Lobby Books:
Book Review: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
It’s very hard to write a review on Philip Pullman’s new addition to Canongate’s Myth series, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. When publishers choose the best known fantasy writer/atheist in the world to rejig the Jesus myth, they have made a very commercial decision to make a barrelful of religious zealots foam up money for them. And impressed though I may be, it’s hard to step willingly into that barrel…
Sam Wilson, Editor in Chief: Women24, Food24 and Parent24.
Read the whole review here.
Book Review: Able-Bodied – Scenes From a Curious Life by Leslie Swartz
In Able-Bodied – Scenes From a Curious Life, Leslie’s Swartz writes an entertaining and very warm story of his childhood as the son of a man who didn’t let his strangely-shaped feet get in the way of his joy in spending Saturday afternoons on the golf course…
Bronwen Muller, Idasa.
Read the whole review here.
New Arrival: A Case of Knives by Julian De Wette
In Julian de Wette’s novel A Case of Knives it is the 1960s in South Africa and the new prime minister has his head full of plans. He consults a powerful witchdoctor, but once he begins his scheme for cutting up the land he loses the sangoma’s protection. In the meantime the family butler has himself reclassified so he can marry the Coloured nanny. But his plans go awry and his desperate struggle with bureaucracy sets off a bizarre chain of events that end in a shocking murder. Witnessed by the precocious grandson of the gardener at the family estate, colourful characters act out a drama on the stage of history, oblivious to the horror with which posterity may view them.
New Arrival: You Must Set Forth at Dawn - Memoirs by Wole Soyinka
In this engrossing follow-up to his acclaimed childhood memoir, Aké, the Nigerian poet, playwright and Nobel laureate demonstrates what it means to be a public intellectual. Soyinka revisits a tumultuous life of writing and political activism, from his student days in Britain through his struggles, sometimes from prison or exile, against a succession of Nigerian dictatorships. Soyinka may be on a first-name basis with almost every major Nigerian figure and he's sometimes involved in high-level intrigues; his chronicle of political turmoil is very personal, full of sharply drawn sketches of comrades and foes, and cantankerous rejoinders to critics. His novelistic eyewitness accounts of repression and upheaval widen out from time to time to survey the humiliation and corruption of Nigerian society under military rule. Soyinka also includes recollections of friends and family, of sojourns abroad with W.H. Auden and other literati and of stage triumphs and fiascoes. His lyrical evocations of African landscapes, the urban nightmare of Lagos, the horrors of British cuisine and the longing a dusty fugitive feels for a cold beer will entertain and educate readers. By turns panoramic and intimate, ruminative and politically resolute, Soyinka's memoir is a dense but intriguing conversation between a writer and his times.
New Arrival: The Promise – President Obama, Year One by Jonathan Alter
Author and Newsweek editor Alter chronicles Obama's first year (plus) as U.S. President, from pre-inauguration planning through the passage of health care reform in March 2010, in this engaging, fast-moving contemporary history. Tasked with "the worst set of problems of any incoming president since Roosevelt in 1933", Obama served up a range of big-ticket solutions that included "the huge and underappreciated stimulus package, the auto bailouts, bank rescue and regulation... sending sixty-one thousand more troops to Afghanistan, and a health care bill", each of which Alter addresses in depth. Alter finds that, despite the denial of right-wingers, Obama performed admirably in the first year, with progress on 50 percent of his campaign promises (and completion of 18 percent). Alter's prose is swift and subtly inspiring; the "Yes, we can!" motto rarely appears but provides an undercurrent for his record of accomplishment. Readers interested in political process and the reality of progressive politics will enjoy this well-considered take on the current US administration.
New Arrival: Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky
This selection of Chomsky's essays and lectures comes divided into geographical areas, but the issues are global in scope and import. In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of American empire and class domination, at home and abroad, Chomsky continues a longstanding and crucial work of elucidation and activism. His latest updates elaborate upon his signature themes – the double standards applied by the centers of U.S. power, including the mainstream media and intellectual culture, and the pervasive disconnect between American policies and public opinion in what Chomsky dubs a dysfunctional democracy. But this book flags another major interest of Chomsky's, signaled in the title: global avenues of resistance, in particular the democratic and independent course being forged across Latin America (where several of these lectures were originally delivered). Chomsky’s writing remains unswervingly rational and principled throughout, and lends bracing impetus to the real alternatives before us.
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