Politics and society
The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement by Jean M Twenge and W Keith Campbell
Twenge and Campbell have been studying the rise in narcissism as a social trend. They are well-qualified to comment, having worked since 1998 with social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who pioneered research in this field. At more than three hundred pages it's rather weighty for the popular market at which it's aimed, but even if you only dip into this book, I think you'll take home their message. Full review...
You Are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain by Tim Moore
This is not the first book I've read about the scummy, unloved corners of our country, and I approached it in just the same way I did with the last - I looked to see if it might feature Leicester, where I live. The opinion seems to be that you can only like Leicester enough to be proud of it if you're not from there originally - and as I grew up on the edge of a village in the middle of nowhere, it suits me fine. But no - despite its problems (thanks, Labour councils) it doesn't count. It's not grotty, ugly, run-down and unappreciated enough. It still has some semblance of life, unlike too many towns and cities in Britain where the industry, the jobs, the life and the thought have been sucked out, seemingly beyond repair. After stumbling upon the nightmare that is the out-of-season, redundant English coastal town, our author has valiantly journeyed round many of these grot-spots, and found the story of decrepitude only exacerbating. Full review...
Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japan's Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster by Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill
In 2011, Japan was hit by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, followed by a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown. The tale of this devastating trio of tragedies is told by two journalists who've lived in Tokyo for years, and the pairing of Birmingham and McNeil give us a real insight into just how this could have happened and the way that half a dozen people, from all walks of life, responded to it. Full review...
The Crocodile by the Door: The Story of a House, a Farm and a Family by Selina Guinness
Selina Guinness lived at Tibradden as a child and in 2002 she and her husband-to-be, Colin Graham, moved back to the house when her elderly uncle Charles became frail. The surname might lead you to suspect that there were brewery millions in the background but this wasn't the case. The couple were young academics and doing what needed to be done at Tibradden would need to be done in addition to full-time jobs. The house was on the outskirts of Dublin - 'derelict fields' if you were a property developer or the last defence against the encroaching city if you were not. Full review...
The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick
It's been said that history is written by the victors. It would also be pertinent to add that the writing will always polish up the worthy parts whilst whilst finding a convenient carpet under which can be swept the events which are best forgotten. There's no country with a victory under its belt which is above this practice: I've just been brought up very sharply as I considered the Irish potato famine from the Irish perspective. That's a story you'll not read in many British history books. The majority of British people would accept though that their country has had an imperialist past - and that the natives have not always thrown themselves down in front of us in their joy at our arrival. Full review...
Black Cats and Evil Eyes: A Book of Old-Fashioned Superstitions by Chloe Rhodes
If you had asked me I would have said that I was not in the least superstitious. I don't have a horseshoe hung outside the house, don't have any concerns about the date 'Friday the 13th' and accept that a broken mirror is an unfortunate accident rather than a blight on my life for the next seven years. After all, it's simply a matter of applying logic to the situation. There are sensible reasons for not walking under ladders or opening an umbrella is the house. Not passing someone on the stairs is just being safety conscious, isn't it? Then my husband sneezed. Full review...
Of the People, By the People: A New History of Democracy by Roger Osborne
Most authors writing on the subject of democracy tend to concentrate on political theory. Osborne approaches the subject from the historical angle instead, looking at different democracies from that of Greece in the sixth century BC, to the present day. 'Humanity's finest achievement', as Osborne calls it in the first sentence of his prologue, comes from the Greek words demos (people) and kratos (rule). It had its origins in the system devised in ancient Athens, the earliest in the world which did not first operate through complex relations of kinship and deference, as had others up to then. Parallels would be seen in Rome a few centuries later. Full review...
House of Fun: 20 glorious years in parliament by Simon Hoggart
'House of Fun' is a selection of some of the best of the parliamentary sketches which Simon Hoggart has written for the Guardian. In time they range from the 1993 Liberal Conference (as as you're probably thinking it, it's worth quoting the 'Little changes... except, periodically, the name of the party') through to the G4S (another case where there have been name changes...) debacle just prior to the 2012 Olympics. So far as Prime Ministers are concerned, we start with John Major and wend our way through to Cameron, with the Conservatives book-ending the Blair/Brown war. But the point about parliamentary sketches is that they are under no obligation to record the major events: they illuminate the unusual, the usually unrecorded and the thought-provoking incidents of life in the political world. Full review...
There Is No Such Thing As A Free Press by Mick Hume
I'll confess that the phone-hacking scandal largely left me cold. It seemed to be about people who had courted the media interest complaining that they had caught the media's interest when they didn't intend to do so. Then the hacking of murdered teenager Milly Dowler's phone came to light and disinterest turned to disgust. The Leveson Enquiry became the best show in town if you really wanted to hear about what celebrities had been doing and I moved to wondering what the outcome would be and whether it would prove to be a talking shop and waste of money. It might have remained that way if the Jimmy Savile scandal hadn't dominated the news for a couple of weeks and I really began to wonder if we here at Bookbag Towers were the only people hadn't known what was going on. Why hadn't this made headlines when other less important news had? I needed to know more about the press. I particularly needed to know if increased regulation - which seems almost inevitable - could produce more Jimmy Saviles. Full review...
War Against the Taliban: Why it All Went Wrong in Afghanistan by Sandy Gall
It's always struck me that there are several countries where western might is going to be largely ineffective when it comes to an invasion or any other form of warfare. Vietnam proved to be one such place for the Americans back in the seventies and when the latest incursion into Afghanistan was announced my immediate reaction was that there would be no positive outcome, not least because that was what history dictated. This was broadly correct but overly simplistic and this was one of the reasons why Sandy Gall's book appealed to me so much. He's been involved with Afghanistan since before the Soviet invasion of 1979. This isn't a war correspondent dropping in and out of a country, but a man with a deep love for the people and a concern for their welfare. He has the contacts, his knowledge is encyclopaedic and he's an expert communicator. Full review...
Sylvia Pankhurst: The Rebellious Suffragette by Shirley Harrison
To some extent, the history of the suffragettes was also the history of the Pankhurst family. Sylvia, born in 1882, was the second daughter of Dr Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst, and one of three sisters. The family had always been heavily politicised, Richard being a founder member of the Fabian Society alongside George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, and the children had quite an austere upbringing. When their father’s health took a sudden turn for the worse in 1898, Emmeline and eldest daughter Christabel were abroad on business and Sylvia was left in charge of her younger siblings as well as having to nurse him, taking the full force of the shock when he died in her arms. With his passing the family were left strangely detached from each other. His widow became heavily involved in public work and political agitation, an increasingly remote mother from the young children who needed her. Full review...
How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser
In his introduction Professor Kaiser states that there are three ways in which the west coast hippies have benefited the development of Physics; they opened up deeper speculation into the fundamental philosophy behind quantum theory, they latched on to a crucial theorem of Bell, about what Einstein termed spooky interactions between particles at a distance. This might otherwise have been totally neglected. Thirdly they propounded a key idea which has become known as the 'no-cloning theorem'. Kaiser tells a lucid account as might be expected from the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and department chief in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's program. Incidentally he also provides an engaging insight into the American industrial-military complex and associated institutions like the Californian University at Berkley. Full review...
Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America by Clive Stafford-Smith
On 16 October 1986, Derrick and Duane Moo Young were shot and killed, in Miami. British businessman Kris Maharaj was arrested, and in 1987 he was convicted of their murders and sentenced to death. His defence lawyer, Eric Hendon, took the unusual line of offering no defence at all - when it came time to present his case, he simply rested. Kris protested his innocence throughout, and continues to do so to this day. Despite weighty evidence in support of this, he still languishes in prison 26 years later. Full review...
The Cage by Gordon Weiss
The history of Ceylon, and latterly Sri Lanka has at its centre an undeniable contradiction. A nation which espoused and proclaimed peaceful Buddhism was caught in one of the bloodiest conflicts in the recent past, a conflict peppered with suicide bombings, mass killings, rapes, torture and imprisonment, and more than a hint of genocide. Gordon Weiss was intimately involved as a journalist and as the United Nations Spokesman in Sri Lanka for two years of the almost 40 years conflict, and has produced a detailed account of the background and eventual denouement of this conflict. Full review...
Living, Thinking, Looking by Siri Hustvedt
'Living, Thinking, Looking' is a collection of essays by Siri Hustvedt which, she claims, are linked by an abiding curiosity about what it means to be human. In these essays she examines who we are and how we got that way. Full review...
Britain for Sale by Alex Brummer
Buy British, we're constantly told, and many people do - the French, the Germans, Qataris, Chinese... If you want to buy British you'd be hard pressed to use a British electricity company, the people shifting North Sea oil to you might be foreign, the trains near you may be foreign-operated, and so much of what's in the shops you buy from would of coursed be sourced from abroad, and shipped through foreign-owned ports. Whether or not the country is going to hell in a handcart, it's moving in piecemeal stages to exterior business interests, and the British citizen gets the worst of the deal. Full review...
This is Not the End of the Book; by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere
In many ways, the cover of my edition of this book is perfectly appropriate. Huge, bold serif script, with nothing but the typeface; a declamatory instance of the art in the most common of fonts, and that perfect semi-colon at the end of the book's name - proving that that itself is not the be-all and end-all. Buy this book, as you can, in electronic form, and you might see this cover for ten seconds at most, but it is so much part and parcel of what's within. Full review...
Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer
We're all used to terms like 'G7' which then became the 'G8' - the group of countries which met periodically to thrash out global problems - frequently with America being expected to take the lead where military muscle or finance was concerned. We even nod knowingly at the mention of the G20 - formed with the good intention that a larger group would be able to tackle such issues as climate change. We know where good intentions generally lead but there wasn't even sufficient agreement amongst the nations to all head off in the same direction. So when a point was reached where America was no longer financially able or politically willing to play global policeman what was left? Full review...
People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan's Shadows by Richard Parry
Just over a decade ago, 21-year-old Lucie Blackman went to Japan in search of adventure, excitement, and a way to pay off her debts. A couple of months later, her disappearance set in motion a high profile investigation which would see her face plastered over the news for some time in this country. As so often happens with the media, though, there was a huge amount of interest in her plight, and her family's desperate search for her, and then, with the mystery looking less and less likely to be solved, the papers found something else to report on. Just over half a year later, there was a tragic end to the tale as her dismembered body was discovered. Full review...
The Expo Files: Articles by the Crusading Journalist by Stieg Larsson
Stieg Larsson would not have known Anders Breivik, but if they'd coincided you can be damned sure he knew all there was to know about him. Larsson and his journalist colleagues were working to condemn the far-right activities throughout Europe, and open the truth about the right-wing Swedish parties to his audience, and here is constant proof he knew an awful lot about his awful subject. In just the first two, powerful, short essays here he brings terrorism in the UK, Italy and Oklahoma to his home audience, and discusses Swedish extremism in its light; showing the liberal laws in Sweden that allowed the extremists to be seen as too much on the straight and narrow, too mainstream, and even able to enter parliament. The idea of 'it couldn't happen here' gets blown out the water, and as we've seen that is relevant to us everywhere. Full review...
The Arab Spring: Rebellion, revolution, and a new world order by Toby Manhire (editor)
A Tunisian man, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire on 17th December 2010, in what appeared at the time to be a desperate gesture showing a complete lack of hope after his humiliation by a municipal official. What followed was one of the most remarkable events of recent years, as a wave of revolutions occured in what became known as the Arab Spring. As you'd expect from a top nwespaper, the Guardian had reporters, bloggers and columnists covering it all, and Toby Manhire provides a compilation of the paper's output here. Full review...
Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett
Daniel Everett previously worked as a missionary in far flung corners of the world– a fact that isn’t surprising given the number of references to faith that crop up over the pages. This new book, however, is about two much more appealing (to me) subjects: language and travel. If Bill Bryson is a travel writer with an interest in linguistics, then Daniel Everett is a linguist with an interest in travel. It’s not quite the ‘read it by a pool’ sort of book that Bryson might release but is somewhere between a formalised every day read and a text book with a big dollop of informality stirred in. The travel stories – jaunts to Brazil, Mexico and beyond – are great, and while you might think they’re taking things a bit off track (albeit in a rather pleasant way) sooner or later the linguistic point will become clear. Full review...
Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism by Kira Cochrane (editor)
Some revolutions happen faster than others, and the revolution in society's thinking about women is certainly one of the more gradual ones. Kira Cochrane, Women's Editor at the Guardian from 2006 – 2010, has collected together the best articles and essays from that paper's women's section since 1971. The result, Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism, is a lively account of the more recent women's liberation movement in the UK and of the issues facing women in a modern, late twentieth/early twenty-first century society. Full review...
The Little Book of Prison by Frankie Owens
It’s probably pretty safe to assume that the sort of prisons shown on TV, and their portrayals of life inside, bear as much resemblance to real jails as the doctors in Grey’s Anatomy or House do to their NHS counterparts. That’s why Frankie has written this book: to provide a guide to what life inside is really like and how best to survive it with your sanity, and body, intact. Full review...
Lotteries in Public Life by Peter Stone (editor)
Peter Stone's reader is an examination not so much of examples of lotteries in public life, but of the theoretical and conceptual issues which the use of 'sortation' in decision taking raises. There are essays here about the use of the lottery in politics, in allocating scarce resources (such as school places or human organs) and even on the problems of defining the lottery and the methods for assuring fairness. Because lotteries are used in many societies to resolve issues and perhaps because of recent discussion of the use of the lottery to allocate school places, this is a hot issue which raises fundamental questions about democracy and choice. Full review...
Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea by Donovan Hohn
In January 1992 a container ship was on its way from China to the USA when it was caught in a storm and two containers broke loose from the deck. They held nearly thirty thousand bath toys - yellow ducks, green frogs, red beavers and blue turtles - which were freed when the containers broke up and have circumnavigated the globe for almost twenty years. Donovan Hohn was a teacher and when one of his students wrote an essay describing what had happened to the toys it caught Hohn's imagination. The rest is - as they say - history and a very good book. Full review...
The Library Book by Anita Anand, Julian Barnes, Bella Bathurst, Alan Bennett and others
I had better begin by saying that I had a vested interest in liking this book since I am a chartered librarian myself and so am wholeheartedly in support of saving our nation's public libraries. But you don't need to be a librarian to enjoy this book. It is rich with anecdotes from some wonderful writers and makes a pleasant read whether you're keen to save libraries or not. Full review...
Bubble Wrapped Children by Helen Oakwater
Bubble Wrapped Children takes a look at the state of adoption in the UK, and how aspects of it are being threatened by the use of social networks. The author, with over 20 years' experience in the adoption world, paints a broad picture of the issues facing adopters and adoptees. Peppering the text are some examples of unwanted Facebook contact from birth parents, which have had massive knock-on effects for the adopted children. Full review...
Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Advertisement by Francesca Beauman
You might think the Lonely Hearts ad a trivial matter. You might think it should appear in lower case and not be capitalised, but you'd be in disagreement with Ms Beauman, who gives a big L and a big H to it every time she writes of it in her survey of its history. What's more, she gets to write about a lot more than just the contents of the adverts in this brilliant book. Full review...
Demystifying the Chinese Economy by Justin Yifu Lin
The success of the Chinese economy, and as Lin makes us aware, a success which contrasts strongly with what appeared major failure in the recent historical past, is something which needs explanation. No one can ignore it, and we are confronted with the effects of it from the ownership of Thames water to the faces of tourists in London and Stratford on a daily basis. And in the roots of its success are the potential seeds of future change, a change that now more than ever is crucial to the way the world economy works. Full review...
The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China by James Palmer
Welcome to China, where the populous are busy leaving a rural country full of prosperous mineral resources and coal mines, and shoddily-built hydro-electric dams in environmentally dubious locations, for the burgeoning, mechanised cities. But this isn't the birth of 2012, it's the dawn of 1976. Chairman Mao is dying, Premier Zhou Enlai has just died, and the cauldron of power is being stirred as never before. Among the momentous events of the year however will be a huge earthquake directly centred on the city of Tangshan, which will kill something like two thirds of a million people. Full review...
From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp
Gene Sharp is an American politologist and a veritable (and venerable) guru of non-violent struggle. The story behind the From Dictatorship to Democracy is a fascinating one. The book, or a booklet really as it consists of 160 small pages, was apparently created in response to a request from Burmese dissenters in the early 1990's. Sharp responded to this request by producing a generic text, a manual for the subversive that lies out the theory and practical advice for those engaged in a struggle to bring down a dictatorship. Full review...
Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson
Most people think about the subject of tax havens - if they need to think about them at all - as something which is unlikely ever to concern them and that they're for the super-rich and celebrities. What might surprise them is that more than half of world trade as well as most international lending is routed through them and that many common items in your everyday shopping will come to you via a tax haven. And we really should be thinking about them because tax havens are ensuring that wealth in unprecedented amounts is being transferred from the poor to the rich - greatly exceeding the aid which flows in the opposite direction. Full review...
Calories and Corsets: A history of dieting over two thousand years by Louise Foxcroft
We’re in that post-Christmas period when all the socialising and indulging is over and all you’re left with is a pasty, bloated, over-fed but under-nourished complexion, a wardrobe full of clothes just a little too tight and a new year’s resolution to Get Healthy. So it’s the perfect time for a new diet book to hit the shelves. The title of this one might make you think it’s going to be full of useful tips, and the cover does little to dispel this idea, groaning as it is with the weight of plump jellies, lavish cupcakes and even a decadent lobster or two, but take a moment to note the subtitle, if you will: a history of dieting over 2000 years. Full review...
The Locked Ward by Dennis O'Donnell
Dennis O’Donnell spent 7 years working in a Scottish hospital and this is the account of his time there. It takes a special type of person to work in Mental Health services, and though O'Donnell ultimately leaves the Locked Ward, he clearly is one of those people, made all the more remarkable by the fact that this wasn’t his life long vocation, having previously worked as a school teacher (some might say an equally challenging role). Full review...