Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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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
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
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
