The Assault on Reason

Al Gore (2007)

Losing the presidency allows Gore to speak his mind much more freely on many issues, and this book provides an excellent example of this. His hostility to the Iraq war and of the fawning media coverage of Bush is coherent and visceral. His opposition to the torture brought in by the Bush administration is heartfelt, and well argued.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007)

Imperial Life in the Emerald City is a journalists account of living in the green zone in occupied Iraq and their effectiveness of lack of it in running the country. It is clear that Chandrasekaran has a great deal of time for the soldiers and ordinary workers and feels that many of them are trying to do a hard job in a difficult place. Nonetheless it is also clear that he is also sceptical about the motives and abilities of the army in general. His Indian ethnicity perhaps gives him a perspective that Caucasian journalists would not necessarily have to the same extent and he makes frequent forays to the red zone to see what the Iraqis have to say. Overall an interesting book, but it would have been more worthwhile if he had spent more time in Iraq proper rather than simply staying with the Americans.

Flat Earth News

Nick Davies (2008)
Davies challenges the notion that journalism is fair, reasoned, or well researched, arguing that journalism has been replaced by what he calls 'churnalism', journalists rehashing press releases without having sufficient time to properly research or fact check pieces. He makes constant references to public relations being dressed up as news and the consequent impact on discourse. He also makes clear that there is a reliance on what he calls the 'dark arts', that is to say illegal practices such as wire tapping to get out information.

He alos makes the controversial claim that the Chernobyl disaster is an example of 'flat earth news', saying that the number of people who died is merely in the dozens, and that anything higher is speculative and consequently untrue. This is where Davies and I part company. Having worked in a Nuclear power research centre and having a physics degree perhaps gives me a slight advantage in saying that I think that we need to be very cautious in dealing with nuclear power, and in particular making the balck and white claim that Chernobyl was not a disaster. Several people did die, and it is still unclear what the total death toll is, although a WHO report states the death toll is around 5,000. Davies cites this same report as proving the death toll is only 66, so we clearly differ in our interpretation of this document, and I would invite interested readers to look through it themselves.

Nonetheless despite this flaw, in the main this is an excellent book, with excellent chapters on deception by the media, about the dangers of becoming too close to power and of corruption.

The Sprit Level

Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett (2009)

Excellent, engaging, well researched and well argued, this book is crying out to be read and shared with more widely. Its basic thesis is that societies with greater economic equality tend to fare better in a number of different areas: mental health, trust, life expectancy, crime social wellbeing, obesity, teenage pregnancy. Countries with high inequality such as the US or Portugal tend to fare worse, and those with low inequality such as Japan and Norway tend to fare better. The authors suggest that low inequality is a social positive, and have formed a charity, the eqaulity trust to promote their message. Will their views be heeded?

Imperial Ambitions

Noam Chomsky (2008)

This ia another set of conversations between David Barsimian and Chomsky, and the informal chatty style of the conversations means the prose is much more easily digestable compared to Chomsky's normal style.

Fourteen days in May

BBC (1988)
Fourteen days in May is a stark and honest portrayal of the last fourteen days of the life of Edward Earl Johnson, a death row inmate.
I've heard a lot of words spoken about this documentary and how touching it is.
Whilst this is true, the initial impression is of clear and bland honesty about the reality of prison life.
The crew walk around the prison and endless sequences of doorways and corridors and the banality of everyday life is shown.
Nonetheless, the quiet simple humanity of Edward Earl Johnson shines through like a beacon.
All the prisoners, the guards and the film crew warm to him due to his likeable personality, his easygoing personality and his likeable nature.
It becomes increasingly clear also that he is an innocent man. It also becomes increasingly clear that his ongoing pleas for clemency will not be heeded.
Clive Stafford Smith ends the film with the immortal line:
"I have had the pleasure of spending the last three hours with Edward Earl Johnson.
I was asked by the family why he died, and my only response was: 'It's a sick world. It's a sick world'."
What is also clear is how all the characters in the story are human. The prison warder is doing his job, and is far from a bloodthirsty revenge filled state authority figure out for retribution against a murder, but rather a technocrat following orders.
If the film has a broader message it is that following orders is by far the most moral course of action.

Maus

Art Spiegelman (1991)
Maus is Spiegelman's description of his father's time in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, interspersed with commentary on the relationship between the father and son.
Touching, worthwhile and well written, it given some inkling of the savagery and brutality that occurrs in a situation when one group is labelled as subhuman.
The overwhelming brutality of the Holocaust is evident and yet simultaneously one is never wishing to stop reading. Moral ambiguity is touched upon more than once: is Spiegelman doing the right thing by profiting from the memory of the Shoah?
He also touches on the fact that those who perish cannot so easily have their story retold. The most notable part of this book is how clearly recognisably human all the characters seem: his father is not portrayed as a saint but a man put in an impossible situation, and a good man but with his own foibles: bad tempered, racism towards blacks.More quiestions are raised than answered, and my time spent in Rwanda has shown how hollow the notion of "never again" really has been.
One will hope that the brutality of the 21st century will be less severe than that of the 20th century, but the recent violence enacted by my own government in Iraq shows how fragile such a hope can be.

Footnotes in Gaza

Joe Sacco (2009)
An excellent, engaging, witty and heartfelt portrayal of the authors expeditions in Gaza in 2002 and 2003 in search of information about a specific series of killings that occurred one day in 1955.
It is a brilliant graphic novel, and the ease with which it is accessible allows the reader to understand more deeply some of the points being made about a region sometimes seen as impenetrable.He asks questions about how reality can be recorded, about conflicting narratives, and about the nature of enquiry whilst simultaneously making an accesible read.
His training as a journalist is evident, and his interviews and work draw upon similiar themes to that in Palestine.
Well recommended.

The Outsider

Albert Camus (1942)
Originally published in French as L'Etranger in 1942 this was seen as a work of existentialism, a label Camus himself avoided. Camus was born in Algeria, and had previously been on the youth team for Algeria as a goalkeeper. The book speaks of emotional disengagement and the protaganists failure to connect with what society regarded as normal behaviour. Other reviewers have mentioned how Camus draws out the sensations as being important: heat, light, colour, smell rather than emotion. This is indeed true as it has been regarded as one of the most influential works of fiction of the 20th Century.
The emotional disengagement felt by the protganaist does strike a chord with me, I have to say. Nonetheless, it doesn't resonate with me as much as it has done many other readers. Perhaps a second reading would explain why Camus later won the Nobel prize for literature.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/apr/12/books.comment