2005 MIT Press Sterling is best known for his work as an author of fictional works within the cyberpunk sci-fi genre, but Shaping Things is a book which largely examines technology, design and sustainability. Sterling is interested in interrogating the types of technological futures we are likely to encounter (a theme which of is of [...]
Archive for the ‘book review’ Category
Bruce Sterling – Shaping Things
Posted in book review, digital culture, environmentalism, tagged bruce sterling, design, shaping things, spime, sterling, sustainability on May 21, 2012 | 2 Comments »
Soul at Work – Franco “Bifo” Beradi
Posted in book review, cultural criticism, politics, tagged Anarchism, Autonomism, Berardi, book review, communism, philosophy on August 7, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Franco Berardi was a key member of the Italian Autonomist movement, alongside the likes of other authors such as Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi, Mario Tronti and Paulo Virno, and was a close associate of Felix Guattari, the French philosopher. Berardi’s work has only recent been translated from Italian into English, and Soul at Work was [...]
Manuel Castells – Communication Power
Posted in book review, media, media activism, tagged castells, communication power, media, network, network society, politics on May 31, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Communication Power is the latest book from Manuel Castells, the Spanish sociologist most famous for his trilogy of books on the Information Age, which give a theoretical overview and empirical evidence for the transition from an Industrial society to an Informational one, which Castells describes as ‘the rise of the network society.’ communication Power seeks [...]
Capital and Language – Christian Marazzi
Posted in book review, politics, tagged capital, capitalism, economics, language, marazzi, politics, post-fordism on May 5, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Christian Marazzi is one of the group of Italian Post-Fordist theorists along with Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and France Beradi. Capital and Language first published in Italian in 2002 is the first of Marazzi’s works to be published in English. The starting point of the economic analysis presented by Marazzi in this text is that [...]
Commonwealth – Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Posted in activism, book review, politics, tagged activism, commons, commonwealth, communism, Hardt, multitude, Negri, Th on April 13, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Commonwealth is the third in the series of socio-political analyses from Hardt and Negri which began with Empire (2000) and continued with Multitude (2004). To briefly summarise the series so far; Empire provided an overview of the changes to the structures of power and economic forces from the 1980′s onwards which Hardt and Negri characterise [...]
Mark Lynas – Six Degrees
Posted in book review, climate change, tagged climate, climate change, global warming, Lynas on September 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Six degrees – Our Future on a Hotter Planet, is the title of Mark Lynas’s 2007 book (this review is from the updated 2008 version) which seeks to give a broad overview of what mainstream scientific opinion (ie those which have appeared in reputable peer reviewed journals) suggests the world might look like over the [...]
Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the edge of Chaos – Graeme Chesters and Ian Welsh
Posted in activism, book review, cultural criticism, environmentalism, media activism, tagged Chesters, complexity, ecology, globalization, media, politics, protest, Welsh, WTO on November 20, 2008 | 1 Comment »
This book, published by Routledge in 2006, is a recent attempt at a sociological analysis of the alternative globalization movement (AGM) using a theoretical framework based on an almagamation of the works of Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri and Gregory Bateson, with complexity theory via D&G deployed to provide qualitative analysis of events such [...]
The Three Ecologies – Felix Guattari
Posted in activism, book review, climate change, cultural criticism, Ecophilosophy, environmentalism, media activism, tagged activism, book review, climate change, ecology, guattari, philosophy on October 7, 2008 | 19 Comments »
The Three Ecologies is one of the final works published by Felix Guattari (1930-1992), a French philosopher, political militant and institutional psychoanalyst. While Guattari is perhaps best known for his co-authored projects with Gilles Deleuze; Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy; The Three Ecologies provides an excellent insight into Guattari’s stance on politics, [...]
The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein
Posted in activism, book review, tagged activism, book review, Naomi Klein, neoliberalism, shock doctrine on July 9, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Naomi Klein’s latest book features a review on the back which says ‘If you only read one non-ficition book this year, make it this one.’ While I’m normally suspicious of such superlative praise, this book may well justify it. First things first. This is not a chirpy or upbeat book. The first 442 pages are [...]
Empire – Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Posted in activism, book review, cultural criticism, tagged activism, book review, communism, Empire, Hardt, multitude, Negri, postmodernism on July 4, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Hardt and Negri’s much lauded text has been a major talking point amongst radical left wing theorists and activists since its release in 2000, being described by some as a Capital for the 21st century, taking its dual heritage from Karl Marx and the radical materialist poststructuralism of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The departure [...]
