You Can't Read This Book: Censorship In An Age Of Freedom

Description

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the advert of the Web, everywhere you turn you are told that we live in age of unparalleled freedom. This is dangerously naïve. From the revolution in Iran that wasn't to the imposition of super-injunctions from the filthy rich, we still live in a world where you can write a book and end up dead. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism and the advent of the Internet, it has become the conventional wisdom that we are living in an age of unprecedented freedom. But, as Nick Cohen argues, this view is in fact dangerously naïve. From the Great Firewall of China to super-injunctions that shield the misdeeds of the filthy rich from public scrutiny, the traditional opponents of freedom of speech are thriving, and in many respects finding the world a more comfortable place than ever before. In Britain, they are shamefully abetted by libel laws that have made the country an international byword for the judicial suppression of inconvenient truths. In You Can't Read This Book, one of the wittiest and most excoriating journalists at work today passionately and persuasively describes how we in the liberated West find ourselves in a situation in which you can write a novel, criticise an alternative therapy or "offend" a religion by drawing a cartoon, and risk ending up financially ruined, or even dead.

About the Author

Nick Cohen is a British journalist, author, and political commentator. He is currently a columnist forThe Observer, a blogger forThe Spectatorand TV critic forStandpointmagazine. He formerly wrote for the LondonEvening Standardand theNew Statesman. Cohen has written four books:Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous(1999), a collection of his journalism;Pretty Straight Guys(2003), a highly critical account of the New Labour project;What's Left?(2007), which he describes as the story of how the liberal left of the 20th century came to support the far right of the 21st; andWaiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England(2009). The Orwell Prize for political writing shortlistedWhat's Left?in 2008.