More from Books

Thursday

Laura Freeman

A choice of first novels | 20 April 2017

If you go down to the woods today… That is the starting point for Idaho by Emily Ruskovich, who grew up on Hoodoo mountain in the Idaho panhandle. A family — mother Jenny, father Wade, daughters May and June — leave their little house in the big woods and drive a pick-up truck to a clearing where they chop birch wood, squabble and drink lemonade that attracts the flies. You want them to find something wonderful there. A teddy bears’ picnic. A magic faraway tree. A Piglet. But this is Idaho, not our friendly day-tripping woods. Nature is vast and hostile. In winter the house is cut off for months at a time, the paths too steep for a snowplough. In summer you sweat and sweat and tempers frazzle. Leave the windows open and the beetles get in.

Katrina Gulliver

Shame and scandal in the American west

In the early 1920s, while the United States was entering its crazed phase of prohibition and prosperity, a group of Native Americans had also just struck it rich. The Osage were a tribe who had been driven west (like others), and had settled in a rocky region of northwest Oklahoma. Unlike other Indian nations, they purchased their new land (which meant the federal government couldn’t move them along again), and in 1906 they had the foresight to include a covenant to the title of what became the Osage nation. Land could be sold, but no matter who owned an individual plot, all mineral rights were retained by the Osage. In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann describes in detail how the subsequent oil boom made the Osage the richest group in America per capita.

Kate Womersley

Bring up the bodies

I grew up with a skeleton in the attic. My mother’s clinical training bestowed on our family a short man’s dry remains, and his residency at home fed the nightmares of my siblings. When I started medical school, he came too, but now as an ally in passing the anatomy exam. On moving house, I stiffened as the taxi driver carried the loosely fastened casket in just one hand. A pavement littered with 200 bones would have been a challenging start in this family-friendly neighbourhood. My accustomed eyes were suddenly anxious to protect others from such a deathly interruption. Carla Valentine doesn’t want her choice of job to sound pathological.

Andy Miller

A passion for vinyl

Every year at this time, as trees come into bud and flowers bloom, middle-aged men (and a few women) sleep overnight on pavements to ensure they don’t miss the year’s crop of Record Store Day releases; April may indeed be the cruellest month if one fails to acquire that limited 12” picture disc of Toto’s ‘Africa’. It is with such dedicated individuals that Magnus Mills’s new novel is concerned, memory, desire and vinyl being the constituent parts not only of Record Store Day on 22 April but also this authentically square book. The Forensic Records Society has been printed to look like a collectable 7” single, complete with die-cut dust jacket resembling a vintage paper sleeve.

Philip Hensher

Truth is stranger than satire

I think we’re all agreed about Donald Trump — by which I mean all of us who read the literary novel, buy hardbacks and take pleasure in good writing. The novel as a form is interested in different points of view; is protean and humanly various; listens to different voices patiently; does not shout down. As Auden said, the novelist ‘in his own weak person, if he can, /Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.’ Donald Trump is not much like that. He shouts down; he evidently does not see much in other people to recommend them, other than their opportunity to proffer sycophancy; and the range of his vocabulary has been assessed as equivalent to a ten-year-old (in American education, moreover).

Rose Prince

A feast in every sense

After reading Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, you might, as I did, sit for a bit wondering what a chef is, exactly. We think of chefs as cooks, people in charge of a kitchen, ingredients, pan and heat, who hopefully produce great dishes of food. But this is apparently an outdated concept. For chefs who want to make their name in the world now, the expression of their art must exceed the nourishment on the plate. Cooking can only take a dish so far in order to make it memorable, claims Professor Charles Spence. ‘No matter how exquisitely executed,’ he adds. Whoa! I can still recall the taste of my mother’s sublime steak-and-kidney pudding from 20 years ago. Spence is an eminent scientist at the department of experimental psychology at Oxford University.

Wednesday

Oliver Balch

Neither green nor pleasant

The old coaching inn on the green. The Sunday morning toll of church bells. The ducklings paddling on the pond. The soft sound of leather against willow. Nothing, absolutely nothing, defines England’s idea of itself more than the sleepy rural village. World events can shake our island nation. Population growth can swell our cities. Who knows, climate change could even sink East Anglia beneath the waves. But as long as the country’s villages stand true, then England is safe and we can all put the kettle on for tea. Utter rot, says Tom Fort, in this timely, myth-busting march through English rural history.

Steven Poole

No end in sight

Are you a deathist? A deathist is someone who accepts the fact of death, who thinks the ongoing massacre of us all by ageing is not a scandal. A deathist even insists that death is valuable: that the only thing that gives life meaning is the fact that it ends — an idea not necessarily embraced by someone about to be murdered on video by an Isis fanatic. But what is the alternative? There has never been one, which is why until recently no one needed to coin the term ‘deathist’. But now many tech entrepreneurs and scientists take a different view: death, they say, is simply an engineering challenge. Biotechnology should, in principle, be able to reverse the wear-and-tear on cellular machinery in our bodies and keep us in our prime indefinitely, barring violent accident.

Tiffany Jenkins

Bones of contention | 12 April 2017

A few years ago, a group of Native American leaders drove 12 hours from Oklahoma to Denver Museum of Nature and Science, a natural history museum in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, to collect 26 sets of human remains. When Chip Colwell, the museum’s senior curator of anthropology, explained to them that, though the remains were fragments from people that populated the Great Plains, he didn’t know from which tribes, they were shocked: ‘The room plunges into silence,’ he recounts, followed by ‘heated deliberation’. The visitors were affronted. ‘They had come to rebury their kin — not strangers.

Susan Owens

Romancing the stones

If Britain’s prehistoric monuments have had a magnetic attraction for generations of artists, it is perhaps because they have long been seen as works of art themselves. ‘The whole temple of Avebury may be consider’d as a picture’, enthused the antiquary William Stukeley in 1743, while ‘my God how sculptural’ was Barbara Hepworth’s response to Cornish sites such as the Mên-an-Tol and the Nine Maidens which she encountered after moving to St Ives in 1939. The creative tension between artists and these mysterious presences in the landscape is the subject of Sam Smiles’s engaging book British Art: Ancient Landscapes, published to accompany an exhibition at the Salisbury Museum (until 3 September).

David Crane

Too young to die

In the north transept of Westminster Abbey, there is a memorial by Joseph Nollekens to three British captains killed at the Battle of the Saintes. It is hard to imagine that many visitors notice it, but when the news of the battle reached London from the West Indies in May 1782, it inspired the same kind of hysteria that 120 years later would greet the relief of Mafeking. The victory might not have been all it was cracked up to be — Rodney had let the French fleet escape — and yet at a time when a bitterly divided country was embroiled in a losing struggle for its American colonies and a mismanaged war with France and Spain, anything which promised that Britannia still ruled the waves and Britons could fight and die as their forefathers had done was manna from heaven.

Stephen Glover

An eye for sensationalism

According to Private Eye, executives at the Daily Mail were alarmed by the impending publication of Adrian Addison’s new history of the paper. They expected an onslaught. So their hearts must have sunk when they saw the cover of Mail Men. Stephen Fry, who may hate the Mail more than anyone alive, pronounces it ‘a damned good read’; and Polly Toynbee, whose loathing is scarcely less vehement, praises it as a ‘well-informed, diamond-shaped analysis’ of the paper that ‘dominates England’s political culture’. Possibly neither of these sages has read the book in its entirety. It isn’t the hatchet job that Mail executives feared and its enemies wanted. Admittedly, as a columnist on the paper for many years I may be an imperfect judge.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

A gaping hole in the week

This is a gem of a book for Radio 4 lovers, particularly those of us who work out which day of the week it is by who’s speaking on the station at 9.02 a.m. Published the week that Midweek was abolished for ever, it is Libby Purves’s story of the programme she presented for 33 years. In this brief memoir she has not only immortalised the distinctive flavour of the ‘And now for some lively conversation’ Wednesday-morning 45 minutes. She has also reminded us that Radio 4 is ‘basically, a marvel’: for many people, it is ‘their university and their friend’. All presenters, Purves writes, are aware that they are obsolescent.

Thursday

Richard Davenporthines

Understated eloquence

It is 50 years since the publication of Very Like a Whale, Ferdinand Mount’s first novel. ‘Mr Mount’s distinguishing feature as a novelist,’ Mary-Kay Wilmers wrote in her sniffy, uncomprehending Times Literary Supplement review, ‘is that his analysis of society is obedient to Conservative economic principles.’ In the ensuing half century Mount has proven resolute in his Conservativism. He had two spells as a gloriously shrewd political columnist in The Spectator, headed Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit, wrote the Tory manifesto for the 1983 general election, and edited the TLS under Rupert Murdoch’s proprietorship.

Paul Keegan

The pleasures of reading aloud

pkkkfffffffrrrffff-ffff! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-fff! Hobble leg, hobble leg, Hobble leg owhmmm! Into the bottle of fluff, rubbed the stuff under! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-ffff! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-fff! This is the voice of Tennyson reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, as recorded by Thomas Edison in 1890 and phonetically or farcically transcribed in a novel by Nicholson Baker over a century later. Drowned in static, ‘valley of death’ sounds like ‘bottle of fluff’, ‘rode the six hundred’ becomes ‘rubbed the stuff under’ and ‘Hobble leg owhmmm’ is — of course — ‘Half a league onward’.

Mark Cocker

Buzzing bees and chocolate trees

It is estimated that the world’s insects perform an annual pollination service for all humankind worth $215 billion. In return, every year, we run up a pesticide bill of about $40 billion to exterminate them (this doesn’t include the $10 billion costs in social and environmental damage wrought by the same chemicals). Why is it still such a reflex in our encounters with invertebrates to reach for the fly spray? Here are two great books that try to change our minds on creepy-crawlies. On the face of it, Dave Goulson has the more straightforward task. This is not just because the founder of Bumblebee Conservation over a quartet of books has perfected the art of turning the entomologist’s technical expertise into easy-reading everyman’s prose.

Andrew McKie

Fragments of the future

Science fiction is not the first thing one thinks of in connection with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, though the Nobel Prize for Literature has in fact been awarded for science fiction poetry — Harry Martinson’s Aniara was an epic about a spaceship. Then again, many English speakers probably don’t primarily associate Milosz with poetry either, but with The Captive Mind, his damning critique of the moral crisis of artists under authoritarian regimes.

Suzi Feay

Perilous times

Helen Dunmore’s new novel concerns lives, consequential in their day, that pass away into utter oblivion. Appropriately, the ‘solitary and no doubt rather grim middle-aged man’ of the opening pages is unnamed and never appears again, once he discovers a forgotten grave near the pathway of the title. Bearing the image of a quill, the headstone commemorates a radical 18th-century writer, Julia Fawkes, who died in Bristol in 1793. The stone was ‘Raised… in the Presence of her Many Admirers’. But who was this Julia, wife of an equally obscure pamphleteer, and what is left of the works that, the stone optimistically proclaims, ‘Remain Our Inheritance’?

Alexandra Coghlan

The lost Stradivarius

Min Kym is a violinist, but if you Google her name you won’t find sound-clips or concert reviews, touring schedules or YouTube videos. What you’ll get are news reports. Because one evening in 2010, when Kym was waiting for a train at Euston Station, her 300-year-old Stradivarius violin was stolen. Almost three years later it was recovered, and an ‘elated’ Kym was back in the papers, but the happy ending was more editorial convenience than truth. Now Kym herself has written a memoir in an attempt to explain what she really lost that day, and the impossibility of ever truly recovering it. Gone is an awkward book.

Andrew Lycett

That’s entertainment | 6 April 2017

The name Maud Russell creeps almost apologetically into a few 20th-century diaries such as those of her friend Violet Bonham Carter. Generally, she keeps her head below the parapet — not a bad place for a diarist, since it allows her to observe without being noticed. She is certainly worth knowing about. The wife of a banker, Gilbert Russell, a scion of the great Whig family, whose cousin was Duke of Bedford, and daughter of Paul Nelke, a seriously rich stockbroker of German Jewish origin, she was from the mid-1930s chatelaine of Mottisfont Abbey, a beautiful 2,000-acre estate in Hampshire, now owned by the National Trust. There, in her mid-forties, she surrounded herself with top-notch artists, writers, politicians and aristocrats.