WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Compelling contradictions of an anti-capitalist activist
PAUL SIMON recommends the story of a charismatic malcontent
CATHARTIC: Leo Zeilig
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
The World Turned Upside Down
by Leo Zeilig
(Iva Valley Books, £7.99)
THIS novel’s protagonist Professor Bianca Ndour is an outsized phenomenon, with her personal and academic contradictions bursting beyond the realistic confines of one mere individual. In many respects, she represents the values and vaulting hopes, as well as the weaknesses, of much of the contemporary left movement.
Writer Leo Zeilig tracks Ndour’s metamorphosis from a comparatively privileged mixed-race bourgeois background to trendy mindfulness self-help author and on to a remorseless and charismatic revolutionary academic.
As such, her intellectual journey reflects that of the anti-capitalist movement since the fall of many socialist states, with the lost wistfulness of the 1990s replaced with a more robust Marxist praxis since.
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