Just Books
Welcome to a shop window for books relevant to the Just Beauty project. Some of them can be bought directly from this site. Where possible we will provide independent reviews.
We will promote books which meet our general aims – of emotional truth for literature and awareness, practical truth for politics and ecology. We also look for a sense that the authors are coming from a generous place, wishing benefit for the reader and the world. They are not producing works of cheap propaganda or manipulation.
The Manual – or No More Miracles
Book design by Blue Poppy Press in Ilfracombe
Henry Mullinger is a Numan. He’s been genetically tweaked to be more rational, numerate and driven to success than ordinary humans. He works for The Corporation, which runs the largest global commercial empire.
Every chapter is told from two angles – Henry’s narrative and a “rational” Gospel he dips into for consolation. It tells of an omniscient deity, Jack, who is proud of his sacred automobile – and who can feel sympathy for his creatures but NEVER intervenes. Many of the well-known Judaeo-Christian stories are retold – but with a satirical edge.
Gifts of the Dark
Publisher Dithering Chaps
Poet and critic Martyn Crucefix: “Although ostensibly a poetic sequence of illness and recovery, Simon Bowden has really written about the places – of spirit and feeling – that the experience of illness took him to.”
“What I particularly admire is the book’s Keatsian quality: permission has been given to the poet and his poems to remain in states of radical uncertainty, in a region of ‘imperfect/tenses of doing/hardly accomplished/gestures of loving.’ The whole collection exudes a courageous attitude to life, to death, and to their mysteries.”
A Young Doctor at War
Published with help from Blue Poppy Press in Ilfracombe
A family memoir featuring three unpublished works by the author’s grandfather Maitland Scott, who as a newly qualified doctor witnessed the carnage at the battle of the Somme.
The book traces the way that a collapse of trust in the British military establishment reverberated through the generations and changed Britain.
Children of the Wise Oak
By Oliver J Tooley
Publisher Blue Poppy Press
I have enjoyed the three Wise Oak series of novels by Oliver Tooley – which contain a mass of interesting research and ideas about the Celtic societies, including the ancient Britons, that were conquered by the Romans.
I once studied Latin and Greek literature at Oxford but I think it’s great to have a re-telling of classical history that does not automatically cast the Romans as the good guys, fighting off the barbarians. And that throws a favourable light on other iron age societies and their polytheist and magical beliefs.
Between a Drowning Man
By Martyn Crucefix
Publisher Salt Publishing
I was at the Betsy Trotwood pub in central London in October 2023 to hear the launch reading of Between a Drowning Man by Martyn Crucefix. It was a revelation. Maybe it is still possible to write poems which are about and for our (“there is no such thing as”) society.
Ever since I studied literature at University, I have imbibed the mantra that T S Eliot’s writing spelled the end of Discursive Poetry. But did it signal the end of ideas, mental argument and consecutive thought in poems? I thought Martyn’s book marked a breakthrough in poetic possibilities. It IS possible to write about politics and society in a manner that is sufficiently distanced and abstract that it becomes true poetry.
Authors
Simon Bowden
Simon Bowden
Simon Bowden came to creative writing from the pressure cabin of news and current affairs broadcasting. He had two long spells with the BBC (and was twice demoted for trying to get politically sensitive stories on air). In between he worked for LBC Radio, TV AM, GMTV and Sky. He was happiest as a producer/reporter on the channel BBC World TV.
In retirement he has turned to literature to try to pin down some emotional truths, to match the increasingly rare factual truth of good journalism. And he has written a book of poetry, Gifts of the Dark published by Dithering Chaps, which has had good reviews and has gone to a reprint with endorsements from nine significant authors.
Brought up as an atheist from a young age, Simon Bowden seeks ways to replace the moral structure of religion and the connection between humans and the cosmos that we have lost in the post-scientific world. As a child in the 60s, unhappiness at home made him a swot and he won an open scholarship to Oxford University to study Latin and Greek. He was fascinated by the sense of the epic in ancient Greek drama and its searing psychological insights into the extremes of family relationships.
Simon found parallels with the high poetry of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, seeming for the first time to place human beings in a conscious relation to the worlds of the gods and nature. He feels that he has only now in retirement understood what we still have to learn from classical literature. He sees it as akin to the indigenous nature religions, earth cults and traditional social cultures which European Christian conquerors suppressed in the process of land grabs around the world.
Finishing university in 1973, with degrees in Classics and English Lit, Simon says he felt surrounded by student lefties who kept repeating “we must smash the system!” So he forged an erratic path into journalism – in an effort to find out how the world worked and what the moral rights and wrongs might be.
Certainly one big motive was a distaste for the kind of right-wing propaganda masquerading as news in papers like the Mail, the Express and the Sun. But Simon was almost equally unimpressed by fellow students who denied that communism had failed – claiming the true path to utopia was to be found in Mao’s Little Red Book.
Many decades on, Simon is not much wiser but still fascinated by our botched democracy. This led him with a friend, Paul Entwistle, to set up a political discussion group, “The Practical Progressives.” Aside from the book of poetry dealing with the human fear of darkness and oblivion, he has published a family memoir about his grandfather Maitland Scott, a young doctor serving in France throughout the carnage of the First World War – who returned to Bournemouth with some fairly subversive notions, expressed in three literary typescripts.
Simon’s latest work is a novella, The Manual or No More Miracles, a satirical study of our society and an examination of the status of religious belief in the modern world.