Review: The Politics of Down Syndrome by Kieron Smith
Disability rights activists stress ‘nothing about us without us,’ and this should include critical discussions of the political issues surrounding disability.
Category: Books
Review: Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues
Half Blood Blues is an excellent entry in a body of literature that might seem tired by now, illustrating what a great author, and a great tale, can unearth in seemingly overworked ground.
Review: The Red Market by Scott Carney
Carney powerfully argues that the “red market” traffics in the commodification of bodies, their parts, and their fluids in a world that has increasingly relied on black market commodities to create and maintain flows of capital to the already-wealthy at the direct expense of some of the poorest and most disadvantaged people across the globe.
The Further Adventures of Hermione Granger
If bookish, overeager boys would truly refuse to read about a bookish, overeager main character, simply because she was female… well, that says as much about contemporary gender relations as anything else. And what it says is depressing.
In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series
Looking back over the series–from Hermione Granger and the Philosopher’s Stone through to Hermione Granger and the Deathly Hallows–the startling thing about it is how original it is.
Review: Embassytown by China Miéville
Embassytown is unabashedly an intellectual exercise, bursting with ideas.
Housework and horror: Charlaine Harris’s Dead Reckoning
In Dead Reckoning, the mix of housework and horror comes into its own.
Review: Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (updated paperback edition)
Though he does refer to very recent pop culture and political examples, the problems that Žižek addresses are sadly likely to prove durable: environmental crisis, growing economic inequality, problems surrounding intellectual property, and advances in science that challenge our sense of what it means to be human.
Review: Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots: Essays on Marcella Althaus-Reid
Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots is an intriguing collection of mismatched elements that sheds new light on sexuality, gender and race in religious locations.
Silence is the problem: the darkness of young adult fiction and why #YAsaves
The underlying assumptions behind the Wall Street Journal piece seem to be rooted in the idea that children read books with heavy content and ‘go bad,’ when in fact the opposite is true. Some children lead dark lives and they read books with intense themes to find protagonists they identify with in an often hostile world.