Lauren Groff, Florida (William Heinemann, 2018), 288 pp.

The stories in Lauren Groff’s new collection are true to the volume’s title. They all orbit a common geographic center, the U.S. state of Florida. In Groff’s Florida, however, this near-tropical locale, with its impinging abundance of wild spaces, is more than a physical setting. Landscape and climate here come to stand for the turbulent private worlds that Groff’s characters inhabit.

In all eleven stories, the action takes place in Florida or at one remove from the state. In these latter instances, the central figure is a Floridian on vacation from the place, a temporary refugee ultimately compelled, with due irony, to face the psychic – and often climatic – derangement that her stateside home embodies.

Groff’s Florida is not the glittering locus of beach and raucous nightlife as popularly conceived. It’s not the tediously festive Orlando; not the urban outposts of Latin culture; not the trim ubiquitous retirement communities. Her Florida, even in its outwardly orderly suburbs, is a sweltering flatland edging vast swampy expanses. In summer Groff’s Florida is a “hellmouth”, “a slow, hot drowning”, “an Eden of dangerous things”: “Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you”.

Biblical associations aside, in Groff’s present collection the physical world is a menacing liminal presence, a realm teeming with snakes, alligators, and the occasional panther, where horridly destructive storms race in from the horizon and sinkholes gape open on the instant. Even in the pieces that take place beyond Florida, stormy downpours seem to dog Groff’s protagonists in their attempts at temporary escape.

Throughout, Groff holds true to a strong narrative line. Her stories are distinctive for their reliance on eventful plots, with her characters’ routine lives disrupted – often catastrophically – by happenings in the physical world. Their reflections never cramp the narrative momentum of their stories. Rather, they pull things forward relentlessly, in tandem with external events, enriched by Groff’s admirable skill at building empathetic suspense in her readers. Conclusive resolutions – following a pattern anything but predictable in short fiction nowadays – are almost always on the way.

Most of the stories in Florida hinge on themes of abandonment and isolation. Groff’s protagonists are often educated, middle-class, fitness-enthusiast moms (only a single story in Florida features a male central figure). Most of them are seeming avatars of the American suburban “lifestyle”.

“Dogs Go Wolf” and “The Midnight Zone” feature characters who are literally marooned and forsaken. In the former story, two little girls, abandoned by their mother for reasons unclear, are left to fend for themselves on a remote island. In “The Midnight Zone”, a suburban mother, on vacation with two very young sons in “an old hunting camp shipwrecked in twenty miles of scrub”, is left alone with her boys. In a household accident she suffers a concussion that renders her virtually helpless. In “Above and Below” a doctoral student dumped by her boyfriend chooses homelessness and sets off on an aimless odyssey, a hauntingly compelling picaresque, around the state.

“Eyewall” also centers on a woman who chooses isolation over physical security, opting to ride out a hurricane alone. As her old house seems to crumble around her, her instability slowly resolves into focus, and “Eyewall” becomes a ghost story. In its best moments the story exemplifies Groff’s marvelously impressionistic eye: “My beautiful tomatoes had flattened and the metal cages minced away across the lawn, as if ghosts were wearing them as hoopskirts.”

“For the God of Love, for the Love of God” – in many respects the most distinctive of the stories – is a gem of trenchant social observation. The narrative unfolds around a suburban Florida mother visiting a college friend in France. This piece, like so many of the stories in Florida, hints at an autobiographical connection to the author.

This autobiographical strain is particularly evident in the brilliantly satisfying “Yport”, the culminating piece in Florida. Groff identifies her lead character only as “the mother” but the piece reads like memoir, and many of the thematic hallmarks of Groff’s Floridafictions are present here as well. The central figure is a Florida-based novelist off with her two sons on a summer’s intellectual pilgrimage in France. Her husband is stateside and largely unreachable as she faces a stark epiphany: the passionate assumptions of her youth have paled and been absorbed into the attitudes and responsibilities she has happily assumed as a mother.

The intimate ties of motherhood loom large in Florida. Groff’s central characters tend to be mothers themselves or daughters tethered to distant mothers. This is yet another in the welter of commonalities that typify this remarkable collection… and help us come to terms with the artistry of this wondrously talented author.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books) Paperback by Mark Fisher (Zero Books / John Hunt Publishing)

It took me a fairly long time and a second read to come up with an view on Fisher 's brief but fairly deep book. With good engagement with some of the major theorists of postmodern thought Fisher casts a picture of Capital as that which cannot be thought beyond. With deference to a number of the other reviewers, I think it is dismissive of his argument to say there are lots of alternatives. If one believes that, one should confront the argument directly. It seems to me that Capitalism does have an inherent blocking function.

The provisional space Fisher opens is in the development of full blown alternatives to Capitalism that grow out of the promises Capitalism makes and not only does not but cannot keep. Towards the end of this book Fisher gives a number of examples. Capitalism promises an end of bureaucracy, but we live in the most standardised world imaginable. Capitalism promises joy for the individual, but we live in a world of increasing affective disorder. We approach catastrophic ecological collapse. In this space alternatives can be developed.

Again, with respect to other reviewers, I really do not care whether this is Zizek lite or otherwise. There is a well thought out argument here that deserves more engagement and less branding. A good book and heartily recommended.

After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.

Terry Tapp, A Serf’s Journal: The Story of the United States’ Longest Wildcat Strike (Zero Books, / John Hunt Publishing),144pp.

Terry Tapp’s A Serf’s Journal: The Story of the United States’ Longest Wildcat Strikeopens with two deaths. Steve, a twenty-two year old construction carpenter and Harley-Davidson enthusiast, is arrested for growing marijuana. He is murdered in prison by a throng of inmates wielding improvised knives. Coby, a twenty-three year old father of two, is killed working atop a gunnel at JeffBoat, the Indiana shipyard that serves as the setting of Tapp’s book. Coby’s ankle gets caught on a cable, which forms a noose around it and slings him upward like an animal in a snare trap. He hangs until the paramedics arrive, his brain dangling out of his skull.

Steve and Coby, like Tapp, were trying to live in a society that locks out the poor from escaping both poverty and the often-deadly jobs they must work to survive. Their deaths haunt the entirety of the book, which tells the story of the 2001 wildcat strike at JeffBoat – one that Tapp was instrumental in fomenting when he worked there.

The prison in which Steve is murdered and the shipyard where Coby is killed comprise part of what Tapp calls The Prison – that is, the conglomeration of disciplinary apparatuses that condemns many to a life of meaningless, dangerous toil only to earn offensively paltry pay. The Prison is so large that it can be nearly impossible to discern, let alone escape. Driving to the shipyards one morning, Tapp takes stock of The Prison around him: helicopters looming overhead, cameras atop street fixtures, chain-link fencing. Arriving at work, he must scan an identification card. He is filmed walking through the turnstiles.

Tapp is aware that fencing and cameras alone cannot make a prison. “Adding a cop and a guard won’t turn them into a prison either. Even adding you and me – as prisoners – leaves something out.” That “something,” Tapp notes, “hides somewhere in the stories of Steve’s and Coby’s deaths.”

Tapp’s debut memoir is a wide-eyed, penetrating look into the working conditions of big industry and a stark example of how corporatism breaks, imprisons, and sometimes kills workers.

A Life of “Unwork”

Tapp took the job at JeffBoat – a job he knew could kill him – to receive health insurance for his pregnant wife. Tapp is a painter and currently lives and works as a tattoo artist in New York City. And during his tenure at JeffBoat, he struggled to survive in an environment that wipes out imagination in its bid to turn a profit through “unwork,” which is Tapp’s term for the negation of productive work. Tapp understood he was being monitored not to ensure he continued to “unwork” but in order to keep him from doing anything else, like sketching or painting or imagining ways to escape. Frequently, he stole away to sheet metal boxes and squatted in fetid sheds to write or do anything remotely creative in a place that allowed no room for an artistic act. He met other workers who wrote poetry and music and who did so in the crucible of poverty.

Tapp pushes these thoughts further, ruminating on the privileged set of artists and thinkers who were the ones to widely promote the idea that art could not be created until bedrock needs are met. “Our understanding of ourselves and how we function is a product of the study of the privileged – those wealthy enough…not to be bothered by unwork or to be able to fully foist that burden on others,” he writes.

Tapp makes it very clear he isn’t trying to “write philosophy” or “produce another book to decorate anyone’s shelves.” And thankfully, A Serf’s Journal is not written in the insulating jargon of high academia. What he does offer is not only a firsthand account of the longest wildcat strike in U.S. history but also a critique of neoliberal society as it entered into the twenty-first century. Much of what Tapp details – the constant surveillance, the concentration of power, the disposability of workers – has only intensified in the years following the 2007-08 financial meltdown and subsequent Great Recession.

Tapp portrays JeffBoat’s work environment as equal parts factory Fordism and managerial post-Fordism. Outside on the job site, Tapp’s body was pushed to work through sweltering heat and on frozen barges where one slip could mean death. Inside, he moved through meeting rooms, trailer offices, and other blank non-places. Administrators passed out awards for productivity and tried to convince the workers to accept programs that forced them to evaluate each other’s performance. When they weren’t risking their lives in the field, the workers rested in drab rooms with posters on the walls that spelled out ways to avoid on-site injuries.

These images of routine, unimaginative blandness (coffee pots in rooms without coffee or filters) resemble the ones posted to the now-defunct Facebook page Boring Dystopia, created by the late theorist Mark Fisher. Fisher started Boring Dystopia as a “consciousness-raising exercise” that encouraged “people to perceive the actual state of Britain rather than the PR state.” Images captured on closed-circuit television and pictures of broken ATMs littered the feed, presenting Britain as a crummy state plagued by techno-capital’s bugs and dehumanizing logic. Working at JeffBoat, Tapp certainly lived in the sort of boring dystopia theorized by Fisher. Turnstiles locked in workers. Administrators circulated “boilerplate” newsletters. And Tapp and the others realized the harder they worked, the lower their pay would be because it took them less time to do it.

Interspersed throughout the normalized moments are glimpses into the kind of hell that exists on these work sites. Tapp and the other employees faced the threat of electrocution working in the rain. And in a particularly shocking scene, Tapp reads a newspaper story about two men who drowned in a vat of chicken parts at a Tyson plant in Kentucky. The plant didn’t offer satisfactory safety equipment, and workers had to pay for goggles.

When Tapp and the other JeffBoat employees realized they would not have the union’s backing for a strike, they decided to initiate their own. Word of the strike spread around the world, and the employees received solidarity messages from all over. They even gained the support of the local police force. “The police in Jeffersonville had been working for two years without a contract,” writes Tapp, “and suffered from low wages and long hours much like us.” In a culture where “Blue Lives Matter” is the reactionary call against movements fighting the kind of top-down brutality of corporatism, this gesture can seem alien. But Tapp’s book takes place during a period before online culture wars and identity politics split the police force from people’s movements.

Amnesia and Control in The Prison

In May 2001, the strike ended. It idled production at JeffBoat for one week. Tapp notes the climate changed significantly upon returning to work:


There was no workplace animosity coming from the company, no attempts to get us to jeopardize our lives for our jobs, no gratuitous firings or suspensions. It was clear, or seemed to be clear to most of us, that the company and the union intended to leave us alone in order to avoid further trouble for further trouble was exactly what we were prepared to cause them if we were provoked.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 changed all of that. Suddenly, in the patriotic furor that exploded afterwards, the idea of dissent became dangerous, un-American. “To strike at all,” writes Tapp, “to harm American business, was a form of terrorism since it wounded America. In fact, to cause problems on the job at all was aiding America’s enemies.”

Tapp notes disconcertingly that “very little has changed” since the strike at JeffBoat. Today, some on the right view protests like the current #RedforEd teachers’ strike – as well as the ones at Standing Rock and for reasonable gun legislation – as affronts to liberal democracy. The common neoconservative narrative is that America was attacked out of the blue on 9/11 and that anyone seeking to slander the shining beacon on a hill is an enemy. Much of this narrative relies on retroactive memory work done by massive PR campaigns that erase historical instances of popular revolt. And JeffBoat, along with the union that did not support the wildcat strike, has lent a hand to such acts of erasure:


Though there was global support within labor and activist communities for what was occurring at JeffBoat…those who worked there afterward almost certainly heard little about what had taken place…it is not in the company’s or the union’s interests that people under their power recall these events.

Tapp saw this trend spread in the years after 9/11, resulting in a “global monoculture” of control and amnesia. He ends the book with a turn towards protecting memory. A mass mediated culture is, he notes, quite good at wiping memories. This kind of directed forgetting operates under the guise of history, but it is no history at all. Our post-9/11 control society wants nothing to do with memory because memories “do not cohere into the larger pattern that forms our understanding of the world and what we take to be the ‘meaning’ of human life.”

Tapp is joining a lineage of thinkers that seeks to preserve memory in the face of tremendous odds. Queer communities, black prophetic thinkers, and indigenous groups (among many others) have all relied upon memory to archive histories that have otherwise been written out of popular discourse. At a time when the right dreams of mid-century stability and the left longs for childhood in the 1980s, Tapp argues for the kind of remembering that opens up possibilities for alternative ways to live – and work.

Tragedy of Lebanon: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and American Bunglers Kindle Edition by Jonathan Randal (Just World Books)u

It's amazing how Western observers--and seasoned journalists to boot, Jon Randal chief among them--still feel justified (and smugly so) labeling Lebanese Christians "Right Wing", and Muslims "Left Wing." This is all the more mind boggling when the epitome of retrogression, patriarchy, feudalism, and reactionary conservatism in the Middle East today (as in the days of Randal) remain Middle Eastern Muslims. Pray tell who were the "Left Wingers" of Randal's "analysis"? The feudal Jumblats? The fascist Syrian Social Nationalists? The racist totalitarian PLO? For a decent work of legitimate dispassionate "social science" on Lebanon WITHOUT Randal's axe-to-grinde, one ought to have a look at Theo Hanf's foundational "Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon." Among its most memorable passages, which destroy Randal's hack journalism, is his description of the Left-Right dichotomy in Lebanon--which, in Hanf's telling, are “political and social fantasies [that] correlate with the analyst’s [own] political convictions”, not Lebanese realities…) Indeed, Left-Wing Progressive Muslims and Conservative Right-Wing Christians might be politically soothing (and Politically Correct to use a modern term) for Western observers and journalists and academics racked with guilt over their Culture’s intrusions into the Middle East; but they are misleading at best, and dangerous at worst when it comes to Lebanon. To borrow again from Theo Hanf:

The cliché of ‘rich [right-wing] Christians’ and ‘poor [left-wing] Muslims’ [or better yet, a ‘bourgeois French-speaking Christian’, and a ‘proletarian Arabic-speaking Muslim’], has had a brilliant journalistic career—and it may not be over yet… [but it is hardly an accurate and honest description of Lebanon’s political divisions…]

In fact, lest this eluded Randal's keen observer's eye, it has traditionally been the Christians of Lebanon who stood for parliamentarianism and constitutional democracy, and it’s been the Christians who espoused “so-called Leftist” causes (from social reform movements, to fiscal reform and wealth distribution, pension and welfare systems, 40-hour work-weeks, paid holidays and week-ends and sick-leave and the rest); and it’s been the Muslims who’ve favored atavistic reactionary politics, patriarchy, and the suppression of minority rights and minority narratives, and it’s been the Muslims (Leftists in Randal's telling) who have traditionally stood for conservative causes and resisted change…

In a 1976 interview with the Lebanese daily al-Bayraq, Kamal Jumblat, (then the “conscience” of the Lebanese Left, and the darling of the International Left) spoke warmly of Hitler and the Nazis. “We must not take a strong stand against Nazism” he said “just as we must not agree with everything the Leftists say—Nazism should be reviewed…

Chief Complaint: A Country Doctor's Tales of Life in Galilee Paperback – February 1, 2015 by Hatim Kanaaneh (Just World Books)

Hatim Kanaaneh’s Chief Complaint: A Country Doctor’s Tales of Life in Galilee, is among the best books I have read in the last ten years. Hatim is a wonderful storyteller with a unique voice. His prose is engaging. His immersion in Galilee and its people brings depth and gravitas to the slightest details of his accounts. While at times he idealizes those about whom he writes, it is the kind of idealization that stems from love, not from hyperbole, all the more credible because of his unflinching if often indirectly expressed objectivity when he addresses the shortcomings of his subjects.

I found Hatim’s first story, the tale of Adheem, a powerful and unstoppable giant of a man, brave, aggressive, at times heroic, but rather dim, whose unthinking impulsiveness ultimately blows his genitals to smithereens, a perfect metaphor for the self-destructive stupidity that so often dominates the policies and efforts of all sides in the conflicts that embroil the Middle East. His second tale is a poignant exploration of lifelong love that moved me deeply. Hatim’s politics, once stated in the preface, blend seamlessly into his tales and the dialogs he reports. While politics are high on his agenda, Hatim is at his best eloquently describing love and family in the Palestinian world, every word deeply rooted in the earth and traditions of his ancestors. His voice begins firmly grounded in the particular and soars to the universal.

The result is a celebration of a fast-vanishing lifestyle and a wistful account of the complexity and centrality of family life in the Palestinian community, and an participant-observer’s account of his ancient culture’s changing, crumbling, and trying to reaffirm itself and its directions as it struggles against engulfment by the twin riptides of modernity and occupation. For readers who have worked alongside their grandfathers in agriculture or gardening, Hatim’s reflections on his family’s tending orchards and crops and his preservation of those traditions just might bring tears to their eyes. It certainly brought tears to mine. I guarantee the reader that after reading this book, eating a pomegranate will never be the same.

Hatim’s home village of Arrabeh comes alive in these pages. Comparisons to Sholem Aleichem’s portrayal of the fictional village of Anatevka spring readily to mind. Both authors are gifted with tremendous wit, demonstrate a deep unapologetic love for what they bring to life in their writing, and share a bittersweet sense of both the precious and the precarious in the times and places they depict. To this reader, Hatim’s fusion of humor, politics, rapid social change, and love, in the context of a closeness to nature, agriculture, and animal husbandry also evokes vague echoes of Virgil’s first and rarely studied masterwork, the Eclogues or Bucolics.

It is hard to imagine a more moving advocacy for the Palestinian cause. I would like to believe that at times the pen is mightier than the sword, and that a wider reading of this book would be far more effective than terrorism and agitation in promoting the cause of the Palestinian people.

Chief Complaint... is an important book with powerful human, political, cultural, and anthropological insights. It deserves a wide readership. It belongs on the reading lists of high schools and universities, and on the bookshelves of those eager to better understand the Middle East today. It should be regarded as required reading for those with interest and involvement in international affairs.

The People Make the Peace: Lessons from the Vietnam Antiwar Movement Paperback – September 14, 2015 by Karín Aguilar-San Juan (Editor), Frank Joyce (Editor) (Just World Books)

This book is an engaging, insightful, informative, heartrending,and significant read. Reading this book was personally a nostalgic experience. We were initially anti-war activists as the young parents of five children and have matured into on-going peace advocates. We first became friends with fellow Detroiter, Frank Joyce, during the Vietnam War era. Frank and the wonderful woman he married, Mary Ann Barnette, are coming 'up north' to the small town where we retired, to facilitate a discussion of the book at our Social-Political book club. It is just one very small example of how generous and giving they are in their ongoing work for peace and justice.

Forty years after the Vietnam War ended, many in the United States still struggle to come to terms with this tumultuous period of U.S. history. The domestic antiwar movement, with cooperation from their Vietnamese counterparts, played a significant role in ending the War, but few have examined its impact until now. In The People Make the Peace, nine U.S. activists discuss the parts they played in opposing the War at home and their risky travels to Vietnam in the midst of the conflict to engage in people-to-people diplomacy. In 2013, the "Hanoi 9" activists revisited Vietnam together; this book presents their thoughtful reflections on those experiences, as well as the stories of five U.S. veterans who returned to make reparations. Their successes in antiwar organizing will challenge the myths that still linger from that era, and inspire a new generation seeking peaceful solutions to war and conflict today. Contributors include: Jay Craven, Rennie Davis, Judy Gumbo, Alex Hing, Doug Hostetter, Frank Joyce, Nancy Kurshan, Myra MacPherson, John McAuliff, Becca Wilson

Baddawi Paperback – April 1, 2015 by Leila Abdelrazaq (JUst World Books)

On October 29, 1948, the Israeli terrorist group Irgun ethnically cleansed the village of Safsaf in Palestine, lining some 70 men up, shooting them, dumping them in a ditch, and raping three girls. Among the survivors who fled to Lebanon were the grandparents of a young woman in Chicago who has a talent for telling stories in pictures and words. Safsaf was called Safsofa by the Romans and can be found as Safsufa on the iNakba app on your NSA-tracking device.

Baddawi is two things. It's the name of a refugee camp in Lebanon where this young woman's father grew up. The name comes from the word Bedouin, meaning nomad. "Al Beddaoui, Lebanon" locates it on Google-Earth. The residents have been there 1948 or since they were born, and they are not nomads by choice. They live in a permament state of desiring to return home forever, even those who have never been home ever.

Justice for Palestine is where little sparks of opposition to war can be found among young people in the militarized United States of 2015, and where their art can be found as well.The second thing that Baddawi is, is a book that tells a story of childhood in Baddawi for Ahmad, the father of the author and artist Leila Abdelrazaq.

I've just read Baddawi and passed it along to my son. It's a book that tells a personal story that is also a cultural and historical record. This is the unique story of one boy, but in great measure the story of millions of Palestinian refugees. Ahmad's experiences growing up are often identical to my own or my son's, but often dramatically different. He plays the games and learns the lessons of children everywhere, but confronts the struggles of poverty, of war, and of discrimination -- of second-class citizenship in the land where Israel and its Western backers swept his unwanted ancestors.

Baddawi is the story of a rather remarkable boy, but a story that conveys a sense of what life was like and is like still for a great many boys and girls who live without nationality, not as a result of choosing world citizenship but by mandate of global powers who find their existence inconvenient. And yet the story is quite straightforwardly entertaining and good-spirited. One is disappointed when it ends rather abruptly, yet heartened to gain the impression that part two may be forthcoming.

I notice, incidentally, that there will be a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on June 2nd, on Israel's mistreatment of Palestinian Children, and that you can go here to ask your Misrepresentative and Senators to attend.

Leta Hong-Fincher, Betraying Big Brother: the Feminist Awakening in China,(Verso Books, 2018), 288pp.

Academic and journalist Leta Hong-Fincher made an impressive debut some years ago with her first work, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (Zed Books, 2014). Leftover Women was an illuminating read detailing the systematic disenfranchisement of women by the Chinese Communist Party. Hong-Fincher’s second work, Betraying Big Brother, picks up naturally where Leftover Women left off, beginning with the arrest of China’s “Feminist Five” on the eve of International Women’s Day, 2015.

On March 6, 2015, the Chinese government arrested Wei Tingting, Zheng Churan, Wu Rongrong, Li Maizi and Wang Man, five women accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” All these women had done were hand out stickers in subway stations against sexual harassment, as part of their campaign against domestic violence. The consequent uproar, and the blatant hypocrisy of the Chinese government (Xi Jinping was scheduled to host a United Nations summit on women’s rights in New York), resulted in the newly dubbed “Feminist Five” being released after a harrowing 37 days.

Where Leftover Women contended with relatively specific issues such as the propaganda campaign shaming “leftover women” and the redistribution of property wealth to men, Betraying Big Brother contends with the state of feminism in China as a whole. It is a far more urgent piece of work, painfully aware that Chinese women are fighting a losing battle against a deeply misogynist government, in a society that appears determined to rob women of safety, wealth ownership, reproductive rights and more.

Previously unknown figures, the Feminist Five quickly became leaders of the stubborn, growing movement for women’s rights in China. Each of them detail, in interviews with Hong-Fincher, their own experiences of domestic and sexual violence – the title of Chapter 4, “Your Body is a Battleground” serving as a poignant reminder of just how much feminist “awakening” is dependent on female pain and suffering. It is a coming to activism that, as Hong-Fincher goes on to relate, is dogged by even more turmoil, not least of which is the harassment and violence meted out by the police.

That being said, Hong-Fincher makes clear that Weibo and access to the internet have proven to be crucial tools in galvanising support for activists like the Five. Even as censorship in China remains notoriously unforgiving (Betraying Big Brother reminds us of the crackdown on internet freedom after the riots in Xinjiang), support for women’s rights on Chinese social media persists. Examples include the creative use of the homophone ‘mi-tu’ (‘rice rabbit’) as a hashtag to dodge censors on Weibo, as well as the galvanising of over 8000 students and alumni from 70 universities in signing #MeToo petitions. Not only is the use of social media despite censorship impressive, it also reinforces the necessarily global nature of feminism – #MeToo reached women all around the world because of social media. Betraying Big Brother asserts that it is because of global connections and transnational activism that women are increasingly able to stand in solidarity against patriarchal regimes – as the founding of the Chinese Feminist Collective in New York, detailed in the book, shows.

Unlike Leftover Women, Betraying Big Brother does not primarily rely on numbers and statistics to make a convincing argument. Instead, the pain and terror experienced by Chinese feminists, their first-hand accounts of imprisonment, harassment and abuse at the hands of the CCP, provide more than enough proof of Xi Jinping’s misogynist regime. However, the overall impression given by the book is one of female persistence, as shows of female solidarity both within China and worldwide (particularly over the internet) confront the relentless crackdown of any breed of “subversiveness” by Xi’s regime.

The incredible audacity of China’s leadership in attacking women who were simply giving out stickers is thus outlined in its full outrageousness before being explained by Hong-Fincher. She traces China’s historical approach to gender equality in Chapter 7, and points out “the profound irony of Chinese authorities persecuting women’s rights activists today” since


the very origins of China’s Communist Party in the early twentieth century lay in the revolutionary dream of women’s liberation, with the publicly celebrated principle that women and men are equal.

The deep ironies in the CCP’s treatment of women, from enlisting female labour during collectivisation to encouraging women to give up their jobs in the twenty-first century, is all traced in Betraying Big Brother to the Party’s foundational prioritisation of economic growth and “political stability” in the form of party-held power. Hong-Fincher provides a sweeping history of modern China’s history, tracing how the ascension of Deng Xiaoping to power in 1976 began sweeping reforms leading to rocketing gender inequality. Along with sharp declines in female labour force participation, the CCP’s eugenics programmes encouraging women, especially educated urban ones, to create “high-quality” children, paint a picture of a dystopian society not unlike Margaret Atwood’s fictional worlds.

Such severe gender inequality might have taken decades to establish, but glimmers of hope appear with the resistance put up by human rights lawyers as well as Chinese women in the Taiwanese and American diaspora, amongst others. Noting such examples, Hong-Fincher strikes a careful balance between documenting the genuinely dire circumstances that activists face in China, as well as the commitment that those activists have towards a more equal society.

This book is a crucial one, broadening the discussion around global #MeToo and focusing on what such a movement might mean to Chinese women – that is, one-fifth of the world’s female population. Even as feminism received a boost from #MeToo, the world is seemingly becoming an increasingly dangerous place for women (one only need look at America, the Philippines, and so on). It is crucial reading for understanding what contemporary feminism looks like, from a non-Eurocentric, Chinese perspective. Betraying Big Brother feels heavy and potent with the evidence upon which it reports, and its arguments urgently need to be heeded. Sadly, for many women in China, it is perhaps already too late for feminism to save the day.

Jenny Xie, Eye Level (Grey Wolf Press, 2018), 80pp.

Winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Jenny Xie’s book of poems Eye Level is sure to stick in her readers’ minds for a long time to come. Xie is in communication with many of her contemporaries, namely Ocean Vuong, Nick Flynn, and Hieu Minh Nguyen, especially when she is expounding on topics such as family relationships and the hardships of life in modern-day America. Her poetry is able to creep up quietly on a reader and make an undeniably profound impact on one’s pre-established notions of the human condition.

The collection begins with “Rootless,” a poem which immediately establishes Xie’s meticulous attention to stanzaic structure and precise language. It is in this introductory poem that many of the book’s predominant themes are brought to the forefront, most notably isolation, displacement, and an unfulfilled desire to belong:


Can this solitude be rootless, unhooked from the ground?

No matter. The mind resides both inside and out.
It can think itself and think itself into existence.

I sponge off the eyes, no worse for wear.
My frugal mouth spends the only foreign words it owns.

Shortly after this introductory poem, the reader is presented with the two halves of the “Phnom Penh Diptych,” “Wet Season” and “Dry Season,” both of which consist of interconnected sections of verse which explore the vast socioeconomic disparities in Cambodia’s largest, most densely populated city. In dividing the poem into these two parts, with “wet” and “dry” representing affluence and impoverishment, respectively, the poet draws further attention to unequal living conditions. Interestingly, while the speaker presents herself as being closer to the poor than the rich, the reader is given evidence suggesting that she likely occupies the middle class: “Every day I drink Coca-Cola and write ad copy. / I’m in the business of multiplying needs.” Because the two extremes of the economic spectrum are made extraordinarily clear throughout this diptych, the speaker’s middle-class status appears to serve as an indeterminate No Man’s Land. As the book progresses, this sense of alienation grows more and more apparent.

Early in the collection’s third section, the poem “Zuihitsu” focuses on a myriad of interlocking issues ranging from the inevitability of suffering, to the inherent difficulties of communication. As a term, “zuihitsu” refers to a genre of Japanese literature which utilizes loosely-connected essay fragments, beginning with Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book. Often, this style of writing tends to expound on the author’s physical environment. Staying true to its namesake, Xie’s poem provides the reader with several self-contained stanzas of prose, each of which is separated by a considerable amount of blank space, thereby subtly implying the desolate nature of the place at hand, presumably the place from which the speaker is originally from. No other line within the poem seems a more fitting summation of its intent than the following: “Funny, the way we come to understand a place by wanting to escape it.”

Exemplified by poems such as “Lunar Year 1988” and “Naturalization,” the book’s third section also shifts its focus to immigration and the struggles commonly experienced by those who move to a new country—in this case, America. While it is apparent that Xie had at least some intent to showcase the difficulties faced by immigrants, she is also sure to make it clear that any environment, regardless of whether its inhabitants are natives, immigrants or otherwise, can become a home for melancholia. . Earlier in the book, for example, the poem “Displacement”—set in Kerkyra (Corfu), a Greek island in the Ionian Sea, a location which is presumably indicative of a pre-immigration existence—exudes an understated sadness. While the poem’s title could, at first glance, be easily attributable to the subject of immigration, I interpret it as being a broader conception of the word as many of its lines demonstrate a universal sorrow. Even the form of the poem is reflective of its titular concept: by beginning with two blocks of prose before ending with a short-versed stanza, the uncertainty at hand is brought into focus even more. Aside from its formal divergence, the poem’s final stanza also beautifully communicates a lack of control, and the futility embedded in all human endeavors:


Crumbled rust on boat metal.
In order to dock the boat,
the fisherman throws all his weight against the line.

Geography and immigration play a part in coalescing the book’s numerous instances of isolation and generalized detachment. Aside from the previously-mentioned Phnom Penh and Kerkyra, other locations include New York City, Hefei (a Chinese city), parts of Vietnam, and Jardin Centenario (a park in Mexico City). By setting various poems in a myriad of places, Xie gives the reader an undeniable range of sociopolitical and personal spaces.

Though the image of eyes is woven throughout Xie’s book, the motif reaches its pinnacle in “Visual Orders.” A work in fourteen short, distinct sections, the poem dissects our collective preconceptions about sight with the utmost precision. While each section tackles this topic from its own unique angle, the fifth section, a prose poem, could be said to be the epicenter of Xie’s vision:


The seductions of seeing ensure there is that which remains unseen. Evading visibility is its own fortune. If to behold is to possess, to be looked upon is to be fixed in another’s sight, static and immutable.

This poem serves as a counterpoint to the solitude and social disconnection running so prevalently throughout the book. In putting forth the possibility that to behold is to possess, the poet provides her readers with this bit of solace: sight, whether literal or metaphorical, is one thing which unifies everyone. One needs only to consider the book’s epigraph, a few lines from the late Spanish poet Antonio Machado, which reads: “The eye you see is not / an eye because you see it; / it is an eye because it sees you.” An unflinchingly bold first book, Xie’s Eye Level acts as a mirror for existence: one which holds itself up to its readers, and asks them to consider how their life plays into humanity’s collective narrative.

Vahni Capildeo, Venus as a Bear (Carcanet Press 2018), 112pp.

Winner of the Forward Prize for their earlier poetry collection Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet, 2016), Vahni Capildeo has returned with a sparkling, humorous and impressive collection of poems, Venus as a Bear (Carcanet, 2018). Fans of Björk will immediately recognize in the title a reference to the Icelandic singer’s 1993 song “Venus as a Boy.” Taken from the singer’s debut studio album, the song borrows elements from Indian music like the use of the tabla. Less recognizable is the collection’s reference to London’s Stinky Bear Press’ earlier DIY-zine from 2013.

Also named “Venus as a Bear,” the zine was a tribute to Björk – a project in which Capildeo was also involved. The title of the collection itself therefore bares hints not just to Capildeo’s academic background, but to the Icelandic research that she carried our during her DPhil at Oxford, as well as her Indian-Caribbean heritage. This polyphonic approach is set up with the opening epigrams, referencing the French poem “Faune et Flore” by Francis Ponge and Gertrude Stein’s “Objects.” True to mission, Capildeo’s eye inspects both inanimate objects and natural life, from around the globe, in what a review in The Guardian compared to Romantic “cross-cultural investigations into the natural world.”

Evidence of Capildeo’s wide-ranging knowledge and deep intellect runs throughout the collection. Split into seven sections, Capildeo’s book ranges from verse inspired by “Creatures” (the first section), by other works of art (“Shameless Acts of Ekphrasis,” the second section), the sea (“Sea Here”) and other objects from nature and elsewhere. These reflections are multi-layered and intelligent: “Brant Geese” for example considers “a Brant goose, a burnt bird, a bit / shorter than other editions of / goose.” These geese are “confusable with barnacles, / those goose-cousins considered fish / by Friday-famished Christians.” The poem refers to the etymology of the Brant goose, named for the Old Norse brandgás (burnt, black) – referring to the dark colour of the species. Until recently, the Brant goose was considered to be the same species as the barnacle goose, which Catholics used to eat on Friday since barnacle geese counted as fish. Such insight into eclectic facts coincides with a playful onomatopoeic rendering of a gaggle of geese that “open a bubble of babble / swagger and swallow a vowel / turd it turn it shine it slime it…putting it bluntly: goose to geese.” This interest in medieval sources and foundational literatures manifests itself as well in “After Hávamál” and “Four Presents with Petrarch,” two poems that reach across time and “Langues/Tongues” (the title of the third section) which draws on Old Norse and Renaissance Italian poetry for inspiration.

Useful to understanding these vignettes is the growing critical resistance towards the idea of “post-colonialism” as seen in the work of those such as Anne McClintock and Carine Mardorossian. McClintock’s work is particularly pertinent in pointing out the pitfalls of post-colonialist thought. These hazards include grounding the study of colonised groups along linear narratives, using the progressive terminology of an Enlightenment worldview. Post-colonialism also generates a false binary between the “colonizer” and “colonized,” ignoring the nuances involved in discussing the lives of women and queer persons, for example, as well as assuming synonymy between ex-colonies that can be very different. Capildeo’s collection reinforces this point, with poems underscoring a particular combination of experiences unique to them alone – combining queer, Caribbean and Icelandic frames of reference. This ironic look at institutional, patriarchal and white power comes from inside academic institutions themselves – the image of “my progressive male colleagues” who “would get me alone” and “a little way into my her-answers, they would roar in my face: ‘Bullshit!’” an amusing and defiant take on male condescension in the university.

Capildeo refuses categorization and takes a detached view from academic judgement and “post-colonial studies,” moving comfortably between Europe and Trinidad, from the medieval to the present, demonstrating that such simultaneity is not only possible, but natural to her life. However, Venus as a Bear does not exist solipsistically; it establishes inter-textual relationships with other works that are worth teasing apart and investigating. “Novena Body Parts,” for example, responds to Puerto Rican poet Loretta Collins-Klobah’s poem “Novena a la Reina María Lionza” while “The Magnificent Pigs of Thetford” responds to Captain Beefheart’s iconic album Trout Mask Replica and its song “China Pig.” While Klobah’s poetry throbs with imagery of Puerto Rican heat and female bodies as well as the combination of Spanish and English, Captain Beefheart combines the rhythms of rock, blues and free jazz to make him – as Rolling Stone once put it – “the only true dadaist in rock.”

Writing in collaboration with Collins-Klobah and in response to Captain Beefheart, Petrarch, Björk and more, Capildeo’s message is clear – this collection is one that combines melodies and images, creating a cacophonous harmony in the whole.

The collection does not intend to be a liberal political manifesto, and is no Adichie-esque rebellion against dominant discourses. Capildeo is not the diasporic writer to saddle with these responsibilities that not all writers of colour ask for, but are often bullied into. Above all, Venus as a Bear is energetic, inspired and funny – turning toward the beauty of nature as inspiration, rather than normative modes of beauty found in human relations. Venus as a Bear bubbles with laughter. “Catifesto” for instance, declares with the anthropomorphized voice of the feline, “I am my own cat,” an “aesthetic chest-sitter.” The Romantics’ narcissistic use of nature to achieve sublime transcendence is rejected. This collection instead reclaims “bullshit” for the bulls, and reaches out to those who “believed in duty; yes in Venus as a bear; wanted a manifestation; wanted Venus to give salvation; yes, Venus as a bear.”

Leta Hong-Fincher, Betraying Big Brother: the Feminist Awakening in China,(Verso Books, 2018), 288pp.

Academic and journalist Leta Hong-Fincher made an impressive debut some years ago with her first work, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (Zed Books, 2014). Leftover Women was an illuminating read detailing the systematic disenfranchisement of women by the Chinese Communist Party. Hong-Fincher’s second work, Betraying Big Brother, picks up naturally where Leftover Women left off, beginning with the arrest of China’s “Feminist Five” on the eve of International Women’s Day, 2015.

On March 6, 2015, the Chinese government arrested Wei Tingting, Zheng Churan, Wu Rongrong, Li Maizi and Wang Man, five women accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” All these women had done were hand out stickers in subway stations against sexual harassment, as part of their campaign against domestic violence. The consequent uproar, and the blatant hypocrisy of the Chinese government (Xi Jinping was scheduled to host a United Nations summit on women’s rights in New York), resulted in the newly dubbed “Feminist Five” being released after a harrowing 37 days.

Where Leftover Women contended with relatively specific issues such as the propaganda campaign shaming “leftover women” and the redistribution of property wealth to men, Betraying Big Brother contends with the state of feminism in China as a whole. It is a far more urgent piece of work, painfully aware that Chinese women are fighting a losing battle against a deeply misogynist government, in a society that appears determined to rob women of safety, wealth ownership, reproductive rights and more.

Previously unknown figures, the Feminist Five quickly became leaders of the stubborn, growing movement for women’s rights in China. Each of them detail, in interviews with Hong-Fincher, their own experiences of domestic and sexual violence – the title of Chapter 4, “Your Body is a Battleground” serving as a poignant reminder of just how much feminist “awakening” is dependent on female pain and suffering. It is a coming to activism that, as Hong-Fincher goes on to relate, is dogged by even more turmoil, not least of which is the harassment and violence meted out by the police.

That being said, Hong-Fincher makes clear that Weibo and access to the internet have proven to be crucial tools in galvanising support for activists like the Five. Even as censorship in China remains notoriously unforgiving (Betraying Big Brother reminds us of the crackdown on internet freedom after the riots in Xinjiang), support for women’s rights on Chinese social media persists. Examples include the creative use of the homophone ‘mi-tu’ (‘rice rabbit’) as a hashtag to dodge censors on Weibo, as well as the galvanising of over 8000 students and alumni from 70 universities in signing #MeToo petitions. Not only is the use of social media despite censorship impressive, it also reinforces the necessarily global nature of feminism – #MeToo reached women all around the world because of social media. Betraying Big Brother asserts that it is because of global connections and transnational activism that women are increasingly able to stand in solidarity against patriarchal regimes – as the founding of the Chinese Feminist Collective in New York, detailed in the book, shows.

Unlike Leftover Women, Betraying Big Brother does not primarily rely on numbers and statistics to make a convincing argument. Instead, the pain and terror experienced by Chinese feminists, their first-hand accounts of imprisonment, harassment and abuse at the hands of the CCP, provide more than enough proof of Xi Jinping’s misogynist regime. However, the overall impression given by the book is one of female persistence, as shows of female solidarity both within China and worldwide (particularly over the internet) confront the relentless crackdown of any breed of “subversiveness” by Xi’s regime.

The incredible audacity of China’s leadership in attacking women who were simply giving out stickers is thus outlined in its full outrageousness before being explained by Hong-Fincher. She traces China’s historical approach to gender equality in Chapter 7, and points out “the profound irony of Chinese authorities persecuting women’s rights activists today” sincethe very origins of China’s Communist Party in the early twentieth century lay in the revolutionary dream of women’s liberation, with the publicly celebrated principle that women and men are equal.

The deep ironies in the CCP’s treatment of women, from enlisting female labour during collectivisation to encouraging women to give up their jobs in the twenty-first century, is all traced in Betraying Big Brother to the Party’s foundational prioritisation of economic growth and “political stability” in the form of party-held power. Hong-Fincher provides a sweeping history of modern China’s history, tracing how the ascension of Deng Xiaoping to power in 1976 began sweeping reforms leading to rocketing gender inequality. Along with sharp declines in female labour force participation, the CCP’s eugenics programmes encouraging women, especially educated urban ones, to create “high-quality” children, paint a picture of a dystopian society not unlike Margaret Atwood’s fictional worlds.

Such severe gender inequality might have taken decades to establish, but glimmers of hope appear with the resistance put up by human rights lawyers as well as Chinese women in the Taiwanese and American diaspora, amongst others. Noting such examples, Hong-Fincher strikes a careful balance between documenting the genuinely dire circumstances that activists face in China, as well as the commitment that those activists have towards a more equal society.

This book is a crucial one, broadening the discussion around global #MeToo and focusing on what such a movement might mean to Chinese women – that is, one-fifth of the world’s female population. Even as feminism received a boost from #MeToo, the world is seemingly becoming an increasingly dangerous place for women (one only need look at America, the Philippines, and so on). It is crucial reading for understanding what contemporary feminism looks like, from a non-Eurocentric, Chinese perspective. Betraying Big Brother feels heavy and potent with the evidence upon which it reports, and its arguments urgently need to be heeded. Sadly, for many women in China, it is perhaps already too late for feminism to save the day.

David Harvey, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (Profile Books, 2017), 256pp.

When I first picked up David Harvey’s most recent book, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, it was with a certain anticipation of finding allusion to André Gorz, an author whose own engagement with that particular ‘reason’ targeted by the title remains seminal. However, it was another figure who came forth as the touchstone for this fine volume by everyone’s favourite Marxist geographer. For the “madness of economic reason” is a phrase coined by the (in)famous Jacques Derrida. The occasion for its issuance was his critique of Levi-Strauss’s account of the potlatch ceremony. Within the structuralist framework which the former advanced, the notion of “the gift” seems as its own lunacy. Yet, this appearance is precisely what indicts economic reason as a species of insanity. The insistence upon a kind of almost algebraic ontology blinds the economic mind from seeing beyond both a logic of mere account, and the fashion in which such a myopic focus leads to untenable contradictions.

It was among the most salient aspects of Marx’s genius that he perceived and articulated some of the chief mechanisms whereby this madness operated through the mode of production and – one is tempted to add in light of Harvey’s explication of that account – realization we now know as capitalism. One is drawn to include both production and realization because, as the book makes evident, the tension between those two spheres is amongst the most crucial loci of contradiction for the system at large. For, without realization, the great promises of production end in mere desolation. That is to say, until the commodities are exchanged for the talismanic money commodity, they do not merely lack value. They act as an expression of anti-value which demands redemption lest the whole machinery of capitalism fall in upon itself. Among the merits of Harvey’s book here is its use of the interchange between production and realization to excavate the notion of anti-value from its suppressed condition within the broader conversation.

Having undertaken that excavation, the text then turns to deploy the notion of anti-value to clarify the import of various other phenomena. Perhaps the chief of these is the unique operation of credit within capitalism to facilitate the constancy of motion for capital itself. It is an operation, though, which contains a crucial contradiction at its core. For whereas credit enables the immediate realization of commodities that otherwise would remain fallow, and hence anti-valuative; it does so through the creation of debt, which acts as another, and in a way yet more hazardous expression of anti-value. That hazard is only compounded by the action of interest.

Discussion of interest plays a prominent role in Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, and it arises out of the convergence of a few currents. Distinct from its relation to anti-value, but related is the dissection of the connection betwixt price and value. For, as Marx keenly noted, though price aims to be an expression of value, it is necessarily a variable expression. From a functional vantage, that necessity derives from the need to accommodate the fluctuation of value. From what might be termed an ontological vantage, the necessity arises from the nature of signification itself: expression and expressed are inevitably at an existential distance from each other. Within the space of that distance, the possibility of distortion arises, the possibility, if you like, of a kind of bad faith.

Now, the quintessential market expression of such bad faith is a commodity with price but no value. Harvey discusses multiple categories of this mauvaise foi, such as fine art, historical artifacts of note, or, less perniciously, activities that underwrite the processes of production and circulation in an ancillary manner. However, arguably, it is interest – or the price of money – which is its premier incarnation. The practical ways in which this asserts itself are evident enough (debt peonage, speculative excess, and so on). Yet that these phenomena are themselves but the logical outcome of the underlying dialectic of value and anti-value rather than merely aberrations can seem less obvious. What Harvey’s explains so adeptly is the way in which money encloses a paradox. As a mere expression of value, it is always at a distance from value, or, more concretely, congealed necessary social labour time. The severing of money from a metallic base makes this especially conspicuous. However, in becoming attached to a price – interest – the contradiction is sharpened yet further. The term of interest constitutes a demand upon future labor time before present labor time yet realized. The upshot is the creation of the momentum that consummates in crisis.

And the analysis which flows from this, and other aspects of the paradigm which Marx initiates, brings a light to the vagueries of the 2007/8 crisis as well as much which has happened in the decade since. As the book comes towards its close, Harvey provides a lucid application of that paradigm to exactly those happenings. Against that relief also Harvey’s exhortations to revisit Marx take on a special urgency. For the basic framework which Marx assembled powerfully dispels the opacity which attend the economic domain. In so doing it potentially empowers us to move beyond the circuits into which we’ve been driven for centuries now, and which presently are translating to nigh catastrophic pressures on our world, both without and within. The demand of constant surplus value production driven by the bad infinities of money and interest is irreconcilable with the bound conditions of materiality. Moreover, it compels a relationship with ourselves and with each other estranged from what is most authentically human. That is, it leaves us profoundly alienated.

Harvey, though, true to his dialectical sensibility, is quick to remind us that that alienation is not altogether to be lamented. For it may well prove germinal to emancipatory possibilities beyond the horizons of received narrative. It may well evidence a discontent which can lead us out of the madness of economic reason to a more embracing vision of the real tasks of life, a vision which discloses the radical possibilities of generosity.

Thomas Lynn is a thinker currently situated in Cincinnati. Among his preoccupations are the ways in which phenomenology can inform questions in current philosophy of mind, the relations between the analytic and Continental traditions in philosophy, and off the beat thinkers such as Jacques Ellus, Paul Feyerabend, or Michael Polanyi. He is also the host of Thinking Thomas, a channel dedicated to critical theory and an interview series with authors in theory and philosophy.

Imagine Hardcover – September 21, 2017 by John Lennon (Author), Jean Jullien (Illustrator) (Clarion Books)

Jullien introduces a new generation to Lennon's anthem for peace. Accompanied by text from "Imagine," vibrant images depict an intrepid pigeon flying about the city and delivering olive branches to encourage harmony. Large, flat, and thick-lined, the naive-style illustrations convey the enduring message of the song in a format that will resonate with a young audience. For example, a pair of seagulls squabbling over a fish ("Nothing to kill or die for,/and no religion too") begin smiling after the pigeon gives them a branch ("Imagine all the people/living life in peace"): a simple—and adorable—way to demonstrate the power to overcome discord. Later, the pigeon snoozes in a tree ("You may say I'm a dreamer") as other birds, touched by the pigeon's actions, fly by carrying branches of their own ("but I'm not the only one"). A colorful spread of the pigeon draping his wings around other birds emphasizes the overall message: "I hope someday you'll join us/and the world will live as one." VERDICT Adults will enjoy this creative take on a beloved song, and the book can easily blend with lessons about cooperation and sharing—and even age-appropriate lessons on global conflicts

Vile Bodies Paperback by Evelyn Waugh (Back Bay Books)

In the years following the First World War a new generation emerged, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of 1920s London, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercised their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade. In these pages a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfillment of their desires. Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny satire reveals the darkness and vulnerability beneath the sparkling surface of the high life.

Though I rarely review books by classic authors who have no need of my support (or lack of) to make their reputations, I sometimes bend my rule for books that might be lesser known in an author's oeuvre. So, admittedly as a fan of Waugh, I'm going to take the time to write a few lines about Vile Bodies.

This is not one of my favorite Waugh novels. There is no plot to speak of. This book is really just a sequence of scenes that are meant to poke fun at the rich & foolish of post-WWI England; mainly, the "Bright Young Things". Though I'm sure this book was quite a riot in its day, I feel that it has aged less well than much of Waugh's work. This is also reflected in the use of what would be considered very un-PC language today. (Though, admittedly, the use of un-PC language doesn't really bother me personally.)

That being said, there's no denying that Waugh is a very funny writer and that there are plenty of laughs still to be had here. Waugh's dialogue in this novel really pops with energy. There are set pieces that can still speak to us--the couple whose state of engagement changes on an hourly basis, the writer who makes up his articles wholesale, the religious proselytizers who don't practice what they preach. In fact, there are a whole slew of ridiculous characters here which each have a moment or two in the sun.

Whatever its deficiencies, there's a reason some writers have their books still read over 80 years after they are first published: the worst book of a great author is better than most of the books out there. And I wouldn't say this is Waugh's worst. It's definitely worth a read.

Animal Farm (Signet Classics) by George Orwell (Signet)

Animal Farm by George Orwell was first published in 1945 and will be celebrating its seventieth birthday next year. It is still a keen area of debate whether it remains relevant for readers of this generation - I certainly believe it is, and the fact that it is still studied as part of the United Kingdom’s English Literature curriculum would add further credence to this opinion. I re-read the novella last night and found its themes and messages just as powerful, moving and relevant as they must have been seven decades ago.

George Orwell was – and still is - one of Great Britain’s most famous writers and it was Animal Farm, and the dystopian nightmare Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) which first brought him worldwide respect. Animal Farm is set in a farmyard where the animals decide to seize the farmer's land and create a co-operative that reaps the benefits of their combined labours. However, some animals see a bigger share of the rewards than others, and the animals start to question their supposed utopia. Little by little, the rules begin to mysteriously change, and the pigs seem to gain power little by little, making the animals question what society they were striving for in the first place and whether their new-found freedom is as liberating as they might have hoped.

Animal Farm is one of the greatest socio-political works of all time but there is no need for the reader to pick-up on - or understand - any of the allusions to Lenin, Marx, Trotsky or Stalin as the story can be enjoyed as the simple, moving and enlightening parable it essentially is, a story that clearly shows humankind at its best and very worst. For me, it highlights the demons within every human – jealousy, greed, laziness and cruelty born of fear.

The parable successfully shows how the dream that communism in theory could be so easily turns into the nightmare that totalitarianism again and again has proven to be. I have always found anthropomorphism within the animal kingdom to provide an excellent framework within on which to build very serious themes – William Horwood’s Duncton Wood deals with religious intolerance, Watership Down deals with the never-ending struggle between tyranny and freedom. And for some reason, a loyal horse betrayed can become one of the most tragic and sympathetic figures in literature.

Jerusalem: The Biography Paperback – September 18, 2012 by Simon Sebag Montefiore (W & N, Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Reading Jerusalem is a compelling experience of a very peculiar place. It's a city that has never made anything but history. Jerusalem is not an entrepot, a manufactory, a place of finance or a crossroads. It is a place apart, a Holy City among broken arid hills on the edge of a desert, where for three thousand years pilgrims have come to repent, to pray, to celebrate, to wait for the second coming, to attempt to question God, and to die.

Simon Sebag Montefiore's history of Jerusalem is a labour of love and scholarship. It is a considerable achievement to have created a sense of pace and variety throughout his 3,000-year narrative. He has a wonderful ear for the absurdities and the adventurers of the past. Beside the humourless high achievers, such as Herbert Samuel and General Allenby, we also get to see Jerusalem through the eyes of professional party animals like Wasif Jawhariiyeh, Amal al-Atrash (a double-agent Druze Princess) and Monty Parker, a totally amoral treasure-seeking English aristocrat, as well as such passionate English interlopers as Orde Wingate, "the Lawrence of Judaea", and the dashing Sir Sidney Smith.

Immersing myself in this chronicle was a totally gripping but an ultimately depressing experience. If this is the point on earth at which God's influence is most manifest, we are indeed nothing but the Devil's spawn and nothing good will ever come of us. Extortion, riot, incest, schism, civil strife, torture and assassination stalk the alleys, cellars and towers of Holy Jerusalem, and that's in the good times. The fat years of peace allowed parasitic dynasties of priests, custodians, hoteliers, shop-keepers and pimps to milk pilgrims, visitors and distant believers. The flow of sacrifices, fees, tithes and charity unite all the different generations of Jerusalemites, be they Jewish, Muslim or Christian.

It was in these good times that the fabric of Jerusalem was embellished by half a dozen of the world's totemic buildings, erected by such fascinating characters as Herod the Great, the Empress Helena, Caliph Abd al-Malik, Queen Melisende and Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. The Temple Mount, the Holy Sepulchure, the Dome of the Rock and the city walls still dazzle the imagination with their unique combination of mystery, elegance and magnificence. We are in the midst of another boom period of construction at the moment, as the modern state of Israel invests a fortune in tarmac, poured concrete and limestone veneer. As well as creating new monuments, old ones have been lovingly restored, while the old city is surrounded with a fortress-like grid of suburban settlements.

What Sebag Montefiore's history also makes clear is that possession of Jerusalem has time and time again been a poisoned chalice, a piece of imperial hubris that brings the fates (and regional jealousies) down upon the state that possesses it. It has always been an extravagance to feed and guard the Holy City, perched amid dry hills and filled with a populace addicted to prayer and charity. For King Abdullah of Jordan, the British, Herod, Heraclius, Babylon, Saladin, the Sassanids and Assyria, Jerusalem was the irresistible jewel in the crown that also marked out the high noon of all their empires.

The transition of Jerusalem from one imperial power to another was not always violent. The British took over from the Ottomans just as Caliph Omar took the surrender of Christian Jerusalem from the hands of the Patriarch - without a drop of blood spilt. Yet it is the sieges and sacks of Jerusalem that keep the story-telling historian in business. The destruction of the Assyrians and Babylonians, and the ultimate flattening of Jewish Jerusalem by the Roman legions (under both Titus and Hadrian), were apocalyptic in their fury. Christian knights of the First Crusade, and a succession of medieval Mongol and Tartar cavalry raids, achieved almost equal levels of horror and destruction.

Another theme revealed is the vital role of the superpower ally. Herod the Great was totally dependent on his subservient alliance (and personal friendship) with the Roman political leadership, just as the Crusader states were on the Frankish Kingdoms. Throughout the Muslim period, it was the wealth of Egypt that underwrote Islamic Jerusalem.

Modern Israel follows these historical examples. Zionism (formed and empowered out of the suffering of countless millions of Jews in the Russian Empire) piggy-backed its way into the Holy Land through the agency of the British Empire before adopting the US as its sole parent after 1956. Part of the political genius of the Zionist leadership was that it created an incomparably effective, good-cop, bad-cop strategy to its public diplomacy. Elegant men of letters and science, a Theodor Herzl or Chaim Weizmann or Sir Moses Montefiore, held sway in the drawing-rooms and conferences, while the people with real power, like Ben Gurion and Menachim Begin, quietly exercised other skills – with guns, bombs, assassination and fear.

I disagreed often with Sebag Montefiore's emphasis, and with what he chose not to tell, but that is the privilege of the writer. However, a number of issues need addressing if his Jerusalem really aspires to be "the" biography, not just "a" biography. Without bewildering his readership with too much pre-history, the Canaanite period (becoming ever more emphatic and extensive from recent digs) deserved a chapter of its own, and an imaginative exploration of its culture. As it is, this foundation level of Middle Eastern history is misleadingly entitled "The World of David" as if it were no more than a prologue to the interesting bit, which is when the Jews first make their appearance on the stage.

Surely it is a vital task for any historian to stress that the Jews - as testified by their own sacred history - also first came to this city as alien conquerors. No creed is indigenous to Jerusalem; we are all guests, even if some have much, much greater claims than others.

Although David and Solomon are eternal fixtures of belief, example and inspiration, they are very far from being established as historical characters – with not a single archaeological pebble of evidence yet found in their favour. So to publish a map showing the extent of their vast and possibly imaginary kingdoms is completely inappropriate.

Nor did I care for the casual dismissal of Edwin Montagu as a "tormented Jew". Montagu was a Cabinet minister with considerable experience of government who feared that a Zionist state would make every Jew in Europe an outsider and a potential fifth columnist, and intensify existing anti-Semitism to murderous levels. He may not have been right, but his fears that Zionism might inadvertently reap rivers of blood must not be kicked under the historical carpet so lightly.

Does anyone write history without an underlying passion and motivation? Sebag Montefiore's own family occupies a distinguished place (alongside the Rothschilds) as one of the aristocratic British Jewish dynasties whose patronage in the 19th century established the first foundations of modern Israel. His own experience, as an emotionally involved historian, helps him sympathise with the chroniclers of the past, be they Josephus, William of Tyre or Usamah bin Munqidh. And that's were I would put this book, right beside Josephus's Jewish Wars: vivid, compelling, engaged, engrossing, knowledgeable – but partial

Jerusalem: The Biography Paperback by Simon Sebag Montefiore ( W & N, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,)

"Jerusalem is the holy city," writes Simon Sebag Montefiore, "yet it has always been a den of superstition, charlatanism and bigotry . . . the cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone." Jew, Christian and Muslim alike feel compelled to rewrite its history to sustain their own myths. "A hundred patients a year," Montefiore notes, "are committed to the city's asylum suffering from the Jerusalem syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion." The 3,000-year conflict provides a terrible story, which he tells surpassingly well, and although not his purpose, one that is likely to confirm atheist prejudices.

Montefiore takes the history of the old city from its beginnings as a fortified village through every conquest or occupation – Canaanite, Israelite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, Seleucid, Roman, Byzantine, Ummayad, Abassid, Fatimid, Seljuk, Crusader, Saracen, Tatar, Mamluk, Ottoman, British, Jordanian and finally Israeli. Rival places of worship were destroyed and new ones constructed with the stones of earlier buildings, thus making Jerusalem the most complicated archaeological site in the world. Populations were slaughtered or sold into slavery, then later replaced by new waves of immigration. Montefiore's book, packed with fascinating and often grisly detail, is a gripping account of war, betrayal, looting, rape, massacre, sadistic torture, fanaticism, feuds, persecution, corruption, hypocrisy and spirituality.

Before going back to the earliest times and King David, Montefiore begins with the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in AD70 by Titus. Jerusalem was packed with refugees and pilgrims for Passover. After his victory, 500 Jews a day were crucified until the Romans ran out of wood. Some survivors were sold into slavery; many others were held back to die in the circus, fighting each other or wild animals.

Titus's destruction of Jerusalem did not start the diaspora – there were large Jewish communities already in Babylon, Parthia, Egypt and Cyprus – but it certainly focused yearning on the lost city and the destroyed Temple. And not all Jews were banished. Sixty years after Titus, Emperor Hadrian faced another, far better-led Jewish revolt. In fact the Jewish population was to rise and fall over the following centuries, depending on the whims of the conquerors and on outside events, such as the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century.

With the decision of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century to impose Christianity on both the eastern and western empires, Judaism faced a new challenge. Empress Helena remodelled the ruins of Jerusalem with churches, including that of the Holy Sepulchre. The city became a centre of Christian pilgrimage. No one could have predicted that Constantine's nephew, Julian the Apostate, would reverse the process. To the astonished joy of the Jews, he set out to rebuild the Temple. But on his death the new emperor, Theodosius, raised Christianity again and banned the Jews from Jerusalem.

In the seventh century, Islam, the third monotheistic religion, was also drawn to Jerusalem. Muhammad, who revered the Bible and saw Moses and Jesus as prophets, believed, like Jews and Christians, that Jerusalem would be the site of the Last Judgment, or "the Hour". The Christians surrendered Jerusalem without a fight, and the Jews especially welcomed the tolerance of their new masters. All admired the celestial beauty of the Dome of the Rock soon dominating the city skyline. Yet for the Jews, its position on the Temple Mount meant that they could not rebuild the Temple of Solomon.

The easygoing Umayyad dynasty was replaced in a massacre by the austere Abassids, who lost interest in Jerusalem just at the time when Christian Europe, led by Charlemagne, looked towards the holy city. It was not, however, until the end of the 11th century, following the persecutions of Caliph Hakim and the massacre of pilgrims, that Christian kings began to think of reconquering Jerusalem. Their timing was fortunate, for the caliphate had been battered by the Seljuk Turkmen and fragmented. In 1099, the first Crusader army took Jerusalem with appalling slaughter. Their knights "rode in blood up to their bridles", recounted an enthusiastic chronicler. The city stank for six months afterwards.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem, with fluctuating fortunes, lasted until Guy de Lusignan, the husband of Queen Sibylla, marched out in 1187 towards Galilee led by the True Cross to fight the great Saladin. Thirst and Armenian archers did for his mighty cavalry. Jerusalem soon fell, and those of its population who could not afford a ransom were sold into slavery or the harem. Other crusades followed. In 1228, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen reached the Holy Land and exploited the divisions among Saladin's descendants. After secret negotiations with the Sultan Kamil, he occupied Jerusalem, but gave the Muslims complete rights over the Temple Mount. His tolerance, enforced by the leader of the Teutonic Knights, Hermann von Salza, was a rare event in Jerusalem's history. (Bizarrely, Heinrich Himmler later named Waffen-SS formations after both Hohenstaufen and Salza.) But in 1244, Christian Jerusalem fell for the last time until General Allenby's army defeated the Ottoman Turks in 1917.

By the time of the first world war, both Jewish and Arab nationalism had begun to develop. The Jews suffered from rising antisemitism in Russia and western Europe, while the Arabs grew restive under the yoke of the Ottoman empire. The necessities of war in the Middle East encouraged the British to make promises to the Arabs that they had little intention of keeping, while philo-semitism in Lloyd George's cabinet led to the Balfour Declaration, raising Zionist aspirations. Even before their betrayal by the British at the Versailles conference, the Arabs had become alarmed at the scale of Jewish immigration. Tel Aviv had been founded on the coast in 1909, and two years later came the first kibbutz. Zionists persuaded themselves that Palestinian Arab and Jew could live happily alongside each other. But the secular and socialist idealists of the first waves of immigrants were very different from the hardliners who came later.

Lloyd George decided to carve up the Middle East, taking Palestine for Britain while giving Syria to France. The British, especially the urbane governor Sir Ronald Storrs, believed that they could persuade Zionists and Arabs to live together. But in 1920 riots broke out in Jerusalem when 60,000 Arabs protested against the Balfour Declaration. Shooting broke out when a secretly raised Jewish defence force tried to protect the Jewish quarter. A cycle of mutual fear and violence was bound to develop. Arabs stoned Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. And by 1936, three years after Hitler's rise to power, there were 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem, with only 60,000 Christians and Muslim Arabs.

In 1936, British police cornered and shot down a cell of armed fundamentalist Arabs in the Judaean hills. The Arab revolt began. The grand mufti of Jerusalem backed it, splitting the Arab community, and fled abroad where he later sought support from Hitler. Jewish paramilitary groups fought back. Neville Chamberlain reversed the Balfour Declaration as the British struggled to control Palestine.

With opportunities for a settlement missed, largely through an Arab rejection of a separate Jewish state, the situation became impossible. Zionist paramilitaries fought a vicious guerrilla campaign against British troops, and at the end of the war an unstoppable flood of Jewish refugees arrived from European camps. Clement Attlee found that turning to the United States provided little comfort. American Baptists and Evangelicals were strongly pro-Zionist, to say nothing of the increasingly vocal Jewish community. President Truman insisted that another 100,000 Jews should immediately be granted entry. Britain gave up the mandate in despair, and the first Arab-Israeli war immediately ensued.

Montefiore's narrative is remarkably objective when considering his own family's close links with Jewish Jerusalem. One might quibble with certain details, but overall it is a reliable and compelling account, with many interesting points.

Britain's biblical enthusiasm in the 19th century was soon far surpassed in the US. Since then, messianic Christianity has intensified. American fundamentalist Christians, excited since 1967 that Jerusalem was again Jewish, believe that the "second coming" is now imminent. Some have even been trying to breed an unblemished red heifer for sacrifice according to the prophecy. Now that the peace process appears to have finally collapsed, Montefiore's book indicates that the Jerusalem syndrome of the comparatively few may well affect us all.

Crime and Global Justice: The Dynamics of International Punishment. Daniele Archibugi and Alice Pease. Polity Press. 2018.

In the absence of truly cosmopolitan jurisdiction, international criminal justice has remained in the shackles of powerful political interests, even though law by its nature should strive towards categorical impartiality. This is the central conundrum addressed by Daniele Archibugi and Alice Pease in Crime and Global Justice: The Dynamics of International Punishment. Archibugi is a Research Director at the Italian National Research Council (INRC) and a Professor of Innovation, Governance and Public Policy at Birkbeck College; and Pease, a freelance researcher and a graduate of University of Edinburgh and University of Bologna. The former has an impressive back catalogue in the field of International Relations, while for Pease, Crime and Global Justice is a formidable debut.

The subtitle of the volume incorporates a zinger. All too often international justice comes across as the powerful punishing the weak by ‘turning [their] enemies into criminals’ (19) under the veil of legalism. An oft-heard critique of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is that nine out of ten of its investigations have focused on Africa, while the global heavy hitters are shielded from its jurisdiction. One only has to think of the Hague Invasion Act passed by the US Congress in 2002 to see the discrepancies here. If true impartiality remains unachieved, why would it not be more meaningful to talk about international punishment rather than international justice? In Crime and Global Justice, Archibugi and Pease dissect the politics of globalising law and show how political forces continue to influence judicial discretion and prevent prosecution altogether.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first section, Archibugi and Pease go through the history and evolution of international criminal justice. They lead the reader down a familiar road from the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) to the signing of the Rome Statute (1998) via the tribunals of Leipzig (1921), Nuremberg (1945-46) and Tokyo (1946-48). The authors examine the theoretical basis of universal jurisdiction and cosmopolitan criminal accountability, while acknowledging the real-life impact of international justice projects. The second part of the book centres on detailed analysis of well-known international criminal cases: the legal action against Augusto Pinochet; the trials of Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY); the spectacular show trial of Saddam Hussein by the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT); and the attempted prosecution of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir by the ICC. The authors describe the political dimensions of these cases in rich detail.

In exploring the case of Hussein especially, Archibugi and Pease demonstrate the perils of politically-driven justice outcomes. In 2006, the Bush administration pushed the IHT for a speedy resolution of Hussein’s case at the expense of a comprehensive inquiry into the crimes of the Ba’athist regime. This was done for the inevitable guilty verdict to be delivered prior to the US midterm elections that same year. The speed at which the IHT was assembled and the lack of cultural awareness in its make-up and conduct only served to escalate the sectarian tensions of Iraq. The result was a tragic farce to the highest degree.

In the case of the African rebellion against Omar al-Bashir’s indictment, the authors show how the biases of the ICC will inevitably erode the moral credibility required for upholding international (or indeed national) jurisdiction. The 2009 indictment of al-Bashir for war crimes in Darfur, and again for the crime of genocide the following year, sparked fierce criticism from the African Union and a wave of non-compliance to enforce the arrest warrant among African ICC members. The case shows that if the ICC is not able to prosecute high-profile cases outside the African continent, it risks appearing as yet another instrument of neo-colonialism.

Archibugi and Pease finish by proposing solutions for the current design flaws of international criminal justice. Their solutions vary from increasing the authority of the ICC through universal jurisdiction, to propping up the role of civil society engagement in international justice projects. The authors frame ‘justice from below’ in the shape of citizen initiatives and opinion tribunals as a way to pursue justice outside of the courtroom. The authors use the Russell Tribunal—in which a group of left-wing public intellectuals held a symbolic trial for American war crimes in Vietnam—as an apposite example of the latter. The Russell Tribunal bit deeply into the performative function of law by mimicking due process and ridiculed the international community for inaction over blatant human rights abuses. At the time, this symbolic trial drew much-needed attention to the US conduct of war in Vietnam and it has since been replicated in other contexts.

Crime and Global Justice is both well-written and thorough. Archibugi and Pease do a great job in conceptualising the often-confounding territory between international legalism and realpolitik—or the ‘hidden political complexities of international criminal justice’, as they themselves put it. The book is clearly laid out and includes multiple list-like elements, making it suitable for use as a textbook. The authors do not steer away from making normative statements and, at points, Crime and Global Justice reads almost like a government white paper. While the authors reveal themselves as advocates of liberal internationalism, they do not spare its central practices from piercing criticism. The result is a balanced and accessible exploration of theoretically complex subject matter: international justice; its history and future trajectories; its central concepts and debates. Crime and Global Justice is particularly well suited for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, or any reader venturing into the world of international justice for the first time.