Category: Book Reviews
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Apocalypse Now Then
Finished reading: In Plain Sight The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile by Dan Davies 📚
In a preview to the dramatised television series of his biography, author Dan Davies says:
There is not a day that passes where I don’t wonder why I chose Savile. Of all the people to become obsessed with, to follow and agonise over, why did it have to be him? It is a question that provides no answer. The only consolation I can find is that my instincts were right.
I wonder why I keep being drawn back to Savile, but I will trust my instincts.
The opening chapter of Davies’ book, “Apocalypse Now Then”, reads, deliberately so, as a litany: a nefarious late night excavation of Savile’s dead body; eulogies from the great and the good that followed his death; the absence of any knowing of the person who carried out the good deeds that earned the tributes from family, friends, and colleagues; the eventual and inevitable exposure of his lifetime of money-grabbing, psychopathic criminality; Savile’s ultimate immunity from it all.
Finished reading: The Son and Heir by Alexander Munninghoff 📚
Not a page turner by any means although it kept drawing me back in until the end. A true life story of very difficult family relationships centred on the author, his self-centred Nazi and all-round failure of a father, and his father’s father “the old boss”, who was a British spy, one of many strings to his bow.
Big kid brought home a June 1983 copy of National Geographic from the school library today (I said it needs an update!).
Some things never change.
At the heart of neoliberalism is the fantasy of escape: escape from taxation and regulation, escape from the European Union and international law, escape from social obligation, escape from democracy. Escape, eventually, to a starlit wonderland beyond politics and beyond people.
Currently reading: The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life) by George Monbiot 📚
Currently reading: Yesterday’s Man by Branko Marcetic 📚
He would indeed spend his Senate career showering Israel with unquestioning support, even when its behavior elicited bipartisan outrage. He helped to secure an unparalleled amount of US aid for Israel early on and to scuttle a 1998 peace proposal with Palestine, and he told an assembly of lobbyists that Americans “cannot afford to publicly criticize Israel.”
The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis in Ealing
There will be 14,800 new homes in 23 new developments in Southall over the next few years. 14 units over 10 stories high, and 7 over 20 stories high. Up to 40,000 new residents (and their cars)!
One third of the total new developments in the whole of Ealing borough (only Acton is getting it worse).
So not happening so much in the ‘white’ or richer areas of the borough, for some reason.
None of these homes will be genuinely affordable to most people currently living in overcrowded homes in Southall or Ealing, as Studio bedsit flats start at around £300,000!
Most will stay empty until they are sold to investors from China, Malaysia, Singapore, Bahrain(!) where they are actively marketed by the greedy property developers.
The same property developers who gave former Ealing Council ‘Leader’ Julian Bell and new Ealing Council ‘Leader’ Peter Mason (also a Southall Green ward councillor) over £30,000 in recent years to holiday in the south of France at the MIPIM property festival in Cannes described as a “booze ’n’ hookerfest” by Private Eye Magazine.
Bell says, “it didn’t cost the taxpayer a penny”, but in Southall we are already paying with our health and quality of life thanks to the poisonous air from the development of the contaminated old gasworks site (due to complete in 2038!).
Town planner Mason says it was a mistake, and not what he expected(!).
Where will 40,000 new residents’ children go to school (and how will they get there and back), how will they get an appointment to see a GP, which hospital will they go to when they need emergency treatment, and how will they get there on the roads already regularly gridlocked by too much traffic?
Worth taking the time to have a look at stopthetowers.info/other-cam…
Cllr Mason recommended we read Bob Colenutt’s ‘The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis’.
So I did.
What Colenutt says (and he has a wealth of experience in local authority housing and planning, and in the community resisting property developers), is that developers do have too much power (as Mason argues), but also that local councils and councillors do not do enough to resist, do not have the negotiating skills (contrary to how Mason originally described the importance of trips to MIPIM to ’negotiate hard’), and too readily embrace the ‘financialisation’ of the land and property market brought about by David Cameron’s and Nick Clegg’s ConDem government in 2010.
So now, we have a very real housing crisis fuelling the huge profits of private developers, all facilitated and egged on by mostly Labour councils too easily rolling over and allowing them to build fewer and fewer ‘genuinely affordable homes’ (because “where’s the profit in that?”).
What Colenutt says loudly and clearly is that without ordinary people’s and communities’ resistance it would be so much worse, and that to all intents and purposes councils and councillors are in bed with the developers.
Non-fiction: The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality behind the Housing Crisis by Bob Colenutt 📚
Finished reading: The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani 📚
The Blood Of Flowers is a magical carpet ride through seventeenth century Iran as seen through the eyes of a spirited and inquisitive Islamic girl who tells the story of her journey from adolescence to adulthood.
Like the threads of the rugs and carpets painstakingly woven by skilled craftsmen and women in the story, this is a tale within tales. The journey begins with a simple life in a small country village where survival is an everyday activity and roles and values are based on traditions handed down through the telling of oral histories. Only superstition and the vagaries of fate can change otherwise seemingly pre-ordained futures.
A passing comet in the sky spells a family crisis, however, and the inability of the village to accommodate changed circumstances requires a new direction and a voyage into the unknown. Arriving in the big city, mother and daughter seek refuge with a long-lost cousin and his family. Their life is transformed from the freedom of simple yet vulnerable existence to paradoxically privileged servitude to their wealthy relatives.
The story’s heroine now embarks on a new period in her life - one of exploration, discovery and awakening of all aspects of her self and environment. In overcoming all the obstacles and setbacks that mark her way, she learns to take responsibility for her life and stand up to those around her.
The author writes in a simple style, which at times seems a little formulaic. That said, it’s not a bad formula to follow and it works to keep the pages turning and the story building. Her style reminds me a little of a pragmatic Paulo Coelho - without the spiritual mysticism - or of sanitised David Mitchell - without the dark and violent fantasy.