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The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity (Keep Calm and Carry On)

The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity (Keep Calm and Carry On)

by OwenHatherley (Author)

  • Used

    Illustrated 2015

    $4.81
Synopsis

In this sharp, witty polemic, award-winning critic Owen Hatherley questions the many ways we have adopted the gospel of luxurious poverty: from ubiquitous Keep Calm and Carry On posters, the commercialization of thrift, the added value of artisanal, and the selling of a make do and mend aesthetic, to a nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed. Hatherley proposes a radical demand for true abundance for all, not just adopting the veneer of a better age. The Ministry of Nostalgia is a rallying cry that reaches across a depleted cultural landscape and refuses to accept that we need to lower our expectations and hopes to fit difficult times. Instead, he demands more because that is what we all deserve.

$4.81

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More Information

Format: Illustrated
 Pages: 224
 Edition: Illustrated
 Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 05 Jan 2015
ISBN 10: 1784780758
ISBN 13: 9781784780753

Media Reviews
A brave, incisive, elegant and erudite writer, whose books dissect the contemporary built environment to reveal the political fantasies and social realities it embodies. - Will Self A lively and gleefully argumentative book. Even when you disagree with Hatherley, he remains interesting. And there is a good chance, depressingly, that he is right about everything. - Jon Day, Guardian [Owen Hatherley] combines analysis of the austerity nostalgia phenomenon with a parkour of film, art, graphic design, and especially architecture and urbanism, comparing romantic notions of wartime cohesion to the historical record. - Maclean's The Ministry of Nostalgia is a brisk and bracing polemic about Britain's relationship with its recent history... Any successful political project must address itself to what's needed right now. Keeping calm and carrying on is about the worst possible response. - Richard Godwin, Evening Standard Reflective and intelligent - Spectator Hatherley hunts down his sacred cows hungrily and with brio. It is a ride that you can enjoy even if you don't agree with the direction in which we're heading... good iconoclastic fun - New Statesman Demonstrates the qualities of empathy and social conscience, combined with acute judgement, that confirms Owen Hatherley to the only true heir today of the great architectural critic Ian Nairn - Gavin Stamp, Literary Review
Author Bio
Owen Hatherley was born in Southampton, England in 1981. He received a PhD in 2011 from Birkbeck College, London, for a thesis on Constructivism and Americanism. He writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal, Architectural Review, Icon, the Guardian the London Review of Books and New Humanist, and is the author of several books: Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon - An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), A New Kind of Bleak - Journeys through Urban Britain (Verso 2012), Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012) and Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015). He also edited and introduced an updated edition of Ian Nairn's Nairn's Towns (Notting Hill Editions, 2013). He lives in Woolwich and Warsaw.