GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Haud forrit!
HENRY BELL recommends a handbook for comrades to bear the pain of living in the gap between communist dreams and capitalist reality
DIMINISHING NUMBERS?
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
Burn Out: On the Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
Hannah Proctor
Verso, £14.99
BURNOUT is now ubiquitous as a term to describe the exhaustion of working too hard in a capitalist world. But, as Hannah Proctor notes in her new book, capitalism does not have the monopoly on this kind of nervous collapse. Burnout is two-sided: it is experienced by those struggling to defeat the system just as much as those struggling to succeed within it.
Proctor first encountered burnout in activist circles, where it was used to describe the physical and emotional exhaustion of those who take part in prolonged political organising, and the psychic distress of those who experience political defeat. These are the objects of this book which elegantly and forensically investigates the historic suffering of revolutionaries and the pain of living in the gap between communist dreams and capitalist reality.
Similar stories
BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
A recognition that individually we are powerless both politically and socially is essential, writes GORDON PARSONS