This Is Not a Diary by Zygmunt Bauman (Polity, £14.99)
The eminent sociologist of "liquid modernity" began this journal of essays sparked by news events in 2010, his 85th year, and he is as sharp and engaging as ever. Reading op-eds and news reports, Bauman spins out mini-essays of combative dissidence, in a highly congenial, intimate tone of late-night rumination. He worries about what will come after the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt; praises Michel Houellebecq as a political dystopianist; notices while watching a Star Trek film "just how many weapons [...] he who prohibits the use of weapons needs"; and speaks up consistently for the victims of the post-financial-crisis era.
Particularly tart are Bauman's sardonic comments on technology: he contrasts "surfing" the internet with "fathoming the best" (an incisive choice of competing metaphor), and decides that "multi-tasking" is the result of "training people to consume more than one commodity at a time". There are also many quotations from a writer Bauman has recently discovered, "my beloved" José Saramago. If Bauman had posted the pieces of this book on the internet as he went along, it would have been the world's best blog. But I'm glad he didn't.
Seven Puzzles of Thought by RM Sainsbury & Michael Tye (Oxford, £25)
What is a "concept"? Like pornography, you know it when you see it, but it turns out to be hard to define. Noting problems with existing accounts (attributed broadly to JS Mill and Frege, and later elaborators), the authors present a new theory they call "originalism", according to which concepts should be distinguished according to their historical origin rather than their meaning. This, they argue, makes it easy to solve the "seven puzzles" they begin with, which are famous problems of naming (eg, about a liquid called "twater" on the planet twin-Earth).
The authors' defence of this position with examples that include quarks, amoebas, eternal damnation, Swampman, and other colourful philosophical fauna is lucid, though some consequences of it seem strange. (They claim that, in the old saying "now you see it; now you don't", the two uses of the word "now" are two different concepts: this appears to imply that there exist infinitely many concepts all called "now", which seems rather profligate in an age of austerity.) The book ends with a civilised and generous response to criticisms, which almost helped me forget the fact that it is typeset in sans-serif. No, I don't know why either.
The Meat Fix by John Nicholson (Biteback, £12.99)
After the recent study about how eating meat is bad for you, here is the contrarian story of a man who was a vegetarian for 26 years but felt terrible until he took up eating meat again, and became cleverer and more energetic. "Bye bye Mr Soya, hello dead sentient creatures," he recalls fondly. All his faddish "healthy eating" had just made him fat and ill.
In pungently matey prose, Nicholson describes his childhood scoffing ("I bloody loved cheap sweets"), the inconclusive medical investigations into his veggie ills ("He peered at my bum hole"), and his first fleshmunching orgy ("The skin was crispy, salty, hot and spicy, and utterly orgasmic"). His main point seems to be that "one-size-fits-all" healthy-eating advice (from "the health police") doesn't fit all, and there is anyway disagreement among experts (are cholesterol and salt really bad for you?). The plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but by the end I did feel like multi-tasking a burger and chips.
