CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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A useful work of political ecology
MARTIN GRAHAM recommends a book that makes a critique of neoclassical economics and attempts to envision a sustainable global future
The global average in 2021 was 50,000 kilocalories per head, in the US, however it was 190,000 kilocalories per head
[NASA Earth Observatory/CC]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
The Physics of Capitalism: How a New Political Ecology Can Change the World
by Erald Kolasi
Monthly Review Press £27.99
READERS who struggle with the maths and abstractions inherent in the physics of the 20th and 21st centuries — Einstein, Niels Bohr and all that flowed from their work — should not be deterred by the title of this book.
Erald Kolasi draws only on classical physics to show how energy flows determine the fate of complex systems, including economic systems and life itself. It also equips him to provide a devastating critique of neoclassical economics and enables him to give us a vision of a sustainable global future — all without resorting to a single equation!
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