WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Wasters
SETH SANDRONSKY appreciates a fresh take on a 100-year-old novel that helps to contextualise the current moment of conspicuous wealth, waste and climate chaos
BLING: Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, with gold-infused glass
[Roy Luck/CC] 
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
A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby
John Marsh, Monthly Review Press, £16.99
AS month two of the Trump 2.0 era careens forward, reading author and English professor John Marsh’s book is a wake-up call to systemic themes and trends as he unpacks culture and the economy over a century through the lens of Fitzgerald’s novel.
He revisits an influential work of fiction to examine an enduring “popular fascination with the rich – their houses, their clothes, their manners.” At the base of these cultural features is an economic system of, by and for the accumulation of capital held together by competition and class.
More from this author
SETH SANDRONSKY savours a personal account of the life and thought of the great Italian revolutionary
SETH SANDRONSKY welcomes the faith-based argument for a moral revolt against zionism but finds it insufficient
Similar stories
RON JACOBS welcomes a survey of US punk in the era of Reagan, and sees the necessity for some of the same today
SETH SANDRONSKY savours a personal account of the life and thought of the great Italian revolutionary
RON JACOBS relishes a riotous epistolary novel of revenge against sexual harassment and patriarchy
