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What's Going On?: The Meanderings of a Comic Mind in Confusion | 
 enlarge | Author: Mark Steel
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £12.99
Buy New: £6.49
You Save: £6.50 (50%)
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 1847372813
EAN: 9781847372819
ASIN: 1847372813
Publication Date: August 4, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 On life & the Left after 40. November 22, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Left-wing comedian Mark Steel, now in his 40s, has written an honest, funny and moving book about his general bafflement with the political situation under New Labour and the failure of his longstanding relationship. He displays growing disillusionment with his membership of the Socialist Workers Party and believes that "the link between the Left and youth now seems almost completely broken". This all comes to a head when, to his horror, he witnesses Respect MP, George Galloway, demeaning himself on Celebrity Big Brother and decides to cancel his subs to the SWP. Perhaps Mark's hero and friend Paul Foot, had he been alive, would have persuaded him to stay?
All in all this is a perceptive and amusing book which gives a revealing snapshot of life & the Left in Britain today.
refreshingly hopeful November 12, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I absolutely loved this book- as with most of mark steel's meanderings. He is brutally honest and still creates a sense of hope which makes such a marked change to the fashionably cynical times we live in. An absolute must for anyone who enjoyed any of the political riots in Britain during the last three decades. If you have the pervading political disillusionment that comes with age read it!
 Yes what is going on October 12, 2008
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
What's going on by Mark Steel begs the question "Yes what is
going on?" I purchased this book after hearing him on radio
being very funny but Oh dear the paperback book is about 150
pages too long. You should have given up while you were ahead.
Were the newspaper reviews edited from somebody else's book? as they were not what I read.
Don't give up your day job and please promise me you will not
write another book.
Laughter Therapy for Middle-aged Lefties September 1, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I've read a couple of Mark Steel's other books, so I kind of knew what to expect. However, this has more depth and poignancy. That'll be due to age, I reckon (both his and mine).
His humour doesn't always work for me, but there is enough here to more than satisfy. Besides, I like it that his humour has a point to it and that, while he sometimes picks easy targets, he's never nasty or vicious. What I most liked was the sense of truth in his telling of how confusing things have become as he has got older. Also, the story of his marriage breakdown is told, as another reviewer mentions, withough bitterness and with due regard to privacy. Really not sure what one of the other reviewers means about him being 'grumpy'. Quite the opposite, I'd have said. Even when he is getting hacked off with the SWP, you can see there's more affection there than anything else.
Because of the honesty about the political changes he's seen, the book has contemporary relevance. Anyone who has had any experience of the left these past twenty years or so (and I'm on the pink, tepid, Labour Party edge of the left) will instantly get where he's coming from. Sometimes it helps to laugh, so long as you don't get cynical.
I loved it and would recommend it to anyone.
 Disillusionment was never so uplifting August 31, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Mark Steel stands out in modern Britain as one of the consistent and committed unreconstructed socialists in public life, although he's much funnier than most.
This book is more melancholy though as he discusses the horrors of modern society (how the view that nothing is worth doing unless someone can make a profit out of it has become so dominant in the UK) in the context of the breakdown of two of his long term relationships- one the woman he had kids with, the other the Socialist Workers Party.
It's amazing that he can discuss the breakup of his long term relationship without ever really giving away the specifics, or with recriminating comments about his ex-partner, and yet at the same time articulating the confusion, hurt and despait such a break-up can lead to (and make some good jokes along the way).
The stuff about the SWP is harder to take as it takes him the whole book to realise that the SWP are a bunch of pointless, ineffectual idiots, whose only achievement seems to have been to helped reduce socialist principles in the UK to a laughing stock. At least he's realised this by the end.
As ever, like in his columns for The Independent, Steel is able with razor-sharp humour, logic and insight to pinpoint the absurdities of the modern age. His excoriation of how the logic of capitalist 'competition' and 'choice' have led to more and more homogeneity on the high street- in every town and city in Britain there's nothing but a sea of chain stores, many of which are global chains too- is particularly incisive.
Despite the rather gloomy tone throughout, Steel's sense of humour in spite of everything, and continued hope for the future wins through in the end.
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