Bradley K. Martin – Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea & the Kim Dynasty

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea, was established in its current form not long after WW2, when competing US/Soviet interests split the peninsula into two halves. Within the space of a few short years, a former anti-Japanese guerilla fighter who styled himself Kim Il-sung had risen to take control over the fledgling nation. American journalist Bradley K. Martin, armed with decades of experience reporting on East Asian affairs, as well as several trips into DPRK himself, explores how the country has become one of the most fascinating, cruel, tyrannical and stubborn regimes the world has ever known. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader (2004) hopes to pull back the screen from behind North Korea and to illuminate this vile, enigmatic regime. The popular narrative about North Korea is well established in the popular mindset by now: the brainwashed, uniformed masses, indoctrinated from birth to deify and revere their “Dear Leader” Kim Il-sung and his successor, son Kim Jong-il. Statues of the leader adorn squares across the nation’s capital, Pyongyang; children learn to repeat by rote his name and wisdom in school; Christmas is not celebrated but the Dear Leader’s birthday is a national holiday; citizens must wear a badge of the Dear Leader’s face on their clothing; and all media is state-provided, such that all films, all television, and all books are about the Dear Leader and his achievements in North Korea. Outside influences are strictly frowned upon. There is much truth to all of this, and what Martin also reveals in his illuminating book is what lies behind the bizarre facade: prison camps, gulags, forced labour, torture, disappearances and widespread state brutality. It is distinctly possible that the modern state of North Korea represents the most perfect and hermetic totalitarianism that the imagination of man has yet conceived.

Martin relies on many interviews with state defectors during his book, building up a picture of what life is like inside the deeply stratified society. Only the elite are permitted to live in Pyongyang, which is perhaps best thought of as a showcase for foreign eyes. Most of what little money North Korea has is poured into elaborate building projects in Pyongyang: the world’s tallest hotel, for example. Or another statue dedicated to Kim Jong-il and the “socialist paradise” he and his father have created. Or the five-lane highways (cars are notoriously expensive and scarce in DPRK) in which the middle lane is reserved especially for use of the Dear Leader. The old, the crippled and those from “bad” family backgrounds (read: those with anything less than perfect loyalty to the regime) live in the rural, remote parts of the country, where state-distributed food rations are often scarce and families often resort to living of berries and sometimes tree bark for survival. Any criticism of the regime is punished strictly – the prisoner herself and, until recently, her entire family would be carted off to some gulag in the mountains for anything up to ten years (Kim certainly seems to have picked up a thing or two from those early days with Stalin), and Martin recounts interviews with former prisoners who talk of near-stavation, of being forced to sit, straight-backed and fists held out, for over ten hours a day. While in recent years it seems that public executions have halted, and the families of political prisoners and defectors are no longer punished (ascertaining accurate information about the most secretive state in the world is never easy), the country remains both cruel and unusual. Meanwhile, of course, the Dear Leader lives in the most resplendent luxury: owns more than a dozen palaces, has concubines to spare (picked up from the street to audition – their parents merely informed that their daughter has gone to “serve the state”), and there is even an anecdote that each grain of rice eaten by Kim Il-sung was individually chosen and washed.

Of course, North Korea is now over fifty years old, and things have changed. Martin talks the reader through the economic, political and social evolution of the state; from its initial status as little more than Stalinist lap-dog, through its 1950-53 war with South Korea (Kim Il-sung invaded, although that was not the message given to DPRK citizens, who have always been taught that South Korea and its ally, the USA, represent an aggressive imperialist threat), the thorny nuclear issue (which in the 1990s seemed to halt promising talks with South Korea), and the stuttering “reforms” begun in recent years by Kim Jong-il, who was historically reluctant to follow the path of China and embrace market forces, having witnessed the collapse of Communism both in Russia and in Eastern Europe. It seems, in recent times, that private black markets have begun to organically emerge in some parts of the country; the last resort of a people with no alternative. It may be these black markets which save  the people of North Korea. Rice rations have been historically extremely unreliable; DPRK is a country rife with malnutrition and pellagra. Reunification with the South remains the great obsession of the Kim regime and its states ultimate goal, although, as Martin points out on more than one occasion, the South itself is currently less than keen on the idea; facing the prospect of absorbing a failed state with an emerging economy would not be in the best interests of South Korea at this point.

While Martin briefly touches upon some of the ideological and philosophical traditions that have helped form the modern DPRK, I would have liked to see more of this. North Korea cannot be understood without grasping the concept of juche, a specifically Korean form of nationalist self-reliance propounded by Kim Il-sung which has been largely responsible for the country’s isolationism and inward-looking nature. This idea of juche, combined with a feverish dedication to Communist ideals, and – as Martin suggests all too tantalisingly – combined with the Confucianism which permits dynastic succession, is the mindset which helps form North Korea. There are many hard-won details in this book which will inform and educate anyone who wishes to learn about DPRK; the role it has played, and continues to play in the world, as part of George W. Bush’s famous “axis of evil” (along with Iran and Iraq). It is a superb achievement, and will no doubt lead to further reading on my part on the subject of North Korea.

Azar Nafisi – Reading Lolita In Tehran

Azar Nafisi lives in America now. The decision to leave her native Iran full-time and emigrate to America was, understandably, a long and difficult decision for her, but one which ultimately I absolutely applaud. As a professor of Literature at Iranian universities, she lived through the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war and the strictures of Khomeini whilst her life revolved around art, thought and forbidden novels. Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is Nafisi’s account of the small, private classes she began teaching, with a small group of hand-picked students, at her home in Tehran. It is a story primarily about women, and the way in which women were treated under the vile theocracy of Iran and its dogmatic, misogynist ayatollahs. It is the veil, that most symbolic and histoically loaded of garments, which takes centre stage for substantial portions of the text, as Nafisi details her own resistance to the enforced wearing of hijab, which eventually led to her initial expulsion from her university post. She writes also about the “morality squads” of Iran, driving around the city in their van, making sure the women are “appropriately” dressed, with no hair visible, no make-up, and no touching of men who are not husbands, at risk of fines, imprisonment or worse. Such are the horrors of the Islamic caliphate in Iran for women; the logical conclusions of  the velayat-é-faghi.

And yet the book is not a mere (mere!) depiction of the awful treatment of women in Iran; it is also, finally, about the redemptive power of art and literature. As Nafisi and her all-female group of students gather in her flat, remove their veils and begin to learn to speak openly about themselves, their lives and their dreams, they read and study some of the great canonical works of Western literature: Nabokov, The Great Gatsby, Henry James and Saul Bellow; Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Reading these novels, they find ways of expressing and identifying what is happening in their own lives, both personally and politically: Nabokov’s great protagonist Humbert Humbert is read as a way of thinking about how the regime in Iran imposes an identity as “woman” on them, just as Humbert imposes a constructed identity upon his “nymphet”. The quiet subversion of Austen slots neatly into a discussion of the roles these women must play in their own relationships with men, whilst a reading of Fitzgerald forms the backbone of Nafisi’s recollections and thoughts on the ascendancy of the Islamic revolution and the attempt to recapture some kind of mystical past. Her students are a varied bunch; some extroverted, some introverted, some desperate to escape and others determined to change Iran for the better, or merely to reconcile their own faith with what they see around them; all of them struggling with the confines placed upon them. They are brought to life on the page with empathy and no small amount of grace in the straightforward (this is an eminently readable book) yet quietly poetic prose of Nafisi, whose only flaw is that of repetition over the course of the text.

For anyone interested in the roles and lives of women in Iran, or what life was (and is) like for the citizens under the theocracy; or for anyone who wished to be introduced to, or reminded of, the transformative power of literature and the necessity of that imaginative bridge between the personal and the political, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a thoughtful, unusual and, in its own personal and small way, a powerful work.

Robert Fisk – The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

Based for the last 30-odd years in Beirut, Robert Fisk is one of Britain’s most formidable and courageous journalists. In his articles for first The Times and then The Independent, he has witnessed and reported on the manifold tragedies of the Middle East throughout all its recent tumultuous past, and finally he has written what the Sunday Times calls his “testament”. This is not a book to be taken lightly: at approximately 1300 pages, it details unflinchingly the horrors perpetrated by occupying forces, religious fundamentalists, despots, mujahedin forces and others, in Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Turkey, Syria, ‘Palestine’ and more besides. The Great War For Civilisation (2006) is a mammoth achievement, and one which anyone with an interest in this most fascinating, beautiful, war-torn and cruel part of the world must read. It begins with two interviews Fisk has done with Osama bin Laden – one during his days road-building in the Sudan, and one in the caves of Afghanistan during the 1990s, the only country which would take bin Laden after he was kicked out of Khartoum. For the Afghans, of course, bin Laden represented the resistance to the Soviet invasion. He was their great freedom fighter who high-tailed there from Saudi Arabia as soon as the Soviets invaded. He tells Fisk, in a moment of great sinister portent, “I pray that one day God will allow us to turn America into a shadow of itself.”

From this opening moment, the Middle East’s wounds are pulled open and shown to us, with all the concomitant horror and shame that we – as Westerners – must bear. Fisk’s reporting on the cancer wards of Baghdad following the 1991 Gulf War will turn the stomach: children and teenagers groaning sick with cancer caught from depleted uranium munitions from Western forces. Or the shocking details of the monstrous, epic Iran-Iraq War, in which American-supplied chemicals were used to devastating effect against the Iranians – this in the days, of course, when Donald Rumsfeld was happy to shake hands with Saddam Hussein, the West seeing him as a “secular strongman” in the Middle East against Khomeini’s spreading Islamic Revolution. This, of course, before Iran-contra, selling arms to Iraq’s opponents and using the money to fund right-wing militiamen in Nicaragua. This is a book with a body count in the millions: Fisk’s chapter detailing the Armenian genocide and the Turkish government’s pusillanimous refusal to acknowledge it is devastating in its accounts of torture and horror (and topical: only last week Barack Obama refused to acknowledge the genocide by its proper name: after all, Turkey is an American ally – such cowardly attitudes, Fisk is at pains to point out, are what have caused Arab resentment towards the West for the last hundred years or so). He also recounts the deposition by Western forces of Mossadeq, Iran’s only ever democratically elected leader, and our subsequent installing of the Shah, with his torture chambers and secret police. Suddenly Iranian nationalism and Khomeini’s anti-Western propaganda has a more understandable wellspring.

While the pornography of torture is hardly the point, the chapter describing the events of the Algerian Civil War is particularly harrowing, and even I had to skip certain passages. An internecine conflict over Islam and Algerian nationalism, the Civil War in Algeria threw up some of mankind’s most cruelly imaginative methods of inflicting pain and suffering on his fellow human beings. De Gaulle emerges rather positively in Fisk’s account; but those who followed him, let us say, do not.

Also central, of course, is the Israel/Palestine conflict, and it is here that Fisk occasionally reaches white-hot anger and eloquence. An ongoing theme in this book is the softening of language, and ongoing compliance of journalists with the Western authorities, that marks contemporary reporting. It is this softening which allows Israel to hold “disputed territories” rather than what they are – occupied. It is what allows a wall to be a “fence”, it is what allows Israeli bombers to be “extremists” but Palestinian bombers to be “terrorists”. Fisk has a journalist’s ear for language and what language can do, and some of the most insightful moments of this book are not descriptions of the Shah’s torture chambers or the Taliban’s oppressions, but his ruminations on the language of war.

Fisk is dismissive of the Oslo accords: so highly trumpeted as a great “opportunity for peace”, how could this treaty be regarded by the Palestinians as anything other than a humiliation, when Israel continues to flout Resolution 242 and the agreed 1967 territories shrink further and further from view? Might has indeed made right, in the eyes of the international community, which turns a blind eye to Israel’s crimes, and especially to America, which virtually bankrolls the nation. Make no mistake: Fisk details massacres and cruelty with a true gaze, and captures too the brutality and loss of children blown apart by Palestinian suicide bombers in Gaza and elsewhere. And if there is one event, one moment which seems to have affected Fisk most deeply, it is the 1982 events at Sabra and Chatila. Fisk returns to this episode repeatedly, an episode in which Lebanese Phalangist militia, aided and abetted by Ariel Sharon’s Israeli troops (the same Ariel Sharon, let us not forget, who was memorably described by George W. Bush as a “man of peace”) slaughtered and massacred their way through Palestinian refugee camps, murdering perhaps a thousand people.

Are there problems with this book? Well, yes. Fisk’s attempts to draw a thematic and narrative thread of his father, the WW1 soldier, feels tacked-on and contrived, and adds little to the book. Given that this work is culled from thirty or more years of reporting, there are also moments which Fisk repeats himself somewhat, and this can test the reader’s patience. And yet, this huge, devastating book deserves to be read: we are, as Camus said, “up to our necks in history”.

George Orwell – Homage To Catalonia

In late 1936, George Orwell went to Spain to fight against the Fascist forces of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He was stationed primarily in Catalonia, mostly around Huesca and Barcelona, fighting under the auspices of the POUM, a Marxist organization notable for being headed and formed by Andrés Nin. Orwell fought both as a private and a corporal, and lasted just over six months in Spain before returning to England following a gunshot wound to the throat. Homage To Catalonia (1938) is his account of this time and his reflections on the war. It is safe to say one thing, I believe: the book Orwell wrote is not the book he would have wished to have written. Although the longstanding effect of this period on Orwell was to strengthen and solidify his adherence to the belief in democratic socialism (specifically as pitted against both capitalism and Stalinism), Homage To Catalonia is a book which reads as the slow disintegration of a man’s optimism about the war in which he was engaged. The opening of the text is almost wide-eyed in its hope: on entering Barcelona, Orwell is both disappointed by the scarcity of resources like food and weaponry, but most of all, deeply moved and impressed by a town where “the workers seemed to be in the saddle”: Barcelona in late 1936 gives Orwell a glimpse of the kind of Socialism and equality he considered an ideal. An end to class distinctions and hierarchies, all men working together as one for a common goal, all drawing the same pay, all using the same resources, all language of servility and deference abolished. Buoyed by these experiences, he is sent to the front line, and one of the great strengths of Homage to Catalonia is its articulation of these days – the boredom, the lack of action, the lice in the trousers, the mud and stubble, the antiquated rust-buckets serving as rifles and bombs – all punctuated by the occasional move forwards or the whizz of bullets flying overhead. The depiction of what was ostensibly trench warfare here is one of the book’s great delights.

The other great strength of the text is what occurs when Orwell returns to Barcelona in May 1937 – his account of the internecine squabbling and fighting in the city between the various Republican forces (both governmental and non-governmental), which while only serving to strengthen his idealism in a larger sense, damaged forever his idealism as regards the Spanish Civil War. Las Ramblas is transformed into a collection of barricades and occupied buildings as the various factions – supposedly on the same “side” in the war – compete for dominance, leading Orwell to ruefully assert in one of the Appendices that the war must be understood to be triangular in nature. Slowly the anti-Fascist side was being torn apart by its own internal machinations and power struggles. The POUM and other revolutionary groups supported the continuation of the workers’ revolution which begun at the outbreak of the war, whereas the Republican government, supported by the Communist factions which had the support of the USSR (along with the superior weaponry this brought) favoured restricting activities to merely defeating Franco. The story of Orwell’s political sympathies in this fight is the story of his movement from the latter to the former, ultimately concluding that the kind of hierarchical democratic capitalism being espoused at this point by the Communists and the Republicans was not only detrimental to the anti-Franco campaign but also would serve only to bring in Fascism by the back door. The extent to which Orwell’s political and social views had been solidified and focussed by his experiences in Spain are most powerfully brought to bear in the book’s conclusion, where Orwell returns home to England:

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of Outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen – all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

Homage To Catalonia is a work both personal and political, crucial to both an understanding of Orwell’s developing political consciousness, and as a record of that most romanticized conflict, the Spanish Civil War.

Christopher Hitchens – Letters To A Young Contrarian

I became aware of Christopher Hitchens, unusually, by way of his right-wing younger brother Peter, the demagogic and ultra-conservative Mail On Sunday columnist. It is to be endlessly celebrated that the elder Hitchens sibling is a substantially more interesting and intellectual figure. A once-Trotskyist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of twentieth century history and conflict, whose firm commitment to individual freedom from state terror led him into an alliance with Bush and Blair over Iraq; the man invited by the Vatican to play Devil’s Advocate over the beatification of Mother Teresa; and the author of the coruscating attack on religion God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens has made a formidable career as a radical, a freethinker, one who rubs against the grain, a contrarian, if you will. Letters To A Young Contrarian (2001) takes its form from Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet, with Hitchens penning a series of letters to a fictional correspondent, forming a series of lessons and instructions of how to live the life of the non-conformist, he-who-does-not-agree. For Hitchens, this position is a serious one – he litters this short and marvellous book with examples from history and the arts of those who speak for the dispossessed, those who fought alone for Reason and truth, and urges the reader to do the same. With the wisdom and bite of his own experiences, he instructs his anonymous student that disagreement and conflict are not merely irritating detours on the road to some blissful Utopia. Such a Utopia – a “Disneyland of the mind”, as he calls it, is not what we as humans desire, nor should we. Dissonance and conflict are what spark change, are the catalysts for action and keep us from moral, social and cultural atrophy.”It is not what one thinks”, he writes, “but how one thinks.” Hitchens’ breadth and depth of knowledge is impressive: sweeping from Kissinger to Peter Porter; from East Timor to Washington via Bosnia and Palestine, he is a thinker not to be taken lightly, and writes with clarity and vision of the value of the dissident voice in an increasingly meretricious, apathetic and ‘post-ideological’ world. He is deeply suspicious of the fashionable “identity politics” which dominate much contemporary social discourse, wherein emotions take the place of opinions, and where a “feeling” is elevated to the level of a principled stand – and calls for the reader to reject such solipsism and to embrace the life lived at an angle from society, raising questions, bristling with angst and, yes, a troubled mind; for Hitchens, the life of the independent thinker is one which necessarily will be plagued by dark nights of the soul. Embrace and welcome solitude.

Over the course of the text, Hitchens’ true loves and most enduring concerns make themselves known through sheer force of repetition – the fate of those oppressed by totalitariansim whether of the Left or the Right, victims of fascism both secular and religious; language with all its attendant joys and dangers; and most of all, irony (“the gin in the Campari, the x-factor, the knight’s move on the chessboard, the cat’s purr, the knot in the carpet”); and a profound distrust of those who claim certainty for themselves, in particular religious dogmatists and tyrants. For these latter Hitchens has nothing but contempt. His praise is reserved for those who stand against prevailing winds – Thomas Paine and George Orwell are heroes, writers such as Czeslaw Milosz are admired, as is, with reservations, Solzhenitsyn (a “titan of morality”). This book is a delight and a call-to-arms for those who do not wish to lose themselves in the crowd, who are suspicious of group-think wherever they find it, and who still see that a path of thinking radicalism is one well worth taking. The final words to the inimitable Mr Hitchens:

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”

Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion

I have been reading the 2007 paperback version of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. This is worth noting because this revised paperback edition contains a new preface from Dawkins where he responds to some of the chief arguments that have been levelled against his controversial book, originaly published in 2006. And controversial it is; The God Delusion inspired both adulation and detestation, from people on all sides of the religious divide. Some atheists adore Dawkins for his refusal to pander to childish religious doctrines; others revile him for his “fundamentalist” attitudes and lack of compromise. I should point out at the beginning of this review that I am an atheist, and share Dawkins’ distaste for the religious mindset which teaches the virtues of faith without evidence, but will attempt to take the book on its own terms. The fact that I felt the need to make that statement, Dawkins would say, speaks volumes about the privileged place religion occupies in our cultural consciousness. Would I feel so nervous about commenting on a book on Communism, or fascism? Of course not, and yet I do where religion is involved. It is part of Dawkins’ chief argument that religion has afforded itself a deference we do not allow to other forms of belief as a way of insulating itself against criticism. We must “respect” religious views as “sacred” and “sacrosanct” – an attitude Dawkins despises, and one which – if I allow myself a little polemic of my own – is currently having a real and substantially negative impact on civil rights and equality in the world at this very moment in time. While the religious community continues to campaign against gay marriage, while women still struggle to become priests, while abortion doctors are killed and threatened, while www.godhatesfags.com exists, while women in Islamic societies are still stoned to death in “honour killings” and cannot leave the house unaccompanied by a man, while the Pope still contributes to the spread of AIDS through his false messages about condom use – while these such things are part of our world, there is a place for writers like Richard Dawkins.

Onto the book itself. Two things must be made clear at the outset. One – Richard Dawkins is a zoologist and biologist, not a philosopher. Two, The God Delusion is a polemic. Neither of these facts is a criticism, per se. Yet we must acknowledge that Dawkins is writing outside of his comfort zone, outside of his speciality – and frankly, it shows. The chapter where he elucidates the classical arguments for the existence of God (ontological, teleological, cosmological, etc) skirts over them and offers only a superficial reading of, say, Anselm (it so happens that further reading of these arguments doesn’t do much to increase their believability). The fact that Dawkins feels compelled to offer definitions of terms like “a priori” and “a posteriori” underlines that he is writing for a general audience, not a philosophical one. There is a rigour and strictness to philosophical writing that isn’t present in this book (compare this book to the Phenomenology of Spirit or A Theory of Justice), which is, instead, a polemic. A welcome polemic, in my opinion, but a polemic nonetheless. And let’s be clear: the scope of this text is giant. Within barely 400 pages, Dawkins attempts to: explain what God is; explain and demolish the arguments for God’s existence, explain why God almost certainly does not exist; account for the development and continuation of religion within human beings; explain the origins and purpose of morality and why we do not need God to be moral; and explain why religion is a poisonous force in the world. A tight, focussed philosophical tract this is not. A doctoral supervisor would advise, “scale it down, Richard. Scale it down.”

Is this a problem? That depends on how one approaches the book. Dawkins makes clear that he wants to engage with the kind of mainstream religion which is actually practiced by the majority of believers in the world, not the rareified theology of Bonhoeffer or Duns Scotus. Alvin Plantinga’s response to Dawkins makes this error (among others): Tielhard de Chardin means nothing to the average Christian in, say, Alabama; and “classical theology” is, for the most part, of no use to Dawkins as it takes for granted the very existence of God which Dawkins is questioning. Data and anecdotes abound about the likes of Pat Robertson; whom, in the cultivated theology colleges of Oxford, may seem like a sideshow of fringe Christianity, but who actually represents a mainstream view of religion in America. It is this mainstream view – the Christianity of Bush, Robertson, Ted Haggard, of money-grabbing televangelists and creationists who advocate teaching the Flood in science lessons – it is this which Dawkins has in his formidable sights. I will not take Dawkins to task here for his philosophical arguments (strong in places [the problematic complexity of God or the "ultimate Boeing 747" argument, in which Dawkins posits, subverting the concept of "intelligent design", that a complex intelligence such as a theist God, capable of interacting in the physical world, must evolve and cannot spontaneously occur] and weaker in others [morality]), but instead point out that it is much more than the strict philosophy of religion which is under fire in this refreshing, spirited and deadly book. Dawkins rails against the indoctrination of children into religious lives, he bemoans the teaching of “faith” as a virtue rather than questioning and doubting, he decries attitudes which are content to let “mystery” and “that’s just how God is” be valid thoughts which end discussions; he makes a good case for the way in which “moderate” faith, and the artificial respect it is afforded in society, fosters a cultural climate where true religious fundamentalism, the really evil kind, can flourish. While Dawkins stutters somewhat to explain the origins of morality, he is pititless in his analysis of why it certainly does not come from God – at least, not any God who is part of any religion I’ve ever heard of.

The God Delusion is not a perfect book, but it is an extremely important book. It has opened up avenues of debate which bring me great joy; it has begun to chip away at the unearned, assumed privilege of faith. It is a passionate defence of the scientific method and evidence-based conclusions. It mercilessly annihilates superstition, irrationality, wishful thinking and the concept of faith without evidence. I applaud it.

Ben Goldacre – Bad Science

Dr Ben Goldacre works full-time for the NHS, as well as contributing a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper, and maintaining a blog also titled “Bad Science”. He is dedicated to debunking popular distortions about science, dismantling inadequate science reporting in the mainstream media and presenting the strong, evidence-based scientific method as the true value of science in the popular mindset. Bad Science was published in 2008 and falls firmly into the “popular science” genre, not because it’s a cheap, lowest-common-denominator treatment of science, but because it aims to demystify and educate the lay reader into what science is, how it works, and how so many of the stories and ideas you may have heard about science in the media are, simply, nonsense. Goldacre writes clearly and with humour, walking the reader through basic scientific concepts like double-blinding, randomisation, the placebo effect (more complex and wide-ranging than one might imagine), regression to the mean, and so on. He interweaves this “good science” with commentary upon those who cynically – or naively – bend this methodology and hawk their quackery to the public. First to come under Goldacre’s good-humoured fire is the detox industry,  based as it is on no science at all. Homeopathy, too, gets a good drubbing from Goldacre, and while the ridiculousness of homeopathy is well-established and may seem like an easy target, Goldacre is at pains to point out that these industries, damaging as they may be, are simply – if I may borrow medical terminology myself – symptoms of a wider malaise. Indeed, throughout the book, he points out time and again that it is not individuals he is interested in, but institutions. For Ben Goldacre, the problems with bad science are always systemic. He dedicates several chapters to self-styled “nutrionists”, exposes their charlatanry, reserving particular ire for their most vocal proponent, Scottish turd-feeler “Dr” Gillian McKeith, who claims a PhD which Goldacre was also able to purchase off the internet for his dead cat. Yet, he points out, the problem is not with McKeith per se, so much as with a popular media and culture which buys into their methodologies, not stopping to examine critically or to hold up to scientific scrutiny, because the quick-fix, cheap-pill solutions seem so much more appealing than the dry, statistical world of actual scientific endeavour.

All of which is good fun, but things become more serious in the second half of the book, where Goldacre moves away from debunking quacks to some of the genuinely dangerous effects of bad science – of particular note is a chapter dedicated to Matthias Rath, a man who has been selling multi-vitamins in South Africa to the public and to the government as a way of treating AIDS (despite a comprehensive lack of compelling evidence that this will do any good), whilst decrying the use of retro-viral drugs (the best current treatment for AIDS). One shudders to think how many deaths and HIV-infected children this man has been responsible for. The “alternative medicine” community, by the way, far from condemning Rath, has routinely championed him as a vocal proponent of “alternative paradigms” to the apparently hegemonic, tyrannical rule of Western medicine.

Goldacre builds ultimately – through analyses of statistics, a somewhat difficult chapter for this non-mathematically inclined reader – to a dissection of what he terms the “prototypical health scare, by which all others must be judged and understood. It has every ingredient, every canard, every sleight of hand, and every aspect of venal incompetence and hysteria, systemic and individual” – he is referring, of course, to the famous and seemingly interminable MMR/autism scare, prompted by Andrew Wakefield’s paper in the Lancet. The story is dissected and the media held to account here, for scaremongering, ignoring scientific evidence, falling prey to emotivism and simply failing to understand how science operates and what it is.

Although I didn’t agree with everything Goldacre says in this book (as a teacher, I am now simply bored of the tedious assertion that “exams are getting easier” – here stated without any corresponding evidence, which is familiar but disappointing from a man who spends the entire book ramming home the notion of how crucial evidence-based conclusions are; and his somewhat smug attitude towards “humanities graduates” made me roll my eyes more than anything else), it is a wonderfully accessible and important book, a crash-course in scientific reasoning, an impassioned defence of evidence-based medicine, and a coruscating attack on the media and the thoughtless chattering classes of dinner-party-throwing Islington. Get rid of those detox pills. Cancel that appointment with the homeopath. Burn that Gillian McKeith nutrition guide. Vaccinate your children. Because the evidence is there.

Jeffrey Brown – Funny Misshapen Body

Funny Misshapen Body (2009) is the latest instalment of comic book artist Jeffrey Brown’s autobiographical graphic novels (although the term “graphic novel” somehow seems not to apply in this case), following previous works such as Clumsy and Unlikely. The book takes us through Brown’s uncomfortable adolescence at high school and art college, through his travails with the opposite sex, his internal struggles with art, his dalliances with drink and drugs, and more. Brown’s trademark sketchy and bare style reflects the universality of his subject, and many readers (perhaps particularly male readers) will be able to identify with various of his experiences (hopeless crushes on unattainable girls, the awkward first kisses, worrying about being fat or ugly and unable to get dates, etc). His drawing style also lends an almost nostalgic, childhood feel to the book; the most interesting sections are those which undercut this feeling, most notably the chapter dealing with Brown’s teenage diagnosis with Crohn’s Disease.

The book is not structured like a typical autobiography or memoir; the  chapters arranged not chronologically, telling a story from beginning to end, but rather thematically, rather in the manner of something like Edmund White’s My Lives (another excellent memoir), and because, as Brown himself explains at the end of the book, “these stories are never really finished.”

Funny Misshapen Body is charming and occasionally touching, a very enjoyable short read; I look forward to reading more of Brown’s work.

Anaïs Nin – Henry & June

It is difficult to know where to begin when writing my thoughts about Anaïs Nin’s Henry & June. Taken from one of her many volumes of diairies, this book recounts Nin’s tempestuous affair with Henry Miller, and her relationship with his wife June, as well as Nin’s own relationship with her husband and her growing sense of a sexual, female Self. Response to Nin’s  work is so fundamentally subjective; she demands that you respond as a unique human being, not a dispassionate enquirer. The text leaves you no options. So this review will be much more personal – it’s what Nin would have wanted.

I found this book to be extraordinary. Nin’s writing is incendiary and I continually found myself dragged back to it again and again. For days – weeks – after finishing the book I was haunted by her voice. There is a substantial part of me which spent the first third of this book raging against it, against Nin’s thoughtless bohemian chic lifestyle of privilege, against her total refusal to counter politics, reality or the outside world, annoyance at how she was so determined to live entirely within her own mind, and seemed to have little else to do each day except languidly fall into the arms of various men and agonise about the status of their relationships. But Nin lives this life so richly, so deeply that in the end one is won over; her vibrancy, her love of the human, felt experience, each one unique and unrepeatable, almost shocks you from your seat. Her total dedication to naked emotional honesty is almost jarring and incongruous; the violence of her truth-telling rendered all the more remarkable when one considers that Nin was a female writing here in the 1930s. Her depictions of Henry Miller conjure up a man and a writer who was, in Miller’s own words, “joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware”, but it is Nin’s feminine awareness which burns under the reader’s skin.

This is not placid writing – it is rich, violent, blood-red, fragile and leaps to be touched. Upon finishing the book, all I could think was that I wanted to live like Anaïs Nin, and I wanted to write like her. I can’t think of a better ambition.

“I am finished with myself, with my sacrifices and my pity, with what chains me. I am going to make a new beginning. I want passion and pleasure and drunkenness and all evil.”

Clive James – Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of my Time

“History is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself.” – Hegel.

Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of my Time is an extraordinary book by the Australian writer, broadcaster, poet and critic Clive James. Over nearly 900 pages and over 100 short essays, James takes us on a look back over the century just gone, with all its attendant despotism, ideological warfare and tragedy. The essays – arranged alphabetically – cover a dazzling variety of people; writers, thinkers, philologists, historians, politicans, directors, some of whom are well-known but many are people who seem to have been forgotten (chapters include Anna Akhmatova, Mario Vargas Llosa, Heinrich Heine, Miles Davis, Coco Chanel, Terry Gilliam, Walter Benjamin, Alexandra Kollontai, Paul Celan, Witold Gombrowicz, Marcel Proust, Karl Kraus, Egon Friedell, Margaret Thatcher, Dubravka Ugresic, Jose Saramago, and many, many more)… and through it all James pulls a thread: the case for humanism and against ideology. The book, in total, is a humanist call to arms against totalitarianism in all its incarnations, and James repeatedly returns to certain themes: the vibrant Viennese cultural scene in the early part of the century, embodied by people like Peter Altenberg and Stefan Zweig; the fate of emigre writers; and most of all, the towering menace of Stalin and Hitler.

It’s not all German/Russian politics, though: James the witty cultural commentator also rears his head. The chapter on poet Heinrich Heine becomes a treatise on celebrity culture and stalking, while another chapter discusses Richard Burton’s hairstyle in more depth than you ever thought you’d read. A chapter on Terry Gilliam becomes an analysis of torture, while his discussion of Sophie Scholl mutates into a meditation on the many virtues of Natalie Portman.

The book is – or should be – compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the 20th century, and the lessons for art and politics that we can learn from it. I will say that I didn’t agree with everything in this book; his attitude towards the Tampa immigrants in the chapter on documentary maker Chris Marker rubbed me the wrong way, but then disagreement and dialogue are part of the book’s own internal dialectic. James – in refreshingly readable and clear prose – attacks hypocrisy, short-sightedness and cowardice wherever he sees it, referring time and again to the conduct of artists and thinkers during WWII and under Stalin. Worth the entry fee alone is the superbly coruscating attack on the pseudo-philosophy and ideological sophistry of Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as James’ moving chapter on Sophie Scholl, guillotined at 21 by the Nazis for her dedication to liberal democracy. Challenging thought both on left and right, James’ only dedication is to humanism and art, and this highly politically haunted book offers his vision of how we respond to the horrors of the century we have witnessed; through the connections in the humanities. Astounding. A feast.