Books
Browse books by title with CW new books archive feature.
‘A Million Little Pieces’ fallout
James FreyIt is a little rich when the expectation and demand in publishing increasingly is for nastier, sadder, more despicable sides of human life to be reeled off, for publishers to complain when writers then try it on.
Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles
Dominic SandbrookWhere Sandbrook really makes his mark is in drily debunking some standard myths that have been propagated about the sixties. The concept of ‘suburban blues’ - a sense of alienation supposedly suffered by suburb dwellers - was a snobbish myth: most dwellers in the ‘burbs’ were happy with their lot
Going Sane
Adam PhillipsPhillips avoids discussing florid insanity as such, rather like Foucault said psychiatry would always be bound to do. Unkindly, one suspects that real madness would freak Phillips, with his measured tones and carefully constructed paradoxes and reversals.
Struck Dumb
The December 2005 New York transit strikeWorkers from the Local 100 of the TWU were used as a stage army in the service of the union leadership’s negotiation strategy, without being engaged in discussions about what could be hoped for or expected. Then, as the going got tough, the strike was called off.
Stupid Gits
A short history of British Public Information Films (part one)You can just imagine the committees designing these PIFs looking at accident statistics and shaking their heads. ‘Just how do we get through to these nutjobs? I know, let’s use Space Invaders.’
How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions
Francis WheenWheen is not at pains to justify his faith in the Enlightenment; he presents this book as a catalogue of modern errors, not as popular philosophy.
Everything Bad is Good for You - How Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter
Steven JohnsonJohnson eschews questions of meaning and content, focusing instead on the ‘cognitive complexity’ of popular culture, as well as the wider determinates of this complexity.
The Strange Death of Tory England
Geoffrey WheatcroftToday’s Tory party seems a colourless, rudderless crew, a sorry affair of opportunist modernisers (folks who live in Notting Hill but whose spiritual home is Islington), traditionalists, fearful fence-sitters and don’t knows.
The New Egalitarianism
Anthony Giddens and Patrick Diamond (eds)What’s new about the ‘new egalitarianism’ is that equality has become an issue largely removed from the field of political contestation, and is no longer conceived of as a zero-sum game of social redistribution.
What Good Are the Arts?
John CareyIf artistic merit is relative only in the same sense that ethics or politics are relative, it is hard to see the point in making such an argument.
Chronicles: Volume One
Bob DylanThe standard autobiographical techniques - chronological narrative, self-searching analysis of the key events in the subject’s life, critical refutation and score-settling - are here eschewed in favour of mini-essays on Dylan’s favourite writers, musicians and influences.
The Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates and the American DreamYates’ charting of the descent of American consciousness away from the cliché of pioneering, blind optimism and exuberance to weary insecurity and alienation is an achievement that reaches beyond any genre.
A permanent state of contradiction
The Paradoxical Primate, by Colin TalbotDrawing on a wealth of literature from areas as diverse as management theory, economics and sociobiology, Talbot attempts to construct a pluralist view in the spirit of EO Wilson’s Consilience, in which the human mind is considered neither as a blank slate nor as entirely socially determined.
The trouble with being human these days
Identity, by Zygmunt BaumanThe demise of social ‘narrative’ has not led to greater individual freedom, but to unreflective conformism to what is considered to be human nature.
Imagining the Soul
Rosalie OsmondLike the contemporary self, the mystical mind which believed its soul would last for eternity was not a rational mind, yet that soul also reflected a progressive human trait which has been lost in our contemporary times – the sense that humanity at least shares some common interests.
