Hi there - as well as being a keen blogger, I'm a bit of a bookworm as well.
So, I'm going to post reviews of the last few books I've read - as I read another one I'll take the last one of the list.
American Sniper - Chris Kyle - 3/5
This is book that I think demands to be
viewed in two ways – firstly as a story about a person and secondly as a story
about a person who we ‘asked’ to do things by his community.
In the first aspect it’s clear that the author
is pretty unpleasant. His casual disregard
for any human life that does not happen to be American is clear, as is his disregard
for the person he claims to love.
The descriptions of his military training as
a SEAL are par for the course in this kind of book – and in fact the author deliberately
leaves out sections of the training, because he is sure his readers will
already be familiar with these things.
However, once the author is deployed the
story line becomes full of obvious racism and bigotry – the way in which he
describes his ‘enemies’ does not show the attitudes of so called elite troops. I found these sections of the book hard to
read.
The second aspect of the story, where the author
is doing what he is trained to do, at the behest of a democracy (well sort of)
are equally unsettling. His basic task
is to kill and keep killing until the declared enemy have had enough and give
up. (In many ways this seems to be an
echo of the ‘kill ratio’ argument of the Vietnam War). If this is really what he was asked to do, do
we really have the right to suggest that he should be a monk as well as a
killer and to suffer agonies of guilt for doing what he has been asked to do?
I think it will become increasing hard to differentiate
this book from the film it spawned – but they seem to be very difficult.
This is an ugly and difficult book. But I also think it is shockingly honest.
It is clearly a book that should be described
as ‘informative’ rather than ‘entertaining’.
Nobody does well in this account of a
modern war.
I think this book is likely to suffer
because of two things – firstly in won the Booker Prize, and secondly the main
thrust of the narrative - the treatment
of POWs by the Japanese during WWII – is fairly familiar.
Its prize wining status would suggest that
the book is truly remarkable, and this is a hard preconception for a book to
carry. The truth of the matter is that
the book was considered the best of the 2014 entrants, and I think this is a
much better way to view it.
The second consideration – that the subject
is well worn – may be true, but it does not mean that the book has nothing new
to say.
The book centres around one major
character, his loves and losses and his struggle to understand his place in the
world. If ever there was a flawed hero,
Dorrigo Evans is one.
But on many levels this also seems a very
realist view – we seem to give people who have achieved what we believe we
could not, super-human powers. The
truth, and their motivations, may be more prosaic.
I was struck that the book did seem to turn
around a number of coincidences that seem so unlikely that I had a hard job
believing them. Some occur early and
dominate the book, and others cast a new light on things that happened in the
past. But when they occur, I could not
help but think ‘really?’ I have not read many ‘generational’ novels, and maybe
such things are typical in them, but just did not find some of the plot twist
convincing.
Having said this, I found that many
sections of the book – especially the scenes in the POW camps - griping, if unrelentingly
grim. Equally I found the sections where
people struggle with the morality of their actions far more convincing than the
plot twists.
So, this is a good four-star book.
Imperfect? – certainly (but what is
not?).
Self consciously clever? – a little.
Worth reading? – absolutely
Recommended? - yes.
In many ways this is a fairly conventional account of the turning of the years around the village of Calxton in the Yare valley in Norfolk. While there are a few side trips to other places, the focus of the book is the titular village.
Like many other ‘year in the life of…..’
books the daily accounts are drawn from more than one year, so while they are
presented in calendar order, they are not truly sequential – I only mention
this because some books seem not to be honest about this format – but this one
is.
The daily entries are generally short –
most are just a single page (more or less) of the book – and most end with a
sort of philosophical musing which seeks to place the short piece in the wider
context of the world. This is both the
strength and weakness of the book: each piece of writing is self-contained, but
each also becomes rather too predictable in tone.
I think this may be due to the way in which
they were originally published – weekly or at least a few days apart. Reading them one after another compresses a
week or a month into minutes and the pace (and predictability) seem too much.
Equally, I think that that the rapidity
with which you can move through the book makes some of the recurring themes
recur a little to often as well – the link between the soil and the rest of the
world, the shape and effect of a passing peregrine and the sound of geese all
occur regularly in the book.
All this being said, I really enjoyed the
book and the writing is very evocative.
Its clear from this and the authors other books that he has a great eye
for detail.
So, would I recommend the book? Absolutely!
But I do suggest that you read it over a
longer period of time than a few days – read a couple of days each day, so that
the year in the book unfolds at a more realistic pace and I am sure you will
enjoy it.
Storm - Tim Minchen - 5/5
This is a really interesting little
book. And two words here are important –
‘interesting’ and ‘little’.
The book is ‘interesting’ because of what
it seeks to explore – belief and rationalism, which are hardly the normal stuff
of comedy. And the book is ‘little’, not
because it is insignificant, but because if you just read the poem that is the
core of the book, you will complete the book in 10 – 15 minutes.
If you are already aware of Tim Minchen’s
work, this book will contain few surprises, but much delight. This beat poem, with its strange rhythms and
off key rhymes, is an account of the kind of ‘rant’ that many of us may have
wished to unleash when exposed to hocus-pocus and pseudo-science – in this case
it happens at a dinner party where we meet an Australian called Storm.
Believers in auroras, spirit healing, the
therapeutic value of crystals and (possibly above all else) homeopathy will
find little joy within these pages.
This is a book for lovers of science, logic
and evidence.
It’s a storming book!
It would not be hard to mount a case
claiming that 1066 was one of the most important years in English history. It may well be one of those turning points in
history the effects of which we are still living.
Language changed, law changed, landscape
changed.
And for the most part, only one aspect of
this year is remembered – the Battle of Hastings. 1066 was a far more complex year than that,
and this book is a good introduction to the intricacies of that period. The other battles, the family infightings and
politics are all introduced, and I suspect that for many people these aspects
of 1066 may be new.
Of course the book is not comprehensive - that
is not its aim. But it does show how
close history came to having a very different pathway.
Recommended.
The Riverbank - Charles Darwin and Fabian Negrin - 4 /5
This is a rather splendid children’s picture book based on the
(reasonably) well-known final paragraphs of Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of
Species’.
In many ways Darwin summarized much of his thinking about variation,
natural selection and evolution in that paragraph – and this book highlights a
number of aspects of his thought in pictures.
The pictures themselves sit at the boundary of ‘cartoon’ and
‘naturalistic’ drawing, and are at their best when they show the small
creatures that dwell in the riverbank – Darwin’s entangled bank. The images are at their least good when they
depict people – with the faces looking more than a little artificial.
As an antidote to talking mice and evil foxes this is a very good book –
but I suspect it will appeal to more adults than children.
Still, a book designed for children, which starts them thinking about one
of the most powerful and influential ideas anybody has ever had, cannot be a
bad thing.
Recommended, but don’t expect it to become a bedtime staple.
If you feel like leaving a comment, either about the reviews or about books that are similar, I have turned on the comments section at the bottom of the page.
This is an interesting, if slight misleadingly
titled, book.
The basic idea behind the book is that the
use of seasons based on the division of the year into four equally long
seasons, all of which are named for the equivalent season in the Northern Hemisphere,
is inappropriate for Australia (and many other parts of the world as well).
This seems to make sense from the very
start of the book, and the author suggests a system of six seasons, with two
new seasons – the Sprinter and Sprummer of the title – and amended dates for
the other four. Generally, these new
seasons as identified by the activity of plants, rather than the date on the calendar
or the location of the earth on its journey around the Sun. Again, this seems to make sense – if you
base the seasons on what is happening around you then the classification of the
seasons may help you understand the world around you. (The converse of this is that using an
externally imposed system of seasons does not help us really understand what is
going on.)
Strangely, the author often uses introduced
plants as part of his markers of seasonal change – which seems to be a step
away from being in tune with the natural environment. Having said that, in some parts of Australia –
heavily urbanised areas for example there may be little other vegetation to
look at!
The book also has a slightly strange “feel”
– the use of frequent sub-headings makes the book read a little like a textbook,
but the relaxed and informal use of language in the text is not textbook-like
at all. Equally, the lack of captions on
the images in the book is a little strange.
These are not “deal breakers” by any means, but I did find these aspects
a little strange.
My
contention that the book is misnamed comes from the sub-title of the book that
is “Australia’s Changing Seasons” – and while the impact of climate change on
the dates of seasonal activity is examined in one chapter, a better sub-title
for the book would have been “Changing Australia’s Seasons”.
An interesting read with relevance to more
than just Australia.
Feral - George Monbiot - 4.5 /5
This is a really rather good book – not perfect,
but one that makes you stop and think ‘do I agree with what I have just read?’
In reality this is almost two books rather
than one – the first is about developing a great connection between people and
the land on which they live. This is ‘re-wilding people’. The second is about taking a less interventionist
approach to wildlife management, by allowing nature a freer hand to build new ecosystems.
The first is a reasonably well-trodden path
- and is based on the assumption that
people and the land do better when they are connected. Connection.
Interest. Care. Passion. And in the end, survival. This all seems to make sense.
The second theme of the book – actually re-wilding
landscape – is probably a little more contentious. Especially as one of the key things that the
author suggests in terms of re-wilding is the re-introduction of large
predators – such as wolves – to some ecosystems. While any such introduction would clearly
rely on human intervention in its early stages, the idea is to re-establish the
kind of ecological processes that have been removed from many ecosystems by
humans.
There is little doubt that conventional
conservation management is not always successful – with large areas (the book
really takes most examples from the UK) being maintained in some sort of
agriculture dominated state – the classic example here being most UK uplands
which are often just sheep, deer or grouse maintained habitats, which lack the
diversity they once had.
I think there needs to a well informed
debate about who land is managed into the future – and this book is as good a
place as any to start thinking about what this debate could mean or should
include.
Highly recommended.
Earthbound - Paul Morley - 4/5
Earthbound is a rather nicely balanced
account of the music that the author, then a writer for the NME, listened to
and was influenced by as he used the Bakerloo Line.
While very little of the music described in
this book is on high rotation on my play lists, this did not take much away
from the book as whole. This is account of
at least three journeys, a musical one, a physical on the train and technological
one in the way that we listen to and ‘consume’ music. These three journeys blend rather well into
a single narrative.
This book manages to combine trains and
music in a rather more sensible way than the last book I reviewed in this
series – Heads and Straights by Lucy Wadham.
A good balance of the history of the line,
music and the author makes for an interesting read.
Recommended.
Goodbye to all that - Robert Graves - 4/5
This is a book with a slow beginning, a
somewhat draw out conclusion and an absolutely riveting core.
Written in wonderfully straightforward
prose this is an account (mainly) of Robert Graves’s experience of the First
World War. I say ‘mainly” because it is
only the core of the book that deals with the war. The first part of the book deals with the
authors background, and in many ways helps inform the core, but this section
never as arresting as the account of life at the front.
The conclusion of the book also seems to
lack the urgency of the middle section – this is hardly a surprise given the
intensity of the experiences of combat.
As a result this slightly uneven book seems
to take a while to become the classic it is thought to be, and then eventually
winds down to a slightly unremarkable finish.
But there is not question that this book is
worth reading for the better middle section alone. There is the meeting of well known names –
Sassoon, Owen, Rivers – that make many of these accounts (factual and
fictional) feel strangely overlapping.
Straightforward, stunning in its portrayal
of the damage done, this is an honest account of life and death at the
front. (Just don’t be put off by the
slow start)
Highly recommended.
Heads and Straights - Lucy Wadham - 4/5 or 2/5!
This is a book that needs two separate
reviews – the first being a review of the book itself, and the second being a
review of the book as part of a series about London Circle Line.
The book itself is a wonderfully honest
account of growing up the (almost) youngest child in a family. Elder sisters have all kinds of adventures,
many of which were neither legal nor healthy.
The book is set in the 1980’s of Punk and Thatcher, and although this is
a point of embarrassment, in Chelsea.
The ‘back story’ of the family is explored
and it’s clear that a certain kind of rebellion is not unique to this period of
history. The past illuminates and
informs the present. The past moves
through Africa, Wales and Australia.
Its worth reading this (short) book just
for this story alone – and if I read this book as a ‘stand alone’ rather than
as a part of series I would recommend it highly.
But the book is part of a series – and this
brings on the second part of the review.
As a book in a series about the numerous
different underground lines of London the book is a disappointment. Apart from being set partly in Chelsea, which
is served by the Circle Line, the underground is almost absent from this
book. I have read a number of books in
the series and they are most definitely not all factual accounts of this line
or that line. They manage to weave all
kinds of histories around the rail line in a way that this book almost
completely fails to do.
So, the story itself is 4 stars. The book as part of the series is only really
worth two stars.
Grendel - John Gardner - 5/5
Earth rim Walker seeks his meals……
At first glance, a book that casts the
monster from Beowulf, Grendel, as the central character may look like just
another “revisionist” tale, or even one of the current crop of modern day /
classic mash-ups.
But this book is far more than that.
Here Grendel is cast as a thinking monster,
reacting to the myths spun by a harper – The Shaper – about him and the nature
of the world.
The duality of fate and free will is what
drives Grendel to do the things he does – violent things, terrible things,
things The Shaper expects him to do. And
while this happens, Heorot (the main target of Grendel’s rage) slays and
slaughters his way to power. Here, again
the duality of violence comes to the fore.
Now, if this sounds all a little too serious,
the tone of the book is often (deliberately) punctured by Grendel’s turn of
phrase, where he cynically comments on the world of men.
This is a splendid book, looking as it does
at the power of myth and persuasion, and how these can impact on our view of
the world.
Highly recommended.
The World of Birds - Jonathan Elphick - 5/5
This is a truly splendid book, which is
probably the best single introduction to the general biology of birds I have
seen. I can’t claim to have read it from
cover – its not that kind of book. But I have read the sections about my favourite
groups of birds and dipped into many to the other parts in passing.
The book comes in three unequally sized
parts – the first eight chapters are about broad aspects of bird biology, the 9th
chapter is about “Birds and Humans” and the 10th chapter is an
account of the bird families of the world.
This final chapter makes up about ½ of the book.
If chapter nine – ie the interactions
between humans are birds is you key interest you may be batter off looking at
Birds and People by Mark Cocker.
However, the rest of the book is
superb. Sure, a few of the pictures may
be rather small, and they do need to be looked at in good light due to their
size, but that’s a minor point. Equally,
the book is rather too big to read in bed – although I tried – but (again) I don’t
really think it’s that kind of book.
I would recommend this book highly, especially
to birders who are more interested in the birds themselves rather than the length
of lists.
A great addition to any birders library.
Britain - One Million Years of the Human Story 4 /5
This is a really rather good book that lays
out the current thinking about the history of human habitation in the UK.
This is really a story of repeated colonisation,
retreat and re-colonisation in the face of changing climate.
One million years is an unimaginable sweep
of time and it is remarkable to think that people have been walking the land
that would become Britain for that length of time.
The story of humans in Britain is laid out clearly
and concisely, but by virtue of its brevity this book can never been more than
an introduction to the subject.
An aspect of the book that I enjoyed was
the way in which our changing understanding of human evolution and expansion is
clearly linked to an evolving and expanding evidence base. Knowledge changes with the acquisition of
evidence, and this story is a decent enough case study of that idea.
I am not entirely sure this book stands on
its own, without the need to visit the exhibition as well (hence the 4 stars),
but if it does not, it comes very, very close.
I recommended both the book and the exhibition
at the Natural History Museum.
Waterlight - Selected Poems - Kathleen Jamie - 5/5
I am not a natural reader of poetry. I came to this book through the wonderful
prose books of the author.
Her prose is marked by a remarkable ability
to see and render detail in clear and precise language.
If anything, the poems take this ability
even further.
As the book progressed the poems became
longer and more complex and I missed the simple, but accurate word picture
painting of the shorter verses.
Maybe I was not ready for multi-page poems,
but the early pages of the book are filled with remarkable images and turns of
phrase.
If ever a book was to direct me towards
more poetry, I think it could be this one.
Highly recommended.
Four Fields - Tim Dee - 5/5
This is a wonderfully dense, slow moving
and thought-provoking book.
In may ways everything else I am going to
say will be just an extension of that opening line – if you are in a hurry I
recommend you stop reading this and buy the book.
For those of you with a little more time I
will expand my comments a little.
Fields are a strange combination of nature
and human control – and the fours fields of books title show varying degrees of
these two aspects. The Fens fields of
East Anglia and the abandoned fields of Chernobyl are mostly, but not entirely,
human. The fields of Africa and North
America are mostly, but not entirely, still shaped by nature.
The fen fields of East Anglia are returned
to in a conventional seasonal approach, but the content of these four chapters
goes far beyond the normal “it was winter and I saw this type of bird”
narrative that dominates so much nature writing. Water flows through the fens and the movement
(and control) of water are central themes in these chapters.
The ideas encountered in the other fields
are as divers as their locations – but ideas of control (or the loss of it) are
also present.
One of the things I most liked about this
book was its clear sense of ending – many books of nature writing seem to stop
only when the author runs out of things to say (or the year has turned full
circle). Here the book has a wonderful concluding feel, where themes come to an
end in a way the feels natural. The book
comes to an end, rather than simply stopping.
While it’s clear that the author is a bird
watcher – and most of the encounters with wildlife in the book are with birds –
this book has a far wider range (field?) of reference than just birds.
This is one of the best books in this
general area I have read in a number of years and it comes very highly recommended.
1 comment:
its a great compilation!! like a gold mine for me.
clipping path
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