Book recommendations thread

MRnotlob606 wrote: »

I know this is sort of back to basics but I'd recommend "The Prince" By niccolo machiavelli

• Poverty Safari (Darren McGarvey). Winner of this year's Orwell prize, McGarvey's text is quite rare in that it is an attempt to analyse the lives of those of the working classes by someone who is of those classes himself. McGarvey details the abuse he received at the hands of his mother, his voluntary work and his projects with the BBC. The other thing which set this book apart for me is that McGarvey eschews blaming the plight of the working classes on the Conservatives, something Owen Jones devotes much of his similar work, Chavs to doing. Instead, he attempts to detail examples of local people taking action themselves instead of just waiting around for the state to fix things for them. I don't think the book contains a single dig at the Tory party. Rather, it is intended as an examination of the left and McGarvey devotes some time to lamenting the left's recent obsession with identity politics and groupthink where it should be embracing diversity and affirmative action.
  
• The Lure of Greatness: England’s Brexit and America's Trump (Anthony Barnett). Anthony Barnett, co-founder of the Open Democracy think tank offers this book as a treatise on the exact cause of Brexit and Trump. However, the book is almost entirely devoted to Brexit with only small portions here and there dedicated to Trump. I suspect the book was conceived as an attempt to explain Brexit and may have been altered for marketing reasons to include Trump. Barnett traces the British public's distrust in its own leadership back to the days of Thatcher going on to the Iraq War and the Cameron-Clegg government of 2010-2015. He seems fixated on the idea that the UK needs to break up and that a key driver of the Leave vote was English Nationalism being trapped within the geopolitical construct of the United Kingdom while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can express themselves through their own national Parliaments. He also attempts to argue that the Daily Mail is one of the few remaining insitutions which truly believes in Great Britain whereas Murdoch is a much simpler beast who is driven by profit alone.
  A good read but there is little new here. As an aside, the editing of the Kindle version is dire so buyer beware.
  
• Politics: Between the Extremes (Nick Clegg). Published a few months after the UK's EU membership referendum in 2016, this book is not intended as a chronicle of (nor apology for) Clegg's part in the 2010-2015 coalition government. Rather, it is an examination of the rise of populism across Europe, the collapse of centrism and the deep and glaring problems with British democracy. Clegg is a classic English liberal who believes in free markets, limited government and individual liberty. I've long considered Nick Clegg to be one of the finest writers on British politics and he writes beautifully here on populism and the unrepresentative and idiosyncratic nature of British democracy. He also proposes solutions which might help to make democracy both more representative and involving for members of the public. While there may be an obvious bias, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the problems with the current British electoral and Parliamentary systems from the perspective of someone who is outside both of the two main political parties.
  
• Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem (Tim Shipman). Shipman's follow-up to his excellent All Out War of 2016. The subject material is a tad less engrossing this time around being just another general election. However, Shipman does bring his trademark studious research, wide-ranging interviews and highly detailed reporting from each side in the election. Particularly shocking is the extent to which May seemed to outsource herself to Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, "the chiefs". The schisms in both of the main parties are examined in depth. The fact that each party had an effective open goal due to their weak leadership and a disastrous Tory manifesto drafted by Timothy and Ben Gumner is probably the most fascinating party of this story.