Ruth Coker Burks’ life changed one afternoon in 1986 when she went to visit a friend with cancer in an Arkansas hospital. There, the 26-year-old happened upon a curious scene: a group of nurses drawing straws to see who would have to enter a room with a forbidding red tarpaulin hung over the door. Intrigue got the better of her, and she decided to investigate. Inside the room was Jimmy, a young man weighing about five stone, evidently in his final hours, and crying out for his mother.
Coker Burks rang his family home, only to be told that they had no interest in seeing him. “My son died eight years ago when he went gay,” his mother said tersely. For Coker Burks, there was nothing left to do, except the right thing. She held his hand and whispered reassurances into his ear. Jimmy, believing his ‘mama’ had finally come and Coker Burks didn’t contradict him died peacefully.
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera / Viking
Several authors tackle colonialism in very different ways, from
Alex Renton confronting his own family’s involvement in slavery in
Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Enslaving Past (Canongate), and
Sathnam Sanghera in
Kehinde Andrews, who rather more controversially takes on capitalism and racism together in
The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World (Allen Lane).
Gender and Identity Politics
Likewise gender and identity politics get a good look-in, from
Julie Bindel’s manifesto,
Feminism for Women (Constable) to
You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed To Be: Into The Chaos of Modern Masculinity (Bloomsbury) by founder of the Book of Man website
damaging an entire generation s perception of sex and intimacy. here s a preview. porn. every kid who has access to a computer or smartphone has access to porn. i was first exposed when i was 7 or 8. would you say that porn was your sex ed? our generation is consumed by pornography. it s the largest epidemic that not many people want to talk about. joining us now is lisa ling, host of this is life. i m so glad you re here, lisa. i m thinking about, first of all, 7 orthoped 8 being exposed pornography. all the young men we talked to said there first exposure to porn was at that age, and not even on phones. like one of them had an ad pop up on his nintendo device. and so, you know, who knows if this is an active effort to lure
inevitable as well. so many things he has said and done he signalled lack of concern. lack of interest in safeguarding american elections against russia. and you are left after this above all with the sense if this is what he said to the envoy. what has he said in the direct conversation with vladimir putin. we do not have access to yet. which we wonder whether will be part of the impeachment inquiry. think about this. we re talking about the national security implications of this. russia the rival. what do you see implications. i would say negative on national security. two in particular. the place in time and it s important to look at the date. the day after the president of the united states essentially decapitated the fbi. taken out the leadership the person running the investigation into his campaign. my former boss.
he was giving this green light to interfere to russia around the world. this is something feared the russians koultd perceive from the comments. he seems to be saying it s an all fair this is the way the world works. i get it everyone does it. the united states doesn t interfere in lexes the way the russians did. there s a history of united states in other countries governments. this is something we should see in more recent history the united states hasn t done. and certainly not in the way russia had done in recently. trump of course briefed by this point by senior intelligence officials that the russian government was behind this in many effort to under mine democratic values. when people heard this moral from the president they thought is he not understanding the severity of what happened in the 2016 election. or his role in it as was