More from Books

Thursday

Jude Cook

A sea of troubles | 4 July 2019

Andrew Ridker’s The Altruists (Viking, £20) is a Jewish family saga of academic parents and grown-up offspring. From this rather careworn material he manages to wring a spry comedy of parental failure and romantic misadventure. Arthur Alter is a terrible father, an ‘emotional cheapskate’ who attempts to bring his estranged children Ethan and Maggie together for a weekend in St Louis, with the ulterior motive of getting his hands on their inheritance. Unsurprisingly, he was excluded from his wife’s will, as he was sleeping with a much younger German medievalist throughout her final illness.

Thursday

Dennis Duncan

Binding love

In the spring of 1998, Rolling Stones fans in Germany were disappointed to hear that the band had been forced to cancel a string of gigs. Keith Richards, the ne plus ultra of rock’s wild men, had damaged a rib in a tumble from a ladder while trying to retrieve a book from one of the higher shelves in his Connecticut library. Hide that smirk: it could just be true. Keef, it turns out, has not one but two extensive libraries — on either side of the Atlantic — and even went as far as applying the Dewey Decimal System to bring his sprawling collections into some kind of order. An addictive personality by any measure, Richards clearly has the book-collecting bug — and bibliomania, as Stuart Kells’s entertaining history cautions, can be a cruel mistress.

Philip Marsden

Ideas are history

Wallace Stevens called it ‘the necessary angel’. Ted Hughes thought it ‘the most essential bit of machinery we have if we are going to live the lives of human beings’. Coleridge described its role a little more vigorously: ‘The living Power and prime Agent of all human perception… a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. The imagination is the subject of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s latest grand sweep of a book. Not a historian to dwell on individual kings, queens or battles, he has identified the creation of ideas as the driver of history, the imagination as their source and the pool of evidence the past 800,000 years.

Anne Chisholm

Born to be wild

It was high time we had a proper look at the four beautiful, original Olivier sisters. Hitherto, with one exception, they have been seen in glimpses, playing marginal parts on the Bloomsbury stage after about 1910. The exception was the youngest, Noel, who all her life and since has been stuck with her invidious role as the girl who turned down a national hero, Rupert Brooke. Even Sarah Watling cannot help beginning and ending her solid, thoughtful book with that piece of the jigsaw. But admirably, if a trifle laboriously, she goes on to consider each of them as an individual, and succeeds in placing them firmly in the vanguard of the slow progress of women towards a measure of personal and professional freedom. Their lives were not plain sailing.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Mastering rocket science

Now that we are stupidly rendering Earth almost entirely uninhabitable by many species including our own (through overcrowding, failing political systems, chemical pollution and climate disorder), a few humans of means are looking forward to migrating soon to other planets, even though, as yet, there are no good hotels and restaurants there. Scientists, stimulated by international rivalry and their own ambitions during the past century, have put together the machines and propellants for interplanetary travel. Here are two excellent, microscopically detailed books about the most important individuals and organisations that achieved personkind’s first progress into space.

Peter Parker

On a wing and a prayer | 27 June 2019

In 1979, despite the best efforts of scientists for more than a century, a butterfly called the British Large Blue became extinct. There is widespread concern about the more recent decline in butterfly populations, but the American ecologist Nick Haddad writes that the collective weight of the known populations of the five rarest butterflies he discusses in his sobering book is just ‘three pounds five ounces — as much as one panda’s paw’. The special importance of butterflies, he argues, is that they provide lessons about the decline and management of other threatened species.

Cindy Yu

A Kan-do attitude

The defining feature of Chinese millennials is not Instagram, avocado on toast or propertylessness. Born in the early years of China’s growth miracle, my generation idled away days on dusty village roads that would be paved as we grew up. Our adolescence coincided with the arrival of the smartphone; and now, with our jet-setting cosmopolitan ways, we drive China’s global tourism boom. We are as much at home with squatting toilets as with Starbucks menus. In Under Red Skies, Karoline Kan tells her own millennial story of rags to riches. She was born into a poor farming community, where her grandfather tilled the fields. When she was in primary school, the family moved to a nearby town, uprooted by the sheer determination of Kan’s mother, Shumin.

Mark Cocker

Return of the iceman

It is more than a generation since the appearance of Barry Lopez’s classic Arctic Dreams. That book’s effortless integration of history, anthropology and ecology, mediated through its author’s radiant prose, introduced a global audience to the frozen north. It freed the frigid ice world from much historical polar literature, conjuring instead landscapes of delicate beauty and extraordinary natural abundance. Lopez also revealed the Arctic as a place of remarkable human achievement, as expressed in the survival skills and spiritual endurance of the indigenous Inuit. A follow-up has long been anticipated and now, 33 years later, Horizon has finally arrived.

Philip Womack

Mothers meeting

Niven Govinden’s This Brutal House is set in the demi-monde of the New York vogue ball. This is an organised, charged battle of display, a peacocking, glitter-fuelled extravaganza, in which transvestites and transsexuals compete against each other for kudos and cash prizes. Eyelashes lengthen, hair is piled up for hours, dresses shimmer and heels clack, as some of the city’s most vulnerable inhabitants seek a place of self-expression and safety. The participants urge each other on with powerful expressions in demotic idiom. One chapter is devoted to a list of vogue ball categories. Running to several pages, it includes everything from ‘Category is: see you in the afternoon realness’ to ‘Category is: dance on my grave madness’.

Boyd Tonkin

Between the devil and the deep blue sea

Death by water haunts the stories of Africans in Europe that flow through this fourth novel by Helon Habila. From the drowning of Milton’s swain Lycidas (a sort of tidal refrain for the book) to the capsized boat in the closing pages that offers victims in their hundreds to the ‘enraged leviathan’ of the sea, the imperious waves help wash these personal histories in an aura of myth. Whether privileged or penniless, the migrants whose journeys fill this episodic fresco of a work all crave the stories ‘traded as a currency among homeless, rootless people’. They hunger for narratives because ‘the water they all crossed to come here has dissolved the past’.

Andrew McKie

Going bats

When it was recently announced that Robert Pattinson, who played the vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight films, had secured the role of Batman, a Twitter user wrote: ‘Worst vampire ever. Took him 11 years to turn into a bat.’ This is  probably Twitter’s second greatest bat joke, beaten only by @LRBbookshop’s ‘I reckon Nagel actually knows full well what it’s like to be a bat’. It is in the nature of social media to carp, though, and in that spirit I point out that, while Twilight’s Edward didn’t become a bat (his main uncanny powers beside immortality seemed to be great cheekbones and a Mr Darcy-ish froideur), Batman isn’t really a bat either.

Thursday

Jean Seaton

He saw it all

Apart from a passionate relationship with the common toad, what do George Orwell and David Attenborough have in common? H.G. Wells is the answer. The self-consciously ‘great’ old man’s bad, yet gripping, writing about utopias profoundly influenced Orwell. And Attenborough, as a lad, was entranced by Wells’s extravaganza A Short History of the World — biology,  space science, archaeology, the past and the future, all delivered for children in digestible weekly parts. Attenborough said he derived from it the idea that you ought to know about everything. This ambitious lack of boundaries that they received from Wells liberated both men.

Colin Greenwood

First-class air mail

Growing up as a rootless army brat in bases home and abroad, I would listen in appalled delight to my parents’ record of Tom Lehrer singing ‘Poisoning pigeons in the park’: ‘When they see us coming the birdies all try and hide/ but they still go for peanuts, when coated in cyanide.’ Now, I have lived in the same house for 20 years, determined to stay put, and every year a brace of feral pigeons join me by nesting under the eaves of my porch. In Homing, Jon Day takes on the humble racing pigeon to ask just what home is, how we establish it, miss it and depart and return to it. He elevates this heroic bird to its rightful place in natural history and our history too, and celebrates its shared instinct with us for home.

Fiona Sampson

Back from the brink

Hugo Williams’s wryly candid reports from the front lines of sex and family life are a perennial delight. Often timeless, they also frequently bring the styles and music of the 1950s and 1960s back to elegant life. These pleasures can be found once again in Williams’s new book, Lines Off; but this time they’re not unmixed. For, in the five years since his last collection, the poet’s worsening health has led him to undergo a kidney transplant. Now the ultimate subject has presented itself, and has resulted in some piercing testimony. Of course, it’s much more than testimony: Williams, who characterises writing a poem as being like sealing a roll-up with ‘that final twiddle and lick’, would never produce anything so po-faced.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

An asymmetrical friendship

If you know your Peter Conradi from your Peter J. Conradi, you’ll also know that the former is foreign editor at the Sunday Times, while the latter is a professor emeritus at the University of Kingston and the authorised biographer of the late Iris Murdoch, of whom he was a devoted friend and disciple. It’s Peter J. who has written this crisp memoir, and he gets the doppelgänger confusion over with early on: ‘We two Peter Conradis have never met,’ he writes, ‘but we share an optician, who once offered me his new spectacles instead of my own, so the world was out of focus.

Ian Thomson

Native wood-notes wild | 20 June 2019

With public life increasingly a din of personalised ringtones and phone chatter, we crave silence. Acoustic ecologists speak of ‘ear cleaning’ exercises that might attune us beatifically to a hushed environment. Silence itself can be quite noisy, of course. Even in the countryside the thoughts in one’s head and the sound of one’s breathing can disturb the peace. Music, at least, may help to restore a sense of quietude. Vaughan Williams’s 15-minute meditation ‘The Lark Ascending’ conjures a pastoral idyll untouched by the clamour and carnage attendant on the Great War. In 1921, when the music was premiered, the green fields of Europe had been psychologically altered by the bloodiest battles in recorded history.

Leyla Sanai

Illusions about delusions

Schizophrenia is the psychiatric illness about which the most misconceptions abound. It’s not so much the ‘negative’ symptoms that cause misunderstanding, devastating as they are — social withdrawal, self-neglect, flattening of mood — but the auditory hallucinations and delusions, often of a paranoid nature, that can accompany it. Nathan Filer, a psychiatric nurse, wrote the best novel I’ve read about schizophrenia, the Costa-winning The Shock of the Fall. The Heartland, his non-fiction book on the subject, is easily as good. Perhaps it’s the foreign nature of their experiences that gives rise to the myth that schizophrenics are dangerous.

Rowan Pelling

A shaggy showgirl story

One of the chief regrets of book-loving women of my age — and a surprising number of men — is that no one writes novels like Love in a Cold Climate and The Dud Avocado any more. I’m talking about the brand of romantic misadventure written with such wit, verve and emotional honesty that you feel you’ve washed down 100 life lessons within a vodka martini. Miraculously, Elizabeth Gilbert has managed to pull off exactly this feat with her high-kicking new novel City of Girls. It helps that she’s set the story in a shabby New York vaudeville theatre in the 1940s, thronging with bohemians, and everyone spouts one-liners straight out of Romcom Central.

Thursday

Alex Colville

The third oldest profession?

Western attitudes to piracy have dripped with hubris. In his classic history of 1932, Philip Gosse confidently argued that European empires and technological superiority had ‘done away’ with pirates entirely. He and others regretted the sacrifice of these noble savages to the march of progress. Nostalgia imbued pirates with a romantic aura as happy-go-lucky rebels, rough in appearance but pure of heart. Long John Silver aspired to be an MP; the Pirates of Penzance swilled sherry, with ‘dash it all’ their adorable attempt at foul language. Dr Peter Lehr puts the brakes on: 174 incidents of piracy were reported to the International Maritime Bureau last year, with Somali pirates responsible for only three.

Taylor C. Sherman

Villains, one and all

K.S. Komireddi sets out to establish his secular credentials before he sets up his primary argument: which is that India’s secularism is in danger. In the prologue, we are introduced to the author as a young man who briefly attended a madrassah, where he made a Muslim friend, and the two celebrated the Hindu festival of Diwali together. In the coda, we peek at his bookshelf, where we find the well-thumbed works of a Muslim poet. These bookends establish Komireddi’s secular bona fides, for his name marks him as a Hindu. And yet at first Malevolent Republic seems to be an assault on everything we associate with secularism in India, including the Indian National Congress Party and India’s secular historians. It is a puzzle.