Category: Review (Page 77 of 133)

2 out of 5 stars

This is the story of three women, each a generation apart, told over one day in their lives. One of the threads tells the story of Clarissa Vaughn who is hosting a party for her award-winning poet-friend Richard who is suffering from the ravages of AIDS. Around fifty years earlier, Laura Brown is an American housewife and young mother who over the course of her day spends some of it reading Mrs Dalloway hoping to escape domestic drudgery in the pages of the book. The third main character of the book is the troubled author, Virginia Woolf and it is set on the day that she begins to write Mrs Dalloway.

It is a clever idea linking the three stories all intertwined together with the common link of the book Mrs Dalloway. Picking up on details of their lives, Clarissa shopping for flowers for Richard, Laura wanting to stay in bed rather than face the stark realities of that day and Virginia avoid eating to spend time alone and writing. He picks up on their fears and insecurities as well as the small victories they pass through the day.

I have read one of his other books previously, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, and really liked it. This had been recommended to me via a friend on Twitter and managed to get hold of a copy, so I’d thought I’d give it a go. However, even though the writing is quite special, especially one particular moment that is one of the key points of the book, it really didn’t work for me. Not sure why, possibly because the link between the three characters is gossamer thin, but I think it might have been because of the Woolf connection. The only book of hers that I have read before, To The Lighthouse, I could not get along with and so it seems with this one.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Regardless of their particular hue, politicians, these days have made themselves one of the least respected professions for a whole raft of reasons, being out of touch, self-serving and how shall I put this, economical with the truth a lot of the time. A sizeable number of them have never worked outside the Westminster bubble either, going straight from a degree from the right university into a policy unit or working for politicians directly. Very rarely these days do you come across one who has a hinterland. In essence, this means someone who has finally become a politician after having experienced the world and workplace and is probably better placed to make a sensible decision.

Mullin was one of those people who did have a life before politics, he had been a journalist reporting from the wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Tracked down the survivors of a CIA operation in Tibet, written three novels and successfully campaigned to free those wrongly imprisoned. He was first elected to parliament as a Labour MP at the age of 39 and immediately set about asking the difficult questions to those who had made themselves too comfortable.

Because of this he was not always liked, even by those in his own party, but his persistence and consistency meant that he earned the respect of other MPs in the end. He was asked to be a junior minister under Blair and New Labour and worked for three departments by the end of his time in government. Mullin much preferred being on the Select committees though where he felt he had much more influence that he did as a junior minister.

I picked this it up because his diaries were a brilliant expose of what it was like to be an MP and a junior minister. It is a little different from those though as this is a potted biography of his life before and outside the political arena, though naturally, he does venture in there as it did take a lot of his life up before retirement. He has far more depth than most current shallow politicians and that alone makes this worth reading.

3 out of 5 stars

Over the course of six years from the late 1950s the bodies of eight prostitutes were found murdered close to the River Thames. It took the police a while to realise that they had a serial killer on their patch, but the similarities between the murdered girls and the way that they had been killed and left meant that there was no speculation. What the motives of the killer were, puzzled the police and as to his identity, they had no idea at all. The media at the time called him Jack the Stripper and there was no end of speculation as to who he was.

The last murder was committed in 1965 and that was the last time that he was thought to have killed. Five years later the detective in charge of the case claimed that as they closed the net on the suspected killer he committed suicide. The Police then declined to reveal his identity and it was this act that prompted further speculation as to who it was. This book is David Seabrook’s take on who that person was, based on interviews with surviving police officers, witnesses, and others who knew the victims personally.

I first discovered David Seabrook when Granta kindly sent me a copy of All The Devils are Here. It was one of the strangest books that I read last year, and in it, he mentions these murders. As my library had a copy, I thought I’d give it a go. Seabrook peers into London’s dark seedy underbelly and the underclass of people who inhabited the bedsits of this world. Naturally, he comes across the Krays and many other unsavoury types and slowly reveals who he thinks is behind the deaths of these poor girls.

There is almost too much detail at times in his profile of the victims and I felt that this spoilt the flow of the narrative a little. This crime has never been solved. There were various conspiracy theories as to who the man was from security guards, police officers and even a murderer who had escaped the gallows. This is the time before DNA analysis and the essential clues that would be found now were not recoverable then and it wasn’t helped by all the evidence being either lost or destroyed. That said, it was still a compelling read.

4 out of five stars

This collection demonstrates that Duffy is a current master of all that she writes, there are poems in here that are very personal and others that are contemporary and political. The common thread that links them though is that they are all written with passion. Duffy is not angry in these but furious, seething with the injustice and unfairness of the world and the vested interests that seek to keep it that way.

My hand on what I take from time and this world

And the stone’s shadow there on the grass with mine

This bold and political book can be summed up in the poem, Swearing In. In this, she does not pull any punches at all as she welcomes the tangerine terror to his new job… I liked the fact that the poems varied in style and length, each written to suit the story she wanted to tell in those few words. Really enjoyable collection.

Three favourite poems

Stone Love

Wood

Once

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

Should you wish to escape from the relentless 24 / 7 grip of the digital world then you need to turn off your phone and head outside. That will help in all sorts of ways, even if it is just for an hour or so. However to really get away from it all you need to head to the wilder parts of the world, to walk the hills, climb the mountains and cross the deserts. It is in these places where the changes over deep time are almost imperceptible, and that are as wild as they are beautiful.

The last thing that you would expect or actually want to see when you are miles from civilisation though is evidence that humans have already been there. However, occasionally a bothy appearing on the horizon can be a welcome sight. Five Star accommodation it isn’t, however, these very simple huts or shelters can offer some respite from the relentless weather that you will often find in the wild.

He was fascinated as a child by the picture of his father and his team outside a small shed in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, where they had stayed and the pelvis of a polar bear that his father had brought back from the far north. Richards’ desire to head to these far out of the way places is genetic. As you’d know if you read his previous book about his great-great-aunt, Dorothy Pilley, who was one of the pioneering women climbers of her time. With this inspiration and background, he sets off on his journeys from Scotland to Washington, to a mountain in Japan and a retreat in Switzerland and from the heat of Mexico to the bleakness and cold of the Arctic hoping to walk in his father’s footsteps. He ends up in Denmark to see an artistic interpretation of a shed too, but he starts his journey in the land of ice and fire; Iceland.

All these landscapes have these tiny places of refuge in common and it is these places that have inspired all sorts of people to write and make art and to seek their peace with our planet. In this book, Richards’ has sought them out to gain his own insight in what appeals with these remote and beautiful places. He writes in a lyrical way that also has an impish humour too, I know that you shouldn’t really laugh at others misfortune, but Dan’s description of his hangover as he stepped off the train in Scotland is truly hilarious. As this is the second family inspired travel book that Dan has written, I am hoping that he has got some more relatives that we don’t know about yet for his next book. Cracking stuff and one for anyone who likes well-written travel writing.

For those that want to go and find the bothies for themselves then there is this guide here: https://www.mountainbothies.org.uk

Or perhaps you have skills that can help keep them weatherproof:

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/jan/25/mountain-rescue-why-bothies-need-a-helping-hand-a-photo-essay

4 out of 5 stars

Despite the recent shenanigans about our relationship with Europe, if you were to go back about 7000 years ago, you’d find that we were physically connected to the continent. This connection point was where the North Sea is now. We know that there were people and animals there because of the number of bones and other artefacts that keep being bought to the surface by trawlers. This land has a name too now, Doggerland.

For lots of people, the past has a lot of allure, there are stories to be told from the things that we find and tales from bumps in a field. Julia Blackburn is one of those who seeks out objects that can speak to her across the bridge of time. She has amassed more and more things but didn’t really feel that she knew much about this land just below the sea. Her curiosity would take her back and forth across this shallow sea and far back in time to the people that inhabited this landscape. She gets to see footprints from humans that had been fossilised in mud and silt, hold flint arrowheads that were last used  a millennia ago, discover the traces of plants that must have come across on the land bridge and even get to see those that have been preserved in the acid waters of the bogs that surround the North Sea.

This fascination, or almost borderline obsession with the past, stemmed from Blackburn’s desire to collect and hold objects from history. The paths she takes as she walks back in time are sometimes walked alone and sometimes with others there to guide her to the wider view or the minutia of the items she is looking at. Entwined with the history and archaeology is her very personal journey as she reminisces about her late husband, the artist Herman Makkink. This the second of Blackburn’s book that I have read now, the other was Thin Paths which I really enjoyed. She is such an evocative and beautiful writer and this has an intensity that makes you think of elements of it long after you have set it aside. I loved the art that was included from Enrique Brinkman, but personally wasn’t that keen on the Time Songs. However, they added a pause to the intensity of the writing. Can highly recommend this.

4 out of 5 stars

Most people headed to the after-hours bar called the Diogenes to concentrate on the serious business of drinking, but some chose to talk and tell each other stories. Men who are on the fringes of society telling each other unexpected strange tales. And they are slightly strange too, there is a girl Charlotte who appears in a soft porn magazine and who never seems to age as a photographer follows her career with interest. There is a man who is neighbours with an old lady who needs to feed on raw meat and a man who has somehow acquired an embarrassing disease and finally there is the ghost story with the suitably creepy house.

Somehow Gaiman manages to take what looks like a normal situation and with some of his magic turns it into something that just isn’t quite normal and it is the same with these four interlinked stories, Foreign Parts, Feeders and Eaters Looking for the Girl and Closing Time. The stories aren’t that dark compared to some of Gaiman’s that I have read, but they are reassuringly disturbing. It is very much an adult graphic novel too… I loved the art from Mark Buckingham, it lifts the book to another level. However, I would have liked to have seen nine panels per page for the stories rather than sixteen as it felt a little cramped. Definitely one for the NG aficionado, but if you have never read one of his graphic novels then you may just enjoy this as first.

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

If you were to ask most people they could probably name several famous men who had achieved something significant in their lives, but if you were to ask the same people if they could think of any women who had achieved similar things then they would be hard pushed to name one or two in the majority of cases. Women are just a capable as men in achieving things that they set out to do, it is just we tend to hear about the men.

In this book there are the profiles of fifty women who have forged their own paths, climbed trees and mountains, flown and sailed solo around the world, crossed deserts, became spies and as the title says there is the profile of one woman, Kimi Werner, who rode a Great White shark. Sadly most of the women mentioned in here are not household names, I had only heard of a handful of them, but they should be. So if you want to know what Manon Ossevoor, Diana Nyad and Wang Zhenyi had achieved then you need to read this book.

Each of the women featured in here has accomplished something amazing or unique and this book is a celebration of all their lives. It is really nicely put together too, with single page profiles that give enough detail of the subject and suggestions of other women to discover and find out about. They are accompanied by bold art for each one to that complement This really nicely put together book should be read by all children, to prove that following your dreams can lead to many things.

4 out of 5 stars

On March the 21st 1913, the poet Edward Thomas set off from Clapham with the intention of heading to Somerset in the West Country searching out the first signs of spring. His journey on his bike would take him through the lanes of Surrey, through my home town of Guildford, across the downs and past Winchester. He heads across a pre-Army controlled Salisbury Plain and onto Somerset where his journey ended.

This is a heady blend of travel, natural history and architecture as well as the history of the places he visits on his ride across the country. He is a keen observer of the things that he sees as he travels through the countryside, spotting flowers just breaking through in the hedgerows, hearing the chatter of birds as he pedalled through a quiet lane and stopping to take in the views, which he relays details of in the account. Intertwined in the book are his thoughts on other writers who he recalls as he passes through areas associated by them. He also takes time to read the epitaphs of people that he never knew and discover stories of others that he comes across on his travels.

The Plain assumes the character by which it is best known, that of a sublime, inhospitable wilderness. It makes us feel the age of the earth, the greatest of Time, Space and Nature; the littleness of man, even in an aeroplane, the fact that the earth does not belong to man, but man to earth.

When Thomas cycled across the south of the UK looking for the first signs of spring, he saw a country that was at peace with itself. A year later that was all to change as war broke out over Europe and men rushed to sign up. Their drain of manpower from the countryside was to change the country forever. A lifelong pacifist he still felt an obligation to enlist for the Great War, which he did in 1915. Sadly his life was tragically taken far too early from us in 1917 in the Battle of Arras.

This is the first of his that I have read, and oddly enough at the same time a poem of his was in another book I was reading, but it won’t be the last. He has a way with words in his descriptions that are quite evocative and in other parts, he can be quite matter of fact about what he is seeing around him. This edition includes several photographs from his collection as he cycled across the country and it adds a wonderful touch to the text.

4 out of 5 stars

To be a modern European means that you have the opportunity to travel amongst the member countries with little or no identification. Quite amazing to think that this is possible when less than a century ago, we were all at War. That was the last in a series of wars that had taken place on the continent over the past millennia too. Should someone from the Netherlands wish to move to Spain to work they are perfectly entitled to do so. This has gone a long way in ensuring that the horrendous things that happen back then are never repeated and that human rights have become one of the key values of the European project.

Whilst freedom of movement is allowed within the borders, if you live outside those lines, don’t have the right passport or sadly don’t have the correct colour skin, it is much much harder to get across and move within. With various conflicts going on around the world, there are a lot of people who want to come here to make some attempt to rebuild their lives.

This displacement affects real people and in 2015 this river of people wanting to come to Europe became a flood. It is these people that Trilling wants to meet with and talk with and try to understand their predicament. To do this he sneaks into detention centres, goes to the camps and hostels with the intention of understanding why the felt the need to move from their homeland. He also hopes to understand what drove his ancestors to do a similar thing when they were displaced from Russia to Germany and then again from there to the UK.

In talking to these people he hopes to find what the differences are between, economic migrant, asylum seeker and refugee and to see if these broad definitions stand up to the reality of life. He helps people like, Jamal, Caesar and Farhan tell the stories from their perspective as well as asking the bigger questions about the way our societies treat these people, why we should we regulate their movement and if there are better ways of dealing with the whole immigration issue. Whilst this is not the most cheerful of books to read, it is an important book in lots of ways and deserves to be read by more people so they can understand the issues we all face.