==Politics and society==
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{{newreview
|author=Amy V Fetzer and Shari Aaron
|title=Climb the Green Ladder: Make Your Company and Career More Sustainable
|rating=4
|genre=Business and Finance
|summary=With the abject failure of the Denmark Climate Change Conference fresh in our minds, it is perhaps time to turn away from the politicians and look back toward what we can do.
The Conference may have finally got the likes of the USA, India and China to acknowledge that they have to join in if we are going to save the planet as a benevolent place for our species to live, but there is still too much posturing and not enough commitment.
Clearly our governments and 'leaders' are not going to do this for us; we have to do it for ourselves.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>047074801X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nicholas Stern
|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>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Martin Lindstrom
|title=Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong
|rating=3.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847940110</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Antonio Negri and Raf Scelsi
|title=Goodbye Mr Socialism
|rating=3
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=''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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1852429526</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=James Polk
|title=The Triumph of Ignorance and Bliss: Pathologies of Public America
|rating=3
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1551643146</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=The Economist
|title=Pocket World In Figures 2009
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846681235</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mark Thomas
|title=Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091922933</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Justin Scroggie
|title=Tic-tac Teddy Bears and Teardrop Tattoos
|rating=4
|genre=Trivia
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340976489</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sarah Lyall
|title=A Field Guide To The British
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184724582X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ben Goldacre
|title=Bad Science
|rating=5
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007240198</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alan Cowell
|title=The Terminal Spy
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0385614152</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Christina Thompson
|title=Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
|rating=4.5
|genre=Travel
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0747582521</amazonuk>
}}
