Category: Review (Page 57 of 133)

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.

2.5 out of 5 stars

Poetry is often about intimacy, those moments with someone else that will always remain a secret between the people concerned. In this shortlisted collection, Scott is prepared to reveal some of those secrets from his life in this very graphic portrait of gay love. Some of these poems are extremely explicit and his prose feels raw, but they are written by drawing from a deep vein of experience and emotion.

the moon bleeds 

light onto the black ash

every branch

in this dismal canopy

rasps indifference

In these very personal poems, run themes of love and sex and it is these encounters, some of which are occasionally disturbing, that have formed his character. I can’t say the subject matter was particularly to my taste, very much not my usual reading material. However, I do need to read out of my comfort zones every now and again. My favourite poem was health and for me, this showed the potential that Scott has as a poet and the power of his language to explore almost any other subjects though his poems.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Families have a way of generating their own traditions and occasionally legends and Nicholas Royle’s family is no exception. His parents were introduced by a man called Peter Townend. He had been social editor of the Tatler and was far more used to moving in much elevated circles in British society. Royle’s father worked for him at Burkes Peerage and he was responsible for introducing Maxwell Royle and Kathleen McAdam. He still has no idea to this day how Townend knew his mother.

Kathleen was Scottish and Maxwell was English and they had fairly comfortable upbringings and their relationship blossomed and they were soon married and before long had two sons, Nicholas and Simon. Kathleen worked as a nurse before the boys were born and carried on after they had arrived. They were a comfortable post-war middle-class family and the boys were allowed a certain amount of freedom that other children weren’t necessarily afforded.

This book by Royle is his kaleidoscope of memories of her and family life in short essays. We read of her sitting in the kitchen doing a Times or Telegraph crossword, the tidy house that was so very different to his cousins home. The brothers would spend hours wandering the countryside, birdwatching and searching for dead animals joy of the family Sunday roast. She would read voraciously, a habit and pleasure that she passed onto Royle, but she could be utterly scathing about the books that she didn’t like, dismissing one classic as drivel!

But in amongst all the happy times were moments of tragedy, he lost his brother to cancer when he was in his twenties, and you can sense that every time he talks about him, that it is still raw even now. The book opens too with Kathleen saying that she ‘is losing her marbles’ and he effectively lost her twice, once to dementia and finally when she passed.

I really enjoyed this as it is a touching book about a normal family growing up in a time that seems to be in a different world to today’s relentless pace of life. I liked that these fragments of his memories did not fit a regular timeline, it felt like someone sifting through a box of photos and the snap found would trigger the memories of a favourite holiday, reminders about other members of the wider family or the time when his brother kept raptors and his father working at Burkes Peerage. A detail mentioned in an earlier essay is expanded on in another before being concluded in yet another. He does not try to make you like her, rather he presents her to us just as she was and tells us he loved her then and still does now.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Mortiz had not really had the easiest of upbringings, he had a tumultuous relationship with his tyrannical and extremely wealthy father, he saw combat in World War Two serving as a bombardier, farmed in California and at the age of 44 volunteered to join the Peace Corps and went to Ecuador where he was an agricultural expert in the small fishing town of Green River. He left the Corps after four years but was to remain in the country for 35 years.

He bought a farm with a man called Ramon which was hard manual work scratching a living out of the land and dealing with neighbours who would use his land as their own. In his early sixties Ramon expelled him from the farm and he was at a loss as to what to do. He decides to indulge in what is called the saddest of pleasures – travel – and decides to take a trip to Brazil and voyage up the mighty Amazon River.

However, there is much more depth to this that of his journey, that is almost an aside to his forensic examination of his past life as he relives the pain of the battles that he had with his father, who considered him a communist and refused to fund him in his ventures. He spends time considering his time spent on the farm and the relationship he had with Ramon and the way that it deteriorated up until the crux point. He is reflective and angry, considering a lot of what he has done in his life has been a failure.

He has a piercing gaze at the things that he sees on his travels, the injustice against the Amazonian Indians as the modern world squeezes their lands in the search for resources, the whores who are waiting for customers and those that are trying to make a life out of the scant luck that life has thrown at them.

Standing on the deck I wait in the darkness for the first light. It comes slowly, leaking weakly out of the east as though there were not enough light pouring in from below the horizon to fill the immense sky and the dimly felt, flat land below it, half underwater and flowing away on every side in a staggering monotony.

I must admit it is not the most cheerful of travel books, he is quite introspective and frankly can be quite depressing at times. However can forgive him for that, as he is an excellent writer, something that he struggled with as he never even considered himself a writer. His descriptions of the tiny details from other peoples lives as he observes them, a man inspecting a mango that has just fallen from a tree or watching two fishermen in a small boat showing their mastery of the river and driving through garua in the dark. Personally I would have liked more on his travels in Brazil as he is such a perceptive and intense writer.

I seem to only have the time and concentration to get through around 16 books a month at the moment, but intend to pick them from this list below:

Finishing Off

Vickery’s Folk Flora – Roy Vickery

Hollow Places – Christopher Hadley

Lotharingia – Simon Winder

Farsighted – Steven Johnson

Blog Tour

Just the one this month from the Wolfson History Writing Prize

Cricket Country – Prashant Kidambi

Review Copies

Amazingly I have read all of the 2020 books that I have been sent / request bar one! So will be trying to work my way through some of the older ones that I have had for far too long:

American Dirt – Jeanie Cummins (still wavering on this one a little with all the publicity about this)

The Dictatorship Syndrome – Alaa Al Aswany

The Many Lives of Carbon – Dag Olav Hessen, Tr. Kerri Pierce

30-Second Elements – Eric Scerri

Elementary – James M. Russell

The House of Islam – Ed Husain

Blue Mind: How Water Makes You Happier, More Connected and Better at What You Do – Wallace J. Nichols

When the Rivers Run Dry: Water – The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century – Fred Pearce

The Glass Woman – Caroline Lea

Sunfall – Jim Al-Khalili

Library Books

Ended up reading a couple of other library books instead in May, so still aiming to read these:

Lone Rider – Elspeth Beard

Sea People – Christina Thompson

The Way To The Sea – Caroline Crampton

A Beginner’s Guide To Japan – Pico Iyer

Pie Fidelity – Pete Brown

The Bells of Old Tokyo – Anna Sherman

Challenge Books

As well as a dusty shelf challenge that I am running on Good Reads, I am joining in with #20BooksOfSummer run by Cathy at 746 books.  Will be posting my list for that tomorrow

Unseen Academicals – Terry Pratchett

Gathering Carrageen – Monica Connell

Against a Peacock Sky – Monica Connell

#20BooksOfSummer – TBC

#20BooksOfSummer – TBC

#20BooksOfSummer – TBC

Own Books

Wanderland – Jini Reddy

Greenery – Tim Dee

The Frayed Atlantic Edge – David Gange

Water and Sky – Neil Sentance

Ridge and Furrow – Neil Sentance

Poetry

Equal Rights – Edward Ragg

Depth Charge – Chris Emery

Science Fiction

Didn’t read any last month so this is still on the list:

One Way – S.J. Morden

3.5 out of 5 stars

Venturing out for a walk in mid-spring is a delight, gone are the drab stark colours of winter, instead, all our senses are assailed by life springing forth after its dormant period. Perennial plants that come back every year, such as celandine, cowslips and bluebells can lift our spirits and remind us that regardless of what is going on in the world, the seasonal change will still happen regardless.

In this collection of nature writing Evans has spilt them into five sections, Yellow, White, Pink Blue and Brown. The grouping reflects the way that the seasons change, the increasing light of spring moves to the intensity of summer before the light retreats in autumn and winter. He writes about various plants in each section, from the Lesser Celandine in the first part, toothwort in the white section, sanfoin for summer and harebell and black knapweed in the later parts of the book.

All the stories were drawn up by the grass and trees and midsummer spaces rolling over the Edge; drawn up in a dreaminess of bees in the wild thyme of Natures telling.

These short essays vary in length from a few sentences to a couple of pages at most. They can be dipped into at random and feel like experimental writing at times as Evans explores our relationship with plants and the places that they grow. As with all of his other books that I have read, he has a poetic style of writing that I like, but every now and again the essays did feel a little random. It is a nicely produced, as all the Monograph books are and I thought that the illustrations by Kurt Jackson were stunning.

4 out of 5 stars

Europe in the 1970s and 1980s was still in the grip of the cold war. The Iron Curtain was very much closed and in certain cities, there was still an underlying paranoia about who was working for who. Richard Bassett was a staff reporter for the Times and he was there watching events unfold around him.

Whilst Trieste is still in Italy, it has a very different feel, the light in January is at its most intense after the Bora wind, it scours the sky and lends an intensity and clarity to the place. It is this light that welcomes Basset in 1979. It had not long been in Italy but an international agreement had returned it from Yugoslavia a few years before. Basset was there to write about the people and place for the Times. As he looked around the city, he could still find fragments of the Habsburg Empire that hadn’t been fully extinguished in 1918. He settles in fast, being welcomed in by the great and the good of that society, making friends he would have for a long time. Away from the echelons of Trieste was a different world, a blend of dialects and culture left over from the Hasbergs could still be heard.

His second appointment was in Austria, which at this time, in particular Vienna, was where some of the warmer parts of the cold war were played out. Its proximity to the Iron Curtain and an austere rebuilding after the Second World War meant that it felt frozen in time. It was a strange staid society, men with slicked-back hair spoke in a language that was both sophisticated and insulting at the same time. It took Basset a while to get used to it, but he reached the point where he could hold his own against them. It was a place utterly drenched in history, plaques denoting a plethora of famous people and their achievements could be found down most streets. He would attend parties and circulate with the upper echelons of Viennese society, but this charmed life had to come to an end, as the paper expected him to cross the Iron curtain to visit Prague and Budapest.

Life of the other side of the curtain was very different to what he had come accustomed to, highlighted by an elderly lady that he met on the train who for the first time was allowed to travel but as the conversation carried on, the limits of where she could and couldn’t go still were very apparent. Basset was in Warsaw at the beginning of 1989 and as snow fell in the city all he could think of was the warmth and sun of the Adriatic. Life was about to get much busier for this reporter though, change was in the air in the Soviet capital and he would witness events as they unfolded that would change Europe for a generation.

I really enjoyed this. Basset has managed to give a taste of what it is like to mix with minor royals and aristocrats that had no power left but still had oodles of charm. This way of life has almost entirely vanished now, and it had echoes of the Europe that still existed back in the time that Patrick Leigh Fermor walked through. He is a perceptive writer, almost certainly from his journalist background, but his stories of these European cities are full of characters and life. It feels like ancient history until I remember that I can recall details of these events as they unfolded on my TV screen and in the papers.

4 out of 5 stars

I first came across Paul Farley in the brilliant Edgelands that he co-authored with Michael Symonds Roberts. I have read a couple of Symonds poetry now, but until I won a copy this I had not actually got to read one of his collections of poems.

There is no central theme to this collection, but around a quarter of the collection is about birds in one form or the other, even the title is short for Mistle Thrush and naturally, he has dedicated it to the great writer, Tim Dee. There are other poems about gadgets, poker, data miners and the ubiquitous hole in the wall.

The silence deepens. The world turns.

As with any collection, there were some poems that I liked more than others. I liked his selection of subjects and the way that he is happy to play with the rhythm and form depending on the writing. I read this in what seems like no time at all, and have since dipped back in every now and again to read some of the poems again whilst it was in the pile awaiting reviews and they have grown on me. Kind of now regret not reading some of his work before. As a small aside, the cover of this book is just beautiful, very much recommended.

Before we fell asleep while he stood guard
As the fire died and the stars formed above

Three (plus one) Favourite Poems
Life During the Great Acceleration
Goldcrest
Lark and Linnet
The Green Man

4 out of 5 stars

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

Robert Dean Frisbie was born in Cleveland at the end of the 19th Century and grew up as any American lad did in those days. He served with the U.S. Army during World War I, but after he was discharged the medical advice was for him to go so somewhere warm as if he stayed in the USA then the next winter would kill him. This was 1920 and he needed to get somewhere warm, and the pacific islands seemed to be a perfect combination.

He ended up in Tahiti for a while before moving the island of Puka-Puka in 1924 to set up a trading post.  This is a sun-kissed coral atoll about four miles by two in the Pacific pretty remote from anywhere else. He had only been there a few months and he had learnt the language and fallen head over heels in love with the island and the culture. The locals take to him and call him Ropati. He begins to learn its ancient ways and the self-sufficiency that they had developed to survive in the little piece of paradise.

Even though the island was visited by missionaries and there was a church that most of the population attended, they still carried on with life as they knew it, sleeping, fishing, making love and playing games. It was a life that Frisbie took to, he married one of the local ladies and had five children with her and relaxed into his little bit of paradise on earth.

The culture of the people of Puka-Puka was not advanced, but it was highly developed. Frisbie fully embraced it too, settling into the life there, catching turtles with them and partaking in the various rituals of life there. It is a fascinating book, I liked the poems from the people there that preface each chapter, some are traditional ones and others were created by an individual for a particular event, like the visit of a supply ship. Frisbie’s prose is very readable, he has a knack of portraying the way of life there in such a way that you can feel the warmth of the sun lifting of the page, hear the gentle sound of the sea lapping the beaches or share the terror of being battered by a typhoon. Highly recommended and if this part of the globe interests you then I can also recommend A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble.

2.5 out of 5 stars

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

No one knows quite who Moshe’s parents are. Unlike most of the people around him in Jamaica, he has pale translucent skin and duo-toned hair. He was found by his adopted mother, Rachel Fisher in the reeds outside her home. He would grow up loved by his parents, but he never quite fitted into life at school and the village.

He does have one friend though, Arrienne Christie. They bond strongly and at times they are inseparable, communicating through a silent language and being the crutch that each other needs at that point in their lives. However, their friendship is fraught with things that threaten to drive them apart.

Moshe has a talent as an artist and it is a skill that takes him from the glorious weather of the Caribbean to the grim cold climate of the UK. He grows in stature as an artist, but he avoids the limelight and fame. But his home country is calling him and he knows it is time to return.

I must admit that I did struggle with this book for several reasons. Firstly the Jamaican patois takes quite a bit of getting used to and I would have to end up reading it a couple of time to get the gist of what they were asking. I found the plot overly convoluted. I think that it would have been better developing the themes of her characters not quite fitting into the societies of Jamaica and the UK in Moshe case as she writes about the racism in the late seventies. It did feel a little overwritten at times, though there were points where the prose was quite lyrical. Glad I gave it a go, but it isn’t really one for me.