“Now, several years on and with hundreds of thousands dead, something has changed irrevocably in his country. It will not return to what it was, not now, not ever. How can Syria ever be what it once was? It has been burnt alive by hatred.”
I was initially sceptical about this book & had no hitherto experience of it’s author. My suspicion was motivated only once I had brought the book & had a quick glance at who was recommending it on the jacket along with Giovanni’s sprawling CV, which had some pretty unsavoury institutions mentioned. Continue reading The Morning They Came For Us – Dispatches from Syria (Janine Di Giovanni)
So I am thinking on which angle to begin writing on this historical book? should it be on the “conspiracy theory”? or rather when the “theory”, after years of strenuous denial by the perpetrators, media & the regulators & legal operators that should have been bringing them down, gets total & utter public confirmation & an ‘oh yes! You were actually 100% right all along’ moment? Or should it be the 
A front-line testament of a revolution from writer & journalist Andrey Kurkov. Apparently never intended to be compiled into a book, Kurkov began writing a diary on Ukraine’s 2013 pro-European protests from a first-hand perspective (his flat being just a few hundred yards from Independence Square in Kiev). Getting accurate information on Ukraine can be difficult, as both Europe/The West & especially Russia deploy so much disinformation, hyper-bias, omission & propaganda. 
So two words to kick the door in with – VITAL & MANDATORY!!! Capitalism & calamity, profit & crisis – are becoming like conjoined twins. War-pollution-incarceration… inflict, sustain, clean-up/eradicate, reaping revenues at every stage. You notice how many of today’s greatest problems/threats/fiascos crawled out of yesterday’s solutions or technological advancements (ISIS/Terrorism, Climate Extermination, Food Insecurity etc’ etc’ etc). 
Somehow, despite my huge interest in the topic, I only discovered Joanna Blythman recently. Not unlike fellow peer Felicity Lawrence (who works more on the abuse of workers & modern slavery in large-scale commercial food production), Blythman shares the front-line of food journalism/activism. This is her fifth book on food & deals predominantly with the hidden ingredients & deceptive stealth-feeding from an increasingly abnormal industry. 