==Politics and society==
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Bernhard Schlink
|title=Guilt About the Past
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Consider, if you will, guilt. You might have it tainting you, as 'beyond the perpetrators, every person who stands in solidarity with them and maintains solidarity after the fact becomes entangled'. The link might not strictly be a legal one, but concern 'norms of religion and morals, etiquette and custom as well as day-to-day communications and interactions'. Hence a collective guilt like no other - that witnessed in Germany. 'The assumption that membership to a people engenders solidarity is something Germans of my generation do not easily like to accept', we read. However difficult it might have been back then in its day, Germany had to physically renounce anything to do with Nazism, to actively 'opt-out' of connections to avoid the solidarity seen connecting the whole nation like a toxic spider web. And since then it's linked in all the children, in a ''bequeathal'' of guilt.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905636776</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael Wolff
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571236111</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Hitchens
|title=The Broken Compass: How British Politics lost its way
|rating=3.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847064051</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein
|title=Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141040017</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nick Davies
|title=Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099512688</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jennifer Worth
|title=Farewell To The East End
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0297844652</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Rania Al-Baz
|title=Disfigured: A Saudi Woman's Story of Triumph over Violence
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844370755</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Brian Dunning
|title=Skeptoid 2: More Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena
|rating=3.5
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=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 [http://skeptoid.com/ website].
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1440422850</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dan Gardner
|title=Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear
|rating=4.5
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0753515539</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Katherine Ashenburg
|title=Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846681014</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jean Hatzfeld
|title=The Strategy Of Antelopes: Rwanda After the Genocide
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=''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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846686865</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Emmanuel Jal
|title=War Child: A Boy Soldier's Story
|rating=4.5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408700050</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ash Amin and Michael O'Neill
|title=Thinking About Almost Everything
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668188X</amazonuk>
}}
