Book Reviews

Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017 Every now and then, one comes across a book that is so out of touch with reality, it could only have been written by an academic. When the reality that the author is…

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Assembly. Oxford University Press, 2017.   Since the 1990s Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have coauthored several controversial volumes of note about contemporary politics and emancipation. This time they offer Assembly, a book that revisits many themes of their earlier publications. Despite this, the new volume also presents a significant…

Peggy Seeger, First Time Ever: A Memoir. Faber and Faber, 2017. Peggy Seeger has written an at times intimate biography charting her early years and her  marriage to British folk legend Ewan MacColl, which produced several talented children. The book’s title, First Time Ever, is drawn from a MacColl song which produced a huge hit…

Asad Haider. Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. London: Verso   Lenin famously said that “imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism”.  But then Lenin never saw Facebook. Social media invites its users to treat all previously intimate and private connections with other human beings as moments for profit-making; all our…

Review: Andrew Feenberg, Technosystem. The Social Life of Reason, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Our modernity is not just a question of values such as equality of individuals, of fair social organization, nor of speeches and communication. It is also a question of objects, systems and procedures and how they shape our gestures and behaviours:…

Malachi O’Doherty, Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life. Faber and Faber, 2017. Gerry Adams earlier this year stepped down as leader of Sinn Fein, formerly or residually the political wing of the Provisional IRA, which forged a peace deal that, however shakily, has held since 1997 in the six counties commonly known as Ulster (of which…

In the prologue to Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, Mary V. Dearborn recollects “ask[ing]…whether a woman could bring something to the subject that previous biographers had not” (7). Her question is, at least in part, a response to the looming presence of “the Hemingway legend” in the American imagination, an impression of the man as “the…

The Provisional IRA appear now like an almost incomprehensible manifestation from another time.  Their militaristic ideology hardly aligns with the current avatars of the Anglophone Left – not the pacific grandfatherliness of Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, much less the multicultural intersectionality of AOC or Ilhan Omar.  The Provos’ use of violence against civilians has…

Brett Anderson was the lead singer with the British pop Group Suede – a successful English group that worked the clubs for years, and finally emerged with all the gleaming trophies: magazine covers, exotic ladies, fashionista pals, backstage ennui, chart topping records, and drug addictions.  As Anderson notes, all bands have histories as predictable as the…

On the morning after Boris Johnson’s election as UK Prime Minister in December 2019, one television commentator predicted, correctly as it turned out, that there would now be a ‘battle of the narratives’ over the reasons for the Tories’ success. One narrative that has so far not figured in that battle is that of psychoanalysis.…