T C Boyle’s writing is utterly engaging. He draws his characters deeply, vividly, and empathetically. You get to know them. Their very personal life stories are set in the context of major cosmic issues – the hostility of nature intertwined… Read more ›
Emmanuel Carrère’s self portrait is unflattering. The mélange of TV journalism into the release of Hungarian war veteran András Toma from incarceration in the sad lost Russian town Kotelnitch where he has suffered long term abuse, Carrère’s prima donna obsession… Read more ›
José Saramago details the grinding abuse of power, the economic injustice, the destruction of human hope and potential, all inherent in feudalism as it seeks refuge from modernity by morphing into fascism in rural 20th century Portugal. The account is… Read more ›
André Degorce is a child of the French Enlightenment. He studied advanced mathematics. He is aware of the deeper moral insights and meanings of Christian religion. But an unrelenting sequence of brutalisation starting in the Gestapo station in Besancon, then… Read more ›
Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller suffers from a disastrous conjunction of naivety and delicate conscience. He is buffeted by events, by inner turmoil, by familiar practices, by worries of what others may think of him, by advice from his seniors, by arrangements… Read more ›
Books on atheist spirituality André Comte-Sponville ‘The Book of Atheist Spirituality’ Bantam 2008 Geoff Crocker ‘An Enlightened Philosophy – Can an Atheist Believe Anything?’ O Books 2011 Richard Holloway ‘Godless Morality’ Canongate 2000 Brian Mountford ‘Christian Atheist : Belonging without… Read more ›
Review of a new book by Geoff Crocker Read more ›
Albania is overpowered and tossed around between predators ; first Italy, then Nazi Germany, then the Soviet Union. Its ancient city Gjirokastër represents historic cultural traditions of honour and virtue, but its population squirms and vacillates under the successive invaders’… Read more ›
This intense portrayal of a destitute writer suffering extreme hunger evokes empathy for the human condition of destitution, and demonstrates the psychosomatic reality that our mentality depends crucially on our physicality. Hunger is a physical condition, but it drives mental… Read more ›
William Stoner is denied love and treated meanly throughout his life. He is born into poverty and hard farm labour. His parents are inadequate – unable to nurture his intellectual gift, or even to hold a social conversation. Life presents… Read more ›
This is a long but charming tale of the Peruzzi family who are evicted from their sharecropping life in northern Italy, and join an exodus south to tame and farm the Pontine Marshes. Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’ is mentioned in… Read more ›
From the perspective of a family and friendship group, Madeleine Thien records the victim’s experience of the rampant evil of the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. It is sheer terror, utterly inhumane, evil. We are left wondering how… Read more ›
The first part of Christopher Burns’ curious book focuses on photographer Gregory Pharaoh’s obsessive sexual attraction to Alice Fell. In classic paradigm, Alice is no more than the object of the male sexual drive. Burns may be presenting some accurate… Read more ›
Developing a just society in post apartheid South Africa was always going to be a challenge in massive social transition. Petty apartheid rules could be easily dismantled, but transiting from resistance to government for the ANC, reversing the huge inequalities… Read more ›
Susan Neiman delivers as promised an accessible text and a great read in which she vigorously defends the Enlightenment against all comers including counter-Enlightenment’s Isaiah Berlin, post modernism’s Michel Foucault (the most amoral man Noam Chomsky ever met!) and evangelical… Read more ›
This is an excellent, readable, inspiring and timely book. Luc Ferry protests that academic philosophy has become too technical, specialised and arid. Instead he develops a fresh focus for philosophy on the great themes and questions of life. Greek philosophy… Read more ›
There is already an embryonic but strong interest in the theme of atheist spirituality, eg André Comte-Sponville’s ‘The Book of Atheist Spirituality’, Alain de Botton’s recent ‘Religion for Atheists’ and Geoff Crocker’s ‘An Enlightened Philosophy – Can an Atheist Believe… Read more ›
Julian Baggini presents a rather moderated case for atheism, based on the argument that naturalism is the best explanation of existence. His chapter 2 on the case for atheism focuses more on questions of intellectual methodology. He could have made… Read more ›
Whatever the struggles, failures and compromises in Fallada’s personal life, and even in the circumstances of his writing this book, `Alone in Berlin’ poses the huge moral question of the value and virtue of the pursuit of idealistic conviction in… Read more ›
