PD Smith

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

Since my last post, the rather sad saga of my addic­tion to books has con­tin­ued unabat­ed. I was unable to say no to four new non­fic­tion books that the Guardian offered me, as well as sev­er­al paper­backs.

Ground Work: Writ­ings on Places and Peo­ple, edit­ed by Tim Dee (Jonathan Cape, £16.99), is a remark­able col­lec­tion of spe­cial­ly com­mis­sioned work by aca­d­e­mics, poets, biog­ra­phers, artists, nat­u­ral­ists, nov­el­ists and his­to­ri­ans about the impor­tance of place. “Place-mak­ing is a sig­nal of our species”, says Dee: “any­where can be a some­where”.

These pieces illus­trate how the slow but con­stant accre­tion of expe­ri­ences and sen­sa­tions turn the way-sta­tions of our hum­drum lives – whether in cities, sub­ur­bia, or rur­al – into dense sites of mem­o­ry and sig­nif­i­cance. It’s a won­der­ful mix of schol­ar­ship, his­to­ry and acute obser­va­tion, touch­ing on themes that are at once intense­ly per­son­al and uni­ver­sal. There are stand-out essays by Philip Hoare, Mark Cock­er and Ken Wor­pole.

All the Pieces Mat­ter: The Inside Sto­ry of The Wire by Jonathan Abrams (No Exit Press, £12.99) is a superb col­lec­tion of inter­views about the mak­ing of The Wire, one of my favourite tele­vi­sion series.

The six­ty episodes of The Wire from 2002 to 2008 were ini­tial­ly large­ly ignored by crit­ics and award-givers alike. Now the series is wide­ly regard­ed as one of the great­est tele­vi­sion shows ever made. Its cre­ator was the for­mer Bal­ti­more crime jour­nal­ist David Simon. Togeth­er with his co-cre­ator Ed Burns, who had spent twen­ty years in the Bal­ti­more police, and a team of writ­ers which includ­ed the nov­el­ists Den­nis Lehane, Richard Price and George Pele­canos, Simon craft­ed an immense­ly pow­er­ful series that was char­ac­terised by its remark­able real­ism, its human­i­ty and out­stand­ing writ­ing.

The ini­tial wire­tap sto­ry­line was based on a 1984 inves­ti­ga­tion into the drug king­pin Melvin “Lit­tle” Williams, led by Burns and cov­ered by Simons in the Bal­ti­more Sun.

Despite its nat­u­ral­ism, none of the dia­logue was impro­vised. Accord­ing to Wen­dell Pierce (Detec­tive William “Bunk” More­land), “they were on us about the words, man. Every piece is impor­tant. ‘All the pieces mat­ter’. That was the mantra.”

Com­plex, nov­el­is­tic and pro­found­ly mov­ing, in The Wire Simon took the police dra­ma to a whole new lev­el. Essen­tial read­ing for any­one who loved the series.

Room to Dream, by David Lynch and Kris­tine McKen­na (Canon­gate, £25), fea­tures an approach to life writ­ing “that some might find strange”. This hybrid form com­bines mem­oir and biog­ra­phy: each of McKenna’s chap­ters is fol­lowed by one by Lynch on the same peri­od, “hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with his own biog­ra­phy”. The result is a remark­able por­trait of one of cinema’s great auteurs. And Twin Peaks also hap­pens to be anoth­er of my oth­er favourite TV series.

Those who have col­lab­o­rat­ed with Lynch in front and behind the cam­era have found the expe­ri­ence immense­ly reward­ing. Accord­ing to Sis­sy Spacek: “once peo­ple work with David they want to work with him again and get near the flame”.

His sur­re­al and often dark vision of mod­ern Amer­i­can life always offers the pos­si­bil­i­ty of redemp­tion and enlight­en­ment. Lynch is a fer­vent believ­er in the pow­er of med­i­ta­tion to change lives and for Robert Forster – who plays Sher­iff Frank Tru­man in Twin Peaks – there is a tran­scen­den­tal qual­i­ty in his films: “he asks us to find that con­nec­tion to the eter­nal in our­selves”.

At times Room to Dream feels a bit like a vale­dic­to­ry Festschrift, but it undoubt­ed­ly offers a mem­o­rable insight into Lynch’s intense cre­ativ­i­ty, from his paint­ing and music to fur­ni­ture design­ing (“I just don’t see a lot of fur­ni­ture that thrills my soul”). As McKen­na says, “to a remark­able degree his life is an exer­cise in pure cre­ativ­i­ty”.

A part of me (the part that writes reviews) thinks that 900-page books should be banned. I’d make an excep­tion though for A Cer­tain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, by Julian Jack­son (Allen Lane, £35).

To tell the life of de Gaulle is also to chart the his­to­ry of mod­ern France and in this suit­ably mon­u­men­tal biog­ra­phy, Jack­son por­trays his sub­ject as a com­plex and con­tra­dic­to­ry char­ac­ter. Accord­ing to Jack­son, “he was a sol­dier who spent most of his career fight­ing the army; a con­ser­v­a­tive who often talked like a rev­o­lu­tion­ary; a man of pas­sion who found it almost impos­si­ble to express emo­tions”.

He dis­trust­ed both Britain (“per­fid­i­ous”) and Amer­i­ca (“it has no depth nor roots”). He once quipped that dur­ing the Sec­ond World War the British based the Free French in Carl­ton Gar­dens because it is “a dead end, with the only way out through Water­loo Place”. Through­out de Gaulle’s life, in his writ­ings and in his actions, his belief in the unique­ness of his nation remained undimmed: “France is the light of the world, her genius is to light up the uni­verse.”

Last week I had the plea­sure of read­ing Let­ters to Change the World: From Pankhurst to Orwell, edit­ed by Travis Elbor­ough (Ebury, £14.99). This is an inspir­ing col­lec­tion of more than six­ty let­ters, from the begin­ning of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry to the present day, which expose injus­tice, chal­lenge per­ni­cious ideas or cel­e­brate the ide­al­ism which is our species’ unique qual­i­ty.

Many are hum­bling. They include Ron Ridenhour’s 1969 let­ter to mem­bers of Con­gress and to Pres­i­dent Nixon expos­ing the My Lai mas­sacre that had occurred the year before. A heli­copter gun­ner in Viet­nam, Riden­hour had heard rumours about the mas­sacre from fel­low sol­diers who had wit­nessed it, con­vinc­ing him that “some­thing rather dark and bloody” took place.

This “con­sci­en­tious cit­i­zen” was so appalled by accounts of hun­dreds of men, women and chil­dren being shot in cold blood that he could not remain silent. In his let­ter he quot­ed Win­ston Churchill: “A coun­try with­out a con­science is a coun­try with­out a soul and a coun­try with­out a soul is a coun­try that can­not sur­vive.”

Writ­ten with deep emo­tion and mea­sured rea­son, these elo­quent, pow­er­ful and coura­geous let­ters speak to essen­tial themes of human­i­ty and jus­tice. At a time of great polit­i­cal uncer­tain­ty and indeed when let­ter writ­ing is almost a for­got­ten art, this col­lec­tion – which should have pride of place in every library – demon­strates the vital and endur­ing impor­tance of speak­ing truth to pow­er.

Among the best paper­backs I’ve read recent­ly are these three gems:

Anoth­er Kyoto, by Alex Kerr with Kathy Arlyn Sokol (Pen­guin, £9.99)
Filled with mem­o­rable insights into Japan (from the city’s ubiq­ui­tous gates to the soft tata­mi mats found in near­ly every home), Kerr and Sokol’s book – beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trat­ed by Tet­su­ji Fuji­hara – pro­vides an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to the sub­lime city of Kyoto.

Applied Bal­lar­dian­ism: Mem­oir from a Par­al­lel Uni­verse, by Simon Sel­l­ars (Urba­nom­ic, £18.99)
This bril­liant­ly writ­ten aut­ofic­tion is osten­si­bly a mem­oir of the author’s obses­sion with JG Bal­lard and his attempt to write a doc­tor­al the­sis on the sub­ject. The the­sis remains unwrit­ten. Instead we have Applied Bal­lar­dian­ism – a won­der­ful­ly orig­i­nal mix of cul­tur­al the­o­ry, lit­er­ary exe­ge­sis, trav­el­ogue and psy­chopatho­log­i­cal mem­oir. As Bal­lard said, “Dan­ger­ous bends ahead. Slow down.”

The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Cal­cut­ta, by Kushana­va Choud­hury (Blooms­bury, £8.99)
Choudhury’s mem­o­rably evoca­tive book reveals the rich cul­ture of this teem­ing and trou­bled com­mu­ni­ty, offer­ing a won­der­ful­ly vivid and per­son­al account of life in Cal­cut­ta, from adda (“the sweet Ben­gali pas­time of aim­less digres­sive con­ver­sa­tion”) and its addic­tive street food, to the bib­lio­phile delights of Col­lege Street, “not just a street but a labyrinth made of books”. A clas­sic urban read.

Hap­py read­ing, fel­low book addicts…

Sue Black has one of the most extra­or­di­nary and – it has to be said – unen­vi­able jobs. She’s a pro­fes­sor of anato­my and foren­sic anthro­pol­o­gy. The task of the foren­sic anthro­pol­o­gist is to read the nar­ra­tive writ­ten into the body or skele­ton in order to recon­struct “the sto­ry of the life lived”. Her work takes her to war zones and to the after­math of dis­as­ters. She also helps the police iden­ti­fy bod­ies. It goes with­out say­ing that what she has to wit­ness is trau­mat­ic and Black admits she has seen col­leagues “haunt­ed” by their expe­ri­ences: “it has destroyed lives, rela­tion­ships and careers”.

At the scene of a mas­sacre in Koso­vo, where she was assist­ing in the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of bod­ies and the col­lec­tion of evi­dence of war crimes, a police­man broke down at the sight of a two-year-old girl who had been shot in cold blood. Pro­fes­sor Black – “the moth­er on the team” – hugged him: “hav­ing chinks in your armour isn’t always a sign of weak­ness. It is often a sign of human­i­ty.”

Black is often asked how she copes with the appalling things she has to wit­ness. “I have nev­er been spooked by the dead,” she replies. “It is the liv­ing who ter­ri­fy me.” She says she’s “hard as nails” and I believe her, although she does admit to being scared of rats. But despite its often grim con­tent, Black’s remark­able and utter­ly grip­ping account of her life and work – All That Remains: A Life in Death – man­ages to be sur­pris­ing­ly life-affirm­ing.

It is also a thought­ful yet down-to-earth med­i­ta­tion on our atti­tudes to death in the mod­ern world. Unlike most of us, Black doesn’t fear death: “thanks to her, I have enjoyed a long, pro­duc­tive and inter­est­ing career”. In fact she regards her own death as a “final adven­ture”, one she wants to expe­ri­ence and under­stand “as com­plete­ly as is human­ly pos­si­ble”.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, she intends to bequeath her body to a Scot­tish anato­my depart­ment, like the one in which she her­self has spent her work­ing life, and she writes with real pas­sion about “the mes­meris­ing beau­ty of human anato­my”. She even hopes to end up as an artic­u­lat­ed teach­ing skele­ton: “as bones have a very long shelf life, I could be hang­ing around for cen­turies, whether my stu­dents like it or not.”

In The Lost Boys, Gina Per­ry explores what the soci­ol­o­gist of sci­ence Bruno Latour calls the “Janus face” of sci­ence: the con­trast between the shiny pub­lic rela­tions image of white coats and hard facts, and the behind-the-scenes details of how sci­ence is made which, as Per­ry says, is “messier, some­times ugly, but always more inter­est­ing”.

Her sub­ject is the social psy­cho­log­i­cal exper­i­ments which Muzafer Sherif con­duct­ed in Amer­i­can sum­mer camps dur­ing the Cold War, using groups of eleven-year-old boys. Although they were the “cream of the crop” in their com­mu­ni­ties, Sherif showed in his 1954 exper­i­ment at Rob­bers Cave State Park, Okla­homa, how quick­ly these boys could degen­er­ate into “dis­turbed, vicious…wicked young­sters”.

Sherif spent his career study­ing the role of groups in direct­ing our behav­iour. He was fas­ci­nat­ed by “the pow­er of trib­al loy­al­ty, in-groups and out-groups, to shape our worlds”. Unlike ear­li­er attempts, his now-clas­sic 1954 exper­i­ment ran accord­ing to plan, with the two groups behav­ing like war­ring nation states and then being brought togeth­er to face a com­mon threat when the camp’s water sup­ply was cut off by a rock fall. Per­ry shows how every­thing was care­ful­ly stage-man­aged by Sherif and his team, with observers secret­ly record­ing the boys, pho­tograph­ing them and tak­ing hand­writ­ten notes of their behav­iour, like some ear­ly ver­sion of TV’s Big Broth­er.

Per­ry has pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten a study of Stan­ley Mil­gram’s con­tro­ver­sial obe­di­ence exper­i­ments and sees in Sherif’s work a sim­i­lar lack of inter­est in the poten­tial harm inflict­ed on his exper­i­men­tal sub­jects. The way the boys’ emo­tions and behav­iour was manip­u­lat­ed by the adults is undoubt­ed­ly dis­turb­ing.

She con­trasts the pub­lished results of the exper­i­ment at Rob­bers Cave with the raw data col­lect­ed at the three sum­mer camps used by Sherif and his teams. She also tracks down some of the par­tic­i­pants – “the lost boys” – who had no idea of the impor­tant role they played in the his­to­ry of social psy­chol­o­gy. Today some of the sub­jects feel used. “It was a crazy sit­u­a­tion run by crazy peo­ple,” says one. But Sherif’s assis­tant remains ide­al­is­tic: “We were fight­ing prej­u­dice.” Sherif lat­er boast­ed of “lab­o­ra­to­ry-like” con­di­tions. But Perry’s account amounts to a dev­as­tat­ing cri­tique of this sem­i­nal exper­i­ment, cast­ing doubt on how it was con­duct­ed and the objec­tiv­i­ty of the researchers.

In the end, how­ev­er, she offers a sym­pa­thet­ic por­trait of Sherif – a dri­ven, tem­pera­men­tal man – find­ing answers to his “lack of com­pas­sion” for the boys in his own trou­bled youth in Turkey. Flawed though it may be, Per­ry finds in his research an admirable desire to cre­ate a world in which “wounds were healed and what was lost was restored”, at a time when the only future was one of war and con­flict.

The writer and edi­tor of the New York Review of Books, Ian Buru­ma, “grew up with two cul­tures”. His father was a lapsed Dutch Protes­tant and his moth­er British, from an Anglo-Ger­man-Jew­ish fam­i­ly: “My des­tiny was to be half in, half out – of almost any­thing.” He always dreamed of escap­ing from the safe and dull cocoon of his upper-mid­dle-class child­hood in The Hague, “a world of gar­den sprin­klers, club ties, bridge par­ties and the sound of ten­nis balls in sum­mer”.

The oppor­tu­ni­ty to study in Tokyo on a schol­ar­ship at the film depart­ment of Nihon Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Art pro­vid­ed the per­fect way out, though Buru­ma admits that “Asia meant very lit­tle” to him beyond falling in love with the Japan­ese char­ac­ter Kyoko in Truffaut’s film Bed and Board (Domi­cile Con­ju­gal).

Buru­ma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, aged 23. Although he quick­ly tired of his film course, Buru­ma immersed him­self in the Japan­ese imag­i­na­tion and in this mem­oir of his six years in Japan he writes with real pas­sion for both Japan­ese movies and the avant-garde the­atre of the time. A Tokyo Romance is a won­der­ful­ly evoca­tive account of cul­tur­al life in Tokyo in the 1970s, rich with anec­dotes about the peo­ple he met and illus­trat­ed with his own strik­ing pho­tog­ra­phy, “the per­fect art for a voyeur danc­ing he explores the around the fringes”. In par­tic­u­lar, he explores the flight of his younger self from bour­geois respectabil­i­ty to the mys­te­ri­ous Oth­er of Japan­ese cul­ture with dry humour and real insight.

After six years in the coun­try, Buru­ma was forced to acknowl­edge that even though he spoke the lan­guage and fol­lowed the local cus­toms, he would always be an out­sider, or gai­jin (lit­er­al­ly, an “out­side per­son”): “every gai­jin in Japan must real­ize that a gai­jin he or she will always remain”. Some peo­ple, who had grown to love the coun­try, found this dif­fi­cult to accept. But Buru­ma – who grew up with a sense of being caught between worlds – found it lib­er­at­ing: as a stranger in a strange land, he no longer felt the need to con­form or even belong. When he even­tu­al­ly returned to Europe, he brought this “rad­i­cal auton­o­my” with him and he realis­es now that “Japan shaped me”.

I par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed Buruma’s mem­o­rable study and it made me want to imme­di­ate­ly book a flight to Tokyo, a city I fell in love with when I vis­it­ed a few years ago. The details of all three books, which I strong­ly rec­om­mend, are below, togeth­er with links to my reviews in the Guardian.

All That Remains: A Life in Death, by Sue Black (Dou­ble­day, £16.99) — Guardian review

The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Rob­bers Cave Exper­i­ment, by Gina Per­ry (Scribe, £14.99) — Guardian review

A Tokyo Romance: A Mem­oir, by Ian Buru­ma (Atlantic, £16.99) — Guardian review

I have to be hon­est and admit that I’m strug­gling a bit to keep up with review­ing, writ­ing and updat­ing my blog at the moment! Still bet­ter to have too much work, than not enough…

So in between try­ing to write my book on urban detec­tives for Blooms­bury (thanks for being so patient guys…), I’ve been read­ing a study of medieval bod­ies and a cou­ple of books on rur­al life for the Guardian, as well as one on the shape of things to come for the TLS.

Art his­to­ri­an Jack Hart­nel­l’s Medieval Bod­ies: Life, Death and Art in the Mid­dle Ages explores the medieval world-view through the body. Rather than a closed sys­tem, the body was seen as fun­da­men­tal­ly linked to the exter­nal world of mat­ter and spir­it: “under­stand­ing the body was just one part of an attempt to make sense of the uni­verse in its entire­ty”. The body was at the cen­tre of their phys­i­cal and meta­phys­i­cal world-view, an end­less­ly fecund source of metaphors and ideas around which their imag­i­na­tive and intel­lec­tu­al lives evolved.

Hartnell’s eru­dite yet live­ly prose, accom­pa­nied by beau­ti­ful colour illus­tra­tions, brings the Mid­dle Ages alive in a phys­i­cal, and almost vis­cer­al way. He high­lights the sur­pris­ing­ly deep cross-cul­tur­al links between Byzan­tium, Europe and Islam, and shows how phi­los­o­phy, art, reli­gion and prac­ti­cal knowl­edge about treat­ing wounds and ill­ness­es, as well as anatom­i­cal ideas, informed medieval atti­tudes and beliefs about the body. A tri­umph of his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship. My review is in Sat­ur­day’s Guardian.

Coun­try­side writer John Lewis-Stem­pel has writ­ten a beau­ti­ful book about a wood in Here­ford­shire which he man­aged for four years. Nature is not abstract in his writ­ing, but vis­cer­al. It’s a phys­i­cal pres­ence, some­times sen­su­al, some­times cru­el, but always full of won­der – from the “sad solil­o­quies” of the robin in Jan­u­ary to “a dead rab­bit rean­i­mat­ed by the mag­gots inside it”.

He has a won­der­ful way with words, and his descrip­tions of nature have a no-non­sense con­ci­sion that is remark­ably evoca­tive, from the “paper-rus­tle of rab­bits scut­tling across dry sycamore leaves” to “the hand-clap of pigeon wings”. You can read my review of The Wood here.

Mark Con­nel­l’s The Cow Book cov­ers a sim­i­lar sub­ject but in a very dif­fer­ent style. It’s a brood­ing, pow­er­ful mem­oir about a 29-year-old man’s return to the fam­i­ly farm in Ire­land and his dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ship with his morose and short-tem­pered father.

As well as a mem­oir, Connell’s book explores our rela­tion­ship with cat­tle, our com­pan­ions for some ten thou­sand years: “to speak of cat­tle is to speak of man”. From the ancient wild ox, the auroch, that appears in ancient cave art to the exter­mi­na­tion of the Amer­i­can buf­fa­lo by Euro­pean set­tlers and Robert Bakewell’s selec­tive breed­ing in the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry that pro­duced the first beef cow and influ­enced Charles Darwin’s the­o­ry of nat­ur­al selec­tion.

It’s clear, though, that the strength and pow­er of this book lies not in nat­ur­al his­to­ry but in Connell’s deeply per­son­al account of try­ing to reassem­ble the pieces of his life after a peri­od of severe depres­sion, what he terms “the Past”. You can read my review at the Guardian.

Both these books about the coun­try­side are mem­o­rable and strong­ly rec­om­mend­ed. I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by the pow­er­ful con­nec­tion to land­scape and nature that I’m find­ing in many new non-fic­tion books. It’s as if the nation whose peo­ple pio­neered the move to cities in the 19th cen­tu­ry and where by 2030 more than 90% will be city dwellers, has sud­den­ly redis­cov­ered the val­ue of recon­nect­ing to the nat­ur­al world.

The final book I’ve reviewed is Peter Bowler’s A His­to­ry of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H. G. Wells to Isaac Asi­mov. This was a fas­ci­nat­ing book for me to read, because it remind­ed me of the research I did while writ­ing Dooms­day Men. In par­tic­u­lar the fic­tion of HG Wells. The his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Peter Bowler describes Wells as a “prophet of progress” and argues that the voic­es of such tech­no­log­i­cal opti­mists have been obscured in sur­veys of the way the future was depict­ed in writ­ing dur­ing the first two-thirds of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. He accus­es fic­tion writ­ers of spread­ing an atmos­phere “of per­ma­nent doom and gloom” while pop­u­lar sci­ence writ­ing was “full of expec­ta­tions of future ben­e­fits”.

Instead of explor­ing the “night­mare sto­ries set in a dehu­man­ized world” of Hux­ley, Yevge­ny Zamy­atin and oth­ers, Bowler con­cen­trates on the work of what he terms the “enthu­si­asts”, writ­ers of pop­u­lar sci­ence from J. B. S. Hal­dane, J. D. Bernal and A. M. Low to Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asi­mov, who were typ­i­cal­ly opti­mistic about a future improved by the dis­cov­er­ies of sci­ence.

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing study and well worth read­ing, although I felt in the end that he risked over-sim­pli­fy­ing what is at heart a com­plex and sub­tle sto­ry of the inter­ac­tion of sci­ence, soci­ety and cul­ture. My review appears in the 13 April issue of the TLS and is sad­ly not free to view, although if you have a sub­scrip­tion it’s online here.

If I find a free moment I may post it on my web­site…

We’ve just returned from a few days stay­ing in Lis­bon — a beau­ti­ful hilly city of cob­bled streets, tiled hous­es and deli­cious food. You can see some of my impres­sions of the city on Flickr.

Before I left, I read Elisabeth’s Lists: A Fam­i­ly Sto­ry, by Lulah Ellen­der, a haunt­ing­ly beau­ti­ful med­i­ta­tion on life and death, span­ning three gen­er­a­tions of a fam­i­ly. The nar­ra­tive is anchored in a book of lists kept by the author’s grand­moth­er. The lists range from inven­to­ries of house­hold linen and a “reg­is­ter” of eggs laid by her chick­ens dur­ing the war, to what to serve at a cock­tail par­ty for eighty peo­ple. Accord­ing to Ellen­der, “Elisabeth’s lists are her fil­ing sys­tem for her trou­bles and her joys, tri­umphs and bore­dom”.

Ellen­der also explores how we use lists to bring order to the world: “these cat­a­logues hold our chaos”. As his mar­riage crum­bled, Ein­stein hand­ed his wife an impos­si­ble list of Con­di­tions for Mar­riage. Before he mar­ried, Dar­win wrote down the pros and cons of mar­riage, even­tu­al­ly decid­ing a wife would be “bet­ter than a dog any­how”.

My review of Ellen­der’s book is pub­lished in Sat­ur­day’s Guardian.