Latest News: Author Archive

Jeanne Thornton talks with Interview magazine about her book THE DREAM OF DOCTOR BANTAM

Monday, October 15th, 2012

Jeanne Thornton’s debut novel The Dream of Doctor Bantam (OR Books) is a punky, poetic rush of a book. Julie Thatch is beautiful and bruised, a chain-smoking 17-year-old whose older sister has killed herself. Patrice is a French girl living in Julie’s Texas, caught up in a cult, the Institute of Temporal Illusions. As Julie’s budding body burns for Patrice, she becomes increasingly involved in a servile relationship, haunted by memories of her sister’s death. Sexy, lucid, and quirky, Thornton nails loss, loneliness, and creepy cult mentalities. We spoke with Thornton about the difference between fun and survival, the yearning of youth, Tarot cards, Scientology, and true love.

ROYAL YOUNG: There’s a big difference between having fun and surviving. But having fun is what a lot of people want to do.

JEANNE THORNTON: I was born in 1983, with the last vestiges of this notion that you weren’t supposed to enjoy whatever you did for a living. I think when I was like 14 or 15, all my friends who did anything creative turned into puppets. I know that’s harsh, but they started saying it was quaint, what we were doing.

Read the full article in Interview magazine

Co-publisher Colin Robinson writes on publishing in The Guardian

Friday, October 12th, 2012

This year, on the face of things, it’s been business as usual at the Frankfurt book fair, with some 7,500 exhibitors setting up shop in the gleaming white Messe. But scratch beneath the surface and a tangible unease about the future of the industry is evident: book sales are stagnating, profit margins are being squeezed by higher discounts and falling prices, and the distribution of book buyers is ever more polarised between record-shattering bestsellers and an ocean of titles with tiny readerships. The mid-list, where the unknown writer or new idea can spring to prominence, is progressively being hollowed out. This is bad news not just for publishing but for the culture at large.

It’s time for a reformation in publishing, and the precepts set out below provide a basis for the creation of a new, healthier book industry. They echo another event that occurred during October in Germany, nearly half a millennium ago: the nailing of Martin Luther’s 95 theses to the doors of Wittenberg cathedral. Luther was protesting against the idea that the route to salvation could be secured by payments to those at the top of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. The theses here should have been pinned to the Amazon stand at Frankfurt.

Read the full article in The Guardian

The Jewish Week covers The New School event with Norman Finkelstein

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

Has Norman Finkelstein, long reviled in the Jewish community as a vitriolic hater of the Jewish state, morphed into a defender of Israel’s legitimacy? And what does Finkelstein’s newfound “moderation” say about the current state of the anti-Israel left, exemplified by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement?

Over the course of three decades, Finkelstein achieved superstar status on the anti-Zionist left by writing a myriad of books and articles in which he declared Israel to be “an insane state” and charged Elie Wiesel and other pro-Zionist Jews with exploiting the memory of the Holocaust as an “ideological weapon” in support of Israel.

Read the full article in The Jewish Week

The Daily Beast weighs in on KNOWING TOO MUCH and Norman Finkelstein

Tuesday, October 9th, 2012

Alan Dershowitz would have been disappointed. Not only did Dershowitz’s occasional debating partner, Noam Chomsky, have to cancel his New School appearance on Saturday (laryngitis, we were told), but his adversary, the controversial scholar Norman Finkelstein, was positively mainstream in his own remarks. Those who are quick to vilify Finkelstein—variations on “self-hating Jew” represent the typical charge—might do well to listen again.

Despite Chomsky’s absence, The New School’s Tishman Auditorium was filled to capacity for an event billed as “The Jewish-American Relationship with Israel at the Crossroads.” While perhaps presumptive in its definitiveness—i.e. “the Crossroads”—the panel name was inspired by the subtitle of Finkelstein’s latest book, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel Is Coming to an End.

Read the full article in The Daily Beast

CYPHERPUNKS is announced in The Guardian

Tuesday, October 9th, 2012

Julian Assange’s last foray into the publishing world ended in an acrimonious and highly costly dispute, after he withdrew from his million-pound contract and his publishers released a draft autobiography manuscript against his wishes.

Now confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in London after being granted asylum, the WikiLeaks founder has announced he is to publish a new book about the internet, freedom and what he terms “the resistance”.

The book, entitled Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, will be published in paperback and electronically on 26 November, the US publisher OR Books told the New York Times. Three “cutting-edge thinkers and activists from the frontline of the battle for cyberspace” are listed as co-authors: US-based Jacob Applebaum, Jeremie Zimmermann from France and German Andy Müller-Maguhn.

The text is largely based on a transcript of an interview Assange conducted with the three others for an episode of his TV show, The World Tomorrow, broadcast in June on the Russian state-funded channel RT, Zimmermann told the Guardian. But he said there would be “plenty of added content”.

Read the full coverage in The Guardian

The New York Times announces CYPHERPUNKS

Monday, October 8th, 2012

The publisher OR Books announced on Sunday that it had acquired “Cypherpunks,” a new book about freedom and the Internet by Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Mr. Assange, who was granted asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in August, wrote the book with three other authors: Jacob Appelbaum, Jérémie Zimmermann and Andy Müller-Maguhn. The book will go on sale Nov. 26 in paperback and as an e-book. Mr. Assange said in a statement that he wrote the book in response to his longstanding worries about government control of the Internet and surveillance. “In March 2012 I gathered together three of today’s leading cypherpunks to discuss the resistance,” he said. “Two of them, besides myself, have been targeted by law enforcement agencies as a result of their work to safeguard privacy and to keep government accountable. Their words, and their stories, need to be heard.”

Read the announcement in The New York Times

The Huffington Post features an excerpt of I TOLD YOU SO

Monday, October 8th, 2012

Gore Vidal was not just a novelist and essayist; he also ran for Congress in 1960 in upstate New York. In a 1988 interview I asked him whether there was any gay baiting in that campaign.

“Even then it was considered bad karma to fuck around with old Gore,” he told me. “But just to be safe I had something on every politician and publisher in the district. There was one old newspaper publisher up in Columbia County, the most conservative of the five counties. He was making some giggly hints about me, and he was also having an affair with his son’s wife. So after he took one particular swipe at me, I went on the radio in Hudson, the county seat, and I was asked, ‘Are you getting any ideas for any novels while you’re doing this?’

Read the full adapted excerpt in The Huffington Post

MAD SCIENCE is featured in Counterpunch

Friday, October 5th, 2012

Do Governments and Corporations lie, cover-up and maintain secrecy as they harm our planet and us? Joe Mangano’s new book Mad Science – The Nuclear Power Experiment clearly lays it out that they have done so for more than half a century.

This book is a page-turner, filled with useful information that many of us don’t know or have forgot. His chapter “Tiny Atoms, Big Risks” explains the various forms of nuclear energy in terms that anyone can understand, and details the harm that has come to all life on our planet as a result of nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants.

Read the full review in Counterpunch

Grantland recommends THE DREAM OF DOCTOR BANTAM

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

It was a strange coincidence that I finished The Dream of Doctor Bantam on the same day that I saw The Master. Both Jeanne Thornton’s debut novel and P.T. Anderson’s latest film feature Scientology-like cults wrapped around unconventional love stories. There is also something common between the disturbed, restless spirit of Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell and Thornton’s central character, Julie Thatch, a hardened teenager whose sense of direction is shaken after her older sister’s suicide.

Read the full article in Grantland

GalleyCat covers FIFTY SHADES OF LOUISA MAY

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

Random House has asked OR Books to change the cover of Fifty Shades of Louisa May, a work that parodies the best seller 50 Shades of Grey–framed as an erotic diary written by Louisa May Alcott.

Random House contacted OR Books after OR launched a “Bonnets for Bondage” promotion, offering readers a free copy of Fifty Shades of Louisa May in exchange for their copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Read the full article in GalleyCat

OR BOOKS to host major event this Saturday with Chomsky, Finkelstein and Baltzer at the New School

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

October Event

KNOWING TOO MUCH is reviewed in Red Pepper

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

The thesis of Knowing Too Much is simple: American Jews are distancing themselves from Israel. An ethnic identification, combined with a belief that Israel and the US shared both interests and liberal values, led to a great love-in after 1967 when American Jews fell head over heels for Israel. But as the evidence piles up it is increasingly difficult to reconcile liberal values with continued support for Israel. And, rather than the predominantly liberal values of American Jews buckling, it is support for Israel that is giving way.

What has caused the change, argues Finkelstein, is that there is now too much information out there. The myths of the past and the early academic work in support of Israel’s foundational myths (‘Exodus with footnotes’) has given way to serious scholarship, much of it by critical Israelis. Increasing numbers of American Jews no longer buy Israeli policies, however strong their primal attachment to Israel. And among younger Jews, even that is not as strong as it was. The evidence of this alienation is carefully chronicled by Finkelstein. How to explain it?

Read the full review in Red Pepper

Publishers Weekly reviews THE DREAM OF DOCTOR BANTAM

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

In this offbeat, emotionally raw debut, FictionCircus.com co-founder Thornton explores the tribulations of romance and rebellion, and the coming-of-age of 17-year-old Julie Thatch. Still reeling from her older sister’s suicide, Julie meets and falls for Patrice, a mercurial, fragile, oddly-innocent young woman striving to move up in the ranks of the Institute of Temporal Illusions, a cult led by the titular Dr. Bantam. Their relationship is a volatile, co-dependent, unstable thing, made worse by Patrice’s damaged psyche and Julie’s cynicism regarding the cult and life in general.

Read the full review in Publisher’s Weekly

FIFTY SHADES is featured in The Los Angeles Times

Friday, September 14th, 2012

Send your copy of “50 Shades of Grey” to O/R Books and they’ll send a book back to you free. If your copy is among the first 50 they receive, they’ll send you a free copy of “50 Shades of Louisa May.”

“50 Shades of Louisa May” is one of many spoofs of E.L. James’ bestselling novel. Like the original, it’s sexually explicit. Unlike the original, it stars Louisa May Alcott, author of the beloved novel “Little Women,” published in 1868.

The publisher writes, “Louisa May Alcott, author of the classic Little Women, consort of Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, beloved icon of professors of American 19th-century literature and perhaps less loved by their legions of students, had a lusty side that was less academic, and more . . . transcendental than any of us knew.”

The wildly popular yet also much-lampooned “50 Shades of Grey” is written in what O/R Books calls a “nightmare of awful prose.” They promise that the text of “50 Shades of Louisa May” is far more delightful, although its author has remained anonymous. What’s more, “50 Shades of Louisa May” is illustrated with X-rated woodcuts.

The “50 Shades of Grey” sequels — “50 Shades Darker” and “50 Shades Freed” — can also be traded in. But remember, only the first 50 copies they receive will get the free book trade. As they say on late night TV, don’t hesitate, this is a limited offer.

Of those first 50 trade-ins, five readers will be selected at random to recieve a gift pack of other O/R books. Expect progressive politics and an interesting take on culture.

Read the full article in The Los Angeles Times

I TOLD YOU SO and FIFTY SHADES featured in Bookforum

Friday, September 14th, 2012

O/R Books has acquired four previously unpublished interviews with Gore Vidal conducted by Jon Wiener. The interviews will be published in November under the title I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics.

Also in O/R Books news, the publisher is offering to send readers free copies of their satire Fifty Shades of Louisa May to anybody who sends in a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. They assure readers that their version is not only better than the original, but also illustrated with “X-rated woodcuts.”

Read the full article in Bookforum

FIFTY SHADES OF LOUISA MAY is featured in The Huffington Post

Friday, September 14th, 2012

“Like a gun buy-back program.”

That’s how Fernanda Diaz at OR Books describes their publicity stunt for the book “Fifty Shades of Louisa May.”

Under the title of Bonnets for Bondage, the first 50 people to send them their copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey” will receive a copy of their parody, a lusty tale about the “unbridled passion-that-might-have-been of one of the world’s most popular authors.”

When asked to differentiate between the two works, OR Books publisher John Oakes responded via email, saying “in one the tools for self-pleasure are hand-operated; in the other, they are battery-powered. In one, the narrator has the vocabulary and syntax of something greater than a philodendron. In the other, the writing is Limbaugh-level.”

As to why he is making the offer?

“I think it’s civilized to pick up trash off the streets.”

Read the full article in The Huffington Post

BEAUTIFUL TROUBLE is featured in Red Pepper

Tuesday, September 11th, 2012

It’s nearly become old hat by now to note that 2011 was a year of apparently spontaneous global uprising. Often forgotten in the awe and feeling of unity, though, is that many of the most visible successes of the past year – from Cairo to Wall Street and everywhere in between – were the result of decades of trial and error on the part of activists and communities experimenting in creative direct action. It’s fitting that the terrifically encyclopedic new book (and interactive ‘web toolbox’) Beautiful Trouble began gestating well before the occupation of Tahrir Square. And yet what better moment for this fantastic collection of ideas?

Read the full article in Red Pepper

WHY THE OLYMPICS AREN’T GOOD FOR US is reviewed in the LSE Review of Books

Friday, August 31st, 2012

Mark Perryman’s most recent work Why the Olympics aren’t good for us, and how they can be might seem insubstantial at a mere 136 pages, but despite it’s slight appearance, this work is anything but lightweight, and was timed precisely to coincide with the arrival of the 2012 games in London. Perryman is well known in the world of sport and leisure culture; indeed, he is the co-founder and head cheerleader for the Philosophy of Football, a team and a mindset that rallies against the corporate dominance of the game and challenges the racism and violence that they believe to still be inherent in some areas of the game.

With this background it comes as no surprise that Perryman’s newest writing opposes what he sees as the corporate control of the Olympics, and expresses concerns about where this culture is taking an event that should be about promoting sport in the community – both local and global – and bringing about a legacy of inclusion, rather than a crack-down on Olympic language used by anyone other than the sponsors and “worldwide partners.” However, despite this stance Perryman is an Olympics enthusiast. His passion for the event is evident throughout his polemic, and helps convince the reader that his alternative “Five New Rings” of Olympic principles really could work to make the next games a true success, not just in terms of sport, but legacy, sustainability and community.

Read the full review in the LSE Review of Books

Author Medea Benjamin is interviewed by The Daily Beast

Tuesday, August 28th, 2012

Political activist Medea Benjamin has spent more than 30 years fighting for peace and social justice around the globe. In addition to Code Pink, she cofounded the international human-rights organization Global Exchange and was one of 1,000 women who were collectively nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. She has authored eight books and previously worked as an economist and nutritionist with the United Nations and World Health Organization.
Click to learn more…

How does this measure up to past conventions as an activist?

I’ve been to the 2000, 2004, and 2008 conventions. I would say there are fewer protesters and more security. There are more police than protesters.

Why are there fewer protesters?

A lot of people didn’t come because of the storm. A lot of people who were driving and taking planes got scared away. They also got scared away by all the hype about violence and police presence and the intimidating pictures they saw of the police preparing.

Read the full interview in The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast calls FIFTY SHADES OF LOUISA MAY “Perhaps the most clever spinoff of E.L. James’ erotica novel.”

Thursday, August 9th, 2012

Although you wouldn’t have guessed it, a manuscript recovered from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum and dated in the late 1800s reveals that Louisa May Alcott, the beloved 19th-century American author of Little Women, actually was quite the little harlot. Adventures with a “Wooden Friend” and more lusty ambitions are laid bare in Fifty Shades of Louisa May: A Memoir of Transcendental Sex. Perhaps the most clever spinoff of E.L. James’s erotica novel, Louisa May’s “memoir,” published under a pseudonym, imagines the feminist writer indulging her every prurient whimsy.

Read the full review on The Daily Beast

WHY THE OLYMPICS AREN’T GOOD FOR US is featured in The Guardian

Friday, August 3rd, 2012

The Olympic Games is fine. The facilities at Stratford are as good as ever. The park, the flowers, the “Henman hill” are a delight. The opening was appropriately zany. Above all, television’s celebration of youthful energy – when spared the endless BBC chat – is a diversion from the woes of the world. Nor is it fair to chide the athletes for Locog’s incompetence, soldiers packing empty seats, public school bias or the weird plutocrats of the “Olympic family”, whom I saw yesterday tumbling out of our limousines into Harrods.

So is it worth £9bn? No, of course not. The Games was never worth that. But those who doubted that a passably competent nation with unlimited cash could deliver two weeks of sport were wrong. The Games seems enjoyable and remarkably scandal-free.

More worrying is the impact on political discourse. Apparently any gesture of national prestige, glory and self-congratulation, once declared by government to be “worth every penny”, is beyond rational debate. To quarrel with any feature of the games is to be a whingeing, unpatriotic naysayer. Normally hard-headed politicians (and journalists) have gone soft in the head – flat-earthers, creationists, climate-change deniers.

Read the full coverage in The Guardian

BOMB magazine features CRUEL

Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

Sue Coe is best known for her paintings and drawings of animals in slaughterhouses and factory farms, but her work examines social justice issues ranging from union struggles to the civil rights movement, from prison abolition to rape. Coe’s images have the urgency of someone trying to save a life, and in a way that is what she is doing—drawing attention to the death and exploitation that happens daily all around us in an attempt to awaken our compassion and move us to action. Coe’s newest work, Cruel, is a harrowing and heart-wrenching examination of animal cruelty in the meat industry. Coe takes us into the slaughterhouse with her. Armed with her pencil and sketchpad, she allows us to be present with these animals, who are usually viewed as nothing more than a future meal, in the last moments of their lives. Coe’s images often take on the dark humor of political cartoons and her graphic imagery sits burned into one’s brain—as any successful piece of propaganda should.

I met Coe at Moo Shoes, a vegan shoe store on Orchard Street in Manhattan. It was an unusual place to do an interview, but as Coe had just celebrated the book release party for Cruel there a few weeks prior, it seemed fitting. It turned out to be a welcoming and quiet place to talk.

Coe’s passion for heart-breaking subjects doesn’t stop her from being a delightful, kind and funny woman to talk to. When I met Coe she was wearing a flowing black dress that matched her long black hair. Her attire was accompanied by bright red lipstick, which, along with her gentle accent and sweet tone, gave her the distinct look of some radical anarchist Hogwarts professor who had been edited out of the Harry Potter books.

Read the full article in BOMB magazine

Mark Perryman is featured in The Daily Beast

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

On July 6, 2005, at the 117th International Olympic Committee Session in Singapore, London made its final presentation for its bid to host the 2012 Summer Games. Mayor Ken Livingstone, who used to be the firebrand known as “Red Ken,” had previously shown little or no interest in sport in the capital. But he was now older and cuddlier, his sharp edges smoothed by the responsibilities of mayoral office. As he made his bid, he dubbed London 2012 “The Regeneration Games,” his enthusiastic support informed by his belief that they would deliver for East London much needed economic renewal.

When the presentations ended and London erupted in celebration after besting favorite Paris in the final round of balloting, the promise of how London and the country would benefit from the Olympics hardly seemed to merit a murmur of a challenge. But in fact substantial question marks can be placed against the promises made.

Read the full article in The Daily Beast

WHY THE OLYMPICS AREN’T GOOD FOR US is reviewed in The Onion

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

For two weeks every few years, the Olympics blot out all other sports coverage in the world to focus on one city. The host cities scramble to earn the right to hold the games, and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to construct arenas, event complexes, and lodgings that rarely, if ever, eke out profits. But how did the Olympics become just like every other professional sporting event, covered in Visa and McDonald’s logos? Can they ever get back to simple, popular, spirited competition?

Sports journalist and university researcher Mark Perryman designed Why The Olympics Aren’t Good For Us, And How They Can Be as a vision of a radically different Olympics, the games’ Communist Manifesto, with an undeniably noble goal: ditch the corporate-controlled event and make it truly the People’s Games, with an emphasis on mass appeal, accessibility, and increased participation. Using the 2012 Summer Olympics in London as a backdrop, Perryman briefly covers the development of corporatized and commodified Olympic competition since 1984 in Los Angeles. As a possible response, he outlines how to bring the games back to their stated goals as global, unity-focused competition, while also acknowledging their inherent politicization.

Read the full review in The Onion

CRUEL is reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books

Monday, July 30th, 2012

For several decades, Sue Coe has been drawing and painting the brutality of the meat industry. She snuck into slaughterhouses and, because she carried only a pad and pencil, not cameras, has been allowed access to chicken and other livestock factories and production facilities.

Brief essays accompany the shocking, sorrowful images. Many of the drawings have a Third Reich feel, black and bloody; tortured animals and human workers mutated by their own cauterized feelings. Coe writes of mother cows and pigs separated from their young; of the yearning of animals for family members. She refuses the truism that animals and fish have no feelings, that sheep feel nothing when they are sheared. Her environments, her backdrops are poisoned, toxic, apocalyptic. She writes with certainty that our cruelty will come back to haunt us.

Read the full article in the Los Angeles Review of Books

The Nation reviews THE TORTURE REPORT

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

On October 7, 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all documents related to post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices. The request was filed simultaneously with the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. By the following May, no response had been issued, so the ACLU filed a second request, and in June took the government to court in hopes of forcing it to comply. Three months later the ACLU prevailed, and by the end of 2004 the documents were beginning to flow. Since then, well over 130,000 pages have been released and posted to a searchable database on the ACLU website.

The database contains, of course, the now infamous “torture memos”: the arguments, crafted by George W. Bush’s closest legal advisers, that waterboarding and the like were neither torturous nor illegal—and that such considerations didn’t apply to US presidents (or indeed anyone else in government, so long as the infliction of pain was not provably his or her “specific intent”). But these were only a small handful of documents among thousands: interrogation and torture logs, prison administration memos, courtroom transcripts and minutes from policy meetings. Several such documents known to exist have still not been released: in regard to one, the government has argued that not only is its existence classified but so too is the font in which it may or may not be written. Other records have been destroyed, including at least ninety-two videos of CIA interrogations. Of the material that has been released, much has been significantly redacted.

Read the full review in The Nation

CNN features OR BOOKS author Mark Perryman

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

The organizers of the 2012 London Olympics have repeatedly asserted the value of the Games in the shape of wider involvement in sport, a lasting legacy of sporting facilities, and increased tourism. But experience from previous Games suggest differently.

Not one recent Olympic host nation can point to an increase in sport participation as a result of the Olympics. Many of the stadiums built for the Greek Games are now expensive-to-maintain wrecks. As for tourism, the Olympics generally leads to a decrease in visitor spending, not an increase, as the travel industry has pointed out.

Read the full coverage on CNN

OR BOOKS author Raja Shehadeh writes for the International Herald Tribune Global Opinion

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

A Palestinian in Jerusalem

Jerusalem — As a tourist visiting the Old City of Jerusalem, seeing Christians, Jews and Muslims walking side by side, hearing church bells ringing and Muslims being called to prayer, you might think the place is a model of tolerance.

As a resident of the Old City of Jerusalem, you think differently.

Last Sunday, I was taken on a tour by Nadera Shalhoub-Kervokian, a Palestinian and a professor of criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has lived in the Old City for the past 30 years. Her home — a tastefully furnished second-floor apartment, where she and her husband raised three daughters — is in the Armenian quarter.

Read the full article in the International Herald Tribune

Mark Perryman talks with “Sunday Morning Live” on BBC1

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

Listen to the interview on BBC1

Mother Board discusses WHY THE OLYMPICS AREN’T GOOD FOR US with author Mark Perryman

Thursday, July 19th, 2012

Next week the Olympic flame will arrive in London for the start of the 2012 Games. With it will come a growing barrage of criticism from counter-event organizers and critical observers, skeptical of the vast secrecy, corporate pandering, great costs, security failings, and political controversy that hover around the events.

These issues, coupled with the problematic structure of today’s competitions, often obscure the true meaning and potential of the games. “There is something in the Olympics, indefinable, springing from the soul, that must be preserved,” said the journalist and London Marathon co-founder, Chris Brasher.

That preservation is the driving force behind a great new book by journalist Mark Perryman, Why the Olympics Aren’t Good For Us, and How They Can Be. Perryman’s work is not an attack on the Olympics, nor is it a snarky dismissal of the lofty sentiments often associated with the event. Unlike many criticisms of the games, he provides detailed suggestions on how they can be improved, laying out his bold and thoughtful modifications in the form of a five-step facelift that he dubs “The Five New Olympic Rings.”

Read the full interview in Mother Board.

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