Euan Lawson
June 2024 reading
- Another England by Caroline Lucas
- The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd
- Our Enemies will Vanish by Yaroslav Tromfimov
- Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography by Don McCullin
- Don McCullin: The New Definitive Edition
- Cuckooland: Where The Rich Own The Truth by Tom Burgis
- Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, war photographer
- The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life) by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison
Notes
Another England is excellent - though I am not wholly surprised as I find most of my views on social reform are closely aligned to Lucas’ politics. There may be a large dollop of confirmation bias here. I picked up Our Enemies will Vanish as the shortlist for the Orwell Prize was announced. There’s rarely a bad book on these lists - much like the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction.
Cuckooland came up via a book recommendation from The Rest is Politics podcast. I have found myself coming back to podcasts quite a lot in recent weeks. For some reason, my attention span hasn’t quite coped with audiobooks and I’ve had several false starts. Ironically, I did actually listen to the audiobook after the podcast recommendation… Tom Burgis, alongside people like Caroline Belton and Carole Cadwalladr, is an excellent investigative journalist that the kleptocracy would dearly like to shut up. Read their works and support them however you can.
The Don McCullin book was a birthday present and it is a heck of a book. It has an excellent foreword by Harry Evans and the images throughout are superb.
Most importantly, book of the month - in a tough field this month - is The Invisible Doctrine. Neoliberalism laid bare in all its ugliness.