A welcome, accessible introduction to Erik Satie—his biography in the form of an illustrated children’s book.
Review: Strange Mr Satie (M. T. Anderson)
Review: The Lute and the Scars (Danilo Kiš)
This book consists of six stories written by Kiš between 1980 and 1986, transcribed and published after his death in 1989. Five of the stories—”The Stateless One”, “Jurij Golec”, “The Lute and the Scars”, “The Poet”, “The Debt”, and “The Marathon Runner and the Race Official”—are directly related to The Encyclopedia of the Dead, while “A and B” …
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Review: Perlawanan dalam Kepatuhan (Ariel Heryanto)
“Untuk kenang-kenangan pada suatu zaman yang dinamakan Orde Baru” Buku ini berisi seleksi kumpulan tulisan Ariel Heryanto yang pernah diterbitkan di berbagai majalah dan koran—antara lain, Kompas, Forum Keadilan, Dialog, Tiara, TEMPO, dsb—selama 14 Mei 1976 hingga 12 Juni 1998. Atau dengan kata lain, pada masa-masa kejayaan hingga jatuhnya Orde Baru. Tentu saja, banyak dari …
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Review: Asia as Methods: Towards Deimperialization
This book has developed out of thoughts and discourses developed over sixteen years in diverse contexts and dialogues with various critical circles in Asia, where Kuan-Hsing Chen has been engaged. Asia as method, Chen proposes, is building multiple reference points in Asia so that every society can become references for one another. It builds on …
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Review: Garden, Ashes (Danilo Kiš)
A semi-autobiographical story, Garden, Ashes is a recollection of Andy Scham, a young child living in Hungary during the World War II. Despite the ubiquitous shadows of Holocaust, Kiš’s masterful composition of vivid, precise minutiae of surrounding details and events, with an intense focus on the (eccentric) father, Eduard Scham, Garden, Ashes evokes the densely …
Review: Encyclopedia of the Dead (Danilo Kis)
A collection of metaphysical short stories set in various times and places, luminously darkened with the themes of fate and death’s impenetrability. With strong political undercurrents and recondite personal insights, Kiš’s reworked facts, Gnostic, Biblical, Koran myths and legends, political situations, rural folktales, depicting the delicate multitude and vicissitude of human life, perhaps with less …
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A History of Modern Russia (Robert Service)
Lucidly written with a lack of political bent and a handful of wry humour, this revised and updated history of Russia is a useful general reference on Soviet past with the main focus on the period of communist government.
Review: Voices from Chernobyl (Svetlana Alexievich)
This is not a book about Chernobyl, but about the world of Chernobyl,†a wide range of oral, first-hand testimony, accounts, sometimes occasional rant and condemnations from broad range of people involved and/or affected by Chernobyl
Review: Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creations (Olivia Judson)
Arranged in such a way as to mimic sex advice columns, with all sorts of frustrated, confused creatures (although that would be an exaggeration —plants are hardly discussed) writing for an advice on their sexual lives, the book gives you up-to-date information on evolutionary biology of sex.
Review: Madness Explained by Richard Bentall
The book is divided into four parts. Part one deals with the history of psychology: it sketches the simplifying effect that Kraepelin’s classification had on the theory and practice of psychiatry and its growth, the triumph of APA, centred around Euro/American-centric ideas, that doesn’t sufficiently take into account cross-cultural differences, and how the production of …
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