Reviews Coming Soon

I'm in Sri Lanka for a short holiday and I have my Kindle loaded up with books. When I get back, I'll be reviewing:

• Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
• Redshirts, by John Scalzi
• Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
• Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson
• Sarah, by J.T. Leroy
• Islands in the Stream, by Ernest Hemingway

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. 

All the West that Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West, by David Gessner

I am embarrassed to admit that prior to reading All the West that Remains I had never actually heard of Wallace Stegner or Edward Abbey. Somehow, in thirteen years of studying American literature, and in particular the period during which they were most active, they'd entirely slipped under my radar.
I will, however, soon rectify that during my next Kindle purchasing session. I will also be seeking out other books by the author, David Gessner, whose innovative first-person narrative style intrigued me throughout this enjoyable book.
I'm at a loss, however, in describing All the West that Remains. Indeed, one of the difficulties in deciding whether or not to buy it in the first place was the odd description:

Now, award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West.

Honestly, I didn't know what to expect. The result was more or less as the synopsis goes. Gessner travels around his native country, visiting places he'd seen as a young man, or not, and ruminates upon the lives and work of Stegner and Abbey.
I suppose it's not so complicated, yet when reading this for the longest time you're left wondering why it's written this way... Why not a straight biography of either man? Why not a straight travel journal? Why not a literary criticism comparing their work? Why not an environmentalist call-to-arms?
Well, the book is all these things, and somehow it works. Despite the wandering narrative, or perhaps because of it, it remains engaging throughout. Despite the differences between the two authors, or perhaps because of them, it provides a gripping view of these two under-rated giants of Western literature - and when I say Western I mean the American West.
Gessner portrays this land as their land - a land that inspired them, and which they worked to save. He shows the present state of the American West long after the death of both men, and speculates that they would not be surprised by water shortages and an increasing strain that is causing forest fires and untold destruction to the landscape.
On a personal level he explores his own struggle between sensible Stegner and wildman Abbey:

The question I now ask myself is whether it is possible to live responsibly, to have a Stegnerian commitment to wife and child, family and friends, while still having real wildness in my life. Is it possible to be properly wild?

He decides that we, as hairless monkeys, are still on some level wild and that's why we need the wilderness. We need to return to the wild now and then, not to make YouTube videos or upload photos to Instagram, but to have experiences because it's still very much a part of our DNA.
And these are ideas I would very much agree with. 

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson

A few weeks ago I read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Shamed and I was so impressed that I thought I’d read another of his books. For a year now one of my friends has been trying to get me to read The Psychopath Test and it certainly sounded interesting, so last week I downloaded it onto my Kindle and began reading.

Like the author, I wasn’t entirely sure what a psychopath was at the beginning of his adventure. Of course, I knew a few things. Psychopath is a bit of a buzzword. But I didn’t know, for example, that it’s used interchangeably with “sociopath,” or what exactly constituted either a psycho- or sociopath.

At the beginning of the book, Ronson is thrown into a bit of a mystery. It’s his style to engage with the subject of his research and to follow a story wherever it goes, putting himself thoroughly into the narrative. I quite enjoyed that in So You’ve Been Shamed. One of my literary heroes, after all, is Hunter S. Thompson, who was a one-man Gonzo genre.

Yet, for me, Ronson’s insertion of himself can be a little annoying at times. Whereas Thompson was larger than life and did it partially for comic reasons, Ronson is, like me, a fairly quiet and anxious person. Moreover, he seems to leave very little out of the book. At the end, in the acknowledgments, he thanks an editor for removing a few lines and I wondered if that’s all that was ever excised from the book. But it was an engaging read, nonetheless. Ronson’s story wandered hither and thither but it was always interesting, even if you were sometimes left wondering when you’d come back to the idea of psychopathy.

Like Ronson, learning about psychopathy made me wonder: Am I a psychopath? When he introduced the Bob Hare checklist that essentially determines whether or not a person is a psychopath, I found myself applying it to myself. Even after an expert in the book tells us that wondering whether or not you’re a psychopath is a sure sign that you aren’t, I still found myself wondering.

Oddly enough, I must admit, I kind of wanted to find myself out as a psychopath… One of the key notions of the book is that psychopaths walk among us, not necessarily hidden the shadows looking for someone to rape or kill, but in plain sight: they are often highly successful people. They are successful because they aren’t held back by guilt and empathy.

In the end, I had to admit to myself I just wasn’t psychopath material. I guess if I want to be successful I’ll have to go forth with guilt and empathy holding me back.

I was interested to learn, however, that I do know one genuine psychopath. I dated her for a year quite recently. I actually called her a “sociopath” at one point and thought of her as such on a few occasions, although I didn’t truly know the word’s meaning. She does, however, check most of the boxes on Hare’s checklist. Given that fewer than one in a hundred people are psychopaths, I found that frightening and yet amazing.

Despite my criticism of its rambling narrative, Ronson’s book is very readable. It doesn’t wander too far from the point, and is always fascinating. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to better understand the human mind.