This is Europe: The Way We Live Now

"(This book is also a vailable on the Bookstory website here .) Exactly. I think Ben Judah is himself interesting. He’s now an advisor to David Lammy, who is likely to play a big role in what is almost certainly going to be the incoming Labour government. This book was written when he was still a full-time journalist. What Ben Judah does brilliantly—and this is as true of This is Europe as it was of This is London —is blending the micro with the very macro. He uses the stories of ordinary people, the people who aren’t written about much, or who certainly aren’t considered appropriate material for long-form profiles by political journalists—cleaners and Uber drivers, you know, the backbone of the economy—as lenses through which to analyse the sweeping trends of our time. In this book, we see political polarisation, migration, globalisation, the drift to the right—all these trends, seen through the stories of ordinary European citizens. We meet the migrant porn star; we meet a pilot at one of Europe’s super terminals, helping to navigate boats into port, a real insight into globalisation. You realise how many people are involved in what feel like intangible forces. Judah zooms in, and we see how these forces are made up of hundreds of thousands of people. It’s a great book. Exactly. He’s very consciously taking an approach totally at odds with the approach that most Western journalists take. Rather than talking to a bunch of men in Westminster with different opinions, he goes to find someone whose life is shaped by those forces. I think it’s a really refreshing way of doing it."