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Vexed by James Mumford review – provocative plea for political nuance [23 Feb 2020|07:00am]
An academic’s argument for policy that bridges the left-right divide exposes the shortcomings of political ‘package deals’

Brendon Kaluza-Graham was born in Spokane, Washington, to parents who were just 14 and 16. His life was split between his separated mother and father and both sets of grandparents, before he was killed, aged 25, by a single bullet to the back of the head. It was fired from a 9mm handgun, as he drove a car he had stolen away from the driveway where he had found it.

The man responsible was one Gail Gerlach. As this book puts it, Gerlach was “an avowed Reaganite conservative”, supporter of the right to bear arms and anti-abortion activist, who could not “fathom how a society that prohibits prostitution, class A drugs, even driving without a seatbelt, can tolerate the killing of an unborn child”. At his trial in 2014, Gerlach’s acquittal on charges of manslaughter sparked no end of controversy, but this alleged legal and moral travesty formed only part of the story. What Gerlach surely symbolised most of all was the fissures that run through the politics of the American right, and the fact that its “pro-life” convictions barely conceal outrageous contradictions.

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A Bite of the Apple by Lennie Goodings – essential literary memoir [23 Feb 2020|09:00am]
The Virago publisher is eloquent and inspiring on writing – but her memoir lacks grit and gossip

Lennie Goodings has had a long and highly respected career in publishing. She is chair of Virago Press, the pioneering publishing house that champions women’s writing. She’s been with Virago since the 1980s and A Bite of the Apple is an account of the company’s journey from punkish upstart to literary stalwart. It’s also – more juicily – about her experiences as an editor working with authors including Sarah Waters, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood and Sarah Dunant.

For the historical lead-in, Goodings maintains a careful, stately tone, like the voiceover in a prestigious BBC period drama about ladies: The House of Elliot, but for books. The story is one of artistry, ambition, activism and a fierce desire to marry the three. Putting women’s lives, women’s stories and women’s words back into history requires work. A Bite of the Apple is about the women who did this work from the 1970s onwards, a time of huge activism around race, class and sex, when “women wanted a voice, women wanted to understand their history, women wanted to see themselves on the page… women wanted their share”.

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Searching for Sylvie Lee by Jean Kwok review – accusations, twists and revelations [23 Feb 2020|09:30am]
Jean Kwok draws on her family history in a pacy, often elegant novel about a woman’s hunt for her missing sister

Jean Kwok – born in Hong Kong, raised in Brooklyn, based in the Netherlands – had a hit a decade ago with Girl in Translation, a novel inspired by her own immigrant experiences. For her new book, a bestseller in the US, she’s drawn on a further harrowing personal history: in 2009, her brother, Kwan, disappeared while piloting a plane and was never seen alive again.

Searching for Sylvie Lee imagines a hunt for a missing sibling. Sylvie and Amy are Chinese-American sisters – but Sylvie was raised by relatives in the Netherlands and goes back to visit her dying grandma. Then she vanishes.

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Thomas Piketty: Why France’s ‘rock star economist’ still wants to squeeze the rich [23 Feb 2020|10:05am]
Promoting his new book, the Frenchman is happy to talk Marx and money, but less forthcoming about a domestic violence claim that has resurfaced

Seven years ago a French economist named Thomas Piketty published a book entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It was 700 pages long and featured in-depth empirical analysis of various historical tax systems, amounting to a forensic argument against widening inequality. You wouldn’t say that it spelled international bestseller, and yet it has sold 2.5 million copies to date.

Hailed as a modern successor to Karl Marx’s monumental Capital, it rejuvenated radical leftwing critiques of capitalism and earned Piketty (it rhymes with spaghetti) the epithet of “rock star” economist. Seldom has a media cliche been more misleading.

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