RaveThe Independent (UK)It’s uncomfortable to know that a violent hatred of women isn’t confined to the tame cliche of spittle-flecked keyboard warriors in greying Y-fronts, and that there are swathes of men in all layers of society who hold views that frankly make Margaret Atwood’s Gilead look progressive. Bates is best known for running the Everyday Sexism Project, a website predating the #MeToo movement that lets women share their dispiritingly commonplace experiences of prejudice and harassment. For her new book, she set out to find the source of an increasingly fanatical wave of misogyny ... as Bates makes devastatingly clear, misogyny hasn’t gone, it’s just gone underground and online. This in a world where police ask her what a Twitter handle is as she reports a flood of graphic rape and death threats, where parents are unlikely to realise that the YouTube algorithm is sending their kids down a rabbit hole of extreme content. Page after page rings with eloquent outrage at a society almost deliberately deaf to the toxic threat of the manosphere ... While Bates goes out of her way to fill in the nuances, documenting the decent men and lost boys who pop up in the most unsavoury chatrooms, her focus is unequivocally on women ... Let’s hope this book stirs a reaction of a different kind, opening our eyes to the threat of extreme misogyny and prodding officialdom into action. We all know that we shouldn’t feed the trolls, but tempting as it is, nor can we pretend they don’t exist.
Andrew Steele
PositiveThe Independent (UK)An ambitious and energetic new book by the scientist and writer Andrew Steele. While he’s not peddling some holy grail of immortality, he does give a startling round-up of the biological factors that make us age and the emerging techniques to tackle them, offering the prospect of both longer and healthier lives ... The science has a long way to go: as Steele points out, most of the research is in its early stages, bristling with the potential for pitfalls and unintended consequences. But there are a number of approaches that hold promise, with today’s huge advances in computing spurring new therapies. Steele posits that senolytics, or drugs that destroy senescent cells, could be with us in the next few years, albeit to tackle age-related conditions rather than ageing itself. After that, \'more advanced treatments like gene and stem cell therapies could be available on timescales measured in decades\'. Ultimately, instead of tackling the individual symptoms of ageing – a creaky knee here, a furred-up artery there – we will move towards “systems medicine” that stops us falling to bits in the first place ... Writing with the vim of a Bill Bryson and the technical knowledge of a scientist, Steele at least gives us a chance to grasp what’s at stake in this dazzling, daunting age where big data meets human biology.
Ali Smith
RaveThe Independent... bursts with the bruised hope of redemption ... burns with moral urgency at the same time as feeling timeless and playful ... What has happened to Britain? It’s a question that echoes through the seasonal series and reaches a perfectly pitched hymn of fury in Spring ... Smith is such a good writer that it’s hard to stop quoting. What’s particularly impressive is the way Spring mixes polemic and plot, creating characters we care about and never losing its madcap momentum ... an astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons.
