Browse books by title with CW new books archive feature.

With some scraps, please

The Uses of Literacy, by Richard Hoggart (Penguin, 2009)

Can we construct a radical politics which takes into account the complexities and contradictions in contemporary culture and does not end up anti-humanist or with a thinly-veiled contempt for ‘the masses’?

To and of humanity

The Education of a British-Protected Child, by Chinua Achebe (Allen Lane)

A 1988 essay entitled ‘The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics’ perhaps surprisingly offers a message directly applicable to the current moment in British politics. ‘Leadership is a sacred trust, like the priesthood in civilised, humane religions’, Achebe writes. His writings should be on a list of required reading for all those thinking of taking up office; perhaps then we might end up with a political class ready to treat the electorate with the respect it is due.

‘Democracy’ without politics

When The People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation, James S Fishkin (Oxford University Press)

Fishkin seems more interested in extracting approval from the public in order to legitimise the power of the elites, than in giving the public a role in political change. Democracy should mean that power is challenged and limited in response to political decisions, not confirmed in advance of them.

Living dolls: reconsidering the legacy of the 1960s

Living Dolls: the return of sexism, by Natasha Walter

The cultural outgrowths of the new left in general play a key role in many of the processes of social change which Walter hints at. Its stress on ‘independence and self-expression’, the focus on authenticity and self-discovery, ultimately are capable of being uncoupled from their political content and rearticulated in a resolutely depoliticised way. Far from undermining capitalism through a reclamation of authentic subjectivity, this cultural radicalism in fact helped fuel the emergence of contemporary consumer capitalism.

Putting the brum back into Brummie

This is Birmingham, written and illustrated by Jan Bowman

In the driving seat, an apt metaphor, given the city’s love affair with the motor car, were the ‘Lunar Men’, or ‘Lunaticks’ as they dubbed themselves. The Lunar Society met when the moon shone brightest, as that was the only way they could get home safely from their highbrow gatherings. They were, like most modern day Brummies, inventive, practical souls – but more than that, they were men of ideas.

The myth of motivation

Smile or die: how positive thinking fooled America and the world, by Barbara Ehrenreich

With the inward turn that positive thinking brings comes the problem of procrastination. When teaching tennis players, a common problem is the decision to avoid competition until a particular stroke is working properly. I call this the ‘perfect forehand syndrome’.

The personal and the political

Conspirator: Lenin in Exile, by Helen Rappaport (Hutchinson, 2009)

A new biography of Lenin recreates his exile years in fine-grained detail, but it intriguingly invokes feminism as a prism through which to makes sense of the past.

Swimming against an authoritarian current

The Bully State: The End of Tolerance, by Brian Monteith

The Bully State is often useful and entertaining. But Monteith’s anthropomorphising of social pressures into a list of bullying ‘socialist’ do-gooders risks underestimating an important part of hyperregulation today.

The trouble with the grain of the brain

Overschooled But Undereducated: How the Crisis in Education is Jeopardizing Our Adolescents by John Abbott with Heather MacTaggart (Network Continuum Education)

Yes, too often teachers fail to inspire and stimulate their pupils, but that is often because they themselves have lost faith in their own subject, and learning which neurons to stimulate is unlikely to overcome that problem.

Meekness in the face of the great big unknown

Reason, Faith and Revolution, by Terry Eagleton, (Yale University Press 2009)

Reading Eagleton’s book one begins to suspect that Eagleton would like to believe in the traditional deity of his Roman Catholic Irish ancestors, except his university-acquired reason and rationality prevents it. So instead he examines the nature of that reason and rationality and is pleased to find them heavily laden with belief of an almost religious nature.

Not too clever

Jolly Wicked, Actually: The 100 Words That Make Us English, by Tony Thorne (Little, Brown)

Is Thorne correct when he writes of words that ‘make us English’? Do words - by themselves - make anybody anything? Words and meanings feed off each other in a complicated, unchoreographed dance of usage and association. As he shows with wicked itself, a word can undergo ‘ironic reversal’ whereby it changes its meaning.

Forget about it

Delete, The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Princeton University Press)

In many respects, search engines know more about you than you do yourself. Human beings forget; digital databases do not. Thus, Mayer-Schönberger suggests, the digital age is becoming an enemy of progress. Forgetting is what make us human. Amnesia is what allows us to move on, develop and mature.

Made and betrayed

The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (Free Press)

Meredith blasts away the stereotypes with cold fact and blunt candour in this magisterial yet concise history in order to demonstrate how what followed in the years after independence was in many ways disastrous for most of Africa’s nascent states.

The new public space

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City, by Anna Minton (Penguin 2009)

An individualised nightmare existence without human contact has been imagined by many, but Anna Minton exposes the privatised and chilling reality of today’s urban spaces.

Modern man made flesh

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Or The Murder at Road Hill House, by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)

Secrets are something the characters both make for themselves and construct themselves around, they form the fulcrum for their engagement with the world, allowing them to have both private and public parts. The content of these secrets frequently goes unrecorded and untold.