Monday, Feb 6th 2012
Book Review: Sins of the Father: Tracing the Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy By Conor McCabe (The History Press Ireland, 2011)
A constant theme of Irish society is the national commentariat’s habit of assuming that anything successful in a green shirt reflects well on all of us. Jack Charlton’s football team embodied this contradiction, the [...]
Book Review: End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity, Wang Hui (Verso 2011)
Apologists for Beijing sometimes like to say that nobody died on Tiananmen Square in 1989. This is the kind of statement whose technical accuracy is meant to be deceptive. It’s long been documented, if not fully embedded in public understanding, that [...]
Book Review: Hilary Wainwright, Reclaim the state: experiments in popular democracy. London / New York / Calcutta: Seagull (2nd edition - 2009).
A new book by Hilary Wainwright is usually a significant event: Beyond the Fragments (with Sheila Rowbotham and Lynne Segal, 1979), Arguments for a New Left (1994) and the first edition of Reclaim the [...]
Album Review: Arise and Go, Stephen James Smith and Enda Reilly, 2011 (on iTunes, on Facebook).
Stephen James Smith- SJS to the scene- is one of the wonderboys of Irish Spoken Word. I first met him at the Electric Picnic in 2007. He made a beeline for me after I had finished a performance on Marty Mulligan’s [...]
Book Review: ‘On the State of Egypt- The Issues that Caused the Revolution‘, Alaa Al Aswany (AUB Press 2011)
David Lynch is currently based in Cairo reporting on post-Mubarak Egypt and the Arab Spring. He is blogging at Arab Spring in My Step.
Massive social phenomena are not easily predicted.
The CIA for instance, was pumped full of [...]
Book Review: Britain’s Empire, Richard Gott (Verso 2011)
Hegel’s metaphor about the awareness that comes only after the event – ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk’ - might encourage the thought that finally we are able to look back at the British empire and draw some [...]
A review of Ghost Estate by William Wall, Published by Salmon Poetry 2011
‘…& are we supposed to sympathise
when the gentry find themselves
in the same boat
or plane
as everyone else?’
From ‘Job in Heathrow’
William Wall is a novelist, poet and blogger. I better ‘fess up straight away that ever since I read William’s Booker Prize long- listed [...]
Book Review: Words of a Rebel, Peter Kropotkin (1885, this edition published in 1997)
History is interwoven with the plight of our times - a hereditary restriction of the masses which allows the supremacist authority of the rulers. Our disassociation from past struggles has ensured that humanity, subjugated through capitalism, has betrayed the nature of revolution. Capitalism [...]
Book Review: The Ask, Sam Lipsyte (2010)
Milo Burke is a man in distress. He’s a man who was whelped in a liberal college that let him believe he was the future of visual art, but now he’s stuck raising the money for another such institution to prop upsimilar self-delusions. But he’s not very good at [...]
Book Review: Prison Notebooks Vol 1, Antonio Gramsci, Columbia University Press (2011)
“Culture is a fundamental concept of socialism because it integrates and concretizes the vague concept of freedom of thought.” Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci’s cultural awareness permeates every single reflection recorded in his notebooks. Arrested and imprisoned in 1926 on conspiracy charges of an alleged attempt [...]
