The Optimist: One Man’s Search for the Brighter Side of Life by Laurence Shorter
Canongate, £10.99
LAURENCE SHORTER is a 30-something jack-of-several-trades still living with his father and wondering what to do with his life. One morning he wakes up more acutely aware than usual that the world is a depressing place where corporate failure, climate change and cancer seem the order of the day.
Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2009
Photographers’ Gallery, London
NOW in its 13th year, the annual Deutsche Börse Photography Prize of £30,000 acknowledges the work of a living photographer, of any nationality, who has made a significant contribution, through either an exhibition or publication, to photography in Europe over the past year. There is little guidance on what constitutes a “significant contribution”, but the artists must show evidence of a consistent and strongly argued involvement with the medium.
Trumbo
Jermyn Street Theatre, London
THE McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s were an unsavoury episode in American post-war history – and were met with a strong response by liberal journalists and playwrights. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is perhaps the best of the works inspired by the crazed Senator Joseph McCarthy who led the anti-red crusade. But there were some casualties with less clear-cut stories.
WHEN Two Lovers premiered in competition at Cannes last May, writer-director James Gray became, after Joel Coen, only the second American this decade to compete for the Palme d’Or in consecutive years. The 2007 festival hosted We Own The Night, a cop/family drama that went on to become one of that year’s most accomplished – and most inexplicably under-appreciated – multiplex releases.
Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity
by Sander L Gilman
Polity, £14.99
ASTUTE Tribune readers will remember that I recently reviewed Susie Orbach’s Bodies (Tribune, February 13). As I am now focusing on another book linked with obesity – here, Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity by Sander L Gilman – you may well be wondering whether I am Tribune’s very own fatso. Don’t. I am merely keen to keep an eye on the scales as I have a few pounds to lose and, as such, need to avoid the chocolate cupboard as otherwise I will become part of the obese which fascinates Sander Gilman.
WITH the rapid approach of European election day on June 4, something akin to panic about the British National Party appears to be gripping folk up ’ere. There is unquestionably reason to be anxious, because the far-right filth took tens of thousands of votes across the region – 20,000 in Leeds alone – in the local elections last year, when not all council seats were being contested.