DIY: THE RISE OF LO-FI CULTURE
BY AMY SPENCER
Marion Boyars, £9.95
Spencer subverts the high-gloss media culture with her do-it-yourself guide for anarchistic amateurs of music and literature who just wanna have fun. The DIY ethos is defined as “the urge to create a new cultural form and transmit it to others on your own terms”. As bedroom bands or as bloggers, you might end up as media moguls, of course, but that’s not the point; lo-fi is a “celebration of the amateur that is at the heart of the DIY scene in both music and literature”. Spencer tells you how to get with high-tech promotion to create low-tech product that continues the great tradition of subversive, alternative cultural experience. Beats, skifflers and punks did it — what are you gonna do?
HARD TIMES
BY STUDS TERKEL
New Press, £11.99
If the photographic record of the Great Depression of the 1930s was made by Walker Evans, the oral record of the “Dirty Thirties” was made by Studs Terkel. His books of first-hand oral history have nailed memory to the page, like billboards to a barn door, in a spirited style of national lament. Terkel is the Homer of modern American history. He gleans “testimony . . . offered by scores who thought ‘like winners’ until they suddenly, astonishingly, wound up losers”. He respects and insists on the moral purpose of memory: “Ours, the richest country in the world, may be the poorest in memory. Perhaps the remembrances of survivors of a time past may serve as a reminder to others. Or themselves.”
THE ARABIAN HORSE
BY PETER UPTON
Thames & Hudson, £24.95
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“I know two things about the horse, and one of them is rather coarse,” wrote the novelist Naomi Royde-Smith in 1928 and her couplet is still quoted by flâneurs at Royal Ascot. This elegant, erudite, ravishingly illustrated book, essentially PR for the most highly bred horses in the world and their princely breeders, will delight them. The emphasis here is on the horses of the Arabian Peninsula, their historical and modern development. I didn’t know that young horses in the Arab world are fed on a traditional diet of camel’s milk and dates, or that all British thoroughbred horses today are descended from just three horses imported into England in the 40 years from 1688-1728. So I’m already two up on Ms Royde-Smith.
THE SINGING BOWL: Journeys through Inner Asia
BY ALISTAIR CARR
Cloudburst, £8.99
Carr “woke up one morning with a compulsion to leave for Mongolia”. This is striking enough, without actually going ahead and doing it. On his travels in Mongolia, he meets Christina Noble, an Irishwoman who first set up a children’s foundation in Vietnam and is now rescuing street children in Ulaanbaatar. She has arrived there for much the same reason. This mystical voice in their heads saying “Mongolia” seems significant to both. Why Carr is in Mongolia for any other reason than to gratify his gypsy soul and to look for dinosaur tracks stays unclear. There’s an endearing trace of Giles Wemmbley Hogg, Marcus Brigstocke’s hapless gap-year traveller on Radio 4, as Carr steps out lightly and writes politely.
MODERN MONGOLIA
BY MORRIS ROSSABI
University of California Press, £15.95
Bearhugged on the one side by Russia, on the other by China, Mongolia is not only squeezed between political heavyweights but has experienced a quick transition from the collapse of uncompromising communism to the uncertain benefits of pure market economy capitalism. This analysis of a country in political and economic decline questions the policies of international financial agencies that were devised to regenerate the Mongolian economy and points to their disastrous results — minimalist government, poverty, unemployment, and deep disruption of traditional culture. Rossabi’s clear, judicious style outlines the shock therapy endured by ordinary Mongolians at the hands of market economists.