Book Review: The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart
By Justine Brian | 03 June 2017 ‘The Road to Somewhere’ is a sometimes brilliant, but ultimately frustrating and flawed, attempt to understand contemporary Western politics, as seen through the apparent realignment in British society in the wake of the shock Brexit vote in 2016. Relying on a wealth of surveys and polls, Goodhart argues we are seeing the creation, or perhaps clarification, of “two great subterranean value blocs of...
Book Review: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
by Martin Earnshaw | 02 April 2017 After the election of Donald Trump last year protesters chanted that he was “not my president”. Hyperbolic rhetoric is the prerogative of the protester but for years now it has seemed that the USA is not one but two countries. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind has been hugely influential in understanding this problem. Haidt sees the political differences between red states and blue states as...
“Style: In defence of Post-Modernism”
by Patrick Lynch | 20 February 2016 In this witty and robust defence, Adam Nathaniel Furman makes a case for thinking about postmodernism as a style and as a way life – or rather, as the expression of the diversity of ways of living that emerged in the 1960s in affluent western societies: Civil Rights, Gay Rights, etc. He convincingly elides these social phenomena with the various strands of architectural thinking that one finds...
The Great Mall of China
‘Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China’ . – by Nick Jewell — After three and a half decades of double-digit growth, China finally appears to be slowing. Even though the modest figures it now reports would be the envy of many Western economies, neo-liberal commentators are gleefully lining up to augur the death of the ‘Chinese Dream’. Predicting the future is a fool’s errand, but the economic slowdown may just...
Free Will: An Illusion?
By Joel Mills | 12 October 2015 Free will is an illusion. Quite a claim, and one that dominates much contemporary scientific thinking, and the pivotal driver for Julian Baggini to write his latest book Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will. Baggini is a much-respected ‘popular’ philosopher, marked out by an ability to offer a nuanced, insightful take on complex subjects. Here, through some compelling narratives, he grapples...
Context by Eric Parry
by Chloe Spiby Loh | 24 August 2015 The latest edition to the AD Primer series comes in the form of Eric Parry’s contemplation on ‘Context’; a gathering of his personal preoccupations on specific locations and projects from a lifetime teaching, travelling and practicing. Parry cites his interests as between art, architecture and anthropology and it is this mix, alongside his background in education that makes this book rich with...
White City Black City
Rozie Saunders | 20 May 2015 Sharon Rotbard’s “White City Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa” is much more than just an architectural history of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The author, an Israeli architect and writer born in Tel Aviv, explores its development, and its sister city Jaffa through the lens of someone who has lived there continuously for decades. A critical examination of the accepted history of...
ISIS: The mad residue of the war on terror
Tim Black | 04 May 2015 Patrick Cockburn’s study of ISIS indicts both Saudi Arabia and the West says Tim Black in a review we republish courtesy of the spiked Review of Books. It is April 2010 and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, an extremist Sunni rebel group-cum-terror-franchise responsible for assorted bombings and assaults over the previous half-decade, is at a low ebb. Its two top leaders, Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, have...
The Art of Memory
Jane Sandeman | 02 February 2015 Review of ‘Suspended Sentences’ by Patrick Modiano “A Marcel Proust of our time” was how the Nobel Academy described Patrick Modiano, the French novelist who received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, an award for conferring ‘the greatest benefit to mankind’. Given only a handful of his 25-odd novels have so far been translated into English, Modiano is not exactly well-known in the...
Book Review: The Writing on the Wall
by Martin Earnshaw | 7 June 2014 If you’ve ever wondered how much of your life you have wasted on Social Media, Facebook will tell you with its new app. Despite the widespread assertion that time spent on the internet is time wasted, enthusiasts of new technology stress its benefits. What both sides don’t realise, according to Tom Standage’s recent book, is that these debates have raged for longer than most people think. According to...
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