History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, University of California Press, October 2017, pp. 312, $34.95, ISBN 9780520293137 It is often said not to judge a book by its cover, but a
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Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India, Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, Harvard University Press, 2018, pp. 393, ISBN: 978-0-674-98060-0 “Why is India so filthy?”, asked the Ugly Indian, a masked man giving a TED Talk in Bengaluru. The anonymous man posed a question that has grappled many
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Dirty Secrets: How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy, Richard Murphy, Verso, February 2017, pp. 216, $23.95, ISBN 978-1-78663-167-1 When the mysterious John Doe provided the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with 11.5 million leaked documents that detailed information of more than 200,000 off-shore entities, he cited income
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Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe, Daniel Triling, Verso Books, 2018, pp. 282, $35.99, ISBN 978-1-78663-279-1 In the summer of 2016, I had the privilege to meet Ali and Prince. Ali and Prince were refugees from Afghanistan, passing through Serbia on their way to
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The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945, J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 275, $19.95, ISBN 9780674545038 There is hardly anyone who has not heard of the word Anthropocene. Officially, Anthropocene has become a buzzword since Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist,
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Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, Adam Greenfield, Verso Books, 2017, pp. 359, $39.99, 978- 1- 78478 – 043 – 2 If we were to judge a book by its cover, Radical Technologies, published by the ‘largest independent, radical publishing house in the English speaking world’, one would assume
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Against Creativity, Oli Mould, Verso Books, October 2018, pp. 240, $33, ISBN 978-1-78663-649-2 In 2015, Martin Prosperity Institute, affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management published a report titled Global Creativity Index. The report sought to assess the ‘creativity’ of countries by measuring their economic growth and
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Climate Leviathan: Towards a Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Verso Books, February 2018, pp. 224, $35.99, ISBN 978 – 1786634290 Increasingly, our hopes for saving the planet from destruction are placed in international conferences; gatherings of heads of states and their delegates aimed at
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Will Big Business Destroy Our Planet?, Peter Dauvergne, polity, 2018, pp. 139, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-5095-2400-6 The Earth system is in crisis. Summer after summer, we are confronted with unprecedented temperatures that warm up the seas, leading to ever stronger and more destructive winds which fuel raging forest fires and destroy
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