THE EDGE magazine | Reviews

Patricia Morrisroe’s book is about as close to autobiography as we get. And as autobiography, Mapplethorpe paints an astonishingly unsympathetic portrait of its subject.

The Stairs

Peter Greenaway's book about his exhibition

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Nik Cohn Yes We Have No

Nik Cohn’s ventures into this vale of Albion find a country ill at ease with itself. Written partly for The Guardian and Sunday Times.

Bill Drummond 45

Drummond muses on nationalism and art; visits Serbia; records a soundtrack Bad Wisdom (co-written by Mark Manning) with a host of fictitious Finnish punk bands; burns ‘a million quid’; drives round the M25; and tours London on Christmas Eve, distributing free Tennant’s Super to the homeless, including an amusing stint outside the Crisis shelter.

Brian Eno A Year With Swollen Appendices

Brian’s diary

Malcolm Hardee with John Fleming I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake

Nominally the autobiography of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s harmonica player, who we might call the Godfather of alternative comedy.

Steven Hawking A Brief History of Time

Gary Indiana Let it Bleed

Essays 1985-1995, mostly from the Village Voice; Gary Indiana is one of those who wakes by the dawn's early light in a state of perpetually enamoured disdain.

Roger Wollen (Editor) Derek Jarman: A Portrait

Largely successful attempt to contextualise a genuine Renaissance man’s life. 151 illustrations archiving his painting; nine essays on various strands of his work.

Derek Jarman & Howard Sooley Derek Jarman’s Garden

The last book Jarman worked on. Jarman’s words occupy only a fraction of these 144 pages; the bulk are given over to photographs of the garden he fashioned from the rocky beach beside his fisherman’s cottage in Kent.

Greil Marcus The Dustbin of History

'Cultural awakening comes not when one learns the contours of the master-narrative, but when one realises -- thanks to a teacher, a book, or the disruptions of an unpredicted historical event -- that what one has always been told is incomplete, backward, false, a lie.'

Nicholas Negroponte Being Digital

Negroponte’s collected and expanded columns from Wired magazine.

Laurence O’Toole

Pornocopia (2 reviews)

The porn business and the new puritanism.

Steven Shaviro Doom Patrols

A theoretical fiction about postmodernism.

Iain Sinclair & Rachel Lichtenstein Rodinsky’s Room

The mystery of David Rodinsky and his room; the Jewish East End; Sinclair on London.

Iain Sinclair Lights Out for the Territory

Sinclair on London, with Marc Atkins.

Iain Sinclair & Marc Atkins Liquid City

Photo-negative of Lights Out for the Territory; Atkins on London, with Sinclair.

Iain Sinclair Baby Doll (photos by Peter Whitehead, afterword by Sinclair)

Sinclair on Whitehead’s photos.

Iain Sinclair Sorry Meniscus

Sinclair on the Millennium Dome.

Peter Whitehead Baby Doll (afterword by Iain Sinclair)

You kill ghosts by photographing them, making them real . . . Peter Whitehead’s photographic exorcism.

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Norman G Finkelstein The Holocaust Industry

‘Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering’. Finkelstein, the son of holocaust survivors, launches an assault on the accepted orthodoxy of the Final Solution and the Zionist groups that would profit from its exploitation. Incendiary but persuasive.

Michael Medved Hollywood vs America

Self-appointed public moralist Medved wages war.

Seamus Milne The Enemy Within

MI5, Maxwell and the Scargill Affair.

Haruki Murakami Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Early on Monday 20 March 1995, five senior members of the Aum Shinrikyo (‘Supreme Truth’) cult, under instruction from leader Shoko Asahara, introduced the deadly nerve agent sarin into the Tokyo subway.

Mark Pendergrast For God, Country and Coca-Cola

When it comes to be written, the history of the 20th century will be viewed through its indigenous consumer culture.

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Michael Drosnin The Bible Code

'One can imagine smoke rising from Michael Drosnin’s laptop after the People’s Princess ((c) T. Blair) so thrillingly pancaked into that Parisian tunnel wall.'

Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval & John Grigsby The Mars Mystery

Big flying rocks might hit the Earth. They might have hit Mars already.

Sandy Robertson The Aleister Crowley Scrapbook

Many photos, and various other things about the Great Beast.

Andrew Sinclair The Discovery of the Grail

A survey of Grail myths and legends through the ages.

Colin Wilson From Atlantis to the Sphinx

A Wilsonian exploration of ancient history.

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film books now have their own section and contents page.

music books now have their own section and contents page.

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Deny All Knowledge

Reading The X-Files; essays, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague & Marla Cartwright.

Stuart Jeffries Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy

A far more substantial text than you’re programmed for.

Potter on Potter

Dennis Potter on himself.

X-Treme Possibilities

The X-Files, by Paul Cornell, Martin Day & Keith Topping.

Reviews from THE EDGE

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