Tescopoly • Andrew Simms Constable, 2007, £7.99 • 978-1-845-295110
The subtitle of the book How one shop came out on top and why it matters describes accurately what this book is about. The author shows that the rise and rise of Tesco does matter significantly to all of us.
Andrew Simms is policy director of the New Economics Foundation and examines carefully and critically the effect of Tesco’s expansion both in the UK and abroad. He considers its effects on towns, communities, employees, independent retailers, government, and developing countries. He explodes some of the myths of the benefits that supermarkets in general and Tesco in particular are supposed to bring and unveils some of the damage they do.
This book should be read by politicians, planners, and economic decision makers as it exposes much of the sheer stupidity of the way this country and our world is run. However I guess few of them will read it, so those who are concerned for justice, truth and the global environment ought to do so in order to lobby more effectively.
Robert Barlow
The Ugandan Letters of Seamus Crowe • Seamus Crowe Athena Press, 2007, £6.99 • ISBN 978-1-84748-126-9
It’s a very rare thing to discover a book that captures the spirit of a country in a couple of hundred pages. Equally rare to find one that makes you both laugh out loud, and cry – alarmingly, for my somewhat butch self, in public – in the space of two pages. Seamus Crowe’s Ugandan Letters does just that.
It is, to coin a phrase, exactly what it says on the tin. A series of letters from Seamus to friends and colleagues back home, sent over the course of two years’ work via The Voluntary Mission Movement where he, and his wife Anne, were sent to advise and assist the young head of St. Clare’s – a girl’s school in Uganda, right next to a war zone.
You have to understand what they were faced with – on top of a unique change of culture. Uganda is not a great place to be if you are a girl. You are not, shall we say, on top of the pecking order in society. Quite the opposite. Particularly if you are poor or, more likely, the rest of your family has been wiped out by Aids. And yet with a great capacity and desire to learn.
Seamus writes with passion, anger, humility and a large dollop of humour and is not afraid to put his head above the parapet and vent spleen at the Ugandan government, its head of state, its apparatchiks and the inevitable endemic corruption.
The letters are, as he entitles one of his letters, vignettes of Africa. Rough, raw and truthful.
The book is a truly fascinating insight into the reality of day-to- day life in another culture. A celebration of two dedicated teachers’ experiences and the everyday heroics of an exploited and subjugated people. And one that has restored my faith in the human condition.
Gus MacDonald
www.arthurrankcentre.org.uk
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