The Spy, by Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho’s latest novel could perhaps as justifiably be called a work of creative non-fiction, albeit it’s a very creative sort of non-fiction. In The Spy, he details the life of Mata Hari, a woman who was executed as a spy. Coelho bases his novel upon copious amounts of research into the woman’s life, based upon recently released information from MI5 and other agencies.

His conclusion is that Mata Hari was not, in fact, a spy. This does not mean that she is not a fascinating character with a place in history, however. Coelho paints a vivid picture of her life as she travels from her homeland – where she was born Margaretha Zelle – to Indonesia to France and Germany. It begins with her execution and moves from there, told from the perspective of her final letter.

It seems that the author wishes to portray his subject as some sort of feminist hero – a woman who was not a spy, but rather a liberated woman who was executed for daring to live a life outside of the control of men. Perhaps that was true, but what I got from this book was not a great deal of sympathy for its protagonist. Instead, I found her annoying, vain, and self-obsessed.

I like that Coelho didn’t idolize her, though. She comes across as pitiful. She is a prostitute who whores herself because she likes expensive things. She dances naked because she wants people to think she is beautiful. She name drops the famous people she encountered, yet thinks herself entirely above them. She is in many ways quite pathetic, and yet that makes her very human. She was most likely not a spy, and instead just a normal woman whose life was shattered and destroyed.

The book is very short and I finished it in just three sittings. I’m not sure I would’ve bothered if it was much longer. Coelho’s story is not hugely interesting, in spite of its fascinating subject matter. It leaves too much unanswered, and yet says so much that isn’t of any importance.  

Bop Apocalypse, by Martin Torgoff

I just did another review over at Beatdom. I promise I'll get back to regular Kindle reviews soon...

Tales of Ordinary Sadness, by Neil Randall

I just reviewed Neil Randall's short story collection, Tales of Ordinary Sadness, for Beatdom Literary Journal. Take a look here.

Currently Reading

I'm currently reading or about to read:

• Neil Randall's Tales of Ordinary Sadness
• Allen Ginsberg (ed. Bill Morgan)'s Best Minds of my Generation
• Martin Torgoff's Bop Apocalypse 
• Camilla Flojas's Zombies, Migrants, and Queers
• Marvin Cohen's Others, Including Morstive Sternbump

Half a World Away, by Alistair McGuinness

In Half a World Away: Jungle Tribes, African Guides, and a Donkey Called Angus, Alistair McGuinness invites his readers along for an unexpected traipse around the world with him and his wife, Fran. Following the closure of his car manufacturing plant in Luton, he is given a redundancy package, which he and Fran choose to spend travelling the world with their ultimate destination being a new life in Australia.


What follows is a trip around part of South America, a vast swath of Africa, and eventually to Australia, with a little excursion to Fiji in the middle. Alistair and Fran seem to be magnets for odd adventures, with Alistair often finding a way to get drunk or otherwise find trouble. He documents the comical characters they meet along the way, as well as the breathtaking scenery.

McGuinness is, for the most part, a very talented and engaging travel writer. His descriptions of the places he visited are wonderful. (I've been to many of them and his perceptions rather match my own.) However, I was suggest that he find a better editor. The narrative could be tightened somewhat to element weaker elements and thereby create a far stronger book. McGuinness is on his best form when describing amazing places and strange people, but the emotional background and the seemingly amusing personal exploits (somewhere between Bill Bryson and Hunter S. Thompson) are not so well-handled.

One thing that caught my attention throughout the book, and which rather depressed me, was something I've noticed as a fellow world-traveller. Everywhere Alistair and Fran go, they are surrounded by tourists, con-men, and the destructive impact of tourism. While tourism brings some measure of prosperity to far-flung parts of the globe, and brings wisdom and experience to those who travel, it also brings with it a lot of negative results. It's something I've struggled with on my own journeys, and which stuck with me while reading about Alistair and Fran's travels. They are occasionally in a position to look out over a marvelous view or otherwise revel in the glory of nature... and yet there's always a tour group nearby waiting to charge in and take a million photos. Nothing is untouched or unspoiled.

Despite that negativity, the book itself was quite enjoyable. If you want a taste of travel in South America or Africa, I recommend you check it out. 

A Great Place to Have a War, by Joshua Kurlantzick

Laos is one of my favourite countries and I've been fortunate enough to have visited twice. Being a history buff, particularly American history, I was eager to read this forthcoming book from Joshua Kurlantzick, which I received as an uncorrected proof.

I was not disappointed. A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA is an excellent history of a tragic period of history. It traces the origins of the war and of the CIA very well, but adds in a personal dimension by telling the stories of four men who guided the war and the expansion of power undergone by the CIA during that period: Bill Lair, Tony Poe, Vang Pao, and William Sullivan.

I studied the Vietnam War in university and later learned bits and pieces during my extensive travels through Southeast Asia, and yet much of this book was new to me. Particularly in his descriptions of battles, his dealings with characters on a personal level, and his studies of declassified CIA documents, Kurlantzick has put forth a valuable and enthralling resource.

It is also, of course, highly disturbing. Anyone well-versed in the tragic history of the Vietnam War knows that atrocities occurred all the time, and a great deal of them by Americans. This book details some of those atrocities, including shocking facts:

US bombing of Laos would become so intense that it averaged one attack every eight minutes for nearly a decade.

and

In 1969 alone, the United States dropped more bombs on Laos than it did on Japan during all of World War II. By 1973, when the bombing campaign ended, America had launched over 580,000 bombinb runs in Laos.

Figures like that, and relating to the unexploded bombs that continued - and still continue - to kill innocent civilians are mindblowing. Yet they are also hard to fathom because they are so terrible. Kurlantzick, however, brings the war over in more personal terms that makes it easier to appreciate the awfulness of the U.S. actions in Laos.

He talks about how random the bombing could be, saying:

In the first months of 1970, some U.S. pilots routinely released ordnance over the kingdom without really locating any military target, simply because they could not find a target to hit in North Vietnam and they did not want to land back in Thailand still carrying their bombs.

He talks of villages wiped off the map and people gunned down in the streets for target practice. The coldness of the U.S. pilots is beyond belief. And yet these were not isolated, single events:

96 percent of the Laotian civilians surveyed had witnessed a bombing attack, and most had witnessed more than one.

He goes on to say that 60% of people had personally seen someone being killed by U.S. bombs.

Towards the end of the book Kurlantzick wraps up his story by showing how the U.S. simply withdrew, leaving Southeast Asia in a terrible mess, and how the CIA had grown during its Laos war from a spy outfit to a war machine. It is a sad read, but an important one in understanding this complicated and depressing modern world. 

Death's End, by Liu Cixin

This is a vast and fascinating book - the third in an engaging, far-reaching trilogy by the greatest Chinese sci-fi writer, Liu Cixin. I will try to review it without spoiling anything for those who haven't yet had the pleasure, although the title rather gives away the inevitable ending.


 
Across his Three Body Trilogy, Liu Cixin has offered a story of earth-versus-trisolaris, and later, in the second book, this scope is expanded with the dark forest philosophy to a chaotic, over-crowded universe of every-civilization-for-itself. In this final book, the seeds that were long ago planted have now come to be fully grown plants. It has been an incredible journey.

Yet Death's End (or The Birth of Death, as its Chinese title goes), is far grander in scope than the previous two novels, which now seem rather dull and uneventful by comparison. In the first book, which was probably the conventional best of the series, Liu took us back to the Cultural Revolution, and how the cruelty of humanity essential brought upon its own downfall. In the second, we saw how humans dealt with the inevitability of death from the cosmos, reeling in the knowledge that we were not alone, and suddenly rather tiny and fragile.

The third book in the trilogy spans tens of millions of years. Its protagonist takes advantage of hibernation technology to travel through time, visiting all of the most important moments in earth's history since "the Common Era" (ie what readers know as now). This is Cheng Xin, a woman who for some reason is constantly tasked with saving the world, and who constantly makes poor decisions. She is a quite likable character, but rather weak - perhaps believable but perhaps a little too "girly". I get the distinct impression that Liu is trying to make a strong female character but it is clear he really doesn't understand women very well. Through all his books, the women are rather poorly written.

In fact, that's this novel's greatest downfall - as with the previous two. Liu is obviously a great mind and he can theorize incredible happenings in the universe. His ideas are spectacular and he describes them pretty well... yet, he seems to struggle with humans. He's better at talking about the technology required to travel at the speed of light or destroy a galaxy than he is at putting two people together and having them talk. So be it. This is sci-fi after all.

Another downfall - and this may be the translator's fault - is that the metaphors liberally employed throughout are rather obviously stated. This occurs first in a strange opening scene, where a puddle is drying on a floor. We are twice informed that this is a metaphor for a dying civilization. Any writer worth his salt knows not to deliberately state that a metaphor is a metaphor.

Granted, this is a translation from Chinese to English. There are certain cultural quirks to understand, and certain translation issues. Stating the obvious and repeating the obvious is not considered a bad thing in Chinese, so maybe that caused this little issue. Anyway, this translation is superior to those of the previous two novels. It is also interesting to see the future from a Chinese perspective, as China may actually have far more of a role in the future history of the earth than Hollywood and Western novels like to suggest. Liu envisages a world where people speak a hybrid of Chinese and English, and where a rather large percentage of the clever folk have Chinese names... Not too give too much away, but by the end of the book it's really only Chinese characters who have anything to do with anything. The non-Chinese characters mostly avoid stereotypes but often speak in odd, clunky ways that are not really believable.

Regardless of its faults, this was a long, long, long trilogy which held my attention and entertained me throughout. I probably enjoyed the first book the most, and the second disappointed me quite a bit, but the third was a gripping story with an absurdly large number of events unfolding over tens of millions of years. I'm absolutely not a fan of science fiction, yet this managed to entertain me immensely, and I highly recommend it.

How Lenin and Stalin Brainwashed Russians, by Larisa Vetrova

How Lenin and Stalin Brainwashed Russians uses propaganda posters from the early years of socialism in Russia to tell the story of the nation's dark modern history. The posters themselves are illuminating and the history is fascinating, but sadly the book is written in quite poor English. It is a short read, almost possible to finish in a single sitting, but unfortunately the experience is spoiled by the unnatural prose. With a little editing, this could be a very enjoyable book. 

The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinaw

Sometimes I go online and feel like genius among idiots. Log into Facebook and you're surrounded by people trying to explain away the latest idiotic ranting by Donald Trump, or parroting a hip meme in the liberal community. Everyone, it seems, is stupid. 

A good way to feel like a complete idiot is to pick up a book like The Grand Design. From start to finish I struggled badly to comprehend much of what was said. Physic has never been my greatest strength - in fact, I didn't even take it in high school and have always struggled with its basic concepts. 

Yet I find science of all sorts utterly fascinating, and so I was eager to read what was touted as a book that was accessible to the lay person. There are no mathematical formulas; just basic descriptions and analogies to make these concepts easier to digest. It is a book that sets out to explain the whole universe, and that's precisely where it lost me. I guess my puny brain cannot comprehend that much information. 

In the beginning, Hawking sounds like a stoned college student. Take for example, the analogy of a goldfish in a bowl, looking out at the world. To him, the world looks very different to what it actually is, yet he can create certain rules from observations that can allow him to "see" the world. Then Hawking speculates that we are that goldfish... 

Although Hawking's analogies allow even people like me to follow along, I found myself lost more often than not. Often, the only thing I could follow were the constant stream of awful dad jokes scattered through the book. It seems as though every complex explanation is punctuated with some lame punchline.  

Aldous Huxley, by Nicholas Murray

When I was in Malaysia this summer, I reread Island, by Aldous Huxley. It's certainly not a great book, yet I was very interested in it and how it was written. I didn't know much about Huxley except for a few well-known facts - that he wrote Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, and that he died on the same day as John F. Kennedy.

Reading Island, I felt myself curious about what inspired him... It seemed that the book wasn't just a work of fiction, but rather that the fiction was a crude vehicle for his ideas about the perfect society. I was vaguely aware of the fact that's a sort of counterpart to Brave New World, his famous dystopia. So what exactly happened in his life to convince him that the island of Pala would be the perfect society.

To find out, I downloaded Nicholas Murray's biography. Of course, because Island was Huxley's last book, published just two years prior to his death, I didn't get the answers I wanted for quite a while. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating book. Huxley is a weird character - incredibly intelligent, bizarrely self-aware, and always on the move. Having now finished it, I almost feel as though I knew the man myself. Murray is indeed a talented biographer.

There were times it felt the biographer glossed over some unsavoury portions of the Huxley story, but he never entirely left anything out. Instead, he would mention and excuse anything that would detract from the Huxley legacy. For example, he often alluded to Huxley's interest in eugenics, but would always play it down and point out that it was fashionable at the time. He acknowledged the author's interest in dianetics, but played it down as just being interested in everything and never taking it seriously, which was likely untrue.

I will continue studying the life and works of Aldous Huxley with the goal of writing a long essay later this year on the subject of Island. There are other biographies of Aldous but Murray's was the only one available on Kindle. It does, however, appear to have the best reputation, building upon that of Sybille Bedford's earlier work with the advantage of new sources having come to light. 

Words on the Move, by John McWhorter

In Words on the Move, John McWhorter begins by observing that no one complains about clouds moving in the sky, but they complain about language changing over time. For example, people these days often complain about the over-use of the word “like” and the mis-use of the word “literally.” However, as tempting as it might be to whine, he says, this is perfectly normal. Our language – and all languages – has been in a state of flux throughout its entire existence. This is the nature of language. Not only does it adapt consciously to incorporate new words, but changes subtly over the decades. He observes that old movies sound stranger with each passing decade partly because of the accents which are moving further from ours, and also to keys in our spellings that indicate the differences in pronunciation over the years – ie daughter is not pronounced like laughter, but it used to be.

He talks about our perception of words as having concrete meanings when, of course, they don’t. Dictionaries are misleading because they imply that a word has a set meaning that is fixed across time, but dictionaries themselves go quickly out of date. Amusingly, McWhorter observes that considering a word as its dictionary definition is like saying a middle-aged person looks like their high-school graduation photo. People change, and so does our language. Throughout this book, the author explains why words change.

McWhorter’s style is accessible and often witty, yet incredibly well-informed. He seems rather hip to modern culture (perhaps trying too hard at times) yet absolutely knowledgeable about the millennia of development leading up to it. The result is a quite readable, very interesting, and valuable book.

Hunting with Hemingway, by Hilary Hemingway

I bought this book two months ago in Chiang Mai, Thailand, because I thought it was a biography of Ernest Hemingway... Well, it's not, but that's ok. It's still an enjoyable read.

Hunting with Hemingway is a strange little memoir by Hilary Hemingway, daughter of Papa's brother, Leicester. It begins with the passing of the author's mother, who left Hilary a cassette tape recorded by an unnamed professor, on which her father, Les, tells various hard-to-believe stories about hunting with his older brother, Ernest.

The book weaves an odd narrative, telling the story supposedly as it was stated on tape, while detailing Hilary's reaction to the deaths of her mother and father and, to a lesser extent, her uncle. At times the personal element is somewhat mishandled, I felt, as in the final chapters of the book, which seem unnecessary.

The book's value comes from the fascinating stories told by the crotchety old man on the tape. These are pure old fashioned boys stories of adventures across the globe - hunting lions, fighting ostriches, chasing Nazi U-boats...

Are they real? Did these things ever happen as stated? Maybe, and maybe not. That's dealt with throughout the book in conversations between the author and her family. At times it is stated, perhaps rightly, that it is unimportant. A story is a story. Leicester Hemingway, paraphrasing his brother, said:

A good story is at its best when the line between truth and fiction remains ambiguous.

 What bothered me was not the element of truth. I don't care if a story is embellished a little here or there. What bothered me was the hunting. It was hard to read these stories about the murder of innocent animals - tigers, lions, komodo dragons, marlin, etc. Leicester and Ernest go on about respecting the animals, yet it never enters their heads that perhaps the animals didn't want to die in the first place, and didn't need to.

I get that hunting has its place. It is not as black and white as right and wrong... But hunting for sport, for fun, is just monstrous and anyone who does it should be castrated, skinned alive, and fed to the buzzards. Of course, this was long ago in a different time, but still... It's hard to read these stories.

I've had the privilege in my life of coming up close to most of the animals they killed and I disagree with Les about them being monsters. The stories about these animals being man-eaters and posing threats are certainly wrong, and their deaths always unnecessary. This book doesn't really glorify the hunting element because it is commented negatively upon by those listening to the tape, but it is still hard to stomach. 

What I Want to Read...

I'm currently reading Hilary Hemingway's Hunting with Hemingway, and almost finished. Next up on my reading list is Aldous Huxley: A Biography, by Nicholas Murray. That's not a book I'm reading for pleasure, although of course I hope I'll enjoy it... but rather one I'm reading for study. I plan on writing an essay on Huxley before the end of this year.

After that, I'm incredibly excited about Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari. His 2014 book, Sapiens, is probably the most important book you could ever read, and I realize how insane that sounds. But seriously, have the world read this and will would all find our lives improved. I reviewed Sapiens somewhere on this blog. Hit the tag below the post to find it.

I'm also excited about the final book in Liu Cixin's Three-Body Trilogy, Death's End. Alas, the second book was not brilliant, but I have my fingers crossed for this one. 

Currently Reading/Watching

I'm currently reading Hilary Hemingway's book, Hunting With Hemingway. It's an odd little story about her - Ernest Hemingway's niece - finding a tape on which her father is recorded telling stories about his adventures with his famous older brother.

I'm quite enjoying the book, although I admit that I despise hunting in almost all forms, and so the supposedly heroic tales of murdering crocodiles, lions, tigers, cobras, etc are really rather off-putting. Still, it's an engaging story.

There's much to hate about Hemingway, including the hunting, but there's no denying that he's one of the great writers of the modern era, and beyond that a fascinating character.

I'll review the book later, but for now, as I finish up reading it, I'll share this video I recently watched, which tells about Hemingway's life in more depth.

Our Human Herds, by Martin Fritz

In Our Human Herds: The Philosophy of Dual Morality and a Theory of Moral Evolution, Martin Fritz says:

…what I propose… is that each and every one of us carries within us two distinct moral codes, either of which can be understood as right, depending upon our circumstances…

The two distinct moral codes have a biological origin. By switching back and forth between these two sometimes cooperating and sometimes conflicting moral patterns we discover that the things we find right in one view can be seen as wrong in the other.

It’s an interesting thought, and that’s pretty much the book in a nutshell. However, it goes on for almost a thousand pages of elucidation as the author tries to hammer home his point.

To expand, what he is saying above is that essentially while we now tend to think of our views as moral or immoral, right or wrong, these are actually fairly fluid judgments and they depend upon what is happening around us. What is right for one person in one situation is wrong for someone else. And this a biological imperative. He gives numerous examples and explanations, but it boils down to this: there is one mindset for when we have plenty, and one mindset for when we don’t. You could say today that this is the difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives view the world through fearful eyes, and appear cold and cruel from the liberal perspective. Liberals view the world as providing more than enough for everyone and act dangerously from the conservative perspective.

“Moral conflict,” he says, “began to take shape not as a battle between right and wrong, but a needed and necessary struggle between right and right.” What he means is that we need both the fearful, outsider-hating conservative to keep the group (or herd) on its toes, and the sympathetic, bleeding-heart liberal to make sure everyone has enough. It’s a result of evolution.

One point I found very interesting is this:

Feeling precedes logical justification. Usually, it is after we become aware how we feel that we look for logical arguments to support this emotional position.

How true that is, and it sits nicely with books I’ve read last year about psychology.

Overall, Fritz’s book was pretty interesting and certainly it’s hard to argue with his statements. It was certainly not very original, but he does acknowledge that the dual morality theory is not his own. One problem I had was that, while the concept as a whole is somewhat complex, the book tended to often become bogged down in over-simplicity - a tendency to state the obvious. It was also very repetitive, which sucked the enjoyment out of reading it. 

The Great Shark Hunt, by Hunter S. Thompson

Here’s another cheat review – this book is also a paperback, rather than a Kindle title, and one that I purchased back in Chiang Mai in a very cool place called Backstreet Books.

I was a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson when I was younger and as such I have a tattoo of his Gonzo fist on my left forearm. Although I don’t read him much these days, I still consider him one of my primary literary influences. Perhaps I felt that, after several years of not reading his work, he was not as great as I remembered… perhaps his work was a tad childish, even.

How wrong I was. A few weeks ago, in Laos, I got stuck into The Great Shark Hunt – a collection of Thompson’s finest work before 1980. Indeed, this was his best period as a writer, when he wrote his masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as well as the brilliant Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. This was Thompson at his peak, particularly documenting the counterculture of the late sixties and its subsequent demise, as well as his constant hatred for Richard Nixon.

The Great Shark Hunt chronicles the development of Gonzo, Thompson’s signature style. Although the book doesn’t follow any chronological pattern, the stories are dated, and we see him becoming increasing politicized, as well as finding his way from off-beat reporter to Gonzo journalist. His early works were short and somewhat restrained, while later they become rambling and filled with vitriol and humour.

What I found rereading Thompson’s best works was a profound sense that this is a man who understood the rhythm of speech, and that his work was to some extent intended to be read aloud. A few weeks before buying this book I watched some videos on YouTube wherein other people read his work, and I noticed for the first time just how he laughed at certain points, and how he loved to hear his words being read aloud.

In Thompson’s writing there is something – and I know he would’ve hated the comparison – Ginsbergian in the long-breath sentences. He was famous for his overuse of certain words (like doomed, swine, and atavistic) but his brilliance lay not in overstatement or shock, but in the subtle building of feeling and emotion in his sentences. There is a famous story of him typing out The Great Gatsby to get a feel for the prose, and indeed Thompson’s own work is now similarly copied by hordes of imitation Gonzo writers because he succeeded. In places, his work is as beautiful as any great American literature.

There are no weak links in this collection, although there are sometimes a few paragraphs of pages where the quality drops slightly. Yet this vast, dense volume is one of the great writers of the late twentieth century on his very best form and it is, for anyone interested in Thompson or Gonzo, an absolute must-read book. 

Island, by Aldous Huxley

Here’s a classic novel which somehow I’d managed not to read over the years. Actually, I thought I had read it… somewhere in the back of my mind I told myself that I’d already read this one, and put it aside to “reread” much later.

Island is Aldous Huxley’s vision of utopia – a mysterious, remote, tropical island nation in Southeast Asia. It is a rather clunky novel, actually, which serves, from my perspective, as an often careless vehicle for Huxley’s philosophical and political perspectives. It revolves around the arrival of a newspaper reporter, Will Farnaby, on the eponymous island, Pala. He has been sent to negotiate on behalf of his employer for the rights to drill for oil on Pala.

The entire book essentially follows Will as he recuperates from a fall whilst arriving on the island, and at absolutely every conceivable turn, he is taught in bizarrely eloquent terms, the precise history and philosophy of Pala. The island was once a Buddhist society, rather primitive in its ways, but with many valuable qualities. At some point a Scottish doctor arrived, and the perfect hybrid of Eastern and Western ideas came about.

The book is not awful by any means but it is certainly a bit ridiculous. Nothing happens in it that isn’t a means for Huxley to present his reader with his personal viewpoints on everything from sex to drugs to religion. Some ideas, like the Mutual Adoption Club (MAC), are patently fraught with problems that are never addressed, while actually many of his ideas – while impossible to ever implement anywhere – are very admirable. In particular, his keen awareness of ecology.

I was very surprised to notice a staggering amount of concepts lifted and adapted from Scientology – or, more likely, from L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. I haven’t had internet access since reading the book so I haven’t been able to gauge what Huxley’s relationship was with the Church, but it shocked me that his famous utopian society – an antithesis to that presented in Brave New World – contains so much from a now maligned cult. I shall have to investigate further… 

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, J.T. Leroy

I read this book knowing about the scandal behind it. J.T. Leroy, the purported author, is not a real person, and when the book was released, people thought it was autobiographical. For that reason, the book gets a lot of criticism. It is, however, a fantastic book that loses none of its value, in my mind, from the literary scandal surrounding its author.

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is a novel or series of short stories that tell the story of the horrific childhood of a boy called Jeremiah. Jeremiah is taken from his adoptive familiar at the age of four and given to his birth mother – a mentally unstable, meth-addicted “lot lizard,” or prostitute.

Throughout the book, Jeremiah suffers all kinds of physical and mental abuse at the hands of his severely damaged mother and her boyfriends/husbands/clients. The story, although famously not true, is a depressingly accurate depiction of child abuse. The life of Jeremiah, who we last see at fifteen years old, is beyond tragic, yet this is the plight of too many children in this awful world.

Although it can be difficult to read due to the subject matter, and though people are put off by the scandal surrounding its authorship, this is a truly great piece of contemporary literature. 

iGuerilla, by John Sutherland

In this mostly ridiculous book, John Sutherland details the things in this world that he hates and thinks we should all fear. That includes Muslims, Arabs, and Communists, amongst others. He tells us why these things are awful and why they’re getting worse (well, except for Communism, which is responsible for all the new bad stuff).

Sutherland's iGuerilla: Reshaping the Face of War in the 21st Century careens back and forth attempting to explain how technology is making the world a scary place, while comparing everything to the Fall of Rome or the Rise of Hitler or Pearl Harbor. Anything he doesn’t like is immediately compared to Hitler, and there is nothing bad said about that which he loves – the great countries of America and Israel.

The book is full of stupid and annoying metaphors, always completely overblown and often mixed with other imagery. His language is sneering, violent, and sensationalistic:

They are barbarous and yet tech-savvy denizens of the modern world. They resemble a schizophrenic cross between Attila the Hun and Mark Zuckerburg. (sic)

He thinks in terms of pure Good and Evil, and thinks all change is bad. In his world, the Cold War was good because at least he knew where he stood. Now everything is awful and getting worse, and it’s Russia’s fault for not being tough enough. His logic is overly simplistic, ignoring anything inconvenient.

iGuerilla is researched from Wikipedia, a number of low-brow or right-wing media outlets, and a scattering of reputable sources just for appearances. He also seems to be relying upon his fanciful memory of history class. The author seems fearful about technology and yet also largely ignorant, using ancient terminology like “cyberspace” that no self-respecting author of a book about technology would ever utter. He is vague in describing the threats that our “enemies” pose, but they involve computers.

In the end, this whole awful mess of a book is designed to instil fear in its reader. Yet, like the godawful right-wing news channels Sutherland appears to enjoy so much, his book is shallow, misleading, and woefully lacking in subtlety. Just read this abominable passage and I’m sure you’ll agree this is not a book I could in good conscience recommend:

There’s no shortage of enemies determined to strike Americans. We will face our Arminius just as Rome did...

…We no longer have the luxury of focusing on the very visible state dragon. We now face a snake pit filled with a myriad of non-state threats and their shady rogue state sponsors…

…They can attack the homeland although they aren’t an existential threat – yet. They aren’t toting nukes or superbugs – yet.

Burmese Days, by George Orwell

Ok. This one is a cheat review – the book I read was a paperback; not a Kindle title. But it couldn’t be helped. I generally read while I travel, and I travel with a Kindle. Last week, however, I did some shopping in Chiang Mai’s incredible little backstreet bookstores, and so I’ll be reviewing at least a half dozen paperback titles in the coming weeks.

First up is George Orwell’s Burmese Days. I was attracted to this not because of its author but rather its title. Although I am of course a fan of Orwell’s work, I’m in Southeast Asia at the moment and I’ve always had a fondness for old stories from this part of the world. The very mention of Burma, the British colony, is guaranteed to intrigue me. Not that I am an apologist for colonialism; I just find it a fascinating time in history.

Orwell lived briefly in Burma, where he developed a healthy hatred for the British colonial system. This experience inspired his novel, about a man named Flory in a town called Kyauktada. Here we see the colonial Brits in all their awfulness – racist, gin-soaked society men and women, lording it over the “natives.” The plot largely revolves around the Club where these Brits get drunk and complain about “the niggers.” They are utterly contemptible, including our hero, Flory, although his somewhat progressive views about race put him morally above the rest of the English characters.  Flory’s love interest is the utterly loathsome Elizabeth – a hateful, shallow, anti-intellectual young woman who’s in Burma to find a husband.

No one in the book except, perhaps, Dr Veraswami, is without some major flaw. Dr Veraswami is Flory’s friend, a “native” who is the target of a hate campaign throughout the novel by local magistrate. Orwell’s disdain for corruption and manipulation, which would be evident in his more famous later works, is clear in Burmese Days, whose characters seek only from self-interest, caring little for the consequences of their actions.

Burmese Days is a wonderful attack upon colonialism and a very enjoyable novel. Despite taking the perspective of a cynical man in a hateful regime, Orwell’s love for Burma comes through in his vivid description of the place and the culture, at a time when it was suffering brutally from British rule.

Unspotted, by Justin Fox

Unspotted, by Justin Fox, is a very short non-fiction book in which the author goes in search of the highly elusive Cape Leopard. It is written in a first person – perhaps even a Gonzo – style of narrative. Fox takes us along on this personal journey, investing the reader quite firmly in his own quest to see a rare animal in the wild. Yet it is not some self-involved, Gonzo rip-off. Fox deftly handles his story, providing vivid, enthralling descriptions of the South African landscape with amusing observations and dialogues along the way.

I very much enjoyed Fox’s writing style, which was always a balance of informative and comedic (“The vehicle bounced over boulders like an inebriated frog.”). I was in Southern Africa for a few months earlier this year and developed a strong fondness for the land, the people, and the wildlife. Fox’s book brought me right back into that place, and made me yearn to hike out into the wilds once again, despite the author’s own apparent disdain for physical activity.

Although I’m a slow reader, I made my way through this short text in one sitting. Apparently this is philosophy behind the book’s publisher, Annorlunda Books, which specializes in “novella length or shorter” for both fiction and non-fiction. I dig the concept and will check out more of their books in future. 

Prisoners of Geography, by Tim Marshall

I’ve recently powered through this fantastic book during my rare downtime studying a CELTA course in Thailand. I’m usually quite a slow reader, but Prisoners of Geography is so engaging that I reached the end in no time and was left wishing there was more of the world to cover.

The premise of Tim Marshall’s new book is simple: our world is governed by geography more than we know. Perhaps that seems obvious; perhaps it seems an overstatement. Yet Marshall makes a good case that our present geopolitical situation is dictated by largely the same forces that ancient nations abided.

Geography has always been a prison of sorts – one that defines what a nation is or can be, and one from which our world leaders have often struggled to break free.

He goes from Russia to China to the USA, visiting India and Pakistan, Korea and Japan, and even the Arctic, explaining why our world is shaped the way it is. References are made, fittingly, to Jared Diamond’s work, which I reviewed here last month. His observations on politics and history are astute, and his descriptions of planet’s geographical features are wonderful.

Often Marshall acknowledges the absurdity of the nation state, which is fundamentally a prison of its own, applied forcefully to the world by the European powers, and which chokes us and causes untold destruction today. One passage I loved from this book illuminates that point:

The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries.

Marshall seems pre-occupied with the potential for cataclysmic global war and points out numerous places on the globe where it could happen, although he does end on a more hopeful note, looking off into space – where we are finally free of our geographic prison.

Love, H

I have posted a new review over at Beatdom. As I've mentioned before, any books relating to the Beat Generation (or mid-twentieth century literature) will likely be posted there instead of here.

Here's the Amazon link:


My next review is coming in a few days. It's about a fantastic new book, Prisoners of Geography.

Cannibalism, by Bill Schutt

Bill Schutt’s forthcoming book, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, is an informative and yet very light-hearted look at a fascinating subject. From the animal world to the human world, the author explores cannibalism in a non-judgmental way.

His premise is that cannibalism is perfectly reasonable from an evolutionary perspective, and the first half of the book is devoted to examining its prevalence in nature. As it turns out, cannibal animals are rather common. From parents eating their offspring to children eating their parents, and from an easy meal to mating benefits, cannibalism proves itself a useful tool throughout the animal kingdom.

Schutt consciously avoids sensationalism, preferring not to dwell upon famous cases of survival cannibalism, with the exception of the Donner party story, or cannibal killers who’ve been in the newspapers. As he rightly observes, there are plenty of gory books devoted to these people.

Instead, he talks about cannibalism in China and Papua New Guinea, where it never achieved the taboo status that it did in the West, at least until very recently. From Chinese children slicing off body parts to feed their parents to tribesmen eating their dead out of respect, it is a gory and yet fascinating part of the book.

Also of interest is the section on diseases spread through cannibalism, such as BSE in the UK and kuru in Papua New Guinea. And speaking of medical issues... did you know cannibalism was conducted in the name of medicine in Europe? 

Cannibalism comes out next year from Algonquin Books. Do yourself a favour and pre-order it.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond's 1997 classic non-fiction book is a study of history, geography, anthropology, and other scientific disciplines. It is a readable, highly informative work that won a Pulitzer Prize and has proven very popular in its field over the past twenty years.


Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, attempts to answer the question of why the European powers, or rather the Western World, came to power rather than Asian, African, or South American societies. He suggests this notion was brought to him by a New Guinean friend who asked why it was the European nations who conquered and colonized, and not, for example, Oceanic civilizations. "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Elsewhere he asks why Spain invaded South America instead of the Mayans invading Spain.

His central theory is this: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves." He painstakingly makes the point that societies took different paths for four reasons:

1. The native crops and animals in each region.
2. The orientation of continental axis, which hinders or promotes the diffusion of agriculture.
3. Transfer of knowledge.
4. Population density.

While it is true that European historians have often attempted to use racist theories to explain Western hegemony, at times Diamond seems to go to the opposite extreme. At the beginning of his book he seems eager to explain himself as different from previous generations and free from their racial prejudice. Throughout the book, he pours on the political correctness, which is at times excruciating. He makes outrageous racist statements about white people which are as bad as what you might expect to find in a more traditional "whites are superior and that's all you need to know" sort of study.

It is easy to see why this book earned so much respect. It is incredibly well-researched and does offer a fantastic explanation for why different societies took different paths. I've heard from an anthropologist friend that political correctness is a curse throughout all anthropology these days, so I suppose you just have to suffer through that and accept it for what it is. 

Billy and the Devil, by Dean Lilleyman

This bizarre novel (told through a large number of very short, fleeting chapters from varied perspectives) tells the story of Billy, an alcoholic. Billy is viewed by those around him as a devil of sorts because he hurts everyone with his actions when he's drunk. He is, by all accounts, a terrible human being.

I like stories about terrible human beings because usually there is a reason for what they do, and in real life we seldom look for that reason. Yet, in novels, sometimes we can find sympathy for the devil. Yes, that's the name of a Rolling Stones song, and yes that song is mentioned a handful of times through the book.

We follow Billy's life from before he was even born up until an ambiguous ending of sorts, and always we see the side toll of addiction. We know that if Billy was a player in our own lives, we would be harmed by him and push him away for the awful things he does, but as a character in this novel we pity him.

Billy is drinking heavily from age eleven. As an adult he cannot drink without pushing on through to complete drunkenness, and when he is drunk he invariably ends up doing awful things. He cheats, he starts fights, he alienates everyone.

There is one scene when he actually - uncharacteristically - goes to Alcoholics Anonymous and ends up telling a sad story and cries in front of everyone in the room. Of course, for a working class Glaswegian this is too much to bear and he goes start to the "offy" (off-licence) to buy more booze and get drunk.

The book is depressing in many ways, and it takes a while to get into it. The fragmentary nature of its composition is challenging at first, but soon you realize this is how Billy sees his own life. This is how life can be. It ends up being a rewarding, powerful book. 

Kingdom of Rarities, by Eric Dinerstein

This past week I've been reading the wonderful Kingdom of Rarities, by Eric Dinerstein on my Kindle. As soon as I read the synopsis I was excited to get into it, and it absolutely did not disappoint. Though it may sound a bit inaccessible, it is a thoroughly readable look at species on this earth which are rare, exploring why exactly they aren't in abundance.


Dinerstein has spent his life travelling the world, studying rare animals, and his knowledge and experience guide the reader from chapter to chapter. We are taken on a trip around the world, from South America to the Himalayas to Southeast Asia. His descriptions of his surroundings are vivid and impressive. I've travelled much of my adult life and I envy his ability to capture the magnificence of a locations.

Moreover, he knows a lot about biology and the workings of the world, and where he isn't the expert, he talks to those who are, and eloquently captures their perspectives of rarity. He describes jaguars and rhinos and other amazing creatures, explaining why these animals are rare and what exactly their place in nature is.

The book is filled with fascinating information. For example, in the UK there are 15 species of trees which occur naturally, while in the tropics - where rarities abound - there are 70,000 species. 1,000 of these exist on a single mountain, which harbors numerous rarities. Elsewhere, he describes the tropics canopies and methods scientists are using to explore the life they support. All of it is surprising and informative.

Sadly, though many of these animals exist naturally in small numbers, many of them are endangered due to human activity, and many naturally occurring rarities are pushed from rare to extinct due to our own growth. It is incredible sad how Dinerstein details amazing creatures all across the globe over his career, and yet whenever he draws close to the present day, he finds them extinct or nearly extinct. It is nothing short of heartbreaking just how much destruction we are doing to our planet, and much of it is irreversible.

He talks about the Vietnam War and its aftermath - the battle between conservation and development. Unsurprisingly, the conservationists are losing all the way. Where American bombs damaged populations of wildlife, now the population is hunting every remaining species and ensuring that natural diversity disappears.

Though Dinerstein often seems optimistic about conservation, it is hard to read this beautiful book without feeling the opposite. I've been lucky in my life to have come face to face with the most incredible animals, yet if I have children I'm sure I'll have to explain to them how so many of these animals are no longer with us. 

The Worst Motorcycle in Laos, by Chris Tharp

This fantastic collection of travel essays takes its title from a shorter piece near the end of the book. The author details a comedic journey through Southern Laos on a motorcycle that may very well be the worst bike in the whole damn country. The essay is typical of Tharp's style - witty, descriptive, and no-holds-barred. He barely manages to get the bike through a trail called The Loop, suffering a series of comic misadventures, before coming to the realization that sometimes we need these calamities in order to see the real side of a place.

Throughout this short and enjoyable collection, Tharp takes us off the beaten track to a number of weird and wonderful locations across Asia, from Western China to the Philippines, from Japan to Thailand. In every instance he presents the world as fascinating, colorful, and mysterious. He lopes around drunkenly for the most part, stumbling from misadventure to misadventure, but never forgetting to clue us in on his surroundings. The result is a very funny, very informative, and strangely poignant book.

If you love travel or are interested in the food, the culture, or even the landscape of Asia, check out this cool book. If you're sick of Lonely Planet and sugary-sweet travel blogs, I'm pretty sure you'll get a kick out of Tharp's tales.

The Town and the City, by Jack Kerouac

Recently I've been rereading an old favourite - Jack Kerouac's The Town and the City.

The Town and the City details the lives of the Martin family of Galloway, Massachusetts. The five sons and three daughters' lives are detailed in years before, during, and after World War II. The sons include a college football star, an introverted scholar, and a wanderlust romantic - all elements of Kerouac's own personality. In fact, whereas in later novels Kerouac would write about his own life, the Duluoz saga, with himself as a very loosely fictionalized character, in The Town and the City, Kerouac's personality is split between the characters quite distinctly, reflecting the rather distinct elements of himself. Throughout his life, Kerouac was pulled one way and the other - Buddhist and Catholic; liberal and conservative; lover and misogynist.

This book is very different to Kerouac's later works, and readers of his most famous novel - On the Road - will wonder if it's even by the same author. The Town in the City was an early work - his first published novel - and was heavily influenced in terms of its style by Thomas Wolfe. Later, Kerouac would be influenced by Neal Cassady's Joan Anderson letter (and his general style of talk) to write in a more improvised fashion. He'd focus on longer descriptions of scenes - sketching jazz bars with words to the rhythm of a song.

In this book Kerouac's story weaves in more traditional fashion. It is self-contained, and apart from the Duluoz legend books. It elegantly tracks the family's comings and goings, reaching a logical, satisfying conclusion.

Until recently, Kerouac's works weren't available on Kindle. However, thanks to Open Road Media, several of them, including this, have been recently released. Hopefully one of America's great writers will continue to reach new reads in this format.

Shadows in the Work of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Baraka

Today's review will not be posted here. You can read it here at Beatdom. It concerns a newly released book about Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka, and their relation to shadow imagery in the post-war era.

Anything related to the Beat Generation will be published at Beatdom and not here. 

Currently Reading

The Town and the City, by Jack Kerouac - new on Kindle

Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley

Noah Hawley, creator of the TV show Fargo, is known for his engaging, complex, thrilling screen-writing, and he has now brought that skill set to a novel.

Before the Fall is an unputdownable book which I wished I had the time to read in one long sitting. It begins with a plane crash. Eleven people are on a small jet which crashes into the Atlantic Ocean. One of them, a down-on-his-luck painter, pulls a small boy to safety. The boy is the son of the wealthy family on board.

Where do we go from here? A huge plane crash and epic escape through icy waters seems more fitting for the end of a book...

But Hawley weaves a fascinating story that cuts to the core of modern life. This novel is set last year - 2015 - which still seems futuristic to me. Yet he paints a vivid picture of our modern society. Yes, the tender story the saviour and the child might be timeless, but for me that wasn't the key theme of the book.

While Hawley blends backstories with twists and turns in the days following the crash, only explaining why the plane crashed at the very end, what made the book interesting to me was the exploration of how we - as a society - deal with tragedies.

One thread of the book explores the fascination we have with celebrity, and comes at it from the conservative stand point. There is a TV channel in the book which clearly represents FOX News, and one of their bombastic hosts. These people doggedly chase our book's hero, trying to sully his name.

If that sounds unfair to conservatives, so be it. It could also have been about Gawker or any number of celebrity-obsessed modern media outlets. Eventually these onlookers come to dominate the story as they bugged phones and hack e-mails, essentially trying to make the news as much as cover it.

I also liked the story of the co-pilot and flight attendant, which unfolds seemingly as an add-on later in the book, but whose importance becomes very clearly towards the end.

I seldom read novels these days but this one made me yearn for more thoughtful yet exciting modern fiction. I highly recommend it, and look forward to more from Noah Hawley. 

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley

I liked the sound of this book when I read its synopsis on Amazon and so I bought it a month ago. Indeed, I agree with the author in most respects and many of his arguments, I feel, are correct - the world is getting "better" in most measurable ways and when people talk about the doom and gloom of coming decades, they're typically misguided.

However, I found the author insufferable and struggled to reach the end of his book.



In The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley is writing from the perspective of the financial crisis. He obviously wrote this book as a reaction to the panic that was caused by that particular event. As such, he looks back through human history, nearly to the dawn of time, and then very laboriously describes how everything has just gotten better and better and better, and thus how it's inevitable that things will keep getting better.

He makes some good arguments, but he labors the point endlessly and sounds like an awful curmudgeon. He makes petty attacks on nameless people and seems out to set the world to rights based on his own trivial dislikes. He takes breaks from describing human history to attack proponents of organic farming, his son's teachers, and the like. He seems childish and condescending.

One of his central ideas is that economics - the market - is responsible for absolutely every single positive thing that ever happened. In fact, it's what caused humans to change from animals to people. I'm not saying he's necessarily wrong, but he drives this point home throughout the book, even offering petty insults to the biologists and economists who refute him, yet remain nameless. At a certain point you just wish he would stop creating little parables to describe each stage in human development and how trade suddenly made everything great.

"Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution," he claims. Indeed. Perhaps he should've left it at that.

He argues that kindness comes from interdependence - ie capitalism. "There is a direct link between commerce and virtue," he says. ... "Where commerce thrives, creativity and compassion both flourish."

This is one of his better arguments, and I must say I agree with him wholly. He also asserts that people like to think of themselves as self-sufficient, but it has been humanity's mixing and mingling and trading that has lead to our rise as a species.

Unfortunately, throughout the book, as I've said, the author sounds like a horrible person and one gets the feeling, reading the book, that one's sitting in the corner of a room at a party being lectured by a terrible bore. It's not that he's wrong but he's just awful to listen to... Moreover, although I agree with him, his arguments do seem very cherry-picked, and his research seems to have the depth of a rather hollow Wikipedia page. Matt Ridley, it seems, is a man who never considered for a moment that he might not be correct about something. 

The Pornography Industry, by Shira Tarrant

Pornography is obviously an extremely controversial topic, and like so many controversial topics, the information you get depends largely on who you're talking to. As such, getting the truth can be surprisingly difficult. Speak to an anti-porn conservative or feminist and you'll get a plethora of statistics about its supposed dangers; speak to those inside the industry and you'll get a run-down of the benefits of porn alongside the unfair actions to target actors and directors.



Porn, then, is a tricky subject. Even simple questions like, "What is porn?" will elicit different responses from different people. Luckily, Shira Tarrant's new book addresses a wide array of questions in a disarmingly neutral fashion. Reading this book, from beginning to end I was stunned by just how balanced her discussion was. At no stage did she stray from the role of a moderator in a debate.

If that makes the book sound at all boring, it's not. It is relentlessly informing, yet well-written enough that it isn't just hundreds of pages of dry fact. It is a well-structured and meticulously researched compendium of otherwise surprisingly elusive details. She documents porn's history, its legal status, the ins and outs (pun intended) of day-to-day filming, the financial aspect, and its impact on society and health.

I read a lot of books these days about science and society, and I'm sick of reading biased opinions - even if the author shares my own viewpoint. That's why it was so refreshing to read Shira Tarrant's book and feel that every detail was open to criticism and interpretation. This should not be so surprising, but in today's environment, a book like this is a rare and valuable thing.

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The Pornography Industry will be out on April 1st, 2016.

Currently Reading - aka upcoming reviews

Right now I'm reading a few books on my Kindle and also on paperback. The paper back is a collection of Allen Ginsberg interviews called Spontaneous Mind. I probably won't be reviewing that here.

On Kindle I'm reading:

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley
The Pornography Industry, by Shira Tarrant

In the "to-read" pile:

Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13000 Years, by Jared Diamond
iGuerilla, by John Sutherland
The Kingdom of Rarities, by Eric Dinerstein
Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley
Mary Shelley: The Dover Reader
Billy and the Devil, by Dean Lilleyman

The Dark Forest, by Liu Cixin

Last year I was on a Chinese novel kick and read Liu Cixin's (or Cixin Liu, depending on how you want to Anglicize his name) The Three-Body Problem. Whilst not exactly the greatest work of literature, it was very enjoyable. I'm honestly not a science-fiction guy, and I didn't really expect to like it, but it was good. The story barreled along, and I very much enjoyed the fact that Liu really knows physics, making the ideas unique and plausible.


This year, while travelling around Africa (see my other blog for info about the trip), I read the second book in what was Liu's trilogy. The Dark Forest leaves off more or less from where the first book ended, with the Earth stunned by the news that it will be invaded by an alien power in 400 years.

"Four hundred years?!" you may well ask. "That's not exactly moving along at a riveting pace!"

The book covers some of those years, jumping about a bit through the same characters as they engage in hibernation to brace against the passage of time. Primarily we follow Luo Ji, a Wallfacer. Wallfacers are the humans chosen to engage in planning the Earth's defense. Due to the presence of "sophons" on Earth, Trisolaris - the enemy power on its way to the Solar System - is able to monitor human activity but not thought. A few humans are chosen as Wallfacers and granted certain power to secretly plan Earth's resistance.

What's interesting to me is that these books view humanity's future from a very Chinese perspective. Yes, it's a global fight, but when you read books in English, usually the future concern a plucky band of white men... In this case, most - but not all - of the characters are Chinese, and the world's language is a hybrid of Chinese and English.

I also like that Liu is very well-versed in science and makes very detailed and plausible guesses about technology in the future. These are all pretty believable and make it easy to engage with the book as it passes through time.

However, as with the first book, Liu's new one falls down in regards characterization. The characters are all pretty flat and predictable. Some of them seem to be carbon copies of cliches from old movies. His dialogue is dull, too. The women in the book largely exist to be beautiful, while the men go out and solve problems. It makes the book rather frustrating. Some of this might be down to translation - and not just translation of language, but the culture wrapped up in it.

Altogether, the first book in this series was, despite some flaws, a very good book that I highly recommended. The second not so much. I'll give the third a shot when it comes out this summer, but I'm not hugely enthusiastic. 

The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson

Readers of this blog will know that I've been working my way through the works of Jon Ronson, pretty much going backwards from his most recent book, and now I have ended up with his most famous, 2004's now-classic The Men Who Stare at Goats.



Jon Ronson is a journalist who likes to document the weird, and he seems to come across as trustworthy enough that he can get close to the real weirdos in life. Yet this is probably his most bizarre book in a career of dealing with bizarre people. It is, as the title suggests, about men who believe they can kill goats by staring at them.

The story goes back to 1979, the US government established a team of commandos who would be tasked with developing super-human abilities like invisibility and psychic investigation. They would also be able to walk through walls and stare goats to death.

He traces the history of this movement through painstaking research. Most people would have given up, but Ronson followed the story to its weirdest extents, and details it in his own Gonzo fashion. He brings it right up into the present day (for 2004, at least) and the War on Terror.

This book is a modern classic - hilarious, informative, and unputdownable. 

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That, by Ben Goldacre

I read this book while on holiday in South Africa and Swaziland, among some of the most amazing landscapes on earth... and sadly, surprisingly, the book really bored me. Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with much that Dr. Goldacre says. He's obviously an intelligent man doing important work. I just don't think this book needed to be a book.

The book is a collection of Ben Goldacre's articles, which mostly appeared in The Guardian. Individually, these are well-written and really very fascinating bits of writing. After the first few, I was very impressed. However, it goes on and on and on... Eventually you just become rather tired of Goldacre's voice, even thought you agree with him.

In his blog, Goldacre liked to tear apart bad science. He'd attack journalists for reporting bullshit "science" stories, as well as scientists and organizations for releasing them. His methods were interesting, but they only really function as a blog. Looking back over the years, it loses its value. They were important artifacts of their time, for sure, but who cares about what appeared in the Daily Mail fifteen years ago?

The book is also poorly edited and put together. It is repetitive in places, and jumps from subject to subject. Why this book needed to be made, I don't know... I'd much rather read something by the author that is altogether more coherent. 

The Corrections, by Jonathon Franzen

I got this book for free from Amazon last month as some sort of promotion. I never take the free books because I imagine I'll never read them, but this book was something I'd meant for a while to try. Actually, I'd wanted to read it, perversely, because I expected to join the crowd of Franzen haters.
Alas, while I'm not a Franzen fan, I didn't hate the book. My friend had told me I would, but I didn't. It's not a bad book.
The Corrections is the story of a family. It jumps about in place and time but examines their lives in a complex way. It's not the sort of thing I'd usually read but it was pretty wells written, contrary to what I'd been told.
What interested me was that in places it took the point of view of different characters, yet through their eyes we see their flaws, and the good in others. This is the opposite of what one would expected. We seen characters look at others and feel contempt, but the other character's positive attributes, instead emerge.
Yet every character is deeply, irrevocably flawed in this book. They are in need of, as the title tells us, corrections.


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Please excuse typos etc in this and posts in the near future. I'm on holiday and using my iPad to post.

The Man Who Cycled The World, by Mark Beaumont

Being back in Scotland for a week, I decided to read some paperback books that my family had on the shelves as a bit of a change of pace from my usual digital diet of reading material. First up was Mark Beaumont's The Man Who Cycled The World.



I was attracted to this book because one of my New Year resolutions is to start cycling again and I'd like to do some sort of long-distance trip one day. In fact, to be entirely honest, I'd love to cycle right the way around the world, as the author did. By coincidence, Beaumont is also a Scot like me.

The book is interesting for someone like me, with an interest in travel and mildly interested in bikes, and overall it's a pretty good read. However, the author also seems a little hard to relate to. He's obviously rather well-off and although people might say that about me, too, I nonetheless felt disengaged from his "struggle." For me, if you can raise almost $50,000 to cycle around the world, it's not really easy to comprehend your mindset. I'm the sort of person who hitch-hikes and backpacks and I wouldn't even know what to do if I had $50,000 in the bank.

Beaumont does travel cheap up to a point, like me, but he also meets up with masseuses and team members around the world and is always in the phone to his mum. It's not really the sort of rugged adventure that one might have hoped for.

As a writer, too, he is lacking. Not that it's awful, but with his position of privilege, his background, his somewhat arrogant nature, and then his unnatural storytelling method, it left me cold.