of Wall Street in the 2000s. In fact, given the extent of the current global clusterfuck, it makes the shocking Liar's Poker look positively mild by comparison. Full review...
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love by Xinran
Xinran first came to my notice with her 2002 book "The Good Women of China" which retold tales of the women she had come across through her work in Chinese radio, where for many years she had hosted the local equivalent of a cross between Woman's Hour and a late night phone-in talk show. She has been busy bringing us other stories in the meantime, but in this latest work she returns to those early days in radio and the stories she learned. Many of these stories she decided were too painful to tell. They speak of children, specifically daughters, abandoned by their Chinese mothers one way or another. Full review...
Nothing but the Truth: Selected Dispatches by Anna Politkovskaya
Anna Politkovskaya worked for the Russian newspaper Novaya gazeta, becoming particularly famous for her critical reports on the wars in Chechnya, on Putin, on state corruption and on life in Russia under his regime. She never avoided controversy and received a number of death threats before she was murdered in October 2006. She had reason to know these were no idle threats – one of her articles here entitled 'Is Journalism Worth the Loss of a Life?' reports the attempted murder of one of her colleagues. Full review...
Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City by Jonny Steinberg
South African Steinberg has won awards with previous non-fiction books and after reading the praise from various sources (New York Times, J M Coetzee) I came to the conclusion that I was in for a serious and thought-provoking read.
The preface tells us that the two Liberian men - Rufus and the younger Jacob left Liberian soil in vastly different circumstances and for different reasons. But as they meet up years later and thousands of miles away from their homeland, their Little Liberia in New York City has a tall order: to contain and accommodate their big personalities and to a certain extent, their big egos. Can it cope? Full review...
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
Dr Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to helping the poorest and neediest in society. He works tirelessly to help people less fortunate than him. Dedicated his life and works tirelessly - phrases we've heard many times about many wonderful people, but when reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, you'll realise there's not a shred of hyperbole about these claims. Farmer began working with tuberculosis and AIDS patients in Haiti, and then worked with them, and worked for them, and worked with them, and worked for them, and worked with them. In an area where treating the disease is just one part of the problem, where poverty is rife, he has transformed an area, saved countless lives, and made an incredible difference to many people. Partners In Health, the healthcare organisation he set up with his colleagues, takes this work worldwide. Full review...
Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age by Adrian Johns
If you are inclined to take your cues from the weekly reviews, as the witty poet Gavin Ewart once expressed the matter, you will doubtless find currently articles as varied as; Russell Brand predicting the imminent decline of the BBC, various interpretations of liberalism and how these struggle for expression in Coalition Government policy. There are concerns too about the legislation governing the internet and references back to the Sixties battles between, on the one hand, the unbridled self-expression of the free market and, on the other, the virtues of self-restraint in such matters as the re-examination of the Lady Chatterley trial, now fifty years ago. An unusual and quite intriguing book, Death of a Pirate, about the development of intellectual property and piracy in radio touches on all these contemporary concerns in a dramatic way. It combines the history of modern broadcasting with a crime story and consequent trial. Full review...
Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni: The True Story by Valerie Benaim and Yves Azeroual
In November 2007 the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy was newly divorced from his second wife and, despite his position and busy life, feeling rather lonely. He accepted an invitation to a dinner party from a friend and met supermodel and recording artist, Carla Bruni. The attraction between them was instant – she had already said that she wanted a man with nuclear power and he was smitten by the attentions of a beautiful, famous and intelligent woman. Within months they were married. Full review...
Learning to Scream by Beate Teresa Hanika
Malvina is thirteen years old, the youngest of three children in a dysfunctional family. Her father is a very grumpy teacher, with little understanding of children, whilst her mother seems to suffer permanently from migraine. She has a good friend, Lizzy, and they play together as much as they can, united in their dislike of the 'boys from the estate'. Her grandmother died last year, leaving her granddad on his own and it's Malvina's job to go and visit him and take him his meals. The family think this is a great arrangement because they know how much Granddad loves Malvina and looks forward to her visits. There's a problem though. Malvina doesn't like going, particularly on her own. Granddad kisses her on the mouth. Full review...
The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah
In the Preface, Appiah believes that morality is an extremely important area of our lives as we live them today. He goes on by saying that it's all very well thinking about morality - our morals - our own code of living - but it's the ultimate action which truly matters. Well, I would certainly agree with that. And as Appiah digs deeper into his subject, he tells his readers that he was struck by similarities between, for example, the collapse of the duel, the abandonment of footbinding, the end of Atlantic slavery. In the following chapters he debates the issues of those three major areas of morality. They were, in short, moral issues on a very large scale. Full review...
A Diary of The Lady: My First Year as Editor by Rachel Johnson
Along with most of my contemporaries I've never read 'The Lady' except once when looking for an au pair job in my student days, and that, it turns out, is the problem. Before Rachel Johnson was appointed in June 2009 the average age of the readership was 75, the circulation was dropping and the magazine was haemorrhaging money. The Budworth family, proprietors of 'The Lady' since it was founded 125 years ago, chose son and heir Ben Budworth to turn the magazine's fortunes around before it folded. He asked Rachel Johnson to be editor. Full review...
The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley
After decades of watching politics more or less assiduously I was surprised by the New Labour administration. Never before had so much been put – or so it seemed – in the public domain, but never before had I had quite such a feeling of really not understanding what was going on, of being party to only half a story. The age of spin told us little that we really wanted to know, but left unsaid all the important things. Early in 2010 I was disappointed that I'd missed Andrew Rawnsley's 'The End of the Party' but now I'm rather glad that I did as it's been republished in paperback with two additional chapters which include the extraordinary events surrounding the 2010 General Election. Full review...
School Daze: Searching for a Decent State Education by Andrew Penman
As a teacher myself, I'm naturally well aware of most of the aspects of education that Andrew Penman discusses here and some of the stories he repeats are well-known to me but may be of news to some readers. Yes, people will really do just about anything to try and get their children into the school of their choice – even commit fraud! But how well does this book work as an insight into the type of measures some people will go to for those readers unaware of the desperation that can set in at this time in a child’s life? It’s a good question… Full review...
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...