RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
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MARTIN HALL relishes a history that advocates a dialectical understanding of culture as both representative and transactional
culture
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
New releases from The Tenementals, Nik Bartsch’s Ronin, and Kuunatic
SCOTT ALSWORTH hears the call to burn down and rebuild the video game industry from the bottom up
The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
Culture: A New World History
Martin Puchner
Ithaca, £12.99
MARTIN PUCHNER’S Culture: A New World History manages to achieve something not all histories do: to make you come away feeling that you’ve learnt something.
The book’s strength lies in its storytelling as a narrative history constructed from 15 chronological episodes that the author sees as emblematic of the varying ways in which culture has been created, used, discarded and rediscovered, going back to the 14th century BCE. As well as that, the book is framed by an introduction on the Chauvet Cave from 35,000 BCE and an epilogue about the future of the library in the digital age.
Among other things, we learn about the bust of Nefertiti, the Japanese Pillow Book, the Storehouse of Wisdom in Baghdad, the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, Hildegard of Bingen, Moctezuma and the Aztec Empire, Toussaint L’Ouverture and George Elliot’s role in the origin of historiography. His focus is on visual and performing arts, plus to a lesser degree, literature, so there’s no real discussion of music, and none of film, though given that the latter is only turning 130 next year, so he can be forgiven for that.
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