WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
A uniquely incisive take on reality
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends a book that analyses current affairs in an accessible way that speaks to readers without fancy abstraction, just blunt common sense
IMPERIAL IDIOCY NEWEST BATTLEGROUND: Ukrainian soldiers fire a French-made Caesar self-propelled howitzer towards Russian positions near Avdiivka, Donetsk region, Ukraine, on Monday
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
Living the American Nightmare
Ron Jacobs
Hanian Media £8.50
IF YOU want to understand US imperialism in the here and now, you could do worse than to read the work of Ron Jacobs.
A serial contributor to Counterpunch, essayist and novelist, Jacobs is one of those veteran activist-journalists steeped in the defiant critiques of US counter-culture that equip him with a uniquely incisive take on reality.
The radical pen that he wields as a result, and the consistency of his observations about US foreign policy and its domestic reverberations in a deeply divided society, put him into a category of writers to whom we should all listen.
This collection of essays written from 2018–22, mostly culled from Counterpunch, offers a dyed-in-the-wool critique of Washington’s deadly imperial hypocrisy.
More from this author
GAVIN O’TOOLE explores the resistance expressed by central American artists to their own erasure by US imperialist policies
Here’s an antidote to the Venezuela election-induced tantrums of Western elites. GAVIN O’TOOLE reviews it
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds an analysis of culture that explains why political conflicts today are focused more on values and identity than the economy and social questions
GAVIN O’TOOLE observes that the call for a new international framework for conflict mediation is fatally marred by a partisan position on the Isreali-Gazan conflict
