Browse books by title with CW new books archive feature.

The internet: made for Islam?

iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam, by Gary R Bunt (Hurst & Company, 2009)

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.

Facebook, freeware and working for fun

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, by Clay Shirky (Allen Lane, 2010)

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.

Goods are good

Ferraris for All: In Defence of Economic Growth, by Daniel Ben-Ami (Policy Press, 2010)

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.

Gets your motor running

The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford (Viking, 2010)

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.

Big Two-Hearted Hemingway

Lost in the life of a dead writer we’ve never met but whom foolishly we think know well

Hemingway hasn’t been, not since the 1940s, a mere writer and man, but a preposterous piece of Americana, a living riposte to a 20th century that seemed to otherwise deplete opportunities for masculine privilege and duty as the years of industrialisation, commercialisation, domestication, and entertainment-media saturation rolled on.

Guilty fantasies

The Tyranny of Guilt, an Essay on Western Masochism, by Pascal Bruckner (Princeton University Press, 2010)

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.

Reactionary, reified, religious and revoltingly inhumane

Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change, by Clive Hamilton (Earthscan, 2010)

Hamilton starts his chapter on ‘denial’ by recounting the tale of the ‘cognitive dissonance’ suffered by a 1950s doomsday cult whose apocalyptic predictions failed to materialise; an ironic choice for a thinker in a tradition which has consistently predicted (as yet unrealised) ecological disaster since the 1790s.

‘Necessary compromise’

The New Old World, by Perry Anderson (Verso, 2009)

Anderson’s account of the EU is at its strongest when he shows how it excludes the possibility of any of kind of politics at all. He remarks that though the EU appears in many respects to function as a forum for managing the relations between independent sovereign states, even here we are witnessing something different from traditional diplomacy.

History, handbook and cautionary tale

London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945, Barry Miles (Atlantic Books)

As with any religious, political or social movement, the question arises: how many wanted to effect some form of radical transformation, how many wanted what they could get out of it for themselves, and how many wanted a bit of both?

Dare to be dull

Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics, or why old Tory stories matter to us all, by Richard D North (Social Affairs Unit, 2009)

The uniting thread of conservatism, North says at one point, is a belief in inequality and a hatred of socialism. He also remarks that the British are not brutal or mean, but believe in character and standing on one’s own two feet; this too is Toryism in a nutshell.

Keynes, the straw man and this irrational, crazy world

The Economic Crisis and the State of Economics, Eds. Robert Skidelsky and Christian Westerlind Wigstrom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

If you have any doubt about the irrelevance of the EMH in the real world then just look at how the world’s leaders responded to the financial crisis. Governments everywhere stepped in with massive subsidies to keep the financial system afloat. Would leaders who were supposedly ideologically wedded to the principles of the free market have acted in such a concerted way to bail out the markets?

Does Granny Smith still matter?

Dear Granny Smith: A Letter from your Postman

The past three decades have witnessed a historically unprecedented depoliticisation of economic life, as a narrowly economic discourse of modernisation is used to present profoundly political agendas (for instance ‘slashing’ public services to produce ‘balanced’ budgets) as objective necessities.

The Pull of Reality

Wasted: Why Education Isn't Educating, by Frank Furedi (Continuum 2009)

Humanity has accumulated its knowledge, through millennia of struggles and discoveries, with no regard whatsoever for the nature of the child. On the contrary, education is the process whereby the child acquires a culture that is by definition heterogeneous to his nature. There is nothing natural in learning the multiplication tables, the alphabet, musical notation or the correct movements of tennis. Even if the way in which these are learnt can be more or less humane to children, the acquisition of knowledge is a cultural, as opposed to natural process.

The old one-two punch of history

First as Tragedy, Then As Farce, by Slavoj Žižek (2009)

The sheer vitality of Žižek’s thought usually serves to ensure that his work is an enjoyable read. In First as Tragedy, Then As Farce this effect is amplified by the urgency of his topic and the passion with which he approaches it. It’s perhaps inevitable though that this urgency does not translate easily into prescriptive politics and this is the one aspect of the book’s thesis which disappoints.

Don’t blame it on the Boomers

The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers took their children's future - and why they should give it back, by David Willetts (Atlantic Books)

Can Willetts afford himself the luxury of reticence? This book is not just about a supposed inter-generational conflict. It’s really about the state of the nation. This topic should not invite despair, but nor should it simply breed good - but insubstantial – intentions.