Jeffrey Pilcher, Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food
reviewed by Sarah Emily Duff
In his collection of essays Recipes for Sad Women (Pushkin Press, 2012), the Colombian writer Héctor Abad warns his readers against ‘[t]hose who reproach you for your foreign dishes’:
if they believe their past is unique, that they’re not a miscellaneous mixture of American, European and Africa, then let them devote themselves to cultivating their limited horizons.
He suggests that those who insist upon eating only that which is absolutely ‘authentic’ should consume only... [read more]
In Hitler’s Philosophers Yvonne Sherratt seeks to examine the role of thinkers living in Germany during the Third Reich. The study’s title, however, is something of a misnomer. She writes in her brief introduction that ‘“Hitler’s philosophers” refers to the group of thinkers surrounding Hitler before, during and after the Holocaust’. This too is misleading: under discussion here are not only prominent Nazi party members like Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, but... [read more]
Liam Sprod, Nuclear Futurism: The Work of Art in the Age of Remainderless Destruction
reviewed by Callam Green
It is reasonably safe to say that ‘end-times’ have been an obsession of every culture-producing civilisation throughout human history. The English language itself is terrified of non-ending, the sentence without a full stop signifies the boundless potentiality for language; how can a sentence mean anything when it isn’t formally ended? And ellipses? Their terror is slightly more palatable but only in the paradoxical sense of its formal signification of ending where there is plenty left... [read more]
At the centre of Emily Berry’s debut poetry collection Dear Boy is ‘Shriek’. The poem introduces a creature which recalls Ted Hughes’s’ Crow in being a thing but also not a thing, a concept personified, something to be feared as well as pitied. Berry’s Shriek is presented in a world whose elements are borrowed from fairytale; Shriek lives in a tower and the villagers have gathered to chant and taunt him. Other faux-historical details continue to pastiche the children’s story... [read more]
Simon Sellars & Dan O’Hara (eds.), Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard 1967 - 2008
reviewed by Giovanni Vimercati
‘Let the world-dissolutions of JG Ballard stand as exemplary illustrations of the ways in which the imagination of a dying class – in this case the cancelled future of a vanished colonial and imperial destiny – seeks to intoxicate itself with images of death that range from the destruction of the world by fire, water and ice to lengthening sleep or the berserk orgies of high-rise buildings or superhighways reverting to barbarism.’
- Fredric Jameson in Archaeologies of the Future... [read more]
What is the substance and value of daily life? How is that value related to the construction of a narrative that in both preceding and following the present moment provides a structure that can generate meaning and experience? How active a hand should one take in constructing one’s own narrative, in consciously generating meaning in the objects, events, and interactions of daily life? One strand in the burgeoning field of everyday aesthetics maintains that the value of everyday life comes... [read more]
On the surface the story of Orkney is familiar, perhaps even tired: Richard, a jaded literature professor in his sixties, seduces and marries a younger student, a pale, dreamy twenty-one year old, unnamed throughout, and whisks her away on their honeymoon. This is very much Richard’s story and the book deals with many of the themes one might associate with such a template – male ego, insecurity, a preoccupation with youth and old age. He is not a sympathetic character, but Sackville’s... [read more]
Brian Roper, The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation
reviewed by Stuart Walton
A comprehensive critique of democracy would hardly lack for ammunition. As a political form democracy is limited by the overall level of social and intellectual advancement of the people who constitute its motivating principle. Electorally, its insistence on regular ballots, subject as they are to the vicissitudes of public opinion, produces an endless oscillation of political direction, with the result that the aims and achievements of one particular government may be promptly partially undone... [read more]
Imagine a world in which ashes rain down from the sky. A world in which there are heat waves of such intensity that roads liquefy and armies are mobilised to protect their countries’ right to drinking water. In which there is wind of such ferocity that lizards are sucked clean off trees, never to be seen again. In which there are plagues of flies, ‘not just common house flies but carrion flies, fat-bodied, metallic bluebottles and viridescent greenbottles, typically associated with... [read more]
Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working
reviewed by Steffen Böhm
The economic, social and political crisis the world currently faces is not only to do with debt (public or private) but also work. While left- and right-wing politics and entire countries seem to be engaged in a battle of words over how to deal with the fact that there is literally no more money in the public coffers (bearing in mind that the elites have never been richer), what has always united the political centre-ground is an ideology of work.
In Cameron’s austerity Britain people... [read more]
