{"id":1648,"date":"2008-07-14T08:27:16","date_gmt":"2008-07-14T07:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1648"},"modified":"2008-07-14T08:27:16","modified_gmt":"2008-07-14T07:27:16","slug":"ft-review-of-fishing-in-utopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1648","title":{"rendered":"FT review of Fishing in Utopia"},"content":{"rendered":"\t

Another gratifying review, from the Financial Times<\/a>, where Hugh Carnegy, the executive editor, likes Fishing in Utopia<\/em>,<\/a>a lot, though he thinks, god knows why, that I am “a melancholy soul”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t

It is the window on Sweden that gives this book its real interest, lifted by the characters Brown encounters, who provide a texture that a more academic approach could not. The picture Brown paints will discomfit those who still point to Sweden as the model for a modern, left-of-centre society. He portrays a more or less dysfunctional, rigidly conformist culture lacking the warmth of social interaction. It is one, tellingly, in which a deep divide always existed between blue and white-collar worlds. He writes of his life as a member of the working class: “It was the life of a battery salmon: packed into a crowd in the middle of a boundless stretch of water by a cage of netting that you could not see at all.”<\/p>\n\n\t

Returning in this decade, Brown finds a country grappling with the same issues as any other western democracy: economic change, rising crime and immigration. Sweden, now physically linked to the rest of the world by the bridge to Denmark, can no longer preserve its lofty sense of otherness.<\/p>\n\n\t

But this book is not a right-wing polemic against the “Swedish model”. Brown evinces real respect for a society only recently delivered from rural hardship, whose people collectively determined that social control is the way to achieve social solidarity.<\/p>\n\n\t

This is an affectionate and insightful portrait, offering a much deeper understanding of the country than the usual, often politically motivated, tendency to stereotype.<\/blockquote><\/p>\n\n\n\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\t

Another gratifying review, from the Financial Times, where Hugh Carnegy, the executive editor, likes Fishing in Utopia,a lot, though he thinks, god knows why, that I am “a melancholy soul”. It is the window on Sweden that gives this book … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n ","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7,8,18,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1648"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}