book review – literature

PHILOSOPHY: In the book The Poetics of Reason, Stefán Snævarr goes against a too strict concept of rationality: To live rationally is not only to find the best means to realize one's goals, but also to make life meaningful and coherent. Parts of this work should enter all disciplines concerned with models, metaphors and narratives.

FEMICID: Murders of women do not only occur structurally and not only based on misogynistic motives – they are also largely trivialized or go unpunished.

MEMORIES: Nostalgia has been made into a commercial product that makes the past a constant and pressing presence. Do we really belong in a past tense? Memories are today produced, preserved and managed by commercial actors, by cultural products – which, to say it with Marx, are fetishized. Pop cultural products of the past are recycled, made into collectibles and picture books for the coffee table, sold as retro designs.

THE CLIMATE CRISIS: This book makes all other climate literature seem dangerously anthropocentric. We obviously haven't been very good at monitoring the earthly paradise.

INTELLIGENCE: In the United States, 18 different U.S. agencies at the government level are engaged in intelligence activities. In 1996 there were 6 million decisions to declassify material – by 2016 this had grown to 55 million!

GERMANY: How 'war-ready' should a country be? With a number of top positions in international politics, crisis management and security, security expert Carlo Masala is regarded as an undeniable authority in the field.

ECOLOGY: Ove Jacobsen has created an overview of 55 different green thinkers. In the book we can read that we must move from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric perspective – so that solidarity, cooperation and compassion include all forms of life.

LIBERALISM: Globally and in the West, liberalism is on the retreat. In the West, liberalism has been replaced by an intolerant hyperliberalism, where citizens have problems living side by side with those who think differently.

COMMUNITY: What happens when there is further pressure on falling profit rates brought on by cheaper products for consumers, triggered by greater competition? And with a kind of intensified state control of virtually all socio-economic aspects of life?

ECOLOGY: A tangle of interconnected life. Developments in ecology and technology herald a new Copernican revolution: Language, the bastion of supposed human superiority, also belongs to nature and machines. Can an expanded definition of intelligence improve our relationship with other beings?

SOLIDARITY: For a recipe for an ecological revolution, the subject that can constitute the active social force that can move society towards a radically different future is missing. Radical futurisms are here a new thinking for what may come.

SHAME: The Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg has noble motives for her outbursts against the establishment, but she is also part of a modern trend where shame and shaming have become part of everyday politics and the often dystopian debate on social media. This book takes a closer look at shame.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: In this book, Robert Leib worries that our trust in artificial intelligence could backfire on us. 'Sophie' is a collective consciousness, one 'among many'.

USA: What does it mean to be an American? Who are they, how did they get to where they are today, where have they left cultural traces? Here we see the voices of the civil rights movement that inspired the hippies in the 70s, the champions of gay rights and feminists for several generations.

SUSTAINABLE: A new movement within agriculture that draws on so-called regenerative principles works to increase the humus content, the microbiological life in the soil and cultivate the soil's ability to bind CO2.

SICILY: The poet Joachim Sartorius has written a feather-light book about the magic in the Sicilian city of Syracuse.