Non-fiction: Politics
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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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Meme Wars by Joan Donovan. Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg is an analysis of the memes that have flourished in online subcultures in the 21st century and their impact on real world events. Memes are units for the transmission of ideas, behaviours and styles, usually images or phrases with highly symbolic content, that move from…
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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 started reading Crisis by Henry Kissinger as Covid-19 lockdown started in the UK. It seemed… appropriate, given that it’s a record of a group of people trying to respond to a situation that is changing on a daily basis with limited information. Crisis covers the Yom Kippur war and the last days of the…
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Published by Make Votes Matter and the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, Peterloo 200: The Path to Proportional Representation is a short report making the case for adopting PR in the UK. The 200 year anniversary of the Peterloo massacre was in 2019. This report was published to highlight that the fight for democracy in…
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Misha Glenny’s The Balkans has been my breakfast book for the last year. Breakfast books are the many large, heavy books I have on my shelf that I can’t commute with so they get read in twenty minutes stints while I have breakfast. Sometimes twenty minutes is enough time to read a reasonable chunk. Other…
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Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala is about how the intersection of race and class affect black working class people living in Britain today. It combines academic research with personal experience and biography in a way that makes the statistics accessible and relatable. As well as deeply upsetting. We have…
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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…
Boudica Marginalia 