John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
reviewed by John Newsinger
According to John Darwin, even today there are still historians of the British Empire who ‘feel obliged to proclaim their moral revulsion against it, in case writing about empire might be thought to endorse it.’ There are still historians who consider it ‘de rigueur to insist that for them, empire was evil.’ And there are even some apparently who ‘like to convey the impression that writing against empire is an act of great courage, as if the supporters of the Empire were lying ‘in... [read more]
Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism
reviewed by Jemma Crew
In October 2010, the journalist Malcolm Gladwell claimed controversially that ‘The revolution will not be tweeted’, in response to an overwhelming wealth of commentary celebrating the ‘Facebook revolution’ and the perceived transformation of political activism through online social media. The role that sites such as Twitter have played has been so important to political activism that in 2009 the US State Department asked the site to postpone a planned maintenance closure, given how... [read more]
In the title story of James Robertson's Republics of the Mind, a Scottish woman, enraged by a Conservative victory on an unspecified election night, throws an empty wine bottle at her television screen. The television promptly explodes, bringing a swift and unexpectedly satisfying end to an interview with a government minister. The incident dramatises feelings of disappointment and frustration shared by many Scots. Her husband's means of protest are quieter - he retreats into what he calls... [read more]
Kate Zambreno's Heroines is a tumbling great tale of silenced women. Originating in her blog, Frances Farmer Is My Sister, it is a paean to ‘the mad wives of modernism’, Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Jane Bowles whose work was, and still is, considered secondary to that of the men whom they married and inspired: Vivienne was a figure who both inspired and revolted her husband, Tom, until he left her to be committed to an asylum by her family where she died aged 58; Zelda, desperate... [read more]
In recent years, fans of Vladimir Nabokov have been treated to a steady supply of treasures dug out from the fabled Montreux vault. The unfinished and lavishly produced The Original of Laura (Penguin, 2009), complete with perforated facsimile index cards for the Nabophile to rearrange at will, was greeted with much fanfare from the popular press and ivory tower alike. However, despite the critics’ ardent wrestling with its relative literary value, few could claim Laura to be a masterpiece in... [read more]
The latest book of Verso's 'Pocket Communism' series sees Jodi Dean attempt to deliver a lesson to the political left that the political right already learned long ago: that 'Communism' is the horizon that configures our political landscape. For the right, the communist threat is everywhere. Barack Obama is communist, single payer healthcare is communist, anti-war protest is communist, the regulation of markets is communist, taxing the rich is communist. Superficially of course this invective... [read more]
Junot Díaz is not a prolific author - he's only written three works in the past 16 years. He is, however, a successful one: his Pulitzer Prize, recent MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, PEN/Malamud Award and National Book Critics Circle Award can attest to that. His most recent collection of stories, This Is How You Lose Her, has much in common with his two previous books and, if anything, manages to better them at their own game.
Just as in Drown (Riverhead, 1996) and The Brief Wondrous Life of... [read more]
Sebastian Faulks, A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts
reviewed by Francis Hutton-Williams
Sebastian Faulks has said that his latest novel is written in the style of a five-part symphony, and there is room for both triumph and failure in the way that the parts never add up. A Possible Life abandons the unities of time and place in favour of a wandering depiction of what it is to be human. Though the five ‘movements’ of the book are clearly distinct, certain objects are allowed to cut across them like distant motifs - these include a chipped, plastered and repainted Madonna; a... [read more]
Neal Curtis, Idiotism: Capitalism and the Privatisation of Life
reviewed by Stuart Walton
One of global capitalism's subtlest achievements has been to convince its client populations throughout the developed and developing worlds that it has made available to them a potentially limitless field of social, economic and cultural opportunity. In opposition to the monolithic state communism of the former eastern bloc, but also against the misguided strictures of social democracy in its self-defeating obsession with welfarism and redistributive taxation, the global market frees each... [read more]
Lightning Rods is deft, dedicated satire of Swiftian proportion, so convincingly written in a faux-relatable, business pitch style that I flinched upon reading it. I needed, for the first little while, to remind myself precisely what DeWitt was pulling off – the magnitude of the ludicrous parody she was constructing. It was that or pulling at my cheeks in anxious resistance to the big sell.
The story is simple: a failing vacuum cleaner salesman, Joe, inspired by a long-running sexual... [read more]
