Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North by Horatio Clare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

Sometimes it is who you know, rather than what you know, that opens doors and opportunities and Clare had a friend had a contact in the Finnish Embassy. A message came via this link asking:

We are celebrating a hundred years since independence this year: how would you like to travel on a government icebreaker?

As the sea is a natural draw for Clare; his Down to the Sea in Ships travelling with the modern container ships was a quality piece of travel writing about a system that most people are blissfully unaware of, he jumped at the opportunity and booked his flight.

Most people know Finland from the Nokia 3310 phones that almost everyone used to own, the completely mad rally drivers and the not so talkative F1 star, Kimi Räikkönen. The Finnish are a fiercely independent nation celebrating 100 years of independence from Russia who have a liberated modern life. Part of their character is sisu, it is this combination of grit and determination that helped them to fight off the Soviet invasion in World War II. Their spirit has driven them politically too, they were one of the earliest countries to allow women to vote, have a first class health system and are experimenting with the universal basic income for their population.

As much as Clare is here to gain a little insight into the national character of the Finn’s he is really here for the ice. During the long dark winters there, the Bay of Bothnia is frozen and the Otso, the ship he has been invited to join, assist cargo vessels getting through the sea ice to and from the port. The 99-meter long Otso is one of the most sophisticated icebreakers around. The specialist paint and stainless steel hull combined with air bubbling system, means it almost never gets stuck, it has almost 360-degree vision from the bridge and the highly trained crew can manoeuvre this powerful 9000-tonne ship to within feet of another to break them out of the ice. There are even two saunas on board for the officers and crew.

This world of ice in the Arctic Ocean may not be around forever, given how the world is warming in the far north. As with all his other books, it is full of nuanced observation and is a delight to read. He writes of smelling the sharpness of the ice, the clarity of the light as it reflects and sparkles in the weak sun and you can imagine the noise as the frozen sea succumbs to the power of the ship. If this had one fault, it was too short, but then Clare only had ten days travelling and he relishes every moment with the crew in this white world.

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The Secret Surfer by Iain Gately
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 image that people have of surfers is twenty-something fit individuals with long, sun-bleached hair. Their campers will have an array of boards in the back and if they are not already out in the surf, then they will be staring out to sea, looking for that perfect wave. But there are others who have had the surfing bug for a long time now and have reached middle age and they are still surfing.

Iain Gately is one of those, but having just had a replacement hip operation, he is not sure if he will ever surf again as he hobbles around on his crutches. If he can, then he wants to ride a tube, a wave where you the surfer, is wrapped in a glistening, deafening barrel of water, before it fires you out of the end or swallows you entirely. He has never ridden one before, but the yearning to do so is deep.

As he slowly recovers after the operation, he starts to get back into shape, trying to get his muscle memory back, practising the techniques that a surfer needs to know and digging out an old skateboard to work on his balance and posture. It has been a while since he surfed, and as his health improves he makes the decision to replace his board and wetsuit and venture once again into the waves. His journey back to the waves will take him from Ireland to Andalucía, Galicia to Ireland and Portugal to Morocco, as well as the waves on the Dorset coast that he can hear from his own front door. Will his hip survive and will he find that surfing nirvana?

He is committed to surfing as anyone else who has this particular addiction, and it is an addiction when you read how some are driven to find that perfect wave. The prose is full of contemplative moments as he considers his health as well as the excitement when he catching a wave for the first time in a very long time. Gately’s descriptions of the places that he travels to are quite evocative, I could smell the salt hanging in the air from the white horses, thankfully he doesn’t fill the book with the language of surfing, but there is a glossary should any of the meanings evade you. I found this a really enjoyable read and a worthy addition to the scarce numbers of books on surfing.

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The Many by Wyl Menmuir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Looking to buy a second home in Cornwall, Timothy finds a house in a fishing village. The first time the rest of the village realise that there is someone present in the house is when smoke drifts from the chimney. The previous owner, Perran, died mysteriously 10 years earlier and the house has sat empty ever since, but his dominant character still haunts the village.

Quite why Timothy has bought the house in this village is not clear; it is far from a welcoming place and the sea is heavily polluted as he finds out one day after emerging after a swim. More sinister though is the barrier of huge container ships that stop the fishermen from venturing too far out., and the grey-suited officials that buy the meagre catch from the fishermen of the village.

The fragile equilibrium that has existed since the death of Perran is under threat though as Timothy has lots of questions. He wants to take a trip out in the boats to see what they catch, to head to the ships that crowd the horizon to see why they are there and to find out what happened to Perran. These are questions that no one in the village wants asked, and they really don’t want a stranger asking them.

Menmuir has taken a county normally associated with holidays, sunshine and cream teas and dropped a disconcerting and unsettling novel on it. This dystopian future of a coastal setting is quite disturbing, there is the environmental catastrophe, the Orwellian overtones and a secret that the villagers will not speak of. The tension between Timothy and the villagers is palpable, how can an outsider come and demand answers to questions that they have no wish to talk about. Menmuir’s writing is quite special, the prose taught and sparse, but for me, it left many questions unanswered as the narrative swirled between reality and the flashbacks. I did like it, but I felt that the I wasn’t always sure what is going on. One to read again as I am sure there are hidden depths within.

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Warrior Herdsmen by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

In a post-colonial Africa and before the modern age had overtaken events, the Dodoth were the people who had inhabited the northern fringe of Uganda. The anthropologist Elizabeth Thomas was fortunate to be able to visit these people and live among them for three expeditions. Whilst there she dovetailed in with the people and learnt to understand their traditions, customs and way of life.

Thomas immersed herself in their way of life, experiencing everything in their community, she describes their way of life from sowing seeds to collecting the harvests, seeing cattle bled from the veins in the neck to provide food for the tribe, the shamanic rituals of reading the intestines to gauge the future and witness the men would ready themselves for battle against the raids from the Turkana telling the gripping accounts of a the raids and battles between the two main tribes of the area.

It is a snapshot of a way of life that was never to be the same again. Not only is the modern world just appearing in these people’s lives as spears give way to guns but this was shortly before the brutal regime of Idi Amin took over and their entire culture was diluted somewhat. This books leans heavily towards anthropology rather than purely travel writing, but it is no less fascinating despite that. Thomas takes time to understand the people, their way of life and the subtle nuances in their personal relationships as well as sharing their successes and tribulations. The writing is clear without being dry and academical helping you grow an emotional bond with the Dodoth people as they go about their daily lives. An interesting book that was well worth the time to read it.

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The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything by Marcus Chown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the story goes, in 1666 Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree, and it was this simple action that gave him the inspiration to develop the theory and the mathematics that was first published in 1687 in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) where he laid out the foundations of classical mechanics. These new laws meant that for the first time people could track the progress of the planets across the night sky, and Halley used the laws laid down by Newton to predict the elliptical path of the celestial object to predict the return of Comet, an event that he was never to see, but it carries his name to this day. They were used to predict the presence of a new planet, Neptune, the first to be discovered using these principles.

Variations in the path of Mercury, lead astronomers to search in vain for another planet amongst the inner planets, a subject covered very well in The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson, but this was to show the limitations of Newton’s laws.
These limitations were not addressed until a chap called Einstein who was unhappy with the anomalies that the current theory threw up. It took eight years for him to demonstrate that the concept of gravity as everyone understood it was better described mathematically as the curvature of space-time. The ten equations in his general theory of relativity can be distilled down into this elegant equation:

From this, all sorts of things can be deduced and predicted and it is only recently that one of those predictions was finally detected; gravitational waves. This final part of the books ventures into the strange, surreal and occasionally baffling world of string theory. The physicists working on this are trying to reconcile special relativity and quantum theory to one theory of everything and the current consensus is that the present theories, along with years of understanding will have to be totally re-written.

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off ― Terry Pratchett

Chown has given us a well written and thankfully, given that this is a physics book, a comprehensible text on the history and the most recent developments in research into gravity.
He goes some way to answering the big questions; what is space? What is time? How did it start, but I can’t help but have the feeling that the next breakthrough in this field will make Einstein’s theory as irrelevant as he made Newton’s work at the turn of the 20th Century.

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Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first broadcast at 22.30 on a Wednesday evening in 1978 where the BBC almost hoped that no one would hear it. Radio programmes in those days almost never got reviews either, so there was a collective dropping of jaws when it turned out that there were two in the papers that weekend praising the show. Word of mouth recommendations meant that this obscure comedy sci-fi series grew to have a cult following very soon and it was to permeate the national culture in ways that Douglas Adams could never have conceived when he had the idea in a field in Innsbruck in 1971.

Don’t Panic…

So began a much-loved trilogy that just happened to spread itself across five books. But Douglas Adams created far more things than just this. Born in Cambridge in 1952 he moved to London a little while later and after his parents divorced ended up in Essex. He stood out at school, mostly because he was very tall, 6 foot at the age of 12 and finally reached 6′ 5″, but was also known for his stories that were published in the school paper. University beckoned and he ended up at Cambridge where he tried and failed to join Footlights. He had written material that Footlights wanted to use, but they still didn’t want him in it! Post university, the desire to get into TV or radio as a writer. He was fortunate to have his Revue shown on the BBC and this lead to a brief sketch writing with Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame. Then nothing, so a series of odd jobs ensued; was his brief writing career over before it started? Thankfully no, he kept plugging away and suddenly the thing that he had desired the most was happening. The rest is history; or is it the future.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Neil Gaiman in this fondly written biography of Adams, has written a fitting tribute to the man, who was taken from us far too early. whose work has seeped into the British psyche; even my children knew the answer to everything is 42, but they didn’t know where it had originated from. This has been corrected now and a second-hand set of the books was acquired and pointed out to them on the shelf and they were strongly advised to read them. The book is crammed full of facts and details such as the asteroid named in his honour was 2001 DA42. It is enough to warm the transistors in the heart of a depressed robot. A touching tribute to an author with an amazing imagination and has one of the most amusing dedications written that I have read in a while. Great stuff.

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The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite by Laura Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At the young age of fourteen, Laura Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia. Where everyone saw a really thin girl with almost transparent skin, she saw something utterly different in the reflection in the mirror. It was the culmination of months of avoiding certain foods, before almost stopping eating completely until she reached the point where she was starving to death. While she let very little pass her lips in the form of nourishment, she still devoured books, and it was literature that was to hold the key to her recovery.

The road to recovery for an anorexic is long and fraught and it was no different for Laura, but where others just had the mental battle, she had the extra support from the books she was reading. In between the covers of Dickens, Sassoon, Woolf, Lee and Leigh Fermor, she would discover how they were able to consume vast plates full of roast beef, bowls of soup and exotic sounding breads without a care in the world. She reads of soldiers who treasure the moment of a scalding hot cup of tea after an intense battle in World War One. In fact, what she discovered was that these authors loved food; they reveled in the taste of what they were eating and sharing the moment with others. These passages in the books, slowly gave her the confidence to rediscover food for the pleasure of eating it rather than purely as a fuel.

Even though her mind had driven her to the point of abhorring food, one thing that she never lost was her love of reading. Most people do not realise just how debilitating anorexia is and there is some painful moments in here as she recalls the lowest points of her illness. But there are the moments too, where she is sustained by her mother’s love, an invitation from a friend that arrived at just the right moment. I have read a fair number of the books that Laura talks about in here and whilst the eating and celebration of life between friends and strangers is a key part of them, it is not something that particularly stood out for me, until now. Just reading the descriptions quoted in the book made me very hungry! However, it did for Laura and this list of childhood favourites and other classics has played a crucial role in her accepting that food is not something to avoid and can be enjoyed.

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The Gift of the Gab: How Eloquence Works by David Crystal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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

We have all been in situations where someone has just stood up to speak and by the third sentence in, your eyes are drooping and after five minutes their droning noise is only just louder than your snoring… And yet there are others who can stand up and speak for 30 or 40 minutes and whose every word is captivating and interesting, leaving you wanting to hear more.

So how do these people do it?

The man best placed to answer this is the linguist David Crystal. Using the electrifying “Yes we can” speech of 2008 by Barack Obama he analyses the essential elements of public speaking, from the pitch to the pace and rhythm, when to make a joke and when to interject a dramatic pause, the best technologies to use and that fine line between eloquence and verbosity.

Whilst most people who pick this up are not going to be speaking to millions, there is something in here for anyone who has to do any form of public speaking, for those that have to speak to colleagues, peer groups and at family gatherings. The little interludes between the chapters are amusing, offering a little light relief in between the detailed breakdown of the best way to enhance your public speaking.

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