Category: Review (Page 55 of 132)

4 out of 5 stars

My other half is a gardener and out front and back gardens are full of flowers in amongst the fruit trees, it does make sitting in the garden quite nice, and even when I’m in the office, the view out the front window is a sight to behold. Flowers are the beautiful and occasionally garish parts of a plant that are primarily evolved to attract an insect or bird to aid pollination. For some people, they are an irrelevant part of their lives, but their impact has permeated our culture in many ways.

Fiona Stafford has had a lifetime of enjoying flowers, from the gaudy red and yellow snapdragons, soft mounds of aubretia gladioli spikes and a huge rambling clematis, that made her childhood summers. Every time they moved her mother would begin to garden once again in the new property. The way flowers permeated her life is reflected in wider society, the loss of a loved one is often marked by flowers by the roadside, a couple on their wedding day have some sort of spray to hold and poppies are worn to remember those lost in wars long gone.

In this book, Stafford has selected fifteen flower species that are significant to her in one way or another. Beginning with the first of the late winter flowers, the snowdrop, that for me is the first hint that the world is still turning and spring is coming, she moves through the other flowers, such as daffodils, foxgloves and thistles as they appear in the year.

For each flower she has chosen there is a little potted history of each mixed with some personal memories and a little folklore and cultural and contemporary anecdotes mixed in. She talks about some of my favourites, bluebells, roses and lavender and ends on that most elusive of plants the ghost orchid.

I think overall I preferred this to her first book, the Long Long Life of Trees. Good as that was, this had the edge in a couple of ways. First her passion for her subject is very evident in the prose and secondly her writing as she deftly weaves between contemporary and historical anecdotes about her subject plants is a pleasure to read.

4.5 out of 5 stars

If you were to pop the name of Roumeli into Google maps then all it would bring up is a tiny place on the island of Kriti. For Patrick Leigh Fermor though this name brought to mind an entirely different region of Greece. For him, it is the northern counterpart to the southern Mani and is the ancient name for the lands that went from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth.

Even though this region isn’t known by that exotic and slightly mysterious name now, the people and places that formed it are still there, and Leigh Fermor is there to tease the stories out from them. He begins in Alexandroupolis, a town that normally elicits a groan from the civil servants who have had the misfortune to be posted there, but he had grown to like it partly because it was the first Greek town that he stayed in after a few years absence. But in this town, amongst the bored civil servants, walked a man dressed mostly in black with curving shoes that had a pompom on the end. He was a Sarakatsan shepherd and he was as out of place as a wolf walking through the streets.

This nomadic style of life still existed; part of the population moved from one area to another seeks grazing for their flocks. This practice had been honed over hundreds if not thousands of years and the rituals and traditions were deeply embedded in their culture. Even though the orthodox church had a certain amount of influence over peoples lives, the pagan spirits of old inhabited the land and still need to be placated and resisted.

This book is full of stories like this, a visit to a substantial house of yellow stone to shoes of Lord Byron, rising at dawn to travel by bus to the hinterland of Aetolia, climbing up the steps to the monastery perched onto of rocks and learning that guests used to be winched up, and the rope was only changed when it broke. This is a wide-ranging series of encounters and vignettes as he travels around the region. You can tell he deeply loves this country from the evocative writing as he travels through the landscape. As I have come to expect, it is such beautiful writing from Leigh Fermor. However, I think I of the two Mani just has the edge for me. But this is still a really special book.

4 out of 5 stars

In the Northwest of Ireland is the country of Donegal, it is a beautiful part of the world, but with that beauty comes a price, it is often on the receiving end of the worst that the Atlantic ocean can through at it. Monica Connell Had many fond memories of the place, leaning into the wind of a gale whilst having the cold sea wash around her feet. They shout, but the noise of the storm drowns out their words. It bought happy and sad memories in equal measure.

Then in 1990 her and her husband, Mark, decided that they wanted to move to Donegal, but trying to find a place was proving challenging, but after a conversation in a pub, someone suggested Wattie’s house. They followed a man from the pub to where the house was located and he told them who the owner was. A visit to him the following morning proved productive and they were to be the new tenants of the house. It needed some work though, and they spent three weeks drying the house out and taking the detritus left by the previous residents down the dump. They obtained a bog trespass to allow them to cut peat. Learning to cut peat using a slean to get neat unbroken turf proved challenging at first. As summer faded away, getting the peat cut ad dried before the arrival of the winter storms was the priority.

She met Margaret after stopping to pick her up when driving one day, as they chatted they realised that they had many things in common and they agreed to meet again. She visited her home and was plied with lots of tea, biscuits and cake and Margaret asks her if she would interested in gathering carrageen and dillisk. Connell jumped at the chance to do this with her and at the next full moon headed down to the sea. Connell is shown each of the seaweeds and told to take care as she is walking over very slippery rocks to collect it. The area they are living in provides for them, she catches mackerel and pollack at Leic na Magach and cockles and whelks from other parts of the coast and goes out in a punt with men to collect lobsters from their pots.

One of the highly significant moments of her stay is the pilgrimage that she makes to Lough Dearg. Even though she wasn’t a practising catholic she was informed that she could still participate. It is supposed to be one of the toughest in the Christian world and encompasses a three day fast with only tea or coffee and bread served once a day and a 24-hour prayer vigil at the basilica. There is also a trawler trip to catch herring for a few days with Mark. It is supposed to be unlucky to have a woman aboard, but nothing befell the crew of the boat. She spent a lot of it feeling ill, and the nausea was only relieved on the bridge where she could see the sea. She attends a wedding that went onto 6 am in the morning, the band had gone home at 1 am but there were enough people there to continue playing instruments to keep the party going.

It is a glorious and evocative book about life on the west coast of Ireland. She is a wonderful writer too, you can sense the smell of the sea and hear the howling of the wind or feel the whiplash of hail in a storm, from her prose. But more than that as an anthropologist she has a good measure of the people that she befriends in her stay there, teasing out the stories of their lives and routines. Highly recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time – Winston Churchill

You would think that in the 21st century most of the world would live in a democracy of some form or other, but it doesn’t seem that way. Of the 195 countries in the world, 39% of the world’s population in 87 countries are deemed free. Some are partially free and 49 countries make up around 25% of the population. However, there are still 49 countries with 2.6 billion people in the world that have some form of dictatorship or strict authoritarian government.

I was shocked when I read those facts, as it is something that I thought was ebbing away gradually. The people who live there are subject to injustice in all its forms, from the endemic corruption, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and when incarcerated a lot are subject to torture and often killed or ‘disappeared’. The methods that these dictators use to gain control are well documented, but the questions Alaa Al Aswany wants to explore here concern the nature of dictatorship? How does it take hold? In what conditions and circumstances is it permitted to thrive? And how do dictators retain power as the society that they have dominated starts to crumble?

Al Aswany has written a fascinating book exploring the answers to these questions and he gets right to the crux of what makes a dictator, control of the media and police and army and the way that their personality diffuses deeply into the culture and fabric of society of the country. In a lot of cases, the populace can start behaving like the acolytes of a cult, not questioning any of the often erratic behaviours of the dictator. It becomes a self-enforcing vicious circle as the majority of citizens make the deliberate choice to deny themselves their freedom; instead craving stability and will support this individual totally.

It is a very worrying but readable for a book about a fairly grim subject matter. He grew up in Egypt and was seen as a dissenter before taking the sensible decision to leave the country. He has a very personal grasp of his subject and he eloquently describes just how normal people in a democracy can become inadvertent enablers and supporters of this type of person.

3 out of 5 stars

My wife teaches chemistry all the way up to A-Level and one of her favourite joke for new students is:

Why can’t you trust an atom?

Because they make everything up…

I’ll get my coat.

But it is true, every single thing that you will come into contact with today is made from some of the 118 elements that exist in the periodic table. There are some that you are very unlikely to come into contact with, polonium, for example, but there are others like nitrogen and oxygen that are in contact with your body 24 hours a day.

These fifty elements that they have chosen each has a test tube full of facts and anecdotes on them, for example which element loosely connects cockroaches and tanks, which one of the hardest known and which is one of the most abundant of the earth. Each element has snippets of information on the person who discovered it, the atomic number, and where the name was inspired or derived from.

There is very little depth to this book, but then you may have already worked it out from the title. Rather this is a thin patina to give a flavour (not literally some of these are poisonous) of the selected elements with lots of details and information about them. Nice little gift book.

4 out of 5 stars

People visit the countryside for a variety of different reasons, some for the pleasure of being away from a screen, some for the fresh air and others for some more serious rest and relaxation. There are plenty of guides that you can buy that suggest places to go and things to do, but there are times when some people want to find their own way and set their own agenda.

Reddy is a London based journalist who has had an unconventional and multicultural upbringing. With this outsiders perspective, she sets off on a journey to the English countryside to seek the spiritual and the magical where ever it exists. But rather than go to the classical spiritual sites of the UK , Reddy chooses to find her own paths and use her own inner compass as a guide. This personal pilgrimage had started up a mountain in the Pyrenees with a tent, nine bottles of water and, er, that was it. Alone in the tent the first night she heard a strange voice, terrified, she lay still for a couple of minutes that it lasted and it went as suddenly as it came. To this day she does not know what it was that made that sound, but it led to her wanting to know more about the spirit of the natural world.

It was the beginning of a journey that would take her all over the UK, to the far west in Cornwall, to visit a labyrinth on a farm and is soothed by the sound of birds and the sea. To High Weald in Sussex to search for the search for a spring with magical qualities and onto Herefordshire to meet a lady who has a ‘kenning’ or ‘knowing’ of the plants and animals that surround her. Lindisfarne is also on her travel list, to stay in a Christian retreat house and listen to the silence. Reddy has a passion for trees too and she arranges a trip arrange to Derwent Valley to meet a tree whisperer and she is lucky enough to get to visit the Ash Dome, a piece of living art created by the sculptor David Nash, high in the welsh hills, a place where the 22 trees have been grown together in the shape of a vortex. There is the obligatory visit to Glastonbury, a place where the magic has been expressed in retail form…

A sizeable portion of recent writing about the outdoors and landscape is about what the author can take from it, how it inspired them or was there as a crutch for their own health and wellbeing. And they are good reads, picking up on the connections that we have long lost to the natural world. A lot of this writing has been from predominately white male writers, with female authors only starting to get a look-in in the past few years. Reddy is a breath of fresh air in this camp, as she writes from a perspective from her family heritage and multicultural upbringing. She draws deep on all these facets and elements of her mother’s Hindu faith to explore the countryside in a way that I have not come across before. I really liked it because of that, she is prepared to embrace the activities that she has chosen, whilst still being a touch sceptical about it. It is also a reminder that the natural world is more than just the picturesque, there are thin places that have always had special significance to people over millennia. As an aside, it has an absolutely beautiful cover. If this sort of book interests you, I can also recommend Rising Ground by Philip Marsden, it focuses more on the spiritual legacy left behind in the landscape.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Turning a blind eye isn’t just a very British thing to do, it is a phenomenon that happens in every human culture around the world. There are famous cases where people have had terrible things happen to them, these have often been witnessed and yet those seeing it happen have either ignored the events deliberately or unconsciously.

So why do people seem to be good at recognising bad behaviour but bad at taking action against it? Pioneering psychologist Catherine Sanderson considers this in The Bystander Effect. She takes real-life examples, neuroscience and some of the classics behavioural studies on humans as well as the latest psychological studies to understand why we do this.

The consequences and risks of getting involved in disputes for a lot of people outweigh the benefits. Whilst the risk is low, tragedies do happen; Rick Best, who confronted a man who was shouting racist slurs at two Muslim women got stabbed for his efforts and died shortly after. With this in mind, Sanderson considers people that do intervene on a professional level, i.e. emergency services personnel and looks at the skills those people have. From that, she proposes practical strategies to apply to change the way that we react, by intervening or even just speaking out, to an unfolding situation.

I thought that it was a very interesting discussion of the realities of why some people help and good analysis as to why others really do not want to get involved. She has some very sensible policies that really need to be implemented in schools, partly because of bullying that can dominate a child’s life, but also because skills learnt there can have the biggest long term effect on people’s behaviour and reactions in life. Empathy needs to be taught too. I did think that is was very American centric which surprised me as the author is British!

3 out of 5 stars

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

Just over 150 years ago the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had the idea of collecting the elements together with similar properties and seeing if he could organise them in diagrammatic form. At this moment in time, only 62 elements had been discovered and no one knew if that was it if there were more to be discovered. He decided to arrange them in order by atomic number in a long line.

The key to his breakthrough was noticing that certain elements had broadly similar properties, so he took his line and started cutting it into shorter sections to line these up. His new table had a series of elements, sodium, lithium and potassium all on the left-hand side. From this, he developed his periodic law that argued that elements with similar properties occur at regular intervals. He published it in 1869 but continued to work on it and it was this extra work that both solved the puzzle but also created more questions. He realised Arsenic was in group 13, but its properties fitted group 15 better, so he moved it along. This left gaps, but in those gaps would be other elements, but these hadn’t been discovered yet.

In 1913 Henry Moseley proved that the order of the periodic table needed to be the atomic number, not the atomic mass, this revelation led to the discovery of more gaps in the table and the only logical thing to conclude was that there were unknown elements that still hadn’t been discovered. This simple table revealed so much about each element, the groups that they occupied and the way that these interacted with each other.

Almost everybody has heard of some of the elements, but there are lots that most people would have never heard of nor were even aware that they existed. Chemists have been discovering them for years, but it is only with the help of this brilliantly conceived table that they knew where to start looking for them. In this book, Russel has ordered them in ascending atomic number and collected some of the histories behind their discovery, a small table of facts and other interesting facts, such as why some elements have an utterly different letter to their given name.

It is a nicely put together little book that gives a good overview of each one of the elements along with detail on how they were discovered and by whom, those that have changed their name, for example, one well know element used to be called wolfram. This is a good place to start, but for those that want much more information than this, I can recommend The Periodic Table by Hugh Aldersey-Williams which is much more expansive.

4 out of 5 stars

All of my career I have been an engineer, working with all sorts of materials and changing them from one form to another and making things out of them. But stone as a material has always been a mystery to me; how can people take this material from the ground, cut it, shape it and form it into beautiful buildings and art. Cutting stone with modern tools is relatively easy these days, but the art of taking a roughly shaped stone and using just hand tools and the eye of the mason to create a perfectly square and shaped block is still amazing.

People have been working stone for thousands of year in this country, though how they did it without metal tools is another mystery. Andrew Ziminski has got three decades of experience as a mason and it is with the Neolithic that he begins his journey around the South West of the country, beginning in the West Kennet Long Barrow on the festival of Samhain. He was there to see if the collapsing walls could be repaired, and it was an opportunity to see how our ancient relatives built these structures without metal tools to dress the stones.

Just over a month and a half later he is at Stonehenge for the Solstice and to follow for himself the route in his canoe, laughing Water that most think that the stones took along the Avon and up onto the site and to check for himself a new alignment that a farmer had discovered. Mostly though he wanted to study the sarsens for himself to see how these ancient craftsmen had made their monument.

Next up is a trip to Bath where he is there to help repair a tholos, but this gives him an excuse to consider the impact that Roman architecture had on the country and Bath in particular. When finished there he is back in his canoe to paddle to Bradford-on-Avon to go and see St Laurence’s Church which is a rare survival of a stone Anglo-Saxon church.

The third part of the book is concentrating on marble and he is responding to an urgent call to repair some carved corbels in the Norman church in Lullington. Carving requires more delicate tools than regular masonry and it is an opportunity to hear about the tools that he inherited from a carver from the Purbecks that are over 80 years old now. A trip to Wales to collect freestone from a quarry. After a brief interlude for the summer solstice at Stonehenge again, he is back in my part of the country for this, as the stone he needs for repairs uses the fine stone from the Purbecks.

This is a charming guide to our architecture and history. I really liked this book, as not only is it a fascinating history of how our nation has used stone to build a humble home, breath-taking palaces and places of worship over the past 5000 years, it is also a very personal history of our land seen from the perspective of the craftsmen and women who built it over thousands of years with a little bit of travel thrown in for good measure. He has a wonderful conversational style in his writing, I can imaging sitting in the garden of the Square and Compass pub listening to him tell of the places that he has worked and paddled. I liked the way he wove in the folklore alongside the Christian faith, seeing what they have given us in the way of building as their true contribution. There were a couple of tiny flaws, I would have liked a little more on the craft of masonry, it would have been nice to have some photos or diagrams of the building elements that Ziminski was talking about in the book as well as photos of the buildings that he has worked on. Thankfully he has a website with some of the images here.