This contemporary tension — where most of us live between small-scale personal empowerment and large-scale social disempowerment — makes Carl Cederström and André Spicer’s new book Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement timely and enlightening. It captures the alluring and often insidious desire to be better, especially in an era where things couldn’t seem to be worse.
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All election accounts suffer from the same problem: it is extremely difficult to separate the factors that lead us to cast our votes. Any attempt to explain the results of elections therefore end up focusing heavily on correlation rather than causation: the winning side did x and they won, so x must have led to the victory.
In 2017, the ‘winning’ side did not win per se, but as the result of last year’s general election was so contrary to expectations, it was only a matter of time before Corbyn’s team told their victor’s story.
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This anthology has a strong feminist ethos that cuts through race, gender identity and sexuality. The resistance in the title stems from the fight for agency through suffrage in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as US President. The editor’s note that ‘suffrage’ comes from Middle English, meaning intercessory prayer, and this informs their invocation of the other, encompassing transgender women, as well as its sense of grieving for the violence, rape and oppression of women.
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This book, which chronicles their improvement schemes in daily journals running in parallel, leads them to some very funny—and also very painful and even a little disturbing—places. Do not try this at home.
Read the full review in the latest print issue of Mindful magazine by subscribing here.
Christian television producer Terry Heaton, who worked closely with Pat Robertson on his show The 700 Club, describes him as “a political animal that happens to be a Christian evangelist, broadcaster and television personality.” .
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Warning: If you have no sense of humor about Jewish continuity, the Diaspora versus Israel debate, Jewish American communal politics or the Israeli government, then you definitely won’t want to read Eli Valley’s “Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel”. Of course, you’ll miss some very funny and extremely challenging looks at the extended Jewish world. Valley’s style is satire a la Mad Magazine, meaning that his drawings are caricatures and his humor heavy-handed, but he also has a gift for duplicating the double talk offered by some Jewish communal and political leaders..
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Studio immerses us in material culture. Preserving Chris Marker’s artistic mystique without descending into fetishism – memorializing him without nostalgia – the book is a moving testament to this most elusive of artists
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My conclusion is to encourage all left leaning people to buy this excellent book which addresses many of the issues which concern us… Invest in your future, read and promote this book to bring our democracy alive.
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This is a collection of essays that I would like every bookseller, book blogger, book reviewer, arts page editor, and minister for the arts to read. The Internet has revolutionised how we think, read, and write; for good or for ill, it’s a phenomenon to which readers and critics should be paying close attention. With consistently solid writing and argumentation, and a rich diversity of opinion and focus, The Digital Critic is illuminating at every turn.
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The 45 original stories in this volume achieve their objectives laudably, presenting bleak dystopic near-futures that are firmly rooted in the here and now.
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“It’s a novel in the way Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and Renata Adler’s Speedboat are–that is to say, on its own terms. With Inferno, Myles has written…a meditation on hatching a writing life. …The book, in other words, is packed. Throughout, Myles moves smoothly between her numerous themes: discovery, emergence, memory, and, most important, the lurching ambition to have a life of the mind and the body.”
Read more at http://bookforum.com/inprint/017_03/6364
