William Davies
Free: The Future of a Radical Price
By Chris Anderson (Random House, £18.99)
Chris Anderson is a professional exaggerator. His previous book, The Long Tail (2006), made the eminently plausible claim that online retailers can extract revenue from serving very niche tastes because they’re not limited by the finite shelf space of the high street. But he exaggerated this to the point of predicting the end of the blockbuster. In an article in 2008 for Wired magazine (of which he is editor-in-chief), he gave a fascinating analysis of how the vast data sets collected by Google could be used scientifically to identify behavioural correlations and patterns. But he couldn’t resist calling time on the very foundations of western thought, entitling the article “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.”
Anderson’s latest book has been in a state of public gestation for some time now. Like The Long Tail, it began as a Wired article in early 2008 and has been developing on a blog ever since. Anderson begins with the hunch that the internet is making it rapidly harder to sell things for a price, as demonstrated by free newspaper content, music and software. He also recognises that marketing has a long tradition of selling products well below cost price, by getting them cross-subsidised either by other products (such as razors that are given away in order to sell more razor blades), by other users (low cost airline tickets subsidised by business-class fares) or by advertising (carrying ads lowers newspaper cover prices).
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Richard Lapper
South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid
By RW Johnson (Allen Lane, £25)
After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa
By Alec Russell (Hutchinson, £18.99)
From afar, South Africa is often viewed through a fog of pessimism. After the heroic transition from apartheid under Nelson Mandela many see the country as bedevilled by rampant corruption, unreliable water and power supplies, an Aids emergency and shockingly violent crime.
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Nigel Warburton
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and the Secrets of Consumerism
By Geoffrey Miller (Heinemann, £20)
Why write a book about the evolutionary psychology of consumerism? As the success of John Naish’s Enough (subtitled “breaking free from the world of more”) proved in 2008, the modern publishing environment is hospitable to this particular species. But why write one? To change the world? To make money? No. Geoffrey Miller’s answer to this kind of question is simple: it’s all about showing off. Our evolutionary history has bequeathed us strong tendencies to display signals that indicate our desirability. Being an author, for example, advertises intelligence—something that in turn is supposed to correlate with brain size, physical and mental health, semen quality in men and, ultimately, sexual attractiveness.
And why would anyone buy Miller’s book? Showing off again. Consumerism, in his view, is not about buying things we need, but is almost always about display. We surround ourselves with symbolic indicators of health, wealth and virtue. Successful marketing plays along with this. According to Miller, this explains why some people buy Hummer H1 Alpha sports-utility vehicles for $139,771 even though they are both impractical and slow. The Hummer is the peacock’s tail of the human world—an unwieldy signal of resources and thus of sexual desirability.
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Naomi Alderman
Transition
By Iain Banks (Little, Brown £18.99)
Plenty of contemporary authors have written both realist fiction and science fiction. Anthony Burgess was a master of historical and present-day narrative, but his greatest work was A Clockwork Orange. Kingsley Amis, the great comic realist, wrote an alternate-universe novel, The Alteration. Then there’s Margaret Atwood, with her disturbing futuristic dystopias; although she famously denies that what she writes is sci-fi, saying that her books don’t contain, for example, “talking squids in space.”
Iain Banks, though, has divided up not only his repertoire but also himself— although neither version of Banks could exactly be said to be a pseudonym. There are the “Iain Banks” novels: books like The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Whit that are set in, for want of a better description “our” reality. The characters are often hyper-real, with rich fantasy lives, but they take place in roughly the present day, and there are no rockets, aliens or trips to other planets. Then there are the “Iain M Banks” novels—glorious explorations of a far-future civilisation, “The Culture,” which has developed beyond money and scarcity, converses happily with aliens and whose citizens can change gender on a whim and produce drugs at will from the glands in their heads. These books haven’t yet featured talking squids in space, but it’s probably just a matter of time.
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prospect
FICTION recommended by Julie Myerson
The Little Stranger
by Sarah Waters (Virago, £16.99)
The novel that has given me the most pleasure so far this year is, without question, Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger. Set in a huge, decaying country house just after the second world war, it appears to unfold as a ghost story but, like the very best tales of hauntings, its most chilling aspects are the human ones. Money, class, emotional and sexual repression—and people’s uneasy relationships with buildings and their histories—are its real themes, and Waters handles them with a restraint that feels alternately thrilling and sinister. But what I admire most is that, without resorting to annoying tricks, she makes the entire novel change shape and texture so convincingly as it progresses that you, the reader, start to question your own responses. As its grim conclusion began to dawn on me—at exactly the right moment—I felt entertained and terrified, but also somehow altered by what I’d read.
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Alistair Morgan
Someone, I don’t know who, is living with me in my house. The clues of this person’s existence are subtle—a sip of milk here, a slice of bread there—but nonetheless detectable. Such is my concern that I have taken to measuring and weighing some of the items in my fridge before I leave for the office in the mornings. In the evenings, when I return, I weigh and measure the same foods. The evidence is there in plain view: the mature cheddar cheese I keep in a Tupperware tub is considerably lighter; the half-loaf of wholewheat bread is now a quarter-loaf; the level of orange juice has dropped; there is one less apple in the bowl and, even more telling, the roll of toilet paper in the bathroom is noticeably slimmer. All the signs point to the presence of a ghostly parasite in my house.
I have lived a simple life. I never married and have, therefore, at the age of fifty-eight, never had to compromise my domestic realm for a husband, children or grandchildren. It is a neat, pet-free household and any irregularities are easily noticed. My house, which is in a quiet southern suburb of Cape Town, is modest, with two bedrooms (one, actually, as the second is a study-cum-sewing room), a lounge, a kitchen and a bathroom. There is also a small attic, although I haven’t been up there in years. The last person who went up through the trapdoor in the passage ceiling was an electrician I had called out to lower the thermostat on the geyser (my little contribution to power-saving).
Yes, I know what you’re thinking: if anyone is hiding in my house then the attic would be the logical place to start searching.
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Alexander Linklater
Doctoring the Mind: Why Psychiatric Treatments Fail
By Richard Bentall (Allen Lane, £25)
Uniquely difficult among medical disciplines, psychiatry has the task of conceptualising, studying and treating illnesses for which there may never be any objective physical evidence. There is no blood test, no brain scan, no genetic profile that a doctor can use to identify even acute schizophrenia, let alone any of the more minor conditions. The only diagnostic materials psychiatrists have at their disposal are a patient’s history, behaviour and language.
If psychiatric disorders are diseases at all, they are diseases of the mind rather than of the brain. This is what makes psychiatry so fascinating—and so confounding. For, in a profession with such a fragile diagnostic framework, there remains a very real possibility that its principal disease categories have been misconceived. No other orthodox medical discipline is so open to dispute at its very foundations. It’s hard to imagine a meaningful movement of anti-oncologists, say, who deny the very notion of cancer. “Anti-psychiatry,” however, is a serious minority activity.
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James Dodd
Fool’s Gold
By Gillian Tett (Little, Brown £18.99)
The Storm
By Vince Cable (Atlantic Books £14.99)
As the western world limps towards the end of the new century’s first decade, it’s worth pausing to consider three successive, self-inflicted blunders the last ten years have seen. The first was the dotcom crash of 2000-02. The second was the debacle of Iraq which—at enormous cost in lives, morals and money—bluntly proscribed the limits (and utility) of western military power. The third is the credit crunch of 2007-09, still unfolding before our eyes.
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Angus Donald
What is it about the legend of Robin Hood—or, more properly, the collection of legends surrounding him—that has given this character such an enduring appeal? On the surface, he is an unlikely hero: an outcast, a mugger, a murderer. Yet he is still as popular as ever, popping up in films and on television with astonishing regularity. When I was researching Outlaw, my first book in a series of novels about Robin Hood, I was looking for the hero of my boyhood: the quip-trading, do-gooding gentleman-archer, who stole from the rich only to give the loot to the poor. Instead, I discovered a bloodier, more mercenary man.
There is little indication of giving money to the poor in the original stories: our boy merely stops innocent travellers and demands money with menaces—albeit with a joke or two thrown in. And, despite his deep Christian faith, this Robin is quite prepared to kill, and even to condone the murder of noncombatants. In “Robin Hood and The Monk” (c1450), the earliest surviving poem centred on him, the outlawed Robin is spotted by a monk while praying at a church in Nottingham. The monk reports Robin to the sheriff, who captures our hero. Later, the monk is executed by Little John for informing, while Much the miller’s son casually kills a little boy who witnesses the act to stop him giving evidence. It’s difficult to imagine one of Errol Flynn’s merry men slaughtering a child.
The more I read of the early stories, the more I realised how large the gulf is between the modern perception of Robin and the way our ancestors saw him. Robin is primarily out for himself. He is, essentially, a thief. All the class-warfare, romantic-hero guff was bolted on by the Victorians. Then, one day, when I was watching The Godfather for the umpteenth time, a little light bulb flickered above my head. Don Corleone, I realised, was behaving exactly like a medieval feudal lord. And if 20th-century gangsters behaved like medieval lords then, I figured, I could make my medieval Robin behave like a gangster.
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Eric Kaufmann
God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (Allen Lane, £25)
“God is dead” proclaimed Nietzsche, without fanfare, more than a century ago. In the post-cold war era, Francis Fukuyama’s Nietzschean End of History described “last men” whose faith would fail when exposed to the cosmopolitan reality that their creed was merely one among many. Religion, it seemed, was being consigned to the past by serious western thinkers.
In 1993, however, the late Samuel Huntington poured cold water on Fukuyama’s argument. And since then, a host of others—Philip Jenkins, David Martin, Peter Berger, Rod Stark, Tim Shah and Monica Toft, to name but a few—have charted the global revival of religion and the retreat of the secular, something that has rapidly become one of the most pressing intellectual themes of our times. Now, in God is Back, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge—both leading lights at the Economist—have synthesised these arguments into a vivid and important volume.
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