MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
Latest editorial
Germ of a solution
JOHN GREEN recommends a revelatory account of global pandemics and the ways they can be prevented in future
HARD FACT: Soldiers of French 87th Regiment in their trenches on Hill 304 at Verdun, 1916 - during WWI the average soldier stood more chance of becoming disease fodder than cannon fodder
[National Army Museum/Creative Commons]
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives
by Alex de Waal
(Polity Press, £50)
IN NEW Pandemics, Old Politics, Alex de Waal takes to task what he calls the gargantuan error of characterising the current pandemic as the “war on disease.”
When we most need a narrative to make sense of such a devastating pandemic, that epithet “not only fails but also stops us recognising our failures,” he writes.
Reviewing past pandemics such as cholera, so-called Spanish Flu and Aids he demonstrates — alarmingly — how administrative measures taken in response to the virulent Spanish Flu in 1918-19 were almost exactly the same as today.
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