mlx-community/zer0-books huggingface dataset:
Long Struggle, The
by Amil Khan

The best thing America can do for the Middle East is lose

In The Long Struggle, Amil Khan explains how a shell shocked Muslim world struggled for over a century between emulation and rejection of the West while international events continued to stoke anger among people who were forced to give up the wealth and global influence they felt was their birth right. But it is not going to continue like that, Khan argues. The forces unleashed by the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have forced Muslims to snap out of their dysfunctional relationship with the West. Muslims are finding that Western power is not all conquering and those who present themselves as polar opposites to all things Western are not necessarily Islamic. As the struggle ends, the opportunity to build a new relationship arises. Amil Khan spent 10 years working as a journalist in the Middle East, Africa and Britain before pursuing in depth research and working on counter extremism projects.

Reviews:
In a surprisingly readable format for a scholarly presentation, the author takes the reader on a fascinating journey through personal conversations with Jihadi fighters, fellow journalists and young teenaged Muslim extremists in the UK.

This is a well-researched book and an excellent read for those wanting to understand Muslim world history and outlook; keep up-to-date on unfolding events in the Middle East; and separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to truth and fiction about the Islamic world and organizations.

~ June Maffin, Bookpleasures
For those who do not have an extensive knowledge of the West’s dealings with the Middle Eastern countries in the last century or so this is an excellent, concise and balanced introduction. The current focus on radicalized Islam tends to obscure our understanding of the genuine historical grievances and frustrations that have prevented civil freedom and statehood emerging in the Middle East. This book deftly clarifies a complex picture, especially at a time of tremendous change.

~ Simon Iredale, The Goodbookstall
Across the Arab and Islamic worlds, argues the author, nearly all political trends, whether secular or Islamist, share a sense of humiliation at having lost former glory at the hands of the West and therefore tend to define their politics in terms of their relationship to the West, alternately calling for emulating or rejecting the West. He offers a capsule history describing the relations with the West and how it impacted politics in the region, contending that the dysfunctional relationship with the West is beginning to change as it becomes evident that the West is incapable of actually controlling events in the Arab or Islamic worlds. The time has come, he says, for politics in the Arab and Islamic worlds to be defined by inner dynamics and not in relation to the West.

~ Book News Inc
Ludopolitics
by Liam Mitchell

If the fantasy of control is the problem, then videogame controllers are the solution.

What can videogames tell us about the politics of contemporary technoculture, and how are designers and players responding to its impositions? To what extent do the technical features of videogames index our assumptions about what exists and what is denied that status? And how can we use games to identify and shift those assumptions without ever putting down the controller? Ludopolitics responds to these questions with a critique of one of the defining features of modern technology: the fantasy of control. Videogames promise players the opportunity to map and master worlds, offering closed systems that are perfect in principle if not in practice. In their numerical, rule-bound, and goal-oriented form, they express assumptions about both the technological world and the world as such. More importantly, they can help us identify these assumptions and challenge them. Games like Spec Ops: The Line, Braid, Undertale, and Bastion, as well as play practices like speedrunning, theorycrafting, and myth-making provide an aesthetic means of mounting a political critique of the pursuit and valorization of technological control.

Reviews:
What if we took a closer look at both the design and the play of videogames to find out how politics and technology intersect there? Ludopolitics takes us beyond the more familiar criticism of the way games represent the world to inquire into what kind of world is enacted there, and what other worlds might be possible. The stakes of the game, and the stakes of the world, appear to be a kind of algorithmic control. But perhaps games at their best are a kind of art work where designer and player can meet and learn something about how the mechanics of control might function. Ludopolitics is a theory-assisted speed run through these big picture questions of our time. ~ McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory
Made in Brooklyn
by Amanda Wasielewski

The artist is dead. There are only makers now.

Made in Brooklyn is a belated critique of the Maker Movement: from its origins in the nineteenth century to its impact on labor and its entanglement in the neoliberal economic model of the tech industry. Part history, part ethnography, Made in Brooklyn provides a unified analysis of how the tech industry has infiltrated artistic practice and urban space.

Reviews:
This was a great book. Highly researched, Made in Brooklyn offers a perspective on how and why makers culture took over bad areas of NY (and other cities in the world - the motives seem applicable in most big cities with hip neighbourhoods) and transformed them into middle-class, eclectic, gentrified areas. I'll recommend this book to all of my friends who believe that buying triple organic vegetables is better than (average) organic products from local markets.

~ Silvia Patriche , NetGalley
Anybody interested in artist-led urban gentrification in general, and the poster child for this process - Brooklyn, NYC - should read this book. Combining journalistic, ethnographic and academic perspectives, the book is an engaging, provocative, and pleasurable. Read it and you will see your own city in new ways. ~ Lev Manovich
Since the 19th century Paris prototype, the bohemian romance of young artists navigating the perils and possibilities of the great metropolis has proven both remarkably durable and highly dynamic. In this excellent book, Amanda Wasielewski updates bohemia for the 21st century, via the notorious art scene taking shape against the jagged backdrop of a rapidly changing Brooklyn. Digging beneath the facile and pejorative “hipster” stereotype that dogs Millennial artists, she depicts how young creatives operate in the context of hyper-gentrification and an emergent “gig” economy shaped in equal parts by new media and contingent labor. Ever resourceful, these digitally savvy and increasingly entrepreneurial artists invent new styles of self-expression and self-promotion, while struggling, not always successfully, to preserve their autonomy. Avoiding the traps of either utopian boosterism or cynical critique, Wasielewski gifts us with a measured, analytically incisive and vividly rendered account of a major new trends, in both cities and art. ~ Richard Lloyd, author of Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City
Magic Kingdom, The
by Dan Hind

What would you need if you wanted to live in a democracy? What would living in a democracy be like?

Anyone who knows anything about Britain knows that it is a democracy and a constitutional monarchy. The trouble is, it is neither. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is one of the most exotic nations on earth.

In the republican form of government a defined public exercise sovereign power. Most modern states describe themselves as democratic republics. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is an anomaly, in that formal sovereignty is still denied to its people.

In The Magic Kingdom Dan Hind explores what the republican tradition has to offer the British at a time of deep political, social and economic dislocation. He considers what innovations are necessary if liberty is to be secured in current conditions. His argument will surprise many who consider themselves republicans. It will upset those who benefit from the current arrangements. It offers a way forward for those who can no longer tolerate steepening inequality and its associated ills.

Existing republican institutions have not been able to deliver public control of the state. If substantive democracy is to be possible in large and complex societies, the systems of communication, subsidy and credit must be made subject to popular oversight and control. In a disarmingly calm manner, Hind shows how this can be done, by minor adjustments to the existing institutions.

Perhaps, unlikely as it sounds, Britain will provide the venue for the world's first truly republican society.

Longlisted for the BREAD AND ROSES PRIZE 2015

Reviews:
Dan Hind’s short book The Magic Kingdom is perhaps the best read post-referendum. He not only dissects the contradictions of a non-existent British constitution but provides a practical vision for a modern, republican, future. ~ Mark Perryman, Philosophy Football
A good attempt to get people to think, the precondition for becoming truly human. Dan Hind is one of England's very best public writers. ~ Anthony Barnett
Meaning of David Cameron, The
by Richard Seymour

What you won't have got in the televised debates, party manifestos, campaign trail propaganda and media coverage, portaining to Cameron the cipher and the social forces he represents.

David Cameron was sold to the British electorate as a thoroughly modern politician, part Blair, part Thatcher, a one nation conservative with a soft spot for social democracy, the green movement, big and small business, youth, minorities, traditionalists, the armed forces and the old. Has a politician ever been sold as so many things to so many people, at home in fashion magazines as he is at Party conferences? But despite being told, arguably more, about Cameron the man than any other politician he remains vacuous, strangely unformed, a cipher for the real interests and forces he represents. The Meaning of Cameron is an unmasking of the false politics Cameron embodies, and an examination of the face the mask has eaten into.

How does this critique of Cameron match up after five years in Government?

Reviews:
Synopsis: David Cameron has been sold to the British electorate as a thoroughly modern politician, part Blair, part Thatcher, a one nation conservative with a soft spot for social democracy, the green movement, big and small business, youth, minorities, traditionalists, the armed forces and the old. Has a British politician ever been sold as so many things to so many people, at home in fashion magazines as he is at Party conferences? But despite being told, arguably more, about Cameron the man than any other politician he remains vacuous, strangely unformed, a cipher for the real interests and forces he represents. "The Meaning of David Cameron" is an unmasking of the false politics Cameron embodies, and an examination of the face the mask has eaten into.

Critique: David Cameron was the unmeaning-to-architect for the British vote to leave the European Union. Not since Nevil Chamberlain's blunder with respect to misreading Adolph Hitler has the British political system been so misled. An informed and compelling analysis of a British politician, "The Meaning of David Cameron" is very ighly recommended personal reading lists and for college and university library collections.

Michael Dunford

Reviewer

~ Dunford's Bookself, Midwest Bookreview
If the bourgeoisie was indeed a bit more classically conspiratorial and besieged, they'd stop the presses on this one.

"The Meaning of David Cameron" takes its subject, a vague corporate personality known as David Cameron, as the starting point for an examination of the founding lexemes of contemporary political discourse.

...short and pungent apologia for the Marxist categories of class and class war.

...easy to follow if you are a political layman, ...eloquently phrased.

~ What reviewers say on Amazon
Media Against Democracy, The
by Thomas Field

A radical critique of existing institutions.

The Media does not know what democracy is. Indeed our societies have, for the most part, forgotten the meaning of democracy. Democracy is not a state form. Democracy is a mode of foundationless existential living. As such it needs the kind of attention which our self-satisfied media institutions, riven with complacent journalistic practices and corrupted by institutional privilege, are incapable of. We need to sweep away The Media to allow existential democracy to manifest itself. This will also entail the destruction of key aspects of the academic institution of Media and Cultural Studies, which has evidently failed to radically change the nature of media institutions and practices which was its avowed aim. It has failed because of the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underpin it and which were ultimately drawn from the failed project of structuralism. The images we create arise from chaos. Images of value are in Castoriadis’ expression ‘windows upon the chaos’.

The Media Against Democracy is engaged in rethinking the possibilities for aesthetic engagement with this chaos, proposing an existential-anarchic critique of media. Through our images and sounds we need to learn to understand ontological chaos, only then can we know that whatever we create, when we try to explain to each other how we should live, has no authority other than what we can accord it.

Reviews:
Melancology
by Scott Wilson

Melancology addresses Black Metal as a form of environmental writing and provides a provocative contribution to debates on ecology.

Melancology addresses the notorious musical genre black metal as a negative form of environmental writing that ‘blackens’ the cosmos. This book conjures a new word and concept that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction. Black metal resounds from the abyss and it is precisely only in relation to its sonic forces that the question of intervention in the environment arises in the articulation of melancology with ethics. That is, in deciding ‘which way out’ we should take, in deciding with what surpluses to dwell, with what waste, what detritus or decay in a process of unbinding with sonic forces that traverse an earth choking in wealth and death. The book thus provides a provocative and challenging contribution both to popular and intellectual debates on ecology.

The book contains key contributions from Nicola Masciandaro, author of Hideous Gnosis, Reza Negarestani and Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of this Planet, whose cover cn be seen on Jay-Z’s back promoting Run and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck.

Reviews:
Methods Devour Themselves
by Benjanun Sriduangkaew, J. Moufawad-Paul

A dialogue between story and essay, between speculative fiction and radical philosophy...

Methods Devour Themselves is a dialogue between fiction and non-fiction. Inspired by Quentin Meillassoux's Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction that was paired with an Isaac Asimov short story, this book examines the ways in which stories can provoke philosophical interventions and philosophical essays can provoke stories. Alternating between Benjanun Sriduangkaew's fiction and J. Moufawad-Paul's non-fiction, Methods Devour Themselves is an interstitial project that brings fiction and essay into a unique, avant-garde whole.

Reviews:
"Methods Devour Themselves is a unique intervention in the fields of philosophy and literature. Aside from a foreword by Moufawad-Paul and an afterword by Sriduangkaew, the book alternates between three short stories by Sriduangkaew and three essays by Moufawad-Paul. Rarely does it happen that an artist or writer carries out a sustained conversation with a given theoretical intervention through art (in this case, science fiction) and not wearing the hat, as it were, of the critic or theorist who reflectively theorizes about the literature that serves as the terrain and object of interpretation. Whereas Moufawad-Paul responds through theoretical analysis, Sriduangkaew interjects in fiction." ~ Devin Zane Shaw, https://www.c-scp.org/2018/08/30/benjanun-sriduangkaew-and-j-moufawad-paul-methods-devour-themselves
Taking their cue, and title, from Frantz Fanon, Benjanun Sriduangkaew and J. Moufawad-Paul have refused all methodological straitjackets in this genre-defying book. The result is a chaotically dialectical spiral of fiction-critique-fiction whose form is as speculative as its content, imagining new worlds from amid the crumbling wreckage of the old. ~ George Ciccariello-Maher, author of Decolonizing Dialectics and Building the Commune
Compelling science fiction and evocative instant postcolonial criticism entwined in a mutually reproductive double helix. Every page contains an intellectual thrill. ~ Nick Mamatas, author of Sensation and I Am Providence
Millennials and the Moments That Made Us
by Shaun Scott

A generation on the move, a country on the brink, and a young author's search to find out how we got here.

A generation on the move, a country on the brink, and a young author's search to find out how we got here.

Millennials and the Moments That Made Us is a cultural history of the United States, as seen through the eyes of the largest, most diverse, and most disprivileged generation in American history. The book is a relatable pop culture history that critiques the capitalist status quo our generation inherited - a critical tour of the music, movies, books, TV shows, and technology that have defined us and our times.

Reviews:
Shaun Scott is a budding master of prose. His sentences are tied up in humor, contemporary cultural criticism, head-shaking sadness, and hope. His new work might be the beacon Millennials turn to in staggering times, as his pages are filled with inspiringly precise language. ~ Jake Uitti, Contributing Writer, Washington Post
Millennials are presented as a cultural black box at best and a poorly-executed caricature at worse. With references ranging from Milton Friedman to "Hotline Bling," Shaun Scott creates the most accurate portrayal of the Millennial condition currently in print - what we've endured, what we've created, and, perhaps most essentially, what actionable policies we need to enact in order to thrive. ~ Hanna Brooks Olsen, Writer and Cultural Critic
The situation of Millennials in neoliberal capitalism is still under-theorized, and Scott’s analysis is informed theoretical work. ~ Sarah Grey, Writer, Founder of Grey Editing
Shaun Scott’s “Millennials and the Moments That Made Us” is a depiction of what life is like for Millennials in the age of corporatism, racism, and rampant consumerism. Where Orwell’s fictional 1984 leaves off, Scott begins; because you can’t change the future without having a firm understanding of the past. ~ Sylvia Hysen, Managing Editor, Millennial Magazine
Myth and Mayhem
by Ben Burgis, Conrad Bongard Hamilton, Matthew McManus, Marion Trejo

Myth and Mayhem takes Jordan Peterson's work seriously while criticizing it from a leftist perspective; offering the most sustained theoretical and political critique thus far.

Jordan Peterson rocketed to fame in the 2010s and has preached on everything from the evils of postmodern neo-Marxism to the mating habits of lobsters ever since then. The Left has since leveled many criticisms about the Canadian psychologist, characterizing him as everything from an apologist for the alt-right to simply not being interesting or profound.

Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson is intended as a comprehensive critical look at all aspects of his thought, from the philosophical depths to the mundane heights. Written by four authors who each look at a different element of his thought, it shows why taking Peterson seriously doesn't mean embracing him.

Includes an introduction by Slavoj Zizek

Reviews:
Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene
by William Brown

Through an analysis of Buster Keaton’s classic The Navigator through the combined lenses of posthumanism and critical race theory, Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene deconstructs white modernity and posits a ‘black’ future.

Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene radically re-interprets Buster Keaton's iconic 1924 film, The Navigator, through the combined lenses of posthumanism and critical race theory. This book deconstructs the film's underlying anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity while exposing the unthinking whiteness of theorists and philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze, who have given Keaton's work pride of place in the history of cinema. Through its daring and provocative analysis of Keaton's classic, Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene invites us to consider cinema itself, at least in its classical narrative form, as a tool for constructing and maintaining white supremacy while building the conceptual tools for a world beyond whiteness.

Reviews:
Negative Capitalism
by Dan Taylor

A lucid and groundbreaking analysis of contemporary neoliberalism and its devastating effects for young people today.

Thatcher's claim that 'There is No Alternative' to free-market capitalism has long rung hollow. Yet why is it that, despite the best efforts of protest movements, radical theorists and an increasingly liberal popular culture, when it comes to politics a consensus still reigns about the impossibility of change?

Written to provoke reflection and discussion, Negative Capitalism argues that cynicism is the key feeling of our era, and an effect of our collective disempowerment by the political establishment. Produced for an informed but not academic reader, the book charts the negation of democratic power in chapters covering debt, mental health, meaningless political languages, popular cynicism and pornography. It also grounds its account of neoliberalism in political theory and history, focusing particularly on Thatcher's monetarism. It raises pertinent doubts about blind optimism, and concludes with a fiery, startling polemic.

Reviews:
Negative Capitalism represents a new generation of critique by what I've termed graduates without a future. Taylor brings together incisive and provocative analysis alongside personal experience to explore how debt, cynicism, smartphones, psychopharmacology, underemployment and neoliberalism all represent a new era of negation. In a time of economic meltdown and mass struggle, this book offers one way out of the current crisis. ~ Paul Mason, journalist and author of Why its Kicking Off Everywhere
Seriously researched... its sections on London and gentrification, class and the riots, Ruin Porn and DIY Porn, the brave and risky notes on fascism, and the intriguing practical proposals near the end all really stand out. ~ Owen Hatherley, author of A New Kind of Bleak
Negative Capitalism is a timely reminder of how a logic of negation is as central to an analysis of culture, politics, and the economy as it is to the machinations of capital itself. ~ Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust Of This Planet