Book reviews
Book Review | Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff
With the overnight international bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff utilises his ‘semipermanent seat’ on a West Wing sofa to offer an insider account of the Trump administration. While critical of Wolff’s writing style, methods and failure to separate clear falsehoods from certainties, Jonny Hall concedes that the book remains a gripping read that is at its most revealing when discussing the warring factions shaping Trump’s Presidency.
The Despot’s Apprentice: How to rig an election
In his new book, The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy Brian Klaas (LSE) sets out how Donald Trump deploys the methods of authoritarian rulers – in attacking the press, undermining the rule of law and filling government posts with family members and cronies – to corrode the norms of democracy. In this extract, from the chapter “How to rig an election”, he examines how voter suppression, a preferred tactic of autocrats across the globe, continues to be a threat to US democracy.
Book Review | English Uprising: Brexit and the Mainstreaming of the Far Right by Paul Stocker
In England Uprising: Brexit and the Mainstreaming of the Far Right, Paul Stocker offers a historical account of the rise of far-right movements in the UK from the early twentieth century to the present, showing how the gradual mainstreaming of far-right discourse impacted upon the recent UK Brexit vote. This book is an excellent primer for those looking […]
Book review | Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class, by the Working Class
Inspired by the collection The Good Immigrant, Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class brings together 22 stories reflecting on working-class lives and experiences in the UK today. Edited by Nathan Connolly, this volume offers tales of sadness, struggle, resilience and resistance, all told with warmth and love, that show how class inequality is both personal and […]
Book review | We: Reviving Social Hope, by Ronald Aronson
In We: Reviving Social Hope, Ronald Aronson takes stock of the current state of US society, attributing the rise of Donald Trump to a steep decline in participatory democracy throughout the twentieth century and offering a blueprint for restoring hope to the body politic. This is an intellectually rigorous analysis, writes Jeff Roquen, that will contribute to a broader […]
Book review | Legislation at Westminster: Parliamentary Actors and Influence in the Making of British Law
In Legislation at Westminster: Parliamentary Actors and Influence in the Making of British Law, Meg Russell and Daniel Gover offer a comprehensive and empirically rigorous assessment of the role that parliament plays in the UK policy-making process. This is a meticulously researched book, writes Ed Page, that is a must-read for both students and scholars wanting to better understand how laws […]
Book review | The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style and Representation
In The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style and Representation, Benjamin Moffitt approaches populism as a political style that is mediated through symbols, disseminated through the mass media and performed through verbal and non-verbal modes of communication. While suggesting Moffitt’s work is more an extension of the discourse school than a radical break from it, Ben Margulies welcomes this […]
Book review | Diploma Democracy: The Rise of Political Meritocracy
In Diploma Democracy: The Rise of Political Meritocracy, Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille examine how Western democracies are shaped by educational inequalities that lead to gaps in political participation and governments being dominated by academic elites. While some of the authors’ solutions for these ‘diploma democracies’ are less convincing, this is a very useful account of the influence of education on […]
Book review | The Greens in British Politics: Protest, Anti-Austerity and the Divided Left
In The Greens in British Politics: Protest, Anti-Austerity and the Divided Left, James Dennison draws on statistical data as well as interviews with UK Greens to offer an account of the recent evolution of the Green Party of England and Wales and the Scottish Green Party. While the book suffers from some repetition of content and its findings are […]
Book review | Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C Scott contributes to his longstanding intellectual project of re-evaluating the role of the state in political thought by looking at the development of the early agrarian states to challenge narratives of progress founded on state formation. While acknowledging that a number of objections can be […]
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