The Booking Club

It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth, Remi Adekoya

What really matters when it comes to race?

Western conversations on race and racism revolve around familiar themes; colonialism, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the ideology of white supremacism form the holy trinity of the race debate. But what if we are neglecting a key piece of the puzzle? Something that explains why a racial order persists today despite a moral consensus it should not.

In It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth, Remi Adekoya persuasively argues that – in our capitalist world – it is socioeconomic realities which play the leading role in sustaining racial hierarchies in everyday life and in the global big picture, something regularly overlooked in the current debate. Financial power is what enables ultimate influence over events, environments, and people, and, as Adekoya expertly demonstrates, it is money more than anything else that maintains the racial pecking order. Exploring immigration, technology, media, group stereotypes, status perceptions and more, this book cleverly shows how wealth determines what’s what in key domains of modern life, and how this affects racial dynamics across the globe.

An incisive, insightful and open investigation into the links between financial power and racial hierarchies, Adekoya sheds much needed light on the status and power imbalances shaping our world and reveals what needs to be done to combat them going forward. (Hachette)

Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics, by Kenan Malik

Is white privilege real? How racist is the working class? Why has left-wing antisemitism grown? Who benefits most when anti-racists speak in racial terms?

The ‘culture wars’ have generated ferocious argument, but little clarity. This book takes the long view, explaining the real origins of ‘race’ in Western thought, and tracing its path from those beginnings in the Enlightenment all the way to our own fractious world. In doing so, leading thinker Kenan Malik upends many assumptions underpinning today’s heated debates around race, culture, whiteness and privilege.

Malik interweaves this history of ideas with a parallel narrative: the story of the modern West’s long, failed struggle to escape ideas of race, leaving us with a world riven by identity politics. Through these accounts, he challenges received wisdom, revealing the forgotten history of a racialised working class, and questioning fashionable concepts like cultural appropriation.

Not So Black and White is both a lucid history rewriting the story of race, and an elegant polemic making an anti-racist case against the politics of identity. (Hurst Publishers)

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Mark Watson is generally accepted to be alive. And yet he's died many times. Not just on stage - though he'll tell you about that - but in other ways, too. There's been the death of a childhood dream. The death of his panel-show career. And then there was the time he died inside and nearly lost it all...

Eye-opening, revealing and painfully funny, this is a book about mortification, failure and all the times life doesn't work out as planned. But it also wisely questions whether the things we strive for - recognition, success, the approval of others - are really the things that matter. It's a book about death that reminds us how to live. (Orion Publishing)

Mark met Jack Aldane at The German Gymnasium in King Cross, North London.

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What does it now mean to call yourself European? Who makes up this population of some 750 million, sprawled from Ireland to Ukraine, from Sweden to Turkey? Who has always called it home, and who has newly arrived from elsewhere? Who are the people who drive our long-distance lorries, steward our criss-crossing planes, lovingly craft our legacy wines, fish our depleted waters, and risk life itself in search of safety and a new start?

In a series of vivid, ambitious, darkly visceral but always empathetic portraits of other people's lives, journalist Ben Judah invites us to meet them. Drawn from hours of painstaking interviews, these vital stories reveal a frenetic and vibrant continent which has been transformed by diversity, migration, the internet, climate change, Covid, war and the quest for freedom.

Laid dramatically bare, it may not always be a Europe we recognize - but this is Europe.

Ben met Jack at Abu Zaad, in Shepherd's Bush

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Depp v Heard: the unreal story is the definitive account of the gruelling court battles between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, by the reporter who was there. Using witness testimony and contemporaneous evidence, Nick Wallis has created a gripping reconstruction of the allegations of violence, drug-taking and wild extravagance which dominated two epic trials and made headlines around the world.

Nick also weaves in his own reportage and insights, bringing the courtroom drama to life and analysing how courts in the UK and USA arrived at conflicting conclusions.

If you want to know who to believe, Depp v Heard: the unreal story is your conclusive guide to what really happened.

Nick meets Jack at Babucci in Walton-on-Thames, UK

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In Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington argues that the industrial-era faith in progress is turning against all but a tiny elite of women. Women’s liberation was less the result of human moral progress than an effect of the material consequences of the Industrial Revolution. We’ve now left the industrial era for the age of AI, biotech and all-pervasive computing. As a result, technology is liberating us from natural limits and embodied sex differences. Although this shift benefits a small class of successful professional women, it also makes it easier to commodify women’s bodies, human intimacy and female reproductive abilities.

This is a stark warning against a dystopian future whereby poor women become little more than convenient sources of body parts to be harvested and wombs to be rented by the rich. Progress has now stopped benefiting the majority of women, and only a feminism that is sceptical of it can truly defend female interests in the 21st century. (Forum)

Mary meets Jack at Andrew Edmunds in SOHO, London UK

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Has any war in history gone according to plan? Monarchs, dictators and elected leaders alike have a dismal record on military decision-making, from over-ambitious goals to disregarding intelligence, terrain, or enemy capabilities. This not only wastes the lives of civilians, the enemy and one’s own soldiers, but also fails to achieve geopolitical objectives, and usually lays the seeds for more wars down the line.

Conflict scholar and former soldier Mike Martin takes the reader through the hard, elegant logic to fighting a conclusive interstate war that solves geopolitical problems, and reduces future conflict. In cool and precise prose, he outlines how to orchestrate military forces, from infantry to information, and from strategy to tactics.

How to Fight a War explains the unavoidable, yet seemingly elusive, art of using violence to force your enemies to do what you want. It should be read by everyone seeking to understand today’s wars, as well as those wishing to lead us through the coming decades of conflict. (Hurst)

Mike meets Jack at Sankey's Old Fishmarket in Tunbridge Wells

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“I am not Nicholas Rossi!” gasps Arthur Knight through an oxygen mask in March 2022. Recently discharged from a Covid ward in Glasgow, he's in a wheelchair. The police say he’s Nicholas Rossi, suspected of faking his death and wanted for rape in Utah. The story makes headlines globally. When journalist Jane MacSorley meets Arthur Knight and his wife Miranda, she thinks the police have made a mistake. She embarks on a yearlong investigation, making a unique discovery which changes everything. (Audible)

In The Booking Club's first deep-dive into the true crime genre, Jane MacSorley meets Jack Aldane at La Trompette in Chiswick to discuss the investigation: its thrills, challenges and rewards, plus an update on court hearings from March 2023.

Still wondering about the tattoo? Sign up to Audible and discover the full story now.

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Everywhere you look on the internet, people are giving - and receiving - advice. Advice that promises to transform our lives. How to eat. How to think. How to get rich. How to manage our time.

Across 8 episodes on BBC Radio 4 programme The New Gurus, journalist and author Helen Lewis travels through the strange, powerful and sometimes hidden digital spaces created by these new gurus. Where did they come from? How much power do these charismatic individuals wield? And why are so many of us turning away from the mainstream - mainstream medicine, mainstream politics and the mainstream media - and embracing the power of charismatic individuals instead? (BBC)

Helen met Jack at The Hawksmoor in Borough, Central London.

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She is the woman who clinched the 2019 interview with Prince Andrew, described as 'a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion'. She is many things beside: the first in her family to go to university; a trained barrister; a single mum; a master of persuasion.

In her former BBC colleagues' words, she was the 'booker extraordinaire', responsible for many of Newsnight's exclusives over the past decade, including Stormy Daniels, Sean Spicer, Brigitte Hoess, Steven Seagal, Mel Greig and Julian Assange.

After 12 years producing content for Newsnight, McAlister reflects with candour on her experience, sharing not just the secrets of how the best news gets made, but also the changes to the BBC, the future of 'mainstream media' in the age of clickbait and the role of power and privilege in shaping our media landscape.

This is a backstage pass to the most unforgettable journalism of our times. (Waterstones)

Sam met Jack at The Wolseley in Mayfair on Piccadilly, Central London.

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On 20 November 2022, The Booking Club podcast and Unbound teamed up to promote Rogues’ Gallery, a collection of the best satirical portraits from Martin Rowson’s Twitter #Draw Challenges. 

At Stoke Newington’s legendary Thai restaurant Yum Yum, voice of The Booking Club Jack Aldane hosted a live conversation with Martin about the book’s origins, and why the joys of political caricature are accessible to anyone with a sharp pencil and an axe to grind with unchecked power.

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