Lobby Books:
Book Review: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
Lauren Beukes’s new novel Zoo City is a pacey, hard-edged affair that is hard to put down once it’s sunk its claws into you. When Zinzi December, the story’s tough-cookie heroine with a tragic past, a special gift for retrieving lost things and a sloth on her back, reluctantly agrees to search for the latest human asset of music-mogul-on-the-come-back-trail Odi Huron, she has no idea what she is getting herself into…
Andreas Späth, Idasa
Read the whole review here.
Book Review: Social Accountability in Africa: Practitioners’ Experiences and Lessons, edited by Mario Claasen & Carmen Alpín-Lardiés
Social accountability is increasingly being recognised in Africa as an intrinsic and necessary political tool to preserve democracy in those countries on the continent that are opting for multi-party democracy. With the growing recognition that elections alone are a necessary but by no means sufficient condition to guarantee a transition to a democratic regime, different countries in Africa are designing diverse and innovative tools and strategies for ensuring that their governments are indeed responsive to the electorate. Among the citizens of these countries – and sometimes also among their leaders there is a growing recognition that elections only hold elected officials to account and not appointed office-bearers. A vote alone amounts to no more than selecting the best candidate during elections; citizens of newly democratic African states are asking who holds governments accountable between polls?...
Moira Levy, Idasa
Read the whole review here.
New Arrival: The Spirit Level – Why equality is better for everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
This is the book everyone is talking about at the moment! Based on thirty years of wide-ranging research, The Spirit Level shows that there is one common factor that links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality among their members. Not wealth, not resources, not culture, climate, diet, or system of government. Furthermore, more-unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them – the well-off as well as the poor.
Listen to an excellent 50-minute interview with the authors on one of our favourite radio shows, Against the Grain, here.
New Arrivals: Two Situationist International Books
For all those who remain fascinated by the enigmatic yet influential writings of the 60s art-cum-politics movement that inspired the Paris student uprising, we recommend Guy Debord’s classic Society of the Spectacle as well as Ken Knabb’s revised and expanded Situationist International Anthology which brings together the most seminal, shorter situationist works from Debord, Raul Vaneigem and many others.
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