Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague by Marc Perelman (Verso, £8.99)
Excited about the Olympics? If not, this bolus of weaponised French spleen will be the perfect literary antidote. Perelman ridicules the Olympic charter (Olympianism is claimed to be "a philosophy of life"), notes that global sporting events help to entrench oppressive regimes, and observes that the industrial logic of the sporting-entertainment complex is always to increase doping with new "performance-enhancing" substances – because new records are necessary for spectator amusement.
The author gloomily observes the strange contours of the familiar (why is sport also news?), and is very funny in the fury of his denunciations: sport, he says, is violent, a kind of damaging slavery imposed on young children who become, as athletes, "outlandish monsters of mingled fat and muscle", and it renders its "fans" brutish and depoliticised. It is a "planetary religion", the sole project of a "society without projects", and – yes – "the opium of the people". Perelman ambles, too, around the stadium, that edifice "with its back turned to the city", an acoustic amplifier of bovine cheering, while not shrinking from diagnosing "repressed homosexuality" and "infantile regression" in team sports, and bringing up Hitler and the Munich Olympics a lot. This is a polemic that, like a charismatic pole-vaulter, always goes entertainingly over the top.
Fly and Be Damned by Peter McManners (Zed Books, £14.99)
Aircraft greenhouse-gas emissions currently account for only 2% of the global total, but on some forecasts passenger miles could increase eightfold in the next few decades. In this strongly presented, wonkish book, the author (a "green economist"), argues that gradual meliorist change – designing aircraft that are more aerodynamically efficient, reducing holding patterns and other wasteful aspects of "traffic management", and even running planes on "biofuels" – will be offset by burgeoning capacity, so that emissions will still increase. What's more, flying is currently artificially cheap, McManners argues, so a high aviation-fuel tax ought to be imposed worldwide immediately. Given recent unfortunate events, there's probably not going to be a mass migration to passenger cruise ships any time soon. The most inspiring (and, perhaps, politically practical) ideas of the book are the radical new aircraft designs: of spacious flying wings covered with solar panels and pumped with helium, filled with cabins, a gym and "disco"; or even the development of new airships. Imagine if all the Olympians floated over to London in a fleet of massive futuristic airships. Even Perelman might be impressed.
Self-Esteem: A Practical Guide by David Bonham-Carter (Icon, £6.99)
The modern therapeutic rhetoric of "self-esteem" is puzzling. A person might be right to have low self-esteem, because (say) he is doing bad things, in which case he ought to stop doing the bad things rather than merely working to enhance his opinion of himself. Our life-coach author here takes us through his friendly system, acronymised handily as Value: "Value yourself", "Accept yourself", "Look after yourself", "Understand yourself", and "Empower yourself". (Not, presumably, in the way a dope-taking athlete empowers himself.)
Bonham-Carter has culled from CBT and other therapy styles a compilation of attitude adjusters, lifestyle tips (eat, sleep, meditate, keep a diary), and "reframings" of negative thoughts. To his credit, the author does also point out the potential downsides of, say, accepting yourself unconditionally: it can reduce motivation or lead, heaven forfend, to "arrogance". Too late for me, though: after reading this, I'm now convinced that I am completely unimprovable.
