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Perspectives

A GP reflects on medical practice and, well, just about everything . . .

Judith Harvey. 224 pages

A compilation of 74 published articles originally written for doctors but providing fascinating insights for medical students and patients – and we are all sometimes patients.

Since 2006 GP Judith Harvey has contributed a regular column for every issue of the newsletter of the National Association of Sessional General Practitioners, writing on anything from wart-charming to robots. So, this book is a collection of ten years of meditations on health and medical matters in the widest sense, originally published in that newsletter or other journals. Her short articles explore ideas about doctors, patients, the senses, culture, medical practice, careers, ethics and politics, and the future.

E-book: buy Perspectives now on Amazon Kindle £3.99

The Big Lie

The Truth about Advertising

Chuck Anderson. 320 pages

British advertising is cynical, clever and witty – the best in the world. American advertising is saccharine, crass and clunky – an insult to the intelligence. Is that so? Does either work? How?

An American adman who has worked in Europe for thirty years deconstructs the conventional wisdom of Adland to disclose at its heart a black hole of ignorance and deceit.

Fifty years ago Vance Packard concluded his seminal exposé, The Hidden Persuaders, by questioning the morality of advertising’s manipulative motivational techniques. If his concerns seem quaint now, it is because we have now surrendered to consumerism as the dominant cultural force in the world. Advertising has assumed a priestly role: to sustain its myths by promulgating falsehoods.

Yet the first Big Lie is that advertisers and their agencies know what they are doing. The second is the belief most people have that they are not influenced by advertising. Another is the contention that advertising does not have broad social effects beyond brand-switching. This book also examines whether the seductive techniques advertisers use, such as humour, irony and celebrity endorsement, are really successful; exposes whole industries founded on falsehood; and warns of the false assumptions gathering around the new communications technology and the Internet.

Out of Print

Primrose Hill Revisited

She left her heart in the ’60s

Chuck Anderson. 212 pages

When are you too old to ever fall in love again? Claudia was born too soon. A career woman in London, she is an incurable romantic who is swept up in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. But she’s almost forty.

Though the youthful spirit of liberation appeals to her intellectually, emotionally it challenges her conventional values. Claudia’s resistance to change threatens her job as editor of a woman’s magazine. She supports her brain-damaged daughter and an unemployed ex-husband who lives in the basement. She could solve all her problems by marrying Stephen, an older man and a powerful theatrical producer, but her old-fashioned morality gets in the way. And then, on Primrose Hill, along comes Jake, an uncomplicated and unemployed American would-be actor who’s 15 years younger.

E-book: buy Primrose Hill Revisited now on Amazon Kindle £1.99

Where the Bodies Are Buried

The West Country Existential Thriller

Chuck Anderson. 400 pages

When a man has nowhere left to go, he goes home. Ted Golden returns to the West Country harbour he left almost thirty years ago to restore an old yacht and set sail to – wherever. He owes his new lease on life to his wife’s accidental death – and some people say he murdered her.

He attempts to rekindle the love of Angie, the girl he left behind. She has sought redemption through good works and marriage to Bartholomew, a neglected painter of the op art generation. Bartholomew is missing at sea, together with Matty, his impetuous young Australian mistress.

A chain of apparently random disappearances leads to a mortal conflict at sea which reveals the solution to the fate of ten people over the past 40 years, including Ted’s own parents. When the bodies begin to surface Ted becomes the prime suspect. Leaving the West Country in quest of the lone survivor and a meaning for his life, Ted finds a different resolution of the mystery.

E-book: buy Where the Bodies Are Buried now on Amazon Kindle £1.99

Save the Jubilee Hall!

The battle to preserve the three-hundred-year-old tradition of street market trading in the Piazza of Covent Garden

Chuck Anderson with Ray Green. 208 pages. Hardback

— Why were the citizens of Covent Garden barracking in the residential suburbs of North London?

— What did Lord Geoffrey Rippon think was almost the best thing he ever did?

— Why did Ken Livingstone pull the rug out from under his own GLC planning committee?

— Did Yehudi Menuhin and Daniel Barenboim know what was going on?

— Why was the Communist Party of Covent Garden against public housing?

— How could market traders who rarely owned their own homes come up with £3million?

These questions are part of the fascinating story of the determined struggle by ordinary Londoners to preserve the Jubilee Market Hall in Covent Garden’s historic Piazza for community use. This large hardback book contains historical background, maps and many photographs and illustrations. Published in 1992, it is now out of print, and not available online nor in a Kindle version. However, it may be ordered from covent-garden.co.uk (see below). Used copies are available on Amazon and Ebay.

Buy Save the Jubilee Hall! now from Covent-Garden.co.uk Hardback £16.70