Robert Chesshyre
Road to Nowhere
The Last Days of Detroit: Motor Cars, Motown and the Collapse of an Industrial Giant
By Mark Binelli
The Bodley Head 318pp £20
Detroit is an urban nightmare. Half the population has fled; acre upon acre have been razed by arsonists; each day brings fresh murders; half the children live in poverty and half the adults are functionally illiterate; City Hall has long been beset by corruption; racism is endemic. It does not need J G Ballard to conjure up this hell, just a reporter with a shrewd eye and an open notebook.
Mark Binelli is the man for the job: born in the city’s suburbs – the descendant of a tribe of Italian migrants who cornered the knife-sharpening business in the last century – he departed, started writing for Rolling Stone magazine and returned to chronicle the ‘last days’ of his native
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Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
@StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at.
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‘I have fond memories of discussing Lorca and the state of Andalusian theatre with Antonio Banderas as Lauren Bacall sat on the dressing-room couch.’
@henryhitchings on Simon Russell Beale.
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We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
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