Browse books by title with CW new books archive feature.

Belfast: Exposed

Where are the people? Contemporary photographs of Belfast 2002-2010, edited by Karen Downey

Ethical concerns can just as easily be motivated by an evasion of responsibility, as they can by a desire to capture the displacement of people from history-making. The absence of people in documentary photography can be an accurate picture of the position of the people in contemporary society, but this absence can also amount to an attempt to evade the question Where are the people?

What ever did happen to Modernism?

What Ever Happened to Modernism?, by Gabriel Josipovici, Yale University Press (2010)

What Ever Happened to Modernism? indeed proposes its own definition of Modernism to reveal that it is more to do with a synchronic ‘structure of feeling’, to paraphrase Raymond Williams, than with a continuum in time. Modernism here refers to idiosyncratic approaches to art linked together by the wish to come to terms with the meaning of life and the value of language.

The economics of don’t meddle and muddle through

The Age of Instability, by David Smith (Profile Books, 2010)

Not making decisions, not having a long-term strategy, ditching theory and rationality: all seem to be virtues for today’s economists. Economics post-crash seems like a codification of messy pragmatism: to be anti-theory now in principle. Leaving us, of course, with things just the way they are.

Self-sufficiency with a ‘helping hand’

Hand Made: Portraits of emergent new community culture, edited by Tessy Britton (Social Spaces 2011)

You’d be hard pushed to find a truly ‘people’s’ project among the 28 featured in the glossy pages of Hand Made. At the risk of sounding like a cynic, too many of the projects lend themselves not to the interests of residents, but to the pet-prejudices of a bunch of trendy interlopers.

Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan!

Mumbai Fables, by Gyan Prakash (Princeton University Press 2010)

The promise of the city, like that of Independence, was real – and perhaps still is. There is a tragic quality to Prakash’s account, but the gradual demise of the Modernist dream in the second half of the twentieth century should not be seen as inevitable or even, perhaps, final.

Men and women both from Earth after all

Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, by Cordelia Fine (Icon Books, 2011)

By the time Fine has finished her furious denunciation of the worst examples of discrimination, unconscious and deliberate, still in action, it does seem ludicrous to look for causes of inequality in girls’ larger corpus callosum, or in boys’ testosterone-bathed parietal lobes.

More than the enlightened versus the unenlightened

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, Kwame Anthony Appiah, (WW Norton 2010)

The situation has, to paraphrase Hegel, the makings of a tragedy: it is a clash not of right against wrong, but of right against right. The solution to the dilemma must therefore attend to both the conflicting values and somehow reconcile them, although not necessarily on equal terms.

Life off Earth

The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe?, by Paul Davies (Allen Lane, 2010)

This book’s importance is simply justified. There are only two possibilities: either the Earth is the only planet in the universe to harbour sentient life, or it is not. Each of these possibilities is, as Arthur C. Clarke famously noted, so astonishing as to verge on the incredible.

Interest-free?

The Return of the Public, by Dan Hind (Verso, 2010)

Hind effectively conflates Kant’s notion of public reason as a scholarly ideal with the whole idea of public participation in politics. The effect is to restrict severely what counts as properly ‘public’ participation, and even public opinion.

Civilisation: Should we rehabilitate this unfashionable idea?

In Search of Civilization: Remaking a tarnished idea, by John Armstrong (Penguin, 2010)

It is not just the negative associations with a neo-colonialism to which we react but a dominant cultural mood which is nervous of asserting any strong values at all, or that one work of art, or thought or activity has intrinsically more value than any other. Values we are always told are relative – although it is seldom explained relative to what. It is this cultural climate that is really inimical to the full-blooded and positive account of civilisation Armstrong seeks to articulate.

Stranger friends

A Short History of Celebrity, by Fred Inglis (Princeton University Press, 2010)

In many respects the 20th century saw an extension, not a revolution, in the way public figures were regarded. The likes of Jackson Pollock and Tracey Emin continued where Reynolds left off. After Byron has come a multitude of stars from James Dean to Pete Doherty, whose embrace of the Dionysian has enthralled and appalled.

She freed herself

3,096 Days, by Natascha Kampusch (Penguin, 2010)

Her story was challenged, her accounts of suffering were dismissed and she was even seen to have been complicit in her own capture. This book is a very touching, nuanced and determined two fingers up to those rumour-mongers.

History’s preception

The Sleepwalkers: a Trilogy, by Hermann Broch (first published 1931-32)

The title of the novel refers to how the characters relate to their world, sleepwalking, without questioning conventions, and remaining oblivious to what is changing. As the novel progresses, we also realise that each one of the parts, still acknowledging the sleep and sleepwalking metaphor, is a state of consciousness

Character, education and the role of the state

Of Good Character: Exploration of Virtues and Values in 3-25 Year-Olds, by James Arthur (Imprint Academic, 2010)

For Arthur, character is ‘an interlocked set of personal values which normally guide conduct. Character is about who we are and who we become, which can result in good or bad conduct.’ If character is about values then it’s important where we get these values from. Surely teaching children good values in school is preferable to law of the jungle in terms of peer pressure and media messages?

Something special

Just Another Ape? by Dr Helene Guldberg (Imprint Academic, 2010)

Chimps have to take a step back to square one each time knowledge is transmitted, having to discover an innovation for themselves through ‘aping’ their peers rather than truly learning from others in the sense that humans do.