Books
John Carvill
It’s often said that nobody mythologised Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday. I’m not so sure.In this fine, clear-eyed biography, Paul Alexander documents Holiday’s propensity for feeding the media inaccuracies and tall tales, her enthusiastic embrace of “the adage that said the truth should never stand in the way of a good story.” But the media gave as good as they got, downplaying her artistic achievements and fixating on her problems with substance abuse and exploitative, violently toxic male partners.Many of the myths imposed upon her during her lifetime persist, particularly those that Read more ...
Jon Turney
For a couple of decades, the free video game America’s Army was a powerful recruitment aid for the US military. More than a shoot-em-up, players might find themselves dressing virtual wounds, struggling to co-ordinate tactics with their squad, and facing other supposedly realistic aspects of active service. The realism, of course, had one strict limit. If you died, you could reset the game and play again.The game is one of innumerable examples in Kelly Clancy’s book of how the invented reality of play worlds has an appeal which is functional for some, potentially catastrophic for others. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In some ways I’m an appropriate person to review Hugo Rifkind’s new novel Rabbits, a coming-of-age comedy set in the early Nineties. I’m about the same age as Rifkind, and was going through the agonies of school and university, drinking and girls at the same time as his protagonist Tommo. But safe to say I moved in different circles from this cast of characters, the upper crust of Scottish private schools and hereditary wealth, flying from party to party in a hedonistic whirl of smoking, strong drink, drugs, guns and kilts. My adolescence was very tame in comparison.But Rifkind is, to an Read more ...
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair is a writer, film-maker, and psychogeographer extraordinaire. He began his career in the poetic avant-garde of the Sixties and Seventies, alongisde the likes of Ed Dorn and J. H. Prynne, but his work resists easy categorisation at every turn. Reality shudders against and into its incarnation as fiction; documentary is riddled with the imagination’s brilliant glare; genre-bounds are ruinously questioned. Poetry, biography, film, essay: each form ghosts the next in restless disarray.He has written, for instance, a grotesque account of Thatcherism in Downriver (1991), walked within Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world – and makes from it a diverting and informative read. It is light and conversational in tone, covering topics that range from the clearly important to the niche, showing Elledge’s eye for an entertaining story and an ability to pick up political hot potatoes without burning his fingers.The 47 chapters are each about five pages long (none outstay their welcome) divided into three tranches: “Histories” (how the map of the world changed over time from the earliest Read more ...
Jon Turney
Our home planet orbits the medium-size star we call the Sun. There are unfathomably many more stars out there. We accepted that these are also suns a little while back, cosmically speaking, or a few hundred of our human years ago. Ever since, in imagination, we have supplied other stars with planets, and planets with life. Science, so far, has lagged behind fiction. That may be about to change.The known universe has grown almost unimaginably larger since the time of Galileo. That feels like it should increase the chance there is something else alive out there, somewhere. But how to really Read more ...
India Lewis
Artist and writer, Heather McCalden, has produced her first book-length work. The Observable Universe examines, variously, her familial history, the death of her parents to AIDS, and the subsequent loss of her maternal grandmother, Nivia, who raised her. It’s a fragmentary work, but the medium (half-memoir, half-essay) responds to the author’s own sense of disconnection and uncertainty, and at its heart is an aching feeling of loneliness and grief.Initially, the book seems to present the reader with the story of McCalden’s parents and her relation to them, but this is complicated by the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
According to REM in 1987, “It’s the end of the world as we know it”. And while they sang about topical preoccupations – hurricanes, wildfires and plane crashes – they were really just varying a theme that has been around since at least St John of Patmos in the 1st century CE, and probably before.How – and how soon – will the world end has been a perpetual question in works of popular culture, and Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go is a wide-ranging survey of them, which stands back enough to pick out themes and patterns that emerge from the big picture.It is not a light read, in both the Read more ...
India Lewis
Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, Caledonian Road, feels very much intended to be an epic, or at the very least has designs on being a seminal work, documenting the modern (European) human condition. Character and storyline-rich, dense, and morally weighty, it looks set up to be a "state of the nation" contemporary chronicle.Set roughly on the eponymous A5203, and elsewhere around London, the book’s main focus is the (quite clearly) doomed life of art critic and social parvenu, Campbell Flynn. As well as taking up the bulk of the narrative, he is the first character we encounter. It is a distinctly Read more ...
Jack Barron
"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to change, unimaginably, as the city was blitzed by the airburst of the first atomic bomb, nicknamed Little Boy. Shiota’s perfect weather was instantly and irrevocably translated into a brightness totally beyond the imaginative powers of the humans that brought it into being. It is a brightness that blinds, burns your clothes away, and flays the skin beneath – as Shiota discovered, when she stumbled across her brother. It illuminates your very Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
During the Cold War, US presidents often claimed that the West and the Soviet Union had never fought one another directly. This observation made sense geopolitically – the likelihood of mutually assured destruction made a nuclear conflict seem unthinkable – but it wasn’t strictly true.It was untrue because it overlooked the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20, which the British even more than the Americans had plenty of reasons to forget. “It was an uncomfortable business really,” recalled Christopher Bilney, who served as a seaplane pilot in the Caucasus. “A really nasty Read more ...
Jon Turney
Consider a chimp peeling a stick which it will poke into a termite nest. It strikes us as a human gesture. Our primate cousin is fashioning a tool. Just as important, the peeled stick implies a narrative. Chimp is hungry, will deploy this neat aid to catch termites that lie beyond normal reach, and eat them.The example comes from historian of technology David Nye, but makes a point that recurs throughout Tom Chatfield’s excellent book. Any technology is part of a story. That holds for the chimp, whose story is implicit. It remains true in the high-tech 21st century, when the commercial for Read more ...