Non-fiction: Philosophy
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One of the current exhibitions at the British Museum is Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece and as always, there is an exhibition catalogue which is written by James Fraser, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and Henry Cosmo Bishop-Wright. As with all BM catalogues, it is so much more than that. There are beautiful photos of the objects…
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Some we Love, Some we Hate, Some we Eat: Why it’s so hard to think straight about animals by Hal Herzog is an examination of the complex and contradictory ways we interact with animals. The book looks at our relationship with pets and working animals and how some animals are considered pets and some aren’t.…
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If you have ever wondered why some people respond to the suggestion that something they’ve said is racist with outrage over the implication that they could ever be racist rather than with a desire to understand why, make amends and educate themselves, this book will help you understand. White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for…
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DeGrowth: A Vocabularyfor a New Era is a collection of essays exploring degrowth and related concepts. Degrowth is a philosophy that says in order for human societies to survive the climate catastrophe, we have to shrink our economies, and to re-think what it means to live a good life. The dominant ideology of our time…
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I have been a bit sporadic with posting to this blog for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. What I have now is a backlog. An evergrowing backlog that induces procrastination. Because I am lazy, I am doing a round up post of the non-fiction books I read this year that…
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Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Published 2011 Sapiens: A brief history of humankind is a very interesting book that challenges a lot of received wisdom about humans – what we are, why we do what we do, how we got to this point in history. Harari is a historian but this isn’t the history of…
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In The Establishment, Owen Jones argues that the establishment is not so much a group of wealthy people in cahoots to keep everyone else down, but rather a collection of people with shared beliefs who benefit from being able to influence each other. The establishment hasn’t remained stable over the years and those that…
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I have always bought more books than I read, which has resulted in a bookshelf of unread books that I call book mountain. It is currently the smallest it’s ever been. Still some of the books on there have been in my possession for some time. Such as The Point is to Change It which…
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This book is the findings of a research project asking whether there has been a fundamental shift in Western cultures away from religion towards spirituality. The Spiritual Revolution posits that the decline in attendance at formal church services and in those describing themselves as members of congregations is matched by a rise in people describing…
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Talking about the Elephant by Lupa is an anthology of essays on neopagan perspectives on cultural appropriation. The essays cover various paths from Celtic Reconstructionism to Egyptian mysteries to eclectic paganism. Cultural appropriation is where members of a dominant culture take sacred aspects of another culture and appropriate them for aesthetic purposes. A good, and…
Boudica Marginalia 