Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Menopause and ADHD: How to navigate hormone flux and neurodivergence is a book by Helen Wall.

Wall is a GP and menopause specialist, and this book shares her professional expertise in an accessible wall. It is written with an ADHD/menopause brain in mind: under 200 pages divided into eight chapters, each one with a summary at the start and a bullet pointed summary at the end. It is written from a medical perspective and talks a lot about hormones and their impact, but in a way that is easy to follow and includes practical advice on identification, speaking to your GP, diagnosis and treatment options.

It doesn’t have the same depth as Autistic Menopause, which is based on lived-experience research and participant stories, and also provides a comprehensive introduction to menopause if you are new to the topic. But given how easy to read this book is, it is well worth getting both.

Early Riser is a fantasy novel by Jasper Fforde, set in an alternative history where the climate is much colder over winter and humans hibernate. The story follows the protagonist as he joins the Winter Consul Service who stay up through the winter to and keep everyone safe.

This is the second Jasper Fford novel I have read, after The Constant Rabbit, and I enjoyed this one even more. In fact, I think this is pretty high up my all time favourite fiction reads. Great storytelling and great world building in a place that feels very familiar but also intriguing. Well worth a read.

Psychology’s Quiet Conservatism: How a Supposedly Woke Science Promotes Capitalism and Protects Privilege is a book by Brian M. Hughes, Professor of Psychology at the University of Galway. Which I’ve been to, to do the parkrun, of course.

Psychology has been accused by some of having a liberal bias. Hughes opens the book by looking at the evidence, or rather lack of evidence, for this.

He then goes on to talk about how psychology is traditionally highly individualistic. It is the science of individual behaviour. Anything from psychological distress (mental illness) to police violence is looked at in terms of individual actions rather than as systemic issues. Entire branches, like positive psychology, are built around what can the individual do to be happy, rather than what can we do as a society to ensure everyone is happy.

This leads into a capitalist mindset. Mental health is often measured in terms of economic productivity: depression is costing the economy X amount of money and if we spend Y amount of money on mental health services we can get people back into work. This was the specific aim when setting up IAPT (now NHS Talking Therapies) and is a common discussion point, while completely missing the human side of psychological distress.

He also draws attention to the cigarette industry which spent millions funding psychological research by Hans Eysenck claiming that stress causes cancer, not cigarettes. This is the same industry that spent a huge amount of money trying to undermine government science and helped make climate denial mainstream. This latter point isn’t discussed in the book, but it’s shocking just how much damage the cigarette industry has done across a range of fields.

Hughes also points out that we’re still a very white profession and one that seems obsessed with gender differences, despite so many of us individually seeing gender as a social construct. This leads us into racism without necessarily meaning to: so much of psychology assumes a western approach to solving problems is applicable to every other culture in the world.

It also made me think about the peer review process. Anyone who has written a journal article knows how brutal this process is. And this is regarded as good: we don’t care about people’s feelings, we just want the science. While the intention is good, it means that authors have to have enough self-esteem and enough social capital to endure the process. This inevitably punishes minorities harder, leading to a reduction in submissions. Which reinforces the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) bias we already have. If our objective is to get as much truth as possible, we may want to re-examine this balance.

Psychology might be more popular than sociology, anthropology, political science, or critical theory. But this might be because it conceals real problems rather than revealing them, drawing attention away from structural issues and pointing the blame toward individuals. Psychology research is often done in an American white capitalist echo chamber. It supports existing structures of power, rather than challenging them. Hence, far from having a liberal bias, psychology is deeply entrenched in conservatism and we desperately need to redress this balance.

Hughes starts in quite an academic style. He is rigorous in his referencing but some might find it a little dry. As the book goes on, though, I felt that more of his personality came out without compromising the academic standard. He also writes in very short chapters, which I loved.

The Castle is a novel by Franz Kafka. It tells of a surveyor known as K. who arrives in a village and finds he was summoned by accident. He finds it impossible to navigate the bureaucracy of the castle’s systems, trying in vein to reach the castle authorities.

I was intrieged to see how Kafka could fill 200,000 words on this, but he does and he does it very well. Unfortunately, the novel was unfinished at the time of Kafka’s death. Usually, I would expect either the editor to add a note at the end or someone else to finish it off. This one just ends mid-sentence without any conclusion.

Super Food in Minutes: Easy Recipes, Fast Food, All Healthy is a cookbook by Donal Skehan. It’s really good. The food genuinely is quick and easy to make and there are loads of tasty recipes.

The Constant Rabbit is a novel by Jasper Fforde. It tells of an alternative reality in which “the event” has transformed rabbits, and a few other animals, into anthropomorphised versions of themselves. It explores the political implications of having what are seen as an under-class of a million rabbits, paralleling fears about immigration, and played out through the love story of the protagonist and the rabbit who moves in next door. Well worth a read.

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences is a book by Anton Jäger. In it, he charts the political landscape, describing eras he calls politics, post-politics, anti-politics, and into the current era, hyperpolitics.

People used to be part of social movements such as political parties, trade unions, sports clubs and churches. Now everything is ephemeral: movements rise and die, such as the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter protests on the left, and the Tea Party and Proud Boys on the right. People are highly politically engaged but not part of durable movements. This mirrors the attention span of social media and market trading.

Jäger doesn’t touch on this in the book, but it should be noted that one of the reasons Black Lives Matter doesn’t have clear leaders is to stop them all getting murdered, as happened in the civil rights movement.

Attempts have been made to change things: Corbyn and Momentum in Labour, and Bernie Sanders in the US. But, on the whole, the left has been poorly adapted to this new world. The right has been damaged, too, but has still been able to push policies that are more market friendly. Momentum did not rebuild the base into a coherent political movement and Sanders isn’t even a Democrat.

Jäger argues that the deinstitutionalisation of politics was done deliberately by neoliberalism, that wanted to hollow out social institutions so the market could be protected from democracy. Political parties became an oligarchy of power-sharing by parties basically running along the central line.

What is the answer? Political parties and trade unions may be the answer. But without factories and with suburbs, these may have been a product of their time. We do not have the same communities or shared workspaces we previously had. As Mark Fisher notes, factory strikes worked in a way that university lecturer strikes do not. It might be we need a new paradigm, such as social reproductive contact points (schools, daycares, etc). But work is where conflicting needs clash, so should not be written off.

Even political parties are ephemeral these days. We have seen UKIP come and go, then the Brexit Party come and go, and at time of writing we have Reform. Elsewhere in Europe, Pirate Parties have won elections before fading away. Any solution based on this not only has to build a political party with local engagement, but also has to rebuild class consciousness.

Ever since I watched Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, I knew I had to do Wild. And by do, I mean read the book Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed.

It is a memoir in which Strayed recounts her journey hiking 1,800 kilometres of the Pacific Crest Trail. It opens with a heartbreaking recounting of her mother’s death due to lung cancer that itself was a deeply uncomfortable read, both emotionally and from the physical descriptions. But I’m glad I stuck with it as it opens up into a warming tale as Strayed rediscovers herself.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? is a 2009 book by Mark Fisher.

It explores the idea that capitalism has become so all-consuming, that we can no longer imagine an alternative even as we watch neoliberalism burn the planet to the ground. As captured in the phrase, “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” This, like so much of the book, has been prophetic, as we watch climate breakdown occur before our eyes.

Capitalism no longer tries to justify itself, or hide its flaws, but simply says that it is the only viable system and therefore we have to accept it. It even appropriates those who challenge it: we can buy Fair Trade or Product Red and feel we are doing our bit to mitigate the damage while consuming.

Similarly, Netflix is now awash with documentaries about the problems of everything from fast fashion to climate change, all while being streamed to us from huge data centres. We can then go on social media and be angry about it. But far from opposing the situation, this action provides big tech with free content that they can then monetise for ads.

But maybe it is all worth it. Capitalism claims to offer us an efficient market. But does it fulfill this promise?

The answer is no. Anyone who has phoned a call centre experiences the endless bureaucracy of capitalism. You have to fight your way through a phone menu to speak to a human. But even then, the human can almost never help. They have to send it off to another team and make an empty promise to get back to you. There is no point being angry at them because they are just as much a victim of the system as you are. It’s the same problem the farmers faced in The Grapes of Wrath.

Under market based systems, endless targets are set. And the machinery of organisations is focused on achieving these targets rather than doing the thing itself. Universities become more interested in league tables and student satisfaction surveys than teaching students. This is what Fisher describes as Market Stalinism. The market model creates more bureaucracy, not less.

A good example of this might be marketing. Here is a whole profession that is entirely unnecessary under alternative economic systems. You might argue that people would still need to know about products. But because we can’t trust companies to be honest, we need independent reviews such as Which Magazine or Consumer Reports to give us reliable information. Under capitalism, this parallel system already exists and marketing largely exists to prevent the efficient delivery of high-quality products by manipulating us through branding.

Fisher also discussed the privatisation of stress. Anxiety and depression are a social problem, but neoliberalism has convinced us that the problem is us: that we are somehow defective, and then tries to sell us purely individual solutions in the form of anti-depressants or therapy. But, as discussed in The Inner Level, inequality is shown to be causative to higher rates of mental illness. Given the book was published in 2009, just as IAPT was rolling out, this is perhaps one of the most prophetic points of the book.

Fisher offers some suggestions for fighting back. He suggests we resist managerialism. Strikes, which worked well in an industrial era, may not be as effective today. When teachers strike, schools get to reduce the wage bill and targets are not affected. This is critical because managers exist to fulfil targets, not to teach students. A better approach might be to target the things managers care about: metrics, reputational damage, and paperwork strikes, as these things would target things managers are actually measured on.

Seventeen years on, this is still a highly relevant read. Indeed, it only becomes more relevant as time goes on.

Autistic Menopause: A Guide to the Menopausal Transition for Autistic People and those Supporting Them is a book by Julie Gamble-Turner and Rachel Moseley.

The book is a fantastic resource. It predominantly draws on the experience of autistic participants through qualitative interviews and is heavily grounded in direct quotations. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of what menopause is, what it is like to experience, why it might be more difficult for autistic people, and what both individuals and societies can do to improve things.