A Book I'm Looking Forward To

From Jim Johnson's (Notes On) Politics, Theory & Photography comes exciting news - a new book from John Berger, due out in June. Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance.

More from the Verso website:

From Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and 7/7, to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the countless personal choices, encounters, illuminations, sacrifices, new desires, griefs and memories that occur in the course of political resistance to empire and colonialism.

These sensuous reflections reveal the political at the core of human existence, from the relentlessness of daily life in the West Bank, to the potential force of desire, to the unflinching gaze of Pasolini's political film. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on what political resistance means today, by one of the most compelling radical voices of our age.

I did think to write at greater length about Berger himself and why his work matters so much to me, but I had trouble distilling this into a single blog post. At which point, I got the idea of creating a separate site (organised more appropriately to the task) on which to publish my notes on Berger, Garner and Illich - and the connections and resonances between their work. Because they are generally shelved in different sections of the bookshop, these connections have seldom been made, but I have found them deeply helpful in making sense of the world we're in.

So one of the reasons for the relatively neglected state of this blog is that I have started work on that site, under the title 'Redrawing the Maps'. Given the number of unfinished grand projects gathering dust in different corners of my life, I'm keeping this simple. As soon as I've pulled together enough material to be of use or interest to anyone - hopefully within the next few weeks - I'll make it public, while continuing to add to it as and when I get the chance.