MARIA DUARTE recommends a remarkable study of the friendship between a Palestinian and a Pakistani, broken by a hostile state
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Not the whole story
Some of the much-loved Dr Seuss children's books have been withdrawn after their publishers deemed them to be racist. That may be so, says CHRIS ORLET, but the wider picture provides even more cause for concern
PERNICIOUS: Some of the titles withdrawn from bookshops and Dr Seuss cartoon of a Japanese man handing out TNT explosives to fellow Japanese US citizens
MATTHEW HAWKINS rakes through un-fancy words and flair-free summaries to find who and what might be flamboyant
PETER MASON is exhilarated by an exciting, well-considered and historically minded tribute to the great Trinidadian instrument
Reducing historical lives to ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles, we lose the nuance of those lives and a clearer understanding of past societies, suggests CLAIRE ISABELLA GILMOUR
CHRIS SEARLE relishes the genius of pianist Alexander Hawkins, his many ensembles, and his new album
A FRIEND delights in sending me news stories that demonstrate what he says are the excesses of “liberalism.” One recent article that arrived in my inbox concerned Dr Seuss Enterprises’s decision to halt publication of six children’s books it now believes contain racist imagery.
“I didn’t realise Dr Seuss made us all racists,” he quipped. As usual, a flippant retort to a flippant remark moves the conversation nowhere. One has to dig a bit deeper.
The newly delisted books — And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, The Cat’s Quizzer — were all created between 1935 and 1976, a time when racist imagery in cartoons was as common as giant noses.
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