Browse books by title with CW new books archive feature.

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.

Children’s rites

'I'm Adult! Aren't I': Understanding Juvenile Delinquency and Creating Adults out of Children: The Case For A Formal Rite of Passage, by Geoffrey Ben-Nathan (Rubin Mass 2009)

Geoffrey Ben-Nathan’s intentions are admirable, and his prose pleasant, but he fails to differentiate between state and society. Officialised rituals can emerge organically, and state intervention needn’t be the default panacea for any of society’s perceived ailments.

Legal highs

Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer, by Michael Mansfield (Bloomsbury, 2009)

Mansfield displays a passion for moral argument, which is likely to become rarer and thus considered more and more radical over time, as more and more regulation creeps into the courtroom. It is unlikely that the barristers of tomorrow will dare to talk with any normative authority for fear of missing some vital detail and finding themselves debarred.

For modest liberation?

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, by Ariel Levy (Pocket Books, 2006)

It’s often difficult to see how Levy equates such disparate strands of behaviour: what brings such targets together for Levy doesn’t always read like concern that women have become ‘female chauvinist pigs’ so much as a deep-seated dislike of promiscuity, hedonism and sexual permissiveness.

Industrial resolution

Nations Choose Prosperity: Why Britain Needs an Industrial Policy, edited by Ruth Lea (Civitas 2009)

One wishes the Civitas team well: it makes a compelling case. But it has a mountain to climb in attempting to rejuvenate - or, rather, resurrect - British manufacturing policy. Effecting change will not be easy, especially when it comes to the determined slaying of disparate sacred cows like equality legislation, laissez-faire, protectionism, and the all-must-have- prizes attitude which results in education lacking intellectual rigour

Credit crunch roundup

Various authors, various books past and present

Nominal left and right alike were taken by surprise, and there has been a big gap between the political and intellectual debate. Developing serious political positions on the economy is likely to be a much longer task.

Let the information be free

Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson (Random House)

Anderson analyses Steven Brand’s famous quote that the ‘information wants to be free’, noting Brand also said another kind of information wants to be expensive, and the two are contradictory.

Why bother reading?

The future of reading: A public value project, prepared for Arts Council England by Creative Research

The bulk of the document is concerned with finding out why people read. The usual motives surface: escapism, stimulation, and gaining knowledge (whether about Kierkegaard’s response to Hegelian philosophy, or about the times of the number 9 bus the document does not say).

A more or less partisan press?

The Political Economy of Media: enduring issues, emerging dilemmas, by Robert W Mc Chesney (Monthly Review Press, 2008)

Counter to the underlying implication in this collection, it cannot be simply business’ bloodthirsty desire for profit that has led to the disintegration of stalwart journalism and civic life today. There is also the matter of a very real defeat of the left, and the discreditating of any alternative, which has hurried on apathy, cynicism and lack of political contestation tout court.

Waiting for the pregnant widow

In anticipation of The Pregnant Widow, by Martin Amis (forthcoming from Jonathan Cape)

Speaking in Manchester, Amis likened the relationship between reader and author to that of lovers, and so to expand on the analogy, if Amis were to be our lover: he would be lush, indulgent, too demanding of our attention in his stripling desire to delight.