[[Category:Politics and Society|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Politics and Society]]__NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=The Economist
The above words were uttered in 1943 by a gentleman called Bernard Gabriel. Mr Gabriel was a piano player who founded a unique club, ''The Society of Timid Souls'' that encouraged timid performers and fear-wracked musicians to come in out of the cold 'to play, to criticise and be criticised in order to conquer that old bogey of stage fright.' The method evidently worked, as many a timid soul claimed to be cured by these unorthodox methods and club membership grew considerably in the years that followed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781251908</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Rithy Panh
|title=The Elimination
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Three years ago I went to Cambodia. I went to S21, because you cannot go to Phnom Penh and not go to the former high school Tuol Sleng (Tuol Slav Prey as it had been) and see what it became. I went to Choeung Ek, because you cannot NOT know about the killing fields, and you cannot really know about them until you have stood there.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846689295</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ivo Mosley
|title=In the Name of the People: Pseudo-Democracy and the Spoiling of Our World
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=On the spectrum ranging between democracy and totalitarianism, Ivo Mosley upholds that the system of elective oligarchy lies closer to the latter. And yet, he essentially says, Western democracy as we know it today is ''nothing'' but this form of representative government, excluding a large proportion of the people whose freedoms it claims to protect.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845402626</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul McMahon
|title=Feeding Frenzy: The New Politics of Food
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=It's predicted that the world's population will reach nine billion by 2050 and given that there are regular appeals for money to relieve a famine in some part of the world it's not unreasonable to wonder whether or not we will be able to feed nine billion people. Recent turmoil in food markets adds to the worry, but the truth is that we could feed that number people ''now'' if different approaches were taken and there was cooperation rather than an unseemly scramble to secure access to food even if this results in starvation for the neighbour. Paul McMahon looks at how in this very readable book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781250340</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mac Carty
|title=The Vagaries Of Swing (Footprints on the Margate Sands of Time)
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Mac Carty tells us that the catalyst for 'The Vagaries of Swing' was the BBC television series 'True Love' which portrayed a series of romantic encounters all set by the sea in his home town of Margate. But Carty has taken the original idea - about relationships between people - and run with it, extending ''love'' into ''passion'', say for cricket, or (at the other end of the scale) as a human encounter which ends in violence. Whilst the television series might have been the catalyst for the book there was another and probably more compelling reason. When his friend Mike died he realised that he had no one with whom to share his fund of stories about growing up in Margate, all of which had been revisited on a regular basis and usually over a pint. I've just read the result.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1291336761</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Emily Cockayne
|title=Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=As Emily Cockayne emphasises at the beginning of the first chapter, almost everyone has a neighbour; if you have a neighbour, you are one yourself; and neighbours can enrich or ruin our lives. In this engaging book, she takes various case studies and anecdotes of living side by side in Britain from around 1200 to the present day.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099546949</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan M Katz
|title=The Big Truck That Went By
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=It was January 12, 2010 and AP correspondent Jonathan M. Katz was preparing to ship out of Haiti after spending the last two and a half years reporting about political instability, riots and disasters. He was preparing for a change of scene, a stint in Afghanistan, concluding that ''It sounded like a good place for a break''. Nature had other plans.
When the earthquake struck, Katz was unexpectedly thrown into the thick of the action. As the only American reporter on the ground at the time of the quake, he felt duty-bound to break news of unfolding events to an oblivious world.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>023034187X</amazonuk>
}}