Books Indexed

An alphabetical index of books reviewed on Culture Wars, the online review. Choose a letter below to browse by title, and click on any book title below for more information... Or just select one of the five most recent books.

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 i-Muslims: Rewiring the House of Islam
  • Author: Gary Bunt
  • Publisher: C Hurst & Co
  • ISBN-10: 1850659508
  • ISBN-13: 978-1850659501

The internet: made for Islam?

But what of the ostensible contradiction between Islam and modernity? Far from being in antithesis to Islam, the internet is entirely germane to a religion that has always been ‘wiki’ in its nature.

BooksWorld Development
Thursday, August 19, 2010

 Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
  • Author: Clay Shirky
  • Publisher: Allen Lane
  • ISBN-10: 1846142172
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846142178

Facebook, freeware and working for fun

The dirty secret of free software and services is that they imply free – read unpaid – labour. While this may be difficult for certain business models to accommodate, such as the print media and the music industry, which now have to compete with free alternatives, it is far from clear that it is difficult per se for capitalism as a social system.

BooksIntellectuals & the Public
Thursday, August 05, 2010

 Ferraris for All: In Defence of Economic Progress
  • Author: Daniel Ben-Ami
  • Publisher: Policy Press
  • ISBN-10: 1847423469
  • ISBN-13: 978-1847423467

Goods are good

The implication of Ferraris is that the incessant focus on limits of all kinds today is about the idea of, the necessity for, limits per se rather than specific limits themselves. Any attempt to argue that such and such a particular limit – the ‘tyranny of oil’ – can be overcome – with biofuels - will be countered almost immediately with another limit – a claimed shortage of land.

BooksRadicalism, past, present and futureWorld Development
Thursday, July 29, 2010

 The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good
  • Author: Matthew Crawford
  • Publisher: Viking
  • ISBN-10: 0670918741
  • ISBN-13: 978-0670918744

Gets your motor running

Crawford’s well-aimed blows at scientific management principles, staff team-building exercises and the resistance of modern machinery to home servicing will strike chords with many, and he synthesises a fresh and thought-provoking outlook from his experiences. However, alongside the ambition of his remit, his basic argument - that we can make the world a better place by fixing stuff - is pretty modest.

America, AmericaBooks
Friday, July 23, 2010

 The tyranny of guilt: an essay on Western masochism
  • Author: Pascal Bruckner
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN-10: 0691143765
  • ISBN-13: 978-0691143767

Guilty fantasies

Moreover, it’s noteworthy that for all his shrewd criticism of the way the left projects its fantasies onto the Israel-Palestine conflict, Bruckner himself was a keen supporter of the break up of Yugoslavia and the punishment and demonisation of Serbia during the 1990s. Bruckner failed utterly to understand that the left (and indeed many on the right such as himself) were projecting a fantasy onto the Yugoslav break up and war.

America, AmericaBooksWorld Development
Thursday, June 24, 2010

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