The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Sebastian, Four Mothers, Restless, and The Most Precious of Cargoes
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Visionary guides in times of violence
What better guide for our times, say FIONA O’CONNOR than the example of remarkable women who thought through the experience of WWII
visionaries
JOHN GREEN explores the argument that psychiatry needs to move away from the idea of just seeing and treating the individual
SYLVIA HIKINS applauds a polemic against “cleanfluencers” and considers radical alternatives to current inequalities of housework
RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy
Wolfram Eilenberger, Allen Lane, £25
COMING in this time of war The Visionaries offers insights into the human capacity to think through violence.
Remarkable women caught up in the second world war totalitarian machine: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil are Jewish women fleeing the Gestapo; French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir is trapped in Vichy France. These women’s experiences are captured in this group biography along with radical ideas that shaped a century, born from painful comprehension of human atrocity.
And somehow (bestseller) Ayn Rand gets in the mix; a Russian-Jewish refugee from Stalinism, her writing is shamefully exposed for its inadequacy when read next to the others.
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