Thursday, Sep 2nd 2010
Book Review: Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists by Daniel Dorling, Policy Press (2010)
Over the last two decades or so, scholars concerned with social justice have offered a number of different frameworks for helping us to analyse the problem. These have included the extensively discussed two-dimensional approach that classifies issues under the headings of redistribution [...]
Book Review:The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, (2009) Verso.
It isn’t entirely clear why Verso thought now would be a good time to publish a book of extracts from the writings of the Situationists about the urban environment and experience. Editor Tom McDonough, whose excellent introductory essay renders much of the subsequent material [...]
Book review: ‘Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the 20th Century’ by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso, 2010)
This inspiring book examines how women challenged many aspects of public and private life between the 1880s and 1920s, in Britain and in the USA. They did so from different positions in the political spectrum, as liberals, socialists [...]
Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2010) Paperback £9.99 stg.
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, an academically minded historical work that nonetheless spent nineteen weeks on the bestseller list in Israel, is a book that is much more incendiary than it ought to be. Sand’s basic thesis – that [...]
The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou (Verso 2010)
Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, edited by A.J. Bartlett & Justin Clemens (Acumen Publishing, 2010)
Badiou’s Being and Event, Christopher Norris (Continuum 2009)
Alain Badiou could be the most important philosopher alive today - time will tell - and his work is gradually reaching English-speaking readers. His magnum opus, Being [...]
Book Review: Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism, Natasha Walter (Virago 2010)
When the facts changed, Natasha Walter changed her mind. Or so she says in Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism, a book that describes how raunch culture has co-opted the language of choice and liberation and how the post-feminist cultural politics of celebrating doll-like [...]
Book Review:The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Men and Women Today by Kat Banyard, Faber & Faber (2010)
28-year-old British activist Kat Banyard opens her polemic The Equality Illusion with a quote simply beyond satire from Sir Stuart Rose, Chairman of Marks and Spencer:
‘…there really are no glass ceilings despite the fact that some of you [...]
Book Review: Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, Zero Books, 2009
Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman is a slim but muscular volume, whose pithy prose goes straight to the heart of the challenges currently facing contemporary feminism. Constructed as a series of short, cut-to-the-chase essays on a diverse range of ‘raw-nerve’ topics, from Sarah Palin and the [...]
Book Review: Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2010)
Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in [...]
Book Review: Ireland’s Economic Crash, by Kieran Allen, The Liffey Press
Kieran Allen’s excellent analysis of Ireland’s recession, the first that this writer has encountered from an Irish Marxist, is predicated on a single simple truth: Since 1970, in the worldwide capitalist system, profits have been falling. For example, ‘the profit rate in 1997 was only [...]