MARIA DUARTE recommends a remarkable study of the friendship between a Palestinian and a Pakistani, broken by a hostile state
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Wasters
SETH SANDRONSKY appreciates a fresh take on a 100-year-old novel that helps to contextualise the current moment of conspicuous wealth, waste and climate chaos
BLING: Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, with gold-infused glass
[Roy Luck/CC]
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 Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby
John Marsh, Monthly Review Press, £16.99
AS month two of the Trump 2.0 era careens forward, reading author and English professor John Marsh’s book is a wake-up call to systemic themes and trends as he unpacks culture and the economy over a century through the lens of Fitzgerald’s novel.
He revisits an influential work of fiction to examine an enduring “popular fascination with the rich – their houses, their clothes, their manners.” At the base of these cultural features is an economic system of, by and for the accumulation of capital held together by competition and class.
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RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
FIONA O’CONNOR questions the achievement of this year’s Orwell prize winner for political fiction
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
SETH SANDRONSKY recommends a production that looks back at the political Tinseltown in the mid-1970s when US cinema ‘didn’t pander to trends’