This week Andrew Marr is joined by Sudhir Venkatesh, Peter Berry, Lisa Appignanesi and Mark Leonard.
Fed up with asking statistical questions off a clipboard, sociology student SUDHIR VENKATESH threw out the rulebook to spend almost a decade with gangs in America’s most impoverished housing projects on the South Side of Chicago. Venkatesh looks back on how he befriended a gang leader and uncovered the surprising rules of the black market in a fiercely pragmatic world where the gangs are the de facto government. Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Crosses the Line is published by Allen Lane and Sudhir Venkatesh will be delivering a lecture on the book at the RSA on Tuesday 12 February.
Set in the UK in the very near future, PETER BERRY’s new series for BBC One portrays a country where everyone has an ID card, CCTV cameras monitor our every move and a new super-database is about to be passed into law that can profile and predict anti-social behaviour. The five-part series is a scary prediction, he argues, of the surveillance society that could await us. The Last Enemy starts on BBC One on Sunday 17 February.
From Mary Lamb who, in the throes of a breakdown, turned on her mother with a knife, to the depression suffered by Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, women have played a vital role in the history of how we understand madness and its treatment. Novelist and broadcaster LISA APPIGNANESI charts how female patients - and doctors - have contributed to the medicine of the mind and how mental illnesses mirror the malaise of each era. Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present is published by Virago.
We might know that half of the world’s clothes and footwear have a ‘Made in China’ label, but what do we know about the thinkers in China who are shaping their country’s future? In his new book MARK LEONARD reveals China’s surprising experiments with democracy, its anti-globalisation movement and its plans to deal with America as its own influence grows across the globe. What Does China Think? is published by Fourth Estate.
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