Lots of non-fiction with a smattering of often speculative fiction.
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The book's a pretty interesting take on the Thatcher years. I guess I didn't disagree with much of the opinions, but the are very much that. If you know the music, and it's a wide, but still very particular set of music it's a great way to set the period and the feeling of the times. If you don't know the history, it might be a interesting route in - or it might be infuriating.
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, …
I was very ready not to enjoy this book. Made up of a set of short stories. Each one with a different character. It's bound to be difficult to really get into. Not a bit of it. The book still felt like a whole. Sometimes one story segues into another, other times it just the tone, the threads of thought, or contrasts between them. The chapters each focus on one person, mostly black women, and their personalities are different. Sometimes it feels a little caricatured, how complicated can you get in a few 10s of pages, but at the same time never too much and aren't we all somehow fitting one or other stereotype. A whole range of social topics: life in England as black, poor, rich, lesbian, non-binary... are played out and woven throughout the stories. An enjoyable and thoughtful read.
What would happen if women suddenly possessed a fierce new power?
In THE POWER, the …
Content warning Kind of hard to discuss the 'but' without giving something of the plot of the book away
It's not that the story wasn't good to read, but there's something not so enjoyable about the it. I'd guess it's because it feels like reading a critique of a biological deterministic view of power, or one that only sees power relations through the lens of patriarchy/matriarchy. This leads to a story where the abuse of power by men swaps for exactly the same behaviour in the same structures by women.
Maybe it's the nature of power, but it feels more a perspective of it that only sees it one way which after a while makes it a hard read.
Even under the pretext of the book - women becoming physically stronger than men through having The Power. Would no other structures really change? Would society be so exactly reproduced?
But I guess that was the point of the book.
Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in this defiantly joyful …
A book driven by its characters. I think it would be hard not to empathise with Katrina. The momentum keeps going and you want it to keep going for the characters. Leap of faith in the storyline, no problem, I want this to happen for them.
Written with the narrators view it was able to weave the stories of several people together, but with a strong emphasis on a couple of characters. The narration was also used to skip some of the exacting detail about Katrina's early life while explaining it. For sure a content warning for some of that though.
The title of the book might be stretching what it covers a bit far, or alternatively not far enough. Emily Greble has been researching Muslims in the Balkans, in particular the lands that were in Yugoslavia, for years, this is where the focus of the book lies. The historical dynamic there could be the making of modern Europe, or the even the development of the modern nation state around the world. The period covered is from the later years of the Ottoman Empire, with the Congress of Berlin, where Muslims became citizens of Balkan countries, including the new concept of minority rights. Through the World Wars, into Tito’s Yugoslavia. With the impressive knowledge and research, the book is able to be more of a people’s history. Engaging with the diversity of the communities giving plenty of real life stories of ordinary folk, as well as important and influential people. To …
The title of the book might be stretching what it covers a bit far, or alternatively not far enough. Emily Greble has been researching Muslims in the Balkans, in particular the lands that were in Yugoslavia, for years, this is where the focus of the book lies. The historical dynamic there could be the making of modern Europe, or the even the development of the modern nation state around the world. The period covered is from the later years of the Ottoman Empire, with the Congress of Berlin, where Muslims became citizens of Balkan countries, including the new concept of minority rights. Through the World Wars, into Tito’s Yugoslavia. With the impressive knowledge and research, the book is able to be more of a people’s history. Engaging with the diversity of the communities giving plenty of real life stories of ordinary folk, as well as important and influential people. To paraphrase a whole book terribly the conclusions drawn are that the new ‘secular’ nation state was never neutral, and Muslim practices and minorities were silenced out of the interests of particular power groups. I fear these conclusions, even with the detail of the book, aren’t going to convince anyone who believes that the form of the modern state is superior and that Muslim structures such as Sharia are inherently wrong because they are incompatible with it. For anyone who is actually interested in the contention between quite diverse groups at this point of radical change in the organisation of societies this is a fascinating insight. Differing responses to the new possibilities given by ‘minority rights’ within the new nations, stemming in no small part from the existing power hierarchies, or potential new ones. The different responses of groups depending on where they were geographically, and linguistically – which makes it sound homogeneous, but also how many different languages were used and spoken by the same people. How the decisions of influential, or important, groups in these hierarchies had effect on the daily lives of people with far less power. Through the progression of conflicts that can lead to otherwise counter intuitive (and in reality actually counter productive) decisions such as growing conservatism aligning with the Fascists. The whole detail of groups being be written out of the linear development of history makes me want to have another read of Another Darkness Another Dawn (Becky Taylor 2014) which includes detail of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in Bulgaria, and Germany, from time of the Ottoman Empire through the same period of the development of new nation states. My memory of the changing freedoms, and restrictions, for groups of people there have many similarities here.
Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. …
At times a bit didactic, and certainly anachronistic - it's set in the past, in an anarchist community, with a very present sensibility - the story keeps everything going nicely. If you've ever been involved in non-hierarchical, and anarchist, spaces or groups you'll recognise a lot of the underlying organisation and discussions. There's a fair focus on the different ways of doing things, and social verses individualism. Less so some of the other complex interpersonal situations that arise. All more easily solved, and enjoyable to read, with the outside enemy of the expansionist imperialist state.
Movement goals are reached more effectively with strict adherence to non-violent principles, it’s a position that has existed for sometime, but it has taken on a life of its own since XR used it in their seriously fact-light introduction talk. The selective reading of history and creation of data from Chenoweth’s misuse of her own work to create the myth of the 3.5% and all that. Strict enforcement of this rule, rather than strengthening movements, can be divisive and harmful. This is the point where Case, clearly an activist and academic, comes in with this book. Refreshingly for a work coming out of the contentious politics corner it is aimed at activists.
The book has two parts. The first quantitative, the second qualitative, book-ended with clear, but very honest “I say what I’m going to say”, “I say what I said”, introduction and conclusion. The appendix is also important, highlighting …
Movement goals are reached more effectively with strict adherence to non-violent principles, it’s a position that has existed for sometime, but it has taken on a life of its own since XR used it in their seriously fact-light introduction talk. The selective reading of history and creation of data from Chenoweth’s misuse of her own work to create the myth of the 3.5% and all that. Strict enforcement of this rule, rather than strengthening movements, can be divisive and harmful. This is the point where Case, clearly an activist and academic, comes in with this book. Refreshingly for a work coming out of the contentious politics corner it is aimed at activists.
The book has two parts. The first quantitative, the second qualitative, book-ended with clear, but very honest “I say what I’m going to say”, “I say what I said”, introduction and conclusion. The appendix is also important, highlighting all the limitations of the analysis and approaches. It covers so much that most of the criticisms I had while reading the book are covered. All this is completely different to the neatly packaged works which sell the idea that they ‘have done the science and have the solution’.
The violence focused on in the book is the riot. By the end of it I challenge you not to be a bit frustrated by how broad a term that is. The definition that Case uses for the quantitative section is from the Cross-National Time Series Archive (CNTS) “Any violent demonstration or clash of more than 100 citizens involving the use of physical force,” - yes the evident limitations of this archive are discussed. More generally the definition used is the Riot Act’s “a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd”.
The field of nonviolence studies, Gene Sharp and Erica Chenoweth get the full force of the first part of the book. There has been masses of criticism of the simplistic, sometimes straight incorrect, reading of history, their methodology, the conclusions that follow, and the misapplication of these conclusions. This section covers lots of that ground. While challenging Chenoweth’s Why Civil Resistance Works, Case has what I can only describe as fun combining additional data on riots to the existing list of (Chenoweth defined) successful campaigns. Doing so he is able to suggest, within the limitations of the original, that contrary to the idea these popular uprisings were non-violent, they in fact usually involved a riot. All sorts of effects can be ignored by Chenoweth’s and similar studies, as they claim to focus on quite specific and closely defined movements. Nothing that happens before, after, or around them has validity for the study. Despite this the argument is usually made that there is a demotivating effect of a riot to a movement. The claim is just not backed up by the facts. Case then goes further to outline a different way of analysing the complex dynamics between movements, people, their actions and attempts to repress them.
This leads neatly to looking at those involved. The qualitative section is based on interviews with people involved in ‘riots’, I guess that’s how they might have been reported in the New York Times. The interviewees come from within US Black Blocs and Student Protests in South Africa. These two groups make sense, given the argument being made, they are clearly involved in the protest movements and associated with them. For me, and I suspect for Case too [“there is very little research that investigates interactions between more and less violent forms of unarmed action within movements, and even fewer studies have explored the experiences of rioters themselves”], deeper qualitative research into the even more complex interactions between movements and riots where the participants are less explicitly politically motivated, would be equally, if not more, interesting.
One of the points being made from the interviews is the transformative effect for individuals of being involved in actions that included violence, even the individual did not personally take part in throwing the brick or whatever. This is opposed to being involved in a performative protest march. It is alluded to that physical confrontations could be also performative. The radicalization through transgressions of the rule of law, the taboo or fear of arrest, was clearly something that at least some of XR’s Rising Up formative group had in mind with their non-violent actions designed to encourage arrest. Similar analysis may well find that this was for many people a liberating and positive experience just as in Case’s research of participants in actions that were more physically confrontational. They will probably throw-up negative examples in both too. In the more confrontation examples a concrete difference is the approach to power relations, the former accepts arrest, usually the later literally physically oppose it. As with many texts on the topic the primary reference to underpin this is Frantz Fannon.
There is much more in this book than I’ve covered here. If there can be one thread to conclude it is that collective action does occur. It isn’t something that you can boil down to a set of simplistic repeatable tactics or rules. Here the approaches of contentious politics are better than those of nonviolence studies. It needs more books like these to highlight the complex nature of movements that can, and sometimes do, have power to change society. If it was that easy we’d be in a very different place already.
A sweeping and lyrical novel that follows a young Palestinian refugee as she slowly becomes …
Content warning Impossible to write anything without revealing at least some of the content and the reveal is part of the book. Read the book, it's worth it. Then read this.
The reveal is part of the book, because despite the fact we begin with the narrator, Nahr, in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison. We don't know why she is there, nor her earlier recollections give a pointer to them. But how the story is told almost everything in her life recounted is important to the eventual conclusion. At first the recollections, from years living as a Palestinian in Kuwait, are quite dispassionate. Given the nature of some of what happens, content warning includes sexual violence, this feels quite correct. The tone used resonated with another book I'd read and was struggling to think which? Something about Leila Khaled maybe? No I realised it was Margrit Schiller's in my mind similarly worded description of how she, maybe more, actively fell into the RAF and of being imprisoned. Schiller's description of prison and solidarity confinement is much darker than in this book incidentally. History, and politics, impinge on the life of Nahr, who otherwise wouldn't have been drawn to have an interest in them, nor possibly Palestine itself. But it is love, and a man, that are also important in this too. Part of me feels disappointed that it has to be a man that actually catalyses a lot of this. Right up to the strength found through him in the court room. Different, loving, caring, relationships with people are central to Nahr's character, and drive her and the novel. Set truly for someone in the Palestinian diaspora against a loveless world.
I'd started reading this some time ago, having read Low Bite which was excellent. Low Bite is prison noir, Edge City is I guess parole noir. It's interesting, but didn't capture me so much as Low Bite, I'd given up about half way through. Now I'd just read Snitch World, there I also lost it reading through the scene setting (see my review) so I figured I'd return to finish this one too. The characters in this book completely work, though whether you actually empathize with the (lack of) decisions of Reno the main protagonist is another matter. The atmosphere is dark and flows out of the writing. Once you're through the development of the situation it's fast to an abrupt conclusion.
I'm not sure I'd have got past the long classic Noir scene-setting if I hadn't been looking for a easier read and there was the promise of how these two worlds would collide. Wasn't overly convinced by the twists either, maybe felt a bit like Klinger the lead character. But if you like a bit of gentrification politics mixed into your Noir it might be for you.
How Gentrification is killing our cities, and what we can do about it
What does …
Kern looks at the study of Gentrification and how it has changed since the 60s. Breaking away from a class basis to see the wider power relations at play: an extension of settler colonialism, patriarchy, racism, hetreronormativity. The book also challenges the idea that Gentrification is an inevitable part of the development of the city. In this it’s successful, suggesting that Gentrification is displacement, and that displacement can be challenged. It questions if part of the conflict is over the 'taste' for different communities. The suggested approaches to challenging Gentrification are tied to the intersectional understanding. Not being a book written by a campaigner it doesn’t avoid the complexity to offer comfortable solutions. They also at times feel like they risk being individually framed, but would support diversity in shared space, and challenge the underlying power that makes Gentrification happen.
Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Republic of Congo and a pioneer of African …
The book originally published (1999) before Belgium's Parliament had an inquiry (2001) into their role in the assassination of Lumumba. It is carefully researched, focusing on the people in power: Belgian, but also in the UN, and to a lesser extent the US and UK. Their decisions, to act and not act, that very deliberately lead to the death of Lumumba, and the undermining of the potential democratic nationalist movement that he could lead. As such, despite De Witte's own analysis, contained toward the end of the book, it is more of history of the actions of those individuals and less the larger powers that they are part of. Even so it does make a compelling case about the Western states interests overriding those of the people of DRC itself.
I’d consider myself as relatively well informed about the problems of borders, and the southern European one in particular. However, this book lays it bare, and it’s even worse than I understood.
The book is written from the journalistic first person. I’d like to call it ‘classic journalism’, maintaining ‘impartiality’. But not impartial as in not caring about those with absolutely no power. It cares, about people individually and as a group, but it’s only campaigning because doing so lights a fire under power. The book starts with the online contact being made from someone trapped in a Libyan prison. It then broadly follows Sally Hayden’s own experience of becoming one of the few, maybe only, journalists truly keeping in touch with migrants and their families, investigating the camps, NGOs and UN and reporting about the horrific situation that the EU is complicit in making. By writing it from this …
I’d consider myself as relatively well informed about the problems of borders, and the southern European one in particular. However, this book lays it bare, and it’s even worse than I understood.
The book is written from the journalistic first person. I’d like to call it ‘classic journalism’, maintaining ‘impartiality’. But not impartial as in not caring about those with absolutely no power. It cares, about people individually and as a group, but it’s only campaigning because doing so lights a fire under power. The book starts with the online contact being made from someone trapped in a Libyan prison. It then broadly follows Sally Hayden’s own experience of becoming one of the few, maybe only, journalists truly keeping in touch with migrants and their families, investigating the camps, NGOs and UN and reporting about the horrific situation that the EU is complicit in making. By writing it from this perspective it does run the risk of making us care because there is another white saviour, the journalist. Hayden is critical of the view through the saviours perspective in the book. A tough balance, but I’ll admit the approach does make the book accessible to me, the white north European reader, and the voices of the migrants themselves are highlighted throughout.
A large part of the book is spent with the situation in Libya. I’m not even going to try and describe the stories, it wouldn’t do them justice. The people Hayden is most in contact with are Christian Eritreans which at times, Christians having a particularly hard time in Libya, feels a little out of balance in their prominence in the stories over those Muslim migrants. That’s as it is there clearly is an effort to bring in details of other migration routes, and other migrants. Including a fair section that gives a voice to West African so called ‘economic migrants’. It does do a good job of dispelling a lot of the constructed separation of types of migrants.
By weaving her own journalistic journey, with the personal stories of individual migrants and the politics and actions of traffickers, Nation States, the EU, NGOs and the UN, Sally Hayden makes the book a compelling read. Even if you think you know what’s going on it’ll probably be a revelation.