Book review: Dennis Sewell, The Political Gene (Picador, 2010).

He was the man who gave us the theory of evolution, but according to Dennis Sewell, Charles Darwin was also responsible for the development of a monstrous ideology that cost the lives of millions and which could be about to dominate the world of politics again. In his book, The Political Gene, Sewell presents a disturbing case for revising our opinion of the scientist who explained the origin of life on Earth. By Ed O’Hare.

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Brian O’Nuallain, better known both as the novelist Flann O’Brien and the journalist Myles na gCopaleen, was a writer capable of making jokes that everyone from academics to working men could laugh at. As we celebrate the centenary of his birth we should not forget that O’Nuallain’s works, like the man himself, contain hidden sides that reveal much about the paradoxical nature of being Irish. By Ed O’Hare.

There is an unwritten law of literary criticism which states that a great writer may be many things but they can never be funny. Perhaps it has to do with uncertainty about what defines something as humorous, or with the snobbish sentiment that to be purely amusing is to be ultimately facile, but comic writers always seem to have to wait the longest for recognition. This has certainly been the case with Brian O’Nuallain (aka Flann O’Brien aka Myles na gCopaleen). Novelist, journalist and satirist, O’Nuallain’s mastery of language is obvious to anyone who has read a page of his writings, but this wasn’t enough to stop him from becoming one of the great martyrs of modern Irish literature. Disparaged, abused and resented in his lifetime, only recently have O’Nuallain’s vast talents received a critical re-evaluation.

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Brian O'Nolan was a funny man. His Cruiskeen Lawn columns in the Irish Times hilariously desconstructed colloquaial sayings, pompous journalism and godawful clichés. He effortlessly penned anecdotes on the poets Keats and Chapman, attacked Sean O'Faolain - then editor of The Bell - pretentious artists and the 'professional classes'. October 5 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of O'Nolan's birth.

Documentaries describe O'Nolan's capacity for hilarity as being matched only by his capacity for porter. One recent television documentary depicted O'Nolan as a belligerent drunk in his later years. Another anecdote situates him barely upright on Merrion Square one afternoon, stumbling along the fence repeatedly spewing "Fuck the fucking fuckers".

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Dean Baker recently released his latest book, The End of Loser Liberalism, under a Creative Commons license and as a free download. Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a regular contributor to the Guardian, Truthout and the Huffington Post. 

Introducing the book on his website, Baker writes:

"Most people define the central point of dispute between liberals and conservatives as being that liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider fair, while conservatives want to leave things to the market. This is not true. Conservatives actually rely on the government all the time, but most importantly in structuring the market in ways that ensure that income will flow upwards. The framing that 'conservatives like the market while liberals like the government,' puts liberals in the position of seeming to want to tax the winners to help the losers.

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Book Review: Sins of The Father by Conor McCabe, The History Press, Dublin. (ISBN 13: 9781845886936 ISBN 10: 1845886933)

Like a ship in distress or an army in retreat, Ireland is awash with rumours about what caused our downfall. Among certain liberal citizens the idea has taken hold that we’ve all been doomed by a kind of original sin, a genetic predisposition to buying houses. This is the neoliberal equivalent of Catholic Guilt. We are all sinners and therefore we are all guilty. What are we guilty of? Desire, of course. Without desire there would be no accumulation. And what did we desire most of all? Property.

The very first thing that Conor McCabe does in this meticulous, elegantly written and necessary book is to explode the myth that the Irish are more given to owning their own houses than their European neighbours. We lie, in fact, in 18th place for home ownership in the EU (his figures come not from opinion pieces in quality dailies but from Eurostat and the Irish Census). Ireland is “bucking European trends with a declining level of home ownership,” with ownership figures falling from 79% in 1971 to 74% in 2004. Spain, Italy, Greece and Poland are among the seventeen countries with higher levels of home ownership than us.

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A fascinating look at how our environment shapes our sexuality and a valiant rebuttal of many of the claims made by neuroscience, Cordelia Fine’s new book Delusions of Gender is a lively and worrying work which argues that the scientific community has often sabotaged the fight for gender equality. By Ed O’Hare.

Three years ago Cordelia Fine had an experience which horrified her. On entering her son’s kindergarten she heard the teacher reading to the pupils from a book which claimed that boys’ brains were structured differently to those of girls. Because of their rational, logical brains, the teacher said, boys could never consider things in the same caring, empathic way girls do. Fine was outraged. As a neuroscientist she knew that not an iota of scientific evidence backed up this pronunciation. The more she considered the way in which unverified and often highly speculative neuroscientific theories of gender difference have been widely accepted and promoted by the scientific establishment and the media, the more she believed it was time for her to intervene. The result is Delusions of Gender, one of the most trenchant and illuminating popular science books of recent years.

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Book Review: Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right. (Yale, 2011). By Joseph Mahon. 

Terry Eagleton is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the Universities of Lancaster and Notre Dame. In his latest book, this prolific author sets out to demonstrate that it is reasonable to hold that Marx was correct - if not always, then at least mostly so. To accomplish this task, he takes ten of the most standard criticisms of Marx, in no particular order of importance, and tries to refute them one by one.

The standard criticisms of Marx (and Engels), as Eagleton perceives them, are as follows:

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Peter Godwin talks about his latest book, The Fear: The Last Days of Robert Mugabe. Interview with John Paul O'Malley.

Peter Godwin is sitting in a busy café on Hampstead High Street in North London. Before this interview he had a meeting with a human rights lawyer. "We're trying to help out these people who use homeopathic medicine in Africa. It's part of their culture, and pharmaceutical companies are trying to rip them off. It's the equivalent of copyright, it's kind of tricky and to do with international law," he says, ordering a second latte.

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