I wonder if this book was too early: were we sufficiently out of the coronavirus pandemic to assess it and our healthcare systems’ abilities to deal with it? Perhaps. But this is a good look at the early days from the perspective of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest medical charities.
4/5. Finished Sunday 28 August, 2022.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
A troubling tale of disaffection between classes in Britain – it’s resolute in its class-based analysis, despite how out of fashion that is, and after reading this book it’s difficult to disagree. That makes it an uncomfortable read for any middle-class person, since it’s the middle class who takes the brunt of Garvey’s assignment of blame. By allowing the working class to be demonised, and by allowing the creation of a benefits and support environment at least as “hostile” as that facing immigrants, the stage has been set for a breach between people that allows everyone to be manipulated by those in power.
All this came about (in Garvey’s telling – and I have to agree to a large extent) because social mixing across class lines has collapsed, leaving groups in echo chambers that exclude views that might challenge their established beliefs. And indeed it’s hard to think of counter-examples, beyond perhaps sporting and music events (and even they are now segregated by ticket price).
There are some very uncomfortable ideas in this book, and for that reason it should be recommended for everyone in Britain wanting a challenging explanation of how we find ourselve in our current predicament.
4/5. Finished Wednesday 3 August, 2022.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
A comic-book character who not only has a back-story of her own, but also a fascinating creation story, altogether more interesting than those of the other DC and Marvel universe characters.
It’s an unsettling story, though. The creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marsten, is the somewhat discredited inventor of the lie detector who spent decades trying to persuade law enforcement authorities to take his rather bogus claims seriously. (That he eventually partially succeeded probably worth a book in itself.) He also had a position as an advisor to Hollywood during on of its periodic moral panics, and had an unusual home life involving a wife and a live-in lover pretending to be his children’s nanny (while actually being mother to some of them).
Despite all this, the women in his life seem to have exerted an enormous influence over his creation, who is far more independent and feminist than anything else in the genre at that time. While Marsten comes across as unbearably creepy to a modern (male) reader, he seems to have tapped into a style of characterisation that had to wait another half a century before becoming mainstream.
5/5. Finished Saturday 23 July, 2022.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
A counterfeiting tale for the 21st century.
This is the book of the podcast of the same name. It centres around a banker who decided to start a cryptocurrency, One Coin, that she pitched as being able to transform the finances of those feeling left behind. In actual fact she never actually built the currency at all, just the marketing and trading infrastructure around it that allowed people to feel that their investments had worth. In the process she became entangled with various mafias and ended up on the run – so successfully that one has to consider that she’s dead.
There’s a sub-text to this story that the book doesn’t really explore: what’s the difference between a valuable and a worthless currency? It seems simply to be a matter of belief, that a currency you acquire today will be exchangeable for roughly the same services now or in a month’s time. There’s nothing intrinsic about this, and so cryptocurrencies aren’t a flawed idea because they’re not backed by a central bank, or by gold, or whatever: they’re flawed because this belief can’t be sustained.
So why did people invest? A lot of the hype was targeted specifically at people who were already financially insecure, and believed that. by getting in on the ground floor of the new currency, they’d experience the same dizzying ride as those who first bought Bitcoin – or at least, those who got out at the right time. Buying in on the basis of being able to get out, in other words, so basically gambling – but with a very 21st century mix of “them” not wanting “you” to know about this. Inequality, conspiracy, and magical thinking are all needed to make these scams succeed.
5/5. Finished Monday 18 July, 2022.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
A biography of someone with a claim to having been one of the most influential British music producers of the 20th century. I say “claim”, because it’s not always clear how much is reputation is deserved beyond his pivotal role with the Sex Pistols – whose own influence on punk can be disputed.
McLaren seems to have seen himself more as a fashion entrepreneur than as a musician, and indeed seemed to regard everything he did as an outgrowth of fashion in a wider sense. He emerges as a troubled individual who inflicted similar troubles on those close to him: he didn’t seem to have taken his own background as a warning or as a negative example. And it’s hard to decide whether some of his antics derived from a vision of how society could be different, or simply from truculence and a desire for the limelight. Gorman doesn’t dig deeply into these issues, but does a balanced job of showing McLaren’s strengths and weaknesses.
4/5. Finished Sunday 3 July, 2022.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)