Category: Review (Page 25 of 132)

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

When I think back to the 1997 election when the inept Tory government was thrown out by the voters and the future seemed bright under the new Labour government we have come a long way. Since then we have had all manner of things to contend with; domestic terrorism, the Olympics, unnecessary wars, the financial crash of 2008, Brexit and most recently the pandemic.

How has this changed us as a country though?

This is the question that Jason Cowley is hoping to answer in this book. He starts though with his aunt who has lived in the same house in Harlow for fifty years. They talk about various things, but he is there to hear about her protest of the closure of a doctor’s surgery. It was a shock announcement and there was no consultation or explanation given, other than it was no longer financially viable. This had been decided by an American Insurance and healthcare provider and no one in the area knew that this company was running an essential medical service. She became a bit of a media star in her protest against the closure.

Brexit is a big theme throughout the book. It was sold to the electorate on the grounds that we would be taking back control. I am not sure we have, but this polarization of our country has not been helped by the lurch to the political right and how we have become much less tolerant of other people and their views. But in amongst this conflict, he shows that people are still working to make our society a much better place.

He visits the Finsbury Park mosque where Imam Mohammed Mahmoud, protected a white terrorist from an angry crowd of worshippers. His quick thinking saved a man’s life that night and more than that diffused a situation that was getting more and more heated. There are stories of hope in here too, people came together to support the vulnerable during the first phase of the pandemic and he notes how the England football team under Gareth Southgate show how a diverse Britain could work if we wanted it to.

I thought this was a well-written book. Cowley is not setting an agenda in this book, rather he is holding a mirror up to the various elements of our society and reporting on them. There are moments of doom and gloom in here as some of what he shows is where society is fracturing, but there are happier stories too. Stories where people are making sure that this diverse and multicultural country that we live in works for them and everyone else. Well worth reading for a view on where our country is at this moment

3 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Douglas Board was fortunate. From an early age, he had been coached and schooled to be one of those that are selected to run large organisations and companies. His achievements are the chair of a household-name charity, treasurer of another, and deputy chair of a board-level consultancy. He was fully one of the elite.

Not only did he achieve these lofty positions, but he helped others reach those lucrative senior roles in his position as a head-hunter and mentor to those that wanted to reach the top of the greasy pole. This book is about helping others reach that level should they wish to do so. He takes us through ten lessons, from Reality is Simple, to Take Responsibility and Learn stuff that he says will help people of all levels reach the top, should they wish too.

Wizards who leave top jobs don’t automatically stop becoming wizards, because wizardry is about personal connection and a shared mindset.

Overall this is quite a good read, he is a good writer and the prose is chatty without being too full of business acronyms. I liked parts of this book and there were other parts that I thought less of. I get why he has used the phrases muggles, muggle crust and wizards to denote the levels that people are working at in a business or organisation, but it did come across as slightly patronising. He does go to some effort to suggest the ways that the system can change, and perhaps the disruption that the pandemic has added to the system will help in that, but only time will tell. I don’t think that he has all the answers though, I think that some of the ways that top levels of organisations are structured need to be enforced through wholesale revision to business legislation and the principles by which they operate.

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

In 1905, a young cavalryman arrives in Bengal to serve in the 17th Bengal Lancers on the Northwest Frontier of British India. The nineteen-year-old Francis Yeats-Brown did not know what to expect. On the morning of his arrival in Bareilly, one of the first things that he did was to buy a horse. He called her Judy.

He quickly settled into his privileged new life there, he only had to sign a chit to get anything that he needed. It was when he was out riding his horse though that he got a grasp of how different a life that the people of that vast continent had compared to his. He learnt the army way and was soon be on his way to the northwestern frontier. It was there he would meet the men who would be under his command.

He then had a seminal moment, when he went from doing all the military stuff to realising that there was a spiritual element to the country that he wanted to know about. He sought advice from the yogi, Sivanand Joshi, who advised him that the path he wanted to seek was not going to be easy. It would be a prediction that would prove correct as he is moved from India to Europe to be on active service in the First World War. It was an experience that changed him forever.

This is a very different perspective on the time of the British Raj, mostly because Yeats-Brown is passionately interested in the people that he was living alongside and in particular, their spiritual way of life. It is a book of its time though and some of his prejudices that he has are now out of date, I think that it is still worth reading for this unique inside view of life in that time.

The twin counterweights of Europe have always been France and Germany but way back in time, even before the Normans Invaded us, the three grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. They were there to settle a long running feud over who would inherit the lands. They finally decided to split the land three ways. One grandson inherited the land that we now know as France, the second grandson was granted the land that was to become Germany and the third grandson received the land that split these two.

It was called Lotharingia.

It stretched from the mouth of the Rhine to the alps, and as a place, it doesn’t exist now; unless you know where to look. In this book, Simon Winder will take us back to the beginning when it was handed to the third grandson and bring us an irreverent and personal history of the towns, cities and new countries that we know it by today.

It is a wide-ranging book and sometimes I felt there was too much emphasis on the history of the region. I had hoped for more travel, especially as it was shortlisted for a travel writing prize and whilst there is some in here it very much plays second fiddle to the history.

I didn’t love it, but I did like the book. There were some amusing parts and thankfully he is quite an engaging writer, however, he does indulge himself in researching these places and people that shaped this part of Europe. He does say many times throughout the book that he could have written much more about particular subjects or people, but I felt it should have had a much stricter editor who could have made the prose tighter and shorter. I also felt that it lacked a cohesive thread, but then I suppose that reflects the mess that the place was until recently. If you have read any of his other books in the trilogy, Germania and Danubia then this is probably worth reading too.

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Remember 2019? Everything seemed normal back then but little did we know what was about to arrive. I can’t remember the first time that I had heard about this unusual SARS-like illness that had appeared in Wuhan in China, but I think that it was February. The last event that I went to with people was the Stanford Travel Writing Awards at the end of February. Ironic given that travel and many other things would be shut down a couple of weeks later.

I remember seeing what was happening in Italy and thinking that it might arrive here but really didn’t know what to make of it. Leading epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse learned of a new virus that had appeared in China in early January. He wrote to the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland recommending that they should prepare and got a polite reply that basically said that everything was in hand.

It wasn’t…

In this book, he critiques the way that the UK government tackled the situation fairly, praising them for the things that they did well and rightly criticising them for the many things that they did poorly. He explains his reasoning for not having lockdowns and the immense damage that they cause society as a whole as the ongoing mental health issues that are going to take a long time to cure. He sets out what he considers the procedures and protocols that should have been used instead and how these could have protected people instead of ending up with the frankly horrendous death toll that we have in this country.

I thought that this was a well written and considered book about the UK response to the Covid 19 pandemic. Throughout the book, Woolhouse is very clear on his position on lockdowns and the damage that they cause and he makes a very strong case for his way of thinking. His writing is pragmatic but he occasionally ventures into fairly technical jargon, but thankfully it is not very often. He does say that next time and there will be a next time for this type of medical emergency, we need to do things much better and move much faster in our responses.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

As John Muir wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’ he was not the first to notice this either, Alexander von Humboldt is one of those first credited with the idea of an ecosystem being a vastly interconnected and interdependent species.

He discovered this when climbing the inactive volcano Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador which went from tropical rainforest to a snow-topped mountain. He went from the equator to the north pole in one go and his eyes were opened to the diversity that existed in this one place. But what happens when these finely balanced ecosystems are changed?

In this book, Thor Hanson looks at the way that climate change is forcing the world’s flora and fauna to adapt. Some can cope where they are, but the consensus has been that species will move further north to remain in their zone as temperatures rise, but it is much more complicated than that. Life on this planet can cope with slow change, but rapid change, as has happened in the past and is happening now is forcing evolution at an unprecedented rate.

Hanson takes us through numerous examples. As well as the two mentioned in the title, hurricane lizards and plastic squid I learnt about bears that are changing their diets from salmon to berries which are having wider effects on the health of the forests alongside the rivers too and plants that are relying on new species to help them migrate. He travels all over the world finding these stories of failures and successes and at times it makes for grim reading.

Compared to a lot of environmental books that can be a bit doom and gloom, this took a very different view. Using lots of examples he looks a the way that a variety of flora and fauna are adapting to the spectre that is climate change. And they are adapting much faster than we are. I have read a couple of his other books before and I think that this is the best of his that I have read so far. The writing is clear and concise and a warning about what is happening on our only planet.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

On my long list of places that I would love to visit given a small fortune and no pandemic, is Shetland. From what I have seen in photos, it is a bleak and remote part of the world that also looks utterly beautiful. It is not the only set of islands on the north coast of Scotland, to the west is the tiny isle of Foula. It is only 20 miles away and looking at the satellite images of it, it might as well be on another planet.

Watching the eternal surge and hush of the sea we were lost in its timelessness – a hundred thousand years before us, a hundred thousand years after we were gone, so it would keep rolling in.

The people that live there are tough and resourceful and used to dealing with everything that the Atlantic throughs at them every single day of the year. The weather here is relentless. Sheila Gear wanted to paint a picture of just what life was like there over the course of a year. She was an incomer and married to one of the island’s crofters. Not only did she help on the croft, but there had three young children and a myriad of other responsibilities for the land.

Not only does she write about the things that they have to do over the course of the year, but she tells how the people there used to cope in the past. But this is mostly about the croft, the hard work in the ever so brief summer as they race to get the hay in before winter returns, the struggle to make sure that the lambs are safely born and they have an income for the year. She also talks about the lack of support from the government and how they feel forgotten on their tiny patch of land.

Sit here and scan the distant horizon where sea and sky meet in a far silver line, let your mind roam free; here you will find a glimpse of understanding of life.

Unlike a lot of books about people revelling in Island life, this is a book that does not shy away from dealing with living in a place as remote as this. It is one tough life that they live on Foula. But even though it is bleak there, you can find beauty, and Gear’s prose does just that, picturing evocative moments in the breaks in the weather as well as the particular beauty of the light. It did feel like a philosophical outlook at certain points but she does not hold back on hold bloody difficult it is there. It is a wonderful read about someone who is deeply rooted and in love with the landscape of the place.

4 out of 5 stars

As I write this review the sky outside is a stunning blue and there is not a single cloud in sight. It is a spring day, but it feels a little odd for this time of the year. When I step outside though, there is still a chill in the air that reveals that it isn’t quite summer yet. Whilst it is once to have it bright, it feels a little early in the year for weather like this.

As the grip of climate change bites, what were the familiar seasons, seem to be blurring into each other much more than I remember in my short time on this earth. Gone are the stark differences of cold winters, warm springs and hot summers and autumns where the leaves turned colour ready for the first storm to blow them all off. Now we have warm wet winters and cool wet summers, and freak weather events that can strike in any month.

These themes of a world out of sorts are what Shute explores in this book. He heads to regions where flooding is becoming more prevalent and once in a century events are now happening every 15 years or so. He speaks to farmers who have been noting the day that swallows arrive for decades and now seeing how the dates they appear in the sky are a month earlier than they used to be. Spring is the time that this is most visible, it used to travel up the country at 1.2mph and now moves around 2mph and all the plants and animals are struggling to keep up.
I liked this a lot. Shute’s prose is crisp and to the point, probably his background as a journalist has helped with this and it doesn’t feel like a nostalgic book, more of a careful warning of the changes we are forcing on the world. The points that he makes and reiterates all the way through are made as bluntly as he can; i.e. that we are in the very middle of a crisis that is not going away. If there was one flaw with this, I felt that the inclusion of his own quite sad personal story didn’t really fit with the rest of the book.

4 out of 5 stars

I have not spent that much time on the West Coast of Scotland, but I do remember it having a stunning landscape almost everywhere that went to. I never made it to the islands though, but having now spent some time looking through the magnificent pictures in this book I wish that I had done so now.

This book is a hybrid of Peter May’s recollection of and where and how he draws inspiration from the Islands to create the Lewis trilogy. I am not that much of a crime reader, so I was a bit ambivalent about this, but there are hints and the odd spoiler to the plots of each of the books, but what makes this for me is the stunning photos of the land and seascapes that David Wilson has taken. I can recommend it for those alone.

4 out of 5 stars

One of my low key interests is architecture and the built environment seeing how places have evolved either by planning or not can tell you a lot about the place. I can tell just when someone has really thought about a place and how people are going to use it. The best designs look good and most importantly work really well, the worst just don’t…

Following World War 2 the UK needed to put a lot of effort into rebuilding towns and cities that had been bombed by the Nazis. The men and sadly it was mostly men in those days, had to move quickly to ensure that people were rehomed, slums were cleared and infrastructure was rebuilt. They embraced the wonders of concrete to solve architectural dilemmas.

To see what happened across our country, John Grindrod goes on a journey to see these architectural marvels for himself. He begins though with the prefabs, temporary builds that came in a kit form that was supposed to be an interim measure to house people. They are some still standing and there are people who are still living in them and they are 70 years old in some cases. The nearest to him was a mere three miles away and so it was he walked to Catford, to see it for himself.

His journey will take him to the new towns that were built, Harlow, Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City and to the tower blocks that grew in the inner cities all over the country. Some of these buildings are still with us but others have served their time and have been remodelled or flattened and rebuilt. London features quite a lot, and there is a whole chapter of the Festival of Britain and the reconstruction of the Southbank and the Brutalist buildings that are the National Theatre and the Southbank Centre. They are not to everyone’s taste, but I quite like them.

There is a lot of concrete in here, hence the title. Even though it has been around since Roman times it is only in the last century that we have used it almost everywhere and whilst it can be versatile, it is quite grey and bleak, even in the height of summer. But there is much more to this book than just concrete and buildings. He considers the way that towns and cities have changed and evolved since the second world war and the way that central and local government had to ensure that there was adequate housing for those being rehoused following the war and how some schemes were imposed onto some cities and others managed to get a much better solution

I thought that this was pretty good overall. Reading this reminded me of growing up in Woking and the shopping centre there. It was this huge paved concrete mass with all of the regular shops that you’d expect.  Grindrod is an engaging writer who is very passionate about his favourite material, concrete. The social history aspect is very interesting too and he adds a personal dimension to their stories by going and seeing them in the modern-day.