Books and Me

by Mark Kurlansky (2006) This is a frustrating read, primarily because the author is very much the historian and not a writer or ethicist.  To be fair, he does do what the title suggests, but unless you are gripped by a wide range of historical detail that is touched on quickly and is therefore difficult to retain, you are not likely to draw many useful lessons from history from the bulk of this book.  The moral and practical lessons would have been better drawn from fewer or more thematically bunched historical examples and with much more explication.  The author does try to save the day in the very last chapter which is a bullet point list of the lessons about non-violence that he has drawn from history but these really should have been better explained into the previous chapters and not simply appended out of context.  Further, the stark nature of the list makes it easier to question many of his conclusions as it implies a form of historicism that the s...

by Rod Liddle (2014). True to form, Rod continues to entertain and infuriate by turns .  Actually, if I'm honest, he never does manage to infuriate me, but regular headlines, including one  today , demonstrate that he does successfully irritate a large number of people.  The thing is, unlike the likes of Katy Hopkins, I suspect that being vexatious isn't Rod's entire raison d'etre.  Instead he primarily wants to say it as it is even when what it is he has to say completely unsayable in this day and age.  You have to respect that, even on the few occasions when you suspect that he might also be wrong.   And of course on the entertainment front, he is quite often very funny, turning out perfectly pitched, humorous ridicule annoyingly easily, which is always admirable. The stand out unsayable, the elephant that has occupied my particular room ever since I floundered around for most of my youth as my mother worked her socks off as a doctor, was the...

by Owen Jones (2014) In this book , Owen Jones sets out to expose the way in which the wealthy and the powerful protect their interests at the expense of the rest of us and to this end, he produces a wealth of pretty convincing evidence.  Admittedly he sometimes puts slightly more contentious assertions into the mouths of his interviewees, and leaves these assertions hanging without any serious discussion, but all in all the welter of first hand testimony and argument leave one in little doubt that he has a pretty strong case. Of course, events have rather taken over since 2014, but Jones in describing the immediate history, goes a long way to explain the current confusions of, for example, Brexit and the rise of populist politics, elucidating as he does the ambivalent nature of the Establishment's relationship to Europe and shining a light on quite why so much of the electorate are so utterly fed up with the previously indistinguishable political parties. I'd say his ...

by Richard L. Currier (2015) This is a massive book in terms of scope, being a review of the whole of human history.  Much of the contents will, of course, be familiar to people with a passing knowledge of history, but for the rest of us, it is a concise, thoroughly useful romp through all the key elements that one really should actually already know but somehow don't.  It would make a visit to the British Museum or the Ashmolean for more interesting, and dinner parties with informed guests far less intimidating. Despite the authorial voice being almost non-existent, reading as the book does almost like a collaborative effort of a Wikipedia page, it manages to hold the reader's attention through a spattering of rich historical anecdote and often rather astonishing answers to enormous questions about the nature and form of humanity. When the author does reference himself, it is all the more startling for its rarity. Questions answered include why humans became so mu...