Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #247369 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

GOOD BOOK GUIDE
"He does an excellent job of contextualising the intellectual and political appeal that Islamism holds while examining the failures in Western approaches to the problem. This is a timely, thought-provoking and thorough argument."

Review
"This title apes Michael Moore's polemical Fahrenheit 9/11, but this is not a bombastic broadside. Gove - a Tory MP and Times columnist - denies that the war has made Britain a target, arguing that we have not done enough to punish regimes that sponsor terrorism." (THE TIMES )

"All I can really urge you to do is buy it. It's a truly marvellous book about the refusal in the West to acknowledge the reality and scale of the Islamist threat to civilisation. It ought to be compulsory reading.... It's so well written that it is impossible to put down. Gove ranges across the history of Islamism, the reality of today's terror, the real role of Israel and the response of Western liberals. It's a book that needed to be written. Buy it here. You won't regret it." (Stephen Pollard, David Blunkett's biographer www.stephenpollard.net - political blog )

"a terrific oped in today's Times, excerpted from his forthcoming book, Celsius 7/7" (David Frum, Bush's former speechwriter http://frum.nationalreview.com )

"brilliant, essential and terrifying... lucid, unhysterical, informed - the landmark book that, together with Melanie Philips's Londonistan, finally acknowledges the scale of the problem before us... Gove's book has arrived not a moment too soon." (JAMES DELINGPOLE THE MAIL ON SUNDAY )

on Tuesday I went to hear an MP speak at a debate and was surprised by how surprised I was that he managed to be both persuasive and articulate. The MP was Michael Gove and he was arguing that the West's policy of appeasement has provoked yet more fundamentalist terror.... he has just written a book on this subject, Celsius 7/7... it reminded me that it is still possible to feel inferior to politicians." (Nigel Farndale SUNDAY TELEGRAPH )

"a superb book on the threat of Islamism" (MATTHEW D'ANCONA SUNDAY TELEGRAPH )

"I have never seen the argument for a robust response to the threat spelt out so clearly and succinctly as in Gove's book... Best of all is his analysis of the role that the Israel issue has played in the debate about terrorism and Middle Eastern policy." (THE SPECTATOR )

Michael Gove is one of the rising stars of the British parliamentary Conservative party on account of the exceptional depth and lucidity of his thinking. Almost alone among British politicians, he courageously opposes the ugly anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel which are currently convulsing British society. His new book, Celsius 7/7, is a brilliant analysis of Britain's wilful blindness in refusing to grasp the true nature and extent of the Islamist war upon the west

and the resulting culture of appeasement which threatens to undermine Britain's special relationship with America. At a time when the hostilities in the Middle East are ratcheting up Britain's state of denial to an unprecedented level of irrationality and prejudice, Gove's urgent wake-up call could not be more timely or prescient. (MELANIE PHILIPS )

"Attacks on Israel are merely a small part of what global Islamism is about. As Michael Gove points out in Celsius 7/7 - his short but brilliant guide to the global threat we all face - as fascism degraded nationalism and communism betrayed socialism, Islamism is a political creed that perverts Islam." (RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS, historian of The Economist, IRISH INDEPENDENT )

"Gove does not take prisoners... Gove has done us all a service by uncovering the extremist antecedents of the "moderate" Muslim spokesmen feted by the race relations industry and its sympathisers in the BBC." (DAILY TELEGRAPH )

"Michael Gove is one of the most media-savvy young politicians in Britain. And now, with the release of this remarkable and important book, he has also become one of the most important... one of the best and most important books on the Middle East and the problems facing the West through Islamism to have been published in recent years... the political book of the year so far." (JOHN SPAIN IRISH INDEPENDENT )

"long, well informed and persuasive.... Gove provides the essential background - the origins of Islamist radicalism from Sayed Qutb to Maududi, the role of the Muslim Brotherhood and its main present-day representatives, the aims of the jihadists." (WALTER LAQUEUR THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT )

"Gove's coruscating book makes an impassioned case" (SUNDAY BUSINESS POST )

"He does an excellent job of contextualising the intellectual and political appeal that Islamism holds while examining the failures in Western approaches to the problem. This is a timely, thought-provoking and thorough argument." (GOOD BOOK GUIDE )

THE TIMES
"This title apes Michael Moore's polemical Fahrenheit 9/11, but this is not a bombastic broadside. Gove - a Tory MP and Times columnist - denies that the war has made Britain a target, arguing that we have not done enough to punish regimes that sponsor terrorism."

Customer Reviews

Essential reading
I read Melanie Phillips's "Londonistan" before reading Gove's book. Both books cover roughly the same ground, but I have to say that Phillips's tone can become rather exasperating, no matter how important the topic. Gove's book, on the other hand, is eminently controlled, level in tone, well researched and well written. For these, and for other reasons, "Celsius 7/7" is the more powerful of the two volumes.

And it is mercifully concise.

In his conclusion Gove makes an appeal that we would all do well to heed:

"More broadly, we also need to rediscover and reproclaim faith in our common values. We need an ideological effort to move away from moral relativism and towards moral clarity, as well as a commitment to build a truly incusive model of British citizenship in which divisive separatist identities are challenged and rejected."

Gove's is a clarion call to all of us to defend liberty and rationality. Unless we do this, we may well find ourselves heading rapidly towards a time of repression by religiously motivated totalitarian ideologues.

Strategic & Moral Clarity in Response to Islamist Totalitarianism
For those of us who have struggled to make sense of Islam amidst the swirling fog of current events this is a welcome breath of clear air.

Even as I read the book (Dec 2006) the contorted history of events in Somalia took another twist. The succinctly outlined perspective of Michael Gove helped provide a framework against which to process such current events as the Ethiopian military defeat of the Islamists.

Indeed, this is a model, not only of clear moral and strategic thinking, but of putting issues and events in a proper perspective - a rarity in our postmodern dominated society.

It was helpful to bracket Islamist totalitarianism alongside their 20th century bedfellows of communism and facism.

It was helpful to have 10 key factors which have facilitated Islamist advances in recent years (chapter 9).

It was helpful to trace the leading characters of the Islamist philosophy and the organisations which perpetuate their evil. Some of these were familiar but their import and relation to specific events were, in my mind at least, fog bound!

It was helpful to review the Iranian revolution, the liberation of Iraq, the fatwa on Rushdie, the Danish cartoons of Mohammed and much, much more through Michael Gove's analysis.

Of course not all of this is new. Natan Sharansky has already written very effectively about moral and strategic clarity and the clash of cultures in current events in The Case for Democracy. Gove, however, repeats the clarion call in relation to the Islamist advance and provides a powerful minority critique of the West's inadequate defence of it's culture and foundations. And all of this with admirable brevity and a minimum of partisan padding.

Celsius 7/7 does have some minor niggles. The endnotes are frustratingly inconsistent. Sources are sometimes recorded and sometimes not, and in any case where they are, the citation is hardly helpful. For example. 33% of the notes are simply references to `BBC News' on a particular date, a citation which is neither precise nor authoritative.

But such editorial quibbling aside this is a book which is magisterial in its message and both compact and compelling in its content.

An Informative and Insightful Reflection
Michael Gove's `Celsius 7/7' is an engaging and thought provoking text. His drive is to explain the escalation of the war against `the West,' long waged by Islamic fundamentalists. His argument takes a convincing tone by linking contemporary issues, such as the London bombings to the fundamental teachings and history of radical Islam. He traces the struggle with `the West' back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the reflexive rise of the Brotherhood in the 1920's. Gove reveals how the teachings of the Brotherhood's leading advocates shaped the fundamentalist views of the morally corrupt West.

After setting the basis, Gove's argument takes on a new found momentum, skipping through the middle eastern countries and explaining their activity in the radicalising political map. He aligns this argument with how a series of failures have exposed `the West's' weaknesses, irretrievably damaging their solidarity and common purpose, whilst reinforcing the radical Islamic cause. Simultaneously, Gove explains how the actions of Western governments since the 1970's have encouraged terrorism, extending the argument to contemporary spheres like the Danish Islamists cartoons in 2005 and other examples of the narrow discourse of the current media. He expands these points in light of other recent political issues, such as the merging of the Left with radical Islamic groups and the exposure of fundamentalist sympathisers in the mainstream British media. Here the argument for moral clarity comes to life.

Gove's neatly organised and momentous account employs down-to-earth language which complements to his admirable style over the 152 pages. My review may be plagued by the admission I am not an expert on the subject of Islam. However, writing as a keen learner, the text held my full attention for its duration. I have read few similar books which are so thoughtful and yet make me eager to turn to the next page (when not turning to the limited notes at the back that is). The volume of information presented by Gove in support of his streamlined points, although not cited entirely consistently, will make stimulating reading again and again.