Category: Review (Page 89 of 132)

The Smell of Fresh Rain: The Unexpected Pleasures of our most Elusive Sense by Barney Shaw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When Barney Shaw’s autistic son asked him what 3 O’clock in the morning smells like, he genuinely didn’t know how to answer him. His son is a musical genius who has synaesthesia, so he decided the best way to answer this was to get up at that time and head out on to the streets of London, visiting Billingsgate and New Covent Garden to discover from themselves what the scents and smells are around that time of the morning.

It got him thinking though, how do we smell? What do we smell and do we smell the same things as everyone else? To answer what seems to be a set of simple questions is going to take a lot of unravelling. It will take him to the coast and boatyards, into Harrods to smell the food and the most expensive perfume in the world. Down to Dorset to a charcoal burner, to try and get a grip of the complexity of the aroma of coffee and baffling the owners of a hardware shop as he asks to smell the products. Occasionally he ventures back into history to learn about the big stink and the time when parliament decided that they couldn’t bear the smell from the Thames. All this makes him thirsty, so a trip to the pub is called for, to smell the beer and the crisps and run a little experiment with those in the bar.

Shaw’s considered and curious prose makes this book, on what most would consider the weakest of our senses, endlessly fascinating. His journey around the more aromatic places searching for the scents that tell a story, or evoke memories from many years ago has ended up with him compiling a list of 200 or so different things along with different elements of that particular item described. It is not academically rigorous, but that shouldn’t take anything away from this fine musing on scents and smells.

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Three Sheets To The Wind by Pete Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

The British Pub has been a place of refuge from the outside world for centuries. Its long history reaches all the way back to the taverns of Roman Empire, then the alehouses of the Anglo-Saxons and before coming more like the pubs that we know today. Pete Brown loves pubs, so imagine his surprise when he hears that other countries around the world think that their drinking establishments are better, or have a parotitic duty to consume as much beer as possible. Others have the audacity to think that they produce better beer. The only way to verify that these were only rumours is to travel to the countries making those claims and verify the fact from the fiction and undertake the world’s biggest pub crawl.

It is a tough call, but someone has to do it.

To ensure that the research was valid and rigorous he would visit three hundred bars, in 27 different towns across four continents to countries as far apart as Ireland and Australia, Japan and Belgium, he even headed over the pond to see if the American lagers were as bad in their native lands as there were here, but was fortunate to discover the craft beer scene. In Japan, he finds that the biggest brewer there has a headquarters that looks like a glass of its brew. In Australia just working how to order a beer in each of the places he went was a challenge, and heading to the largest beer drinking nation on earth, China, was an experience that he would never forget and not pub crawl would be complete without a trip to the Oktoberfest. His liver did not stand a chance.

This is not a normal hangover. This is something life threatening with a yellowy green tinge.

Drinking beer is supposed to be about having a laugh, and this is just what he does all the way through this book. He meets some great people, discovers some great beers and has some monumental hangovers. I really liked the chatty style of writing there are some hilarious parts, which means mostly laughing at his suffering and the odd scrape that he got into. But there was something else too, a touch of jealousy perhaps… All I know is that I want his job…

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Patagonia defies definition. It sits at the very end of a continent, nudges into the tumultuous Southern ocean, covers two countries and is a place of enigmas. It was a place that Brue Chatwin had longed to visit for years after seeing a piece of ‘brontosaurus’ in his grandparent’s curiosity cabinet. It wasn’t a piece of a dinosaur, but another part of an extinct animal that had been found in Patagonia.

The memory of it lived on in Chatwin’s imagination and was the spark that made him give up his job and head out there in 1974. The six months that he spent there, become this book. It is not about the landscape or the countries, rather Chatwin spends his time there meeting people, finding out about them and then following the gossamer threads of their lives from place to place and backwards and forwards in time.

To be honest, this wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It is often disjointed, it has some very short chapters, people only briefly appear in the narrative, before he heads off to the next location and snapshot of another life. And yet it is a wonderful piece of writing. Even though it is not about the place per se, Patagonia fully permeates the writing, you have a sense of the barrenness of the desert, the relentless wind off Tierra del Fuego, places that have attracted people from all over the world in search of the nomadic existence. He traces the characters backwards and forwards across this land but reveals as much about himself in his writing. Will try to get to Songlines a bit sooner than this now I have found a copy.

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Rebellious Spirits: Audacious Tales of Drinking on the Wrong Side of the Law by Ruth Ball
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

The British have for thousands of years have been inventing various ways of getting drunk. We have had fruit wines, Even the Romans had vineyards. We have made apples and pears into ciders and perry’s made all types of grains into beers. For a lot of people, alcohol was the only safe way to get fluids as often the water wasn’t safe to drink. To really get a kick from the drink though it needs to be stronger, much much stronger.

There are various claims as to who invented distilling, some say the Egyptians, others the Greeks, but it was brought to the UK by French monks. The products of those first stills were supposed to be used for medicinal purposes, however, it didn’t take long for the locals to realise there were much better uses than trying to make yourselves better. It was always a low key thing though until in 1643 the Long Parliament decided to introduce excise duty on a selection of things including spirits. This tax was universally hated and rather than become legal, lots of stills went underground and it was the beginning of a long battle against the government and the beginning of the whisky industry in Scotland and Ireland.

That most English of drinks, the G&T, is actually Dutch. Bought over when William of Orange invaded and became our monarch, we adopted it and made it our own, so much so that around one in five houses sold drams in one part of London. The political elite was watching the population slowly become drunk all the time and rather than seeing it as the symptom of poverty they saw it as the cause. So they tried to ban it. As you can imagine, it didn’t quite go to plan, so they passed the Gin Act and that didn’t help either…

The Irish had been distilling for a while now, but when the taxman decided that they wanted the revenue from this, then they fought back. They realised that it was easier to move poitin rather than grain around the country, devised methods to hide their little pot stills and generally didn’t really want to assist the authorities in any way at all. They had ingenious ways of hiding the small stills, sometimes the easiest way was in plain sight! On top of all that, they had to try and stop the smuggling; whole coastal communities including the clergy would ensure that goods were snuck in under the noses of the excise men. With the advent of the Second World War, the government clamped down on the production of spirits diverting grain to the food needs of the country. But if you wanted a drink and happened to know the right people, you could still get your hands on a bottle. Not legally of course and the substances that were added were included with the spirits that really shouldn’t have been in some cases.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes – Oscar Wilde

Ruth Ball has managed to take a wide-ranging variety of stories of alcohol and distil them into this delightful little book. I found these tales are entertaining and written with a wry sense of humour. On top of this entertaining read, she has made a collection of recipes based on the originals that were almost certainly more fun trying than making and must have been the source of a few hangovers too. If you like sitting down every now and again with a glass of something to hand, then this is a perfect accompaniment to it.

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Puzzle Ninja: Pit Your Wits Against The Japanese Puzzle Masters by Alex Bellos
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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

Sitting down to do the crossword or Sudoku in a paper gives most people a lot of pleasure, it stretches your brain and enables you to while away a few moments away from a screen of some sort. For those that want to stretch themselves some more, then Alex Bellos has been over to Japan and has come home bearing puzzle shaped gifts.

These have been sought from the enigmatologists of Japan and are very different to the puzzles that you may have come across so far. There are graphical ones, ones that create mazes, a puzzle where you need to separate the wolves from the sheep and even a golf one. For most of them, there are two or three simple rules, however, from simplicity comes complexity and these may start easy, but he collected puzzles that he describes as excruciatingly difficult.

Dare to ask questions and seek answers to the puzzles of life. ― Lailah Gifty Akita

So if you fancy having your brain fried in new and fiendishly complicated ways, this could be the books for you. There are twenty of these new puzzles and over 200 examples in total collected from the wonderfully named Puzzle Poet and The Super Sensi to name but two. Was pleased to see one of my favourites in here, O’Elaki too. If you love puzzles then this is one for your bookshelf; though I cannot be held responsible for any stress caused…

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Inside the Wave by Helen Dunmore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of the ultimate things that surfers seek is to ride inside the tube, this tunnel of water is a transitory and for surfers an almost religious experience that only lasts a few seconds in most cases. It is a place that some surfers feel most alive in, but it can be lethal too. Helen Dunmore looks at this transient line between life and death with her poems in this, her tenth and sadly final, poetry book.

In this moving collection that has themes on water, the voyage of mortality and elements of the ancient Greek classics. There are some poems that I really liked, the Lamplighter, Bluebell Hollows and Festival of Stone in particular. Hold out your arms is a poem that has been added to this collection and was written just before she passed away. As with all poetry collections, there are some in here that did nothing for me. That is the nature of poetry, each reader gets something different from the verse. Will definitely give some of her other collections a read though.

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The Cryptic Pub Quiz by Frank Paul
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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

I do love a good quiz. One that has a balance of straightforward questions and some that you are sure that you know, but aren’t sure until you hear the answer. Sitting down to one of those where you struggle to comprehend what the question actually is, let alone what it is asking might be too much, but that is what the artist Frank Paul does on a regular basis at the Mill in Cambridge.

Since 2015, his cryptic quizzes have become legendary, full of anagrams, cryptic links, word searches and his amazing artistic creations. This book has collected some of his finest examples, including a Murder Mystery Advent Calendar of Doom, Eight Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Premature Obituaries, lots of palindromes and a Quizmas Carol.

Fiendish is an understatement.

I think his brain works in a totally different way to everyone else’s, but if you love quizzes and verbal puzzles then this should be an essential book for your collection. His unique combinations of quizzes and games along with his wonderful art and very original games will have you exasperated and stumped in roughly equal measures; what is satisfying when you know or have worked out the answer. If you’re still totally baffled, and I will admit I was on some of these.

Thankfully there are the answers in the back…

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