I was delight­ed to be offered the oppor­tu­ni­ty to review two books about peo­ple whose lives and work have fas­ci­nat­ed me for a long time. Strange­ly, both were born with­in a few years of each oth­er and in the same region of Ger­many – Swabia.

Albert Ein­stein was born in 1879 in the city of Ulm, which that oth­er son of Swabia, Her­man Hesse, described as an “extreme­ly beau­ti­ful and unusu­al city”. Hesse was born just two years before Ein­stein, in the Black For­est town of Calw. It’s a beau­ti­ful part of Ger­many. The 15th-cen­tu­ry astrologer and alchemist Johannes Faust also came from this region, as well as GWF Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin.

In the autumn of 1922, Ein­stein trav­elled with his sec­ond wife, Elsa, to Japan to give a series of lec­tures at the invi­ta­tion of the head of the Kaizo-Sha pub­lish­ing house in Tokyo, Sane­hiko Yamamo­to. Appar­ent­ly, Yamamo­to had asked Betrand Rus­sell to name the three great­est peo­ple in the world at the time. The philoso­pher replied: “First Ein­stein, then Lenin. There is nobody else.”

Ein­stein spent five and a half months trav­el­ling, also briefly vis­it­ing Hong Kong, Sin­ga­pore, Colom­bo and Shang­hai (he can­celled a planned lec­ture series in Bei­jing at the last moment). On the return leg of his jour­ney he spent twelve days in Pales­tine and three weeks in Spain.

Dur­ing his trav­els, he kept a per­son­al diary. Although it was pri­vate, it has now been pub­lished as The Trav­el Diaries of Albert Ein­stein: The Far East, Pales­tine & Spain 1922–1923, edit­ed by Ein­stein schol­ar Ze’ev Rosenkranz.

The diary begins on 6 Octo­ber 1922 with a typ­i­cal­ly lacon­ic remark: “Lost wife at bor­der.” For­tu­nate­ly Ein­stein was soon reunit­ed with Elsa and they depart­ed for Japan two days lat­er on board the SS Kitano Maru. At Port Said the ship was greet­ed by “a swarm of row­ing boats” filled with “ban­dit-like filthy Lev­an­tines, hand­some and grace­ful to look at”.

At the oth­er end of the Suez Canal he speaks rather more kind­ly of the Arab mer­chants, describ­ing them as “hand­some sons of the desert”. He enjoys views of the night sky from the ship: “Have nev­er seen the Milky Way so beau­ti­ful”. He is some­what less pleased by his new­found celebri­ty sta­tus: “On the ship I am fre­quent­ly pho­tographed, with and with­out peo­ple, main­ly by Japan­ese”.

Ein­stein referred to him­self as a “trav­eller in rel­a­tiv­i­ty” and in Japan he deliv­ered a series of lec­tures on the the­o­ry many still regard­ed as incom­pre­hen­si­ble. Einstein’s typ­i­cal­ly forth­right and some­times rather offen­sive lan­guage in the diary has caused some con­tro­ver­sy. For instance, he describes the Chi­nese as “a pecu­liar herd-like nation…often resem­bling automa­tons more than humans”. By con­trast, he enthused about the Japan­ese: “pure souls as nowhere else among peo­ple. One has to love and admire this coun­try.”

Rosenkranz con­cludes that Einstein’s jour­ney to the Far East “forced him to con­front his own mul­ti­ple iden­ti­ties: “eth­ni­cal­ly as a Jew, nation­al­ly as a Ger­man and a Swiss, con­ti­nen­tal­ly as a Euro­pean and hemi­spher­i­cal­ly as a West­ern­er”. In this trav­el jour­nal, clear­ly writ­ten for his eyes only, we see Ein­stein at his most human, capa­ble of mak­ing boor­ish, unthink­ing and even racist remarks.

Indeed, it shows that Ein­stein was first and fore­most a bril­liant sci­en­tist and that though he undoubt­ed­ly had an unequalled insight into the laws of physics, his under­stand­ing of human nature and of oth­er cul­tures was very far from pro­found. It seems that even a genius is, in the end, only human.

It was my love of Her­mann Hesse’s nov­els that prompt­ed me to study Ger­man lit­er­a­ture at uni­ver­si­ty. I was blown away by works like Demi­an, Narzis­sus and Gold­mund and his clas­sic nov­el The Glass Bead Game. His use of Chi­nese and Indi­an reli­gious and philo­soph­i­cal ideas seemed to offer insights into indi­vid­u­a­tion and an alter­na­tive to the crass mate­ri­al­ism of moder­ni­ty, a theme I explored in an under­grad­u­ate dis­ser­ta­tion. So I was delight­ed to be asked to review Hesse: The Wan­der­er and His Shad­ow, by Gun­nar Deck­er.

Deck­er notes that Hesse was “a noto­ri­ous­ly irri­ta­ble lon­er, who could tol­er­ate oth­er peo­ple – even his own wives – only at a suit­able dis­tance”. From ado­les­cence he was a fig­ure “on the verge of psy­chopathol­o­gy” and the inner har­mo­ny that he sought through­out his life proved elu­sive. Indeed, it was some­thing he only achieved in the pages of his writ­ing: “he was and remains an author of cri­sis”.

Hesse was award­ed the Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture in 1946. After his death in 1962, he became “the most suc­cess­ful Ger­man author bar none world­wide”. His col­lect­ed works now extend to twen­ty vol­umes, some 15,000 pages. His writ­ings were trans­lat­ed into 34 lan­guages dur­ing his life­time. Hesse not­ed wrly: “the Japan­ese under­stand me best and the Amer­i­cans the least.”

Iron­i­cal­ly, it was in the Unit­ed States that he enjoyed a Renais­sance in the 1960s among young, lib­er­at­ed read­ers. Tim­o­thy Leary described Step­pen­wolf as a “mas­ter guide to the psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ence” and the rock group Step­pen­wolf had a sin­gle called “Born to Be Wild”. As Der Spiegel observed in 1968, “it was the hip­pies who dragged Hesse out of the dol­drums”.

Hesse has always had a mixed rep­u­ta­tion among Eng­lish-speak­ing crit­ics, with some detect­ing a “faint whiff of meta­phys­i­cal Leder­ho­sen” about his work. His star has cer­tain­ly waned in recent years.

Nev­er­the­less, Decker’s won­der­ful­ly rich and insight­ful biog­ra­phy reveals the true depth of vision in this “metic­u­lous fab­ri­ca­tor of dreams”. I believe it is des­tined to become the stan­dard work on this dif­fi­cult, reclu­sive and often self-destruc­tive writer who “con­cealed him­self with­in his con­tra­dic­tions”.

Loli­ta is a com­plex and often mis­un­der­stood nov­el, one in which Vladimir Nabokov “gave fic­tion­al author­i­ty to a pedophile and charmed and revolt­ed mil­lions of read­ers in the process”. Sarah Weinman’s The Real Loli­ta: The Kid­nap­ping of Sal­ly Horner and the Nov­el that Scan­dal­ized the World bril­liant­ly reminds read­ers of the true crime behind the fic­tion and “the dark­ness of real life”.

An author­i­ty on crime fic­tion, Wein­man has painstak­ing­ly researched the trag­ic case of Sal­ly Horner, abduct­ed aged eleven in 1948 by Frank La Salle. On the note­cards which Nabokov used to record details of Amer­i­can life for his fic­tion, he wrote that Sal­ly had spent “21 months as the cross-coun­try slave” of “a mid­dle-aged morals offend­er”. These were phras­es that would appear in his 1955 nov­el, Loli­ta, proof, as Wein­man says, that Sally’s sto­ry “cap­tured his atten­tion and that her real-life ordeal was inspi­ra­tion for Dolores Haze’s fic­tion­al plight”.

Indeed, Wein­man makes a com­pelling case (despite the absence of hard evi­dence) that Nabokov was aware of the case from an ear­ly stage in the novel’s com­po­si­tion, and that it is “seed­ed” through­out the nar­ra­tive which he began writ­ing at about the time Sal­ly had been abduct­ed, even refer­ring to her by name at one point.

Though he lat­er denied that the book was inspired by the case, Wein­man argues it did indeed pro­vide a vital impe­tus “to trans­form a par­tial man­u­script primed for fail­ure into the even­tu­al, unlike­ly, stag­ger­ing suc­cess of Loli­ta.” Wein­man offers a time­ly cor­rec­tive to Nabokov’s attempt to deny the roots of his fic­tion in real­i­ty, show­ing that he “pil­fered from a true sto­ry”: “what Hum­bert Hum­bert did to Dolores Haze is, in fact, what Frank La Salle did to Sal­ly Horner in 1948.”

Like one of Nabokov’s but­ter­flies, Weinman’s com­pas­sion­ate and grip­ping book allows Sal­ly to “emerge from the cage of both fic­tion and fact, ready to fly free”.

Although I have to admit I’m no ornithol­o­gist, I’ve been enthralled by two recent books on birds I reviewed for the Guardian.

Christo­pher Skaife has what he him­self describes as “the odd­est job in Britain”. His offi­cial title is Yeo­man Warder of Her Majesty’s Roy­al Palace and Fortress the Tow­er of Lon­don. He is one of the for­mer sol­diers who are the cer­e­mo­ni­al guardians of the Tow­er and cus­to­di­ans of its ancient rit­u­als.

As if that isn’t Gor­meng­has­t­ian enough, Skaife is also the Tower’s Raven­mas­ter, respon­si­ble for the safe­ty and wel­fare of the sev­en black-as-night corvids on whose con­tin­ued res­i­dence at the Tow­er the fate of the nation depends, at least accord­ing to leg­end.

His book – The Raven­mas­ter: My Life with the Ravens at the Tow­er of Lon­don – is not a nat­ur­al his­to­ry, although along the way you do pick up some fas­ci­nat­ing facts about ravens, as well as their place in myth. Rather he describes his unique job and how he has come to love and respect the ravens he cares for: “In learn­ing about the ravens, I have dis­cov­ered a lot about what it means to be a human: I’ve learned to lis­ten, to observe, and to be still. The ravens have been my teach­ers and I have been their pupil.”

These are tru­ly fear­some birds. Appar­ent­ly ravens are par­tic­u­lar­ly fond of dog bis­cuits soaked in blood. They are also par­tial to a juicy, fat rat which they tack­le thus: “foot on, claws in, beak engaged, guts first, then the rest stripped bare, leav­ing just the skin”. Skaife col­lects the remains to feed to the local fox­es.

They also attack pigeons, often work­ing in pairs using a “sim­ple pin­cer move­ment” to trap them. Once Skaife was sum­moned by sounds of scream­ing from tourists stand­ing in a queue at the Tow­er: a raven had caught a pigeon and was eat­ing it “from the inside out while it was still alive”.

Ravens are also remark­ably intel­li­gent and pair for life, liv­ing for some twen­ty years. When their part­ner dies, Skaife has observed how the remain­ing raven is dis­traught: “it was heart­break­ing to watch”. Skaife’s book is a won­der­ful­ly per­son­al and authen­tic account of life with the Tow­er of London’s ravens.

Britain’s large gulls are divid­ed into two sep­a­rate pop­u­la­tions of rur­al and urban birds. There are thought to be more than 100,000 urban pairs of gulls. Bristol’s rooftops have been colonised by these “can­ny oppor­tunists” since at least the 1980s: “the city that brought the Atlantic to Britain – slaves, sug­ar and tobac­co – has drawn seabirds into its heart.”

In Land­fill, Tim Dee goes “gulling” with gull enthu­si­asts, or “larophiles”, a word derived from the Latin name for the gull fam­i­ly: Lar­i­dae.

Dee is less inter­est­ed in writ­ing a con­ven­tion­al nat­ur­al his­to­ry of Britain’s gulls than in “watch­ing the watch­ers and the watched”. These sea birds – “tokens of the far-from-home and the storm-tossed” – are increas­ing­ly infil­trat­ing our urban worlds and, as they do so, our view of them is evolv­ing.

Pick­ing up scraps of dis­card­ed fast food from gut­ters, snatch­ing chips from the fin­gers of tourists, pick­ing over rub­bish dumps for food waste – gulls are scorned as “bin chick­ens” and “the sub­nat­ur­al inhab­i­tants of dross­capes”. But they are becom­ing part of our every­day lives.

Dee’s task is sub­tle and almost philo­soph­i­cal. His beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten book is as much about us as it is about the gulls. In the Anthro­pocene, as we increas­ing­ly dom­i­nate and alter the nat­ur­al world, ani­mals are chang­ing their behav­iour in order to sur­vive.

From con­ver­sa­tions at rub­bish dumps to Chekhov’s seag­ull (prob­a­bly a black-head­ed gull) and gulls in Beckett’s plays (“there is no green; there aren’t even any gulls”), Dee’s book is a mem­o­rable med­i­ta­tion on gulls and our evolv­ing rela­tion­ship with nature in the Anthro­pocene.

Anoth­er book that focus­es on life in the Anthro­pocene is Pri­mate Change: How the World We Made is Remak­ing Us, by Vybarr Cre­gan-Reid. Accord­ing to Cre­gan-Reid our urban, tech­no­log­i­cal world is slow­ly killing us.

British chil­dren now spend less time out­doors than prison inmates. A fifth of 5- to 12-year-olds don’t go out­side at all on an aver­age day and more than one in nine do not go to a park, beach, for­est or any nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment in a year.

Bad backs (from which the author him­self suf­fers – as does this review­er) rarely appear in fic­tion before the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. One of the first exam­ples is that of Jen­ny Wren in Dickens’s Our Mutu­al Friend. Today 80% of adults in the US will suf­fer from it at some point.

Today most of us work sit­ting down, an extreme­ly unnat­ur­al pos­ture – chairs were not a com­mon fea­ture of homes until the Ear­ly Mod­ern peri­od. Sit­ting for long peri­ods weak­ens the mus­cu­la­ture in the back and even­tu­al­ly through­out the body: “sit­ting is a major cause of a sack­ful of dis­eases”. We spend 70–100 hours a week sit­ting, or four to six years of every decade, which is longer than we spend sleep­ing: “the human body was nev­er meant to phys­i­cal­ly expe­ri­ence mod­ern life in this way”.

The result is that in the Anthro­pocene, our cur­rent geo­log­i­cal epoch, most peo­ple now die of a “mis­match dis­ease” caused by the fric­tion between our bod­ies and an unfa­mil­iar envi­ron­ment: “the Anthro­pocene human is one whose body has changed – not as a result of evo­lu­tion but in response to the envi­ron­ment we have cre­at­ed.” Exam­ples of these dis­eases include myopia, aller­gies, tooth decay, type 2 dia­betes and chron­ic obstruc­tive pul­monary dis­ease.

The way we live today is killing us. Although he adds: “still, mod­ern life does have its ben­e­fits; in a busy met­ro­pol­i­tan cen­tre you are sig­nif­i­cant­ly less like­ly to be eat­en by a dinosaur.”

In a work of remark­able syn­the­sis and scope, Cre­gan-Reid ranges across ancient his­to­ry, sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture to explore the long his­to­ry of human evo­lu­tion and adap­ta­tion to our envi­ron­ment. He offers help­ful advice, informed by cur­rent research, on how to avoid the mis­match between our bod­ies – designed for walk­ing in the grass­land – and the urban, seden­tary lives we now lead.

His main point in this wit­ty, infor­ma­tive and poten­tial­ly life-chang­ing book is that we should all get out of our chairs and start mov­ing: “in order for our feet and our bod­ies to stay healthy, they need move­ment in the way that stom­achs need food and skin needs sun­light”.

It’s a shock­ing fact that if you’re aged 45–64 and do seden­tary work, you are 40% more like­ly to end up in a nurs­ing home. Today, “if move­ment were a diet in mod­ern life, we would all be starv­ing”.

And with that in mind, I’ve been sit­ting down for long enough writ­ing this, so I’m off for a walk.

Catch you lat­er!

 

Links to the books & the reviews:

Ze’ev Rosenkranz, ed, The Trav­el Diaries of Albert Ein­stein: The Far East, Pales­tine & Spain 1922–1923 (Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press, £29.95) – Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment (£)

Gun­nar Deck­er, Hesse: The Wan­der­er and His Shad­ow, trans­lat­ed by Peter Lewis (Har­vard UP, £30) – Guardian

Sarah Wein­man, The Real Loli­ta: The Kid­nap­ping of Sal­ly Horner and the Nov­el that Scan­dal­ized the World (Wei­den­feld & Nicol­son, £16.99) – Guardian

Christo­pher Skaife, The Raven­mas­ter: My Life with the Ravens at the Tow­er of Lon­don (4th Estate, £14.99) – Guardian

Tim Dee, Land­fill (Lit­tle Toller Books, £16) – Guardian

Vybarr Cre­gan-Reid, Pri­mate Change: How the World We Made is Remak­ing Us (Octo­pus, £16.99) – Guardian