4 out of 5 stars

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

I have always had an interest in conspiracy theories, not because I believe any of them are true, just a curiosity about where they have originated from and if there were any grains of truth in the stories. A read a number of books in my teenage years, including the thoroughly debunked, Chariots of The Gods by Erich von Däniken, and whilst they tell a convincing story, it is just that, a story.

Is there a New World Order and a secret and corrupt Illuminati controlling the world? Probably not, but I do believe that 21st-century billionaires have too much power to ensure their income streams…

Where populations are stressed and unsettled they look for reasons behind the disruption, mostly to try and make sense of what is happening. In this book, Ronald H. Fritze takes us through several of the most well-known conspiracy theories in four fairly substantial chapters on The Templars, Roswell The Lost Tribes of Israel and another on the Nazis.

I thought elements of this book looking into why conspiracy theories gain so much traction in modern society were fascinating. I thought that the writing was well researched and clearly and concisely presented. I did feel that occasionally it does venture into a lot of detail, in particular the chapter on the Nazis.

I especially liked the chapter on the Roswell incident and the way that the Air Force had kept changing its story, which fired the imagination of the people who believed they were covering up more than surveillance balloons. It does now seem to have become an industry in its own right in the town. Sadly, there is very little on the rise on QAnon, the most recent set of unhinged conspiracy theories to race their way around the world, just a few pages in the final chapter. It would have been good to have a little more about that and the speculation on the origins of Covid. A good introduction to the way that people can become all-consumed by these theories and suspend all rational thought.

4 out of 5 stars

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

I don’t think that who we are can never be absolutely defined, we are people who ebb and flow like the tides. Our character is made up from our successes and failures, our DNA and our sense of belonging in the places we choose to live. That fluidity can be pushed to its limits for those that have had to leave their country of birth to move elsewhere. A detail even more poignant at the moment with the flood of people leaving Ukraine for their own safety.

Davina Quinlivan’s family originate from Burma and her father arrived in the UK at the age of 18 in the mid-1950s. They are not just Burmese though, tracing her family back she finds a rich and diverse cultural heritage from Germany, Ireland, India and China. She considered that her identity was rooted in the place where she was born, London, but the threads linking her to Burma were stronger than she thought.

Her childhood was strongly influenced by her wider family trying to replicate the life they had had back in Burma, cooking the same food and following the same rituals. It gave her memories of a place that she never knew in the same way as they did. This entangled mesh of memory and family is sometimes rooted in reality and often in that liminal zone of the mind, she calls Shalimar. This is her story of that place.

Over time, this colonisation of the body, engendered through DNA, comes to represent a more tender geography and our lineal likeness, as it finds its way to the surface of the present, is a map of the power we hold inside ourselves.

I thought that this was a wonderfully written book. Quinlivan’s prose is just beautiful, it feels sparse and yet it is loaded with feeling and emotion. Whilst it feels like she is deconstructing her past and family history, she isn’t, she is sifting through it and using it to build a new narrative that defines her and her place in this country. She can hear the echoes of her late father’s voice sometimes when her son speaks. He never met his grandfather and it makes her wonder how he knows how to speak that way, but when she listens there are echoes that she can sometimes hear in her own voice. She knows that all of these threads are how she will make a new map of their lives

4 out of 5 stars

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

When I think back to the 1997 election when the inept Tory government was thrown out by the voters and the future seemed bright under the new Labour government we have come a long way. Since then we have had all manner of things to contend with; domestic terrorism, the Olympics, unnecessary wars, the financial crash of 2008, Brexit and most recently the pandemic.

How has this changed us as a country though?

This is the question that Jason Cowley is hoping to answer in this book. He starts though with his aunt who has lived in the same house in Harlow for fifty years. They talk about various things, but he is there to hear about her protest of the closure of a doctor’s surgery. It was a shock announcement and there was no consultation or explanation given, other than it was no longer financially viable. This had been decided by an American Insurance and healthcare provider and no one in the area knew that this company was running an essential medical service. She became a bit of a media star in her protest against the closure.

Brexit is a big theme throughout the book. It was sold to the electorate on the grounds that we would be taking back control. I am not sure we have, but this polarization of our country has not been helped by the lurch to the political right and how we have become much less tolerant of other people and their views. But in amongst this conflict, he shows that people are still working to make our society a much better place.

He visits the Finsbury Park mosque where Imam Mohammed Mahmoud, protected a white terrorist from an angry crowd of worshippers. His quick thinking saved a man’s life that night and more than that diffused a situation that was getting more and more heated. There are stories of hope in here too, people came together to support the vulnerable during the first phase of the pandemic and he notes how the England football team under Gareth Southgate show how a diverse Britain could work if we wanted it to.

I thought this was a well-written book. Cowley is not setting an agenda in this book, rather he is holding a mirror up to the various elements of our society and reporting on them. There are moments of doom and gloom in here as some of what he shows is where society is fracturing, but there are happier stories too. Stories where people are making sure that this diverse and multicultural country that we live in works for them and everyone else. Well worth reading for a view on where our country is at this moment

3 out of 5 stars

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

Douglas Board was fortunate. From an early age, he had been coached and schooled to be one of those that are selected to run large organisations and companies. His achievements are the chair of a household-name charity, treasurer of another, and deputy chair of a board-level consultancy. He was fully one of the elite.

Not only did he achieve these lofty positions, but he helped others reach those lucrative senior roles in his position as a head-hunter and mentor to those that wanted to reach the top of the greasy pole. This book is about helping others reach that level should they wish to do so. He takes us through ten lessons, from Reality is Simple, to Take Responsibility and Learn stuff that he says will help people of all levels reach the top, should they wish too.

Wizards who leave top jobs don’t automatically stop becoming wizards, because wizardry is about personal connection and a shared mindset.

Overall this is quite a good read, he is a good writer and the prose is chatty without being too full of business acronyms. I liked parts of this book and there were other parts that I thought less of. I get why he has used the phrases muggles, muggle crust and wizards to denote the levels that people are working at in a business or organisation, but it did come across as slightly patronising. He does go to some effort to suggest the ways that the system can change, and perhaps the disruption that the pandemic has added to the system will help in that, but only time will tell. I don’t think that he has all the answers though, I think that some of the ways that top levels of organisations are structured need to be enforced through wholesale revision to business legislation and the principles by which they operate.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

In 1905, a young cavalryman arrives in Bengal to serve in the 17th Bengal Lancers on the Northwest Frontier of British India. The nineteen-year-old Francis Yeats-Brown did not know what to expect. On the morning of his arrival in Bareilly, one of the first things that he did was to buy a horse. He called her Judy.

He quickly settled into his privileged new life there, he only had to sign a chit to get anything that he needed. It was when he was out riding his horse though that he got a grasp of how different a life that the people of that vast continent had compared to his. He learnt the army way and was soon be on his way to the northwestern frontier. It was there he would meet the men who would be under his command.

He then had a seminal moment, when he went from doing all the military stuff to realising that there was a spiritual element to the country that he wanted to know about. He sought advice from the yogi, Sivanand Joshi, who advised him that the path he wanted to seek was not going to be easy. It would be a prediction that would prove correct as he is moved from India to Europe to be on active service in the First World War. It was an experience that changed him forever.

This is a very different perspective on the time of the British Raj, mostly because Yeats-Brown is passionately interested in the people that he was living alongside and in particular, their spiritual way of life. It is a book of its time though and some of his prejudices that he has are now out of date, I think that it is still worth reading for this unique inside view of life in that time.

The twin counterweights of Europe have always been France and Germany but way back in time, even before the Normans Invaded us, the three grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. They were there to settle a long running feud over who would inherit the lands. They finally decided to split the land three ways. One grandson inherited the land that we now know as France, the second grandson was granted the land that was to become Germany and the third grandson received the land that split these two.

It was called Lotharingia.

It stretched from the mouth of the Rhine to the alps, and as a place, it doesn’t exist now; unless you know where to look. In this book, Simon Winder will take us back to the beginning when it was handed to the third grandson and bring us an irreverent and personal history of the towns, cities and new countries that we know it by today.

It is a wide-ranging book and sometimes I felt there was too much emphasis on the history of the region. I had hoped for more travel, especially as it was shortlisted for a travel writing prize and whilst there is some in here it very much plays second fiddle to the history.

I didn’t love it, but I did like the book. There were some amusing parts and thankfully he is quite an engaging writer, however, he does indulge himself in researching these places and people that shaped this part of Europe. He does say many times throughout the book that he could have written much more about particular subjects or people, but I felt it should have had a much stricter editor who could have made the prose tighter and shorter. I also felt that it lacked a cohesive thread, but then I suppose that reflects the mess that the place was until recently. If you have read any of his other books in the trilogy, Germania and Danubia then this is probably worth reading too.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Remember 2019? Everything seemed normal back then but little did we know what was about to arrive. I can’t remember the first time that I had heard about this unusual SARS-like illness that had appeared in Wuhan in China, but I think that it was February. The last event that I went to with people was the Stanford Travel Writing Awards at the end of February. Ironic given that travel and many other things would be shut down a couple of weeks later.

I remember seeing what was happening in Italy and thinking that it might arrive here but really didn’t know what to make of it. Leading epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse learned of a new virus that had appeared in China in early January. He wrote to the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland recommending that they should prepare and got a polite reply that basically said that everything was in hand.

It wasn’t…

In this book, he critiques the way that the UK government tackled the situation fairly, praising them for the things that they did well and rightly criticising them for the many things that they did poorly. He explains his reasoning for not having lockdowns and the immense damage that they cause society as a whole as the ongoing mental health issues that are going to take a long time to cure. He sets out what he considers the procedures and protocols that should have been used instead and how these could have protected people instead of ending up with the frankly horrendous death toll that we have in this country.

I thought that this was a well written and considered book about the UK response to the Covid 19 pandemic. Throughout the book, Woolhouse is very clear on his position on lockdowns and the damage that they cause and he makes a very strong case for his way of thinking. His writing is pragmatic but he occasionally ventures into fairly technical jargon, but thankfully it is not very often. He does say that next time and there will be a next time for this type of medical emergency, we need to do things much better and move much faster in our responses.

4 out of 5 stars

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

As John Muir wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’ he was not the first to notice this either, Alexander von Humboldt is one of those first credited with the idea of an ecosystem being a vastly interconnected and interdependent species.

He discovered this when climbing the inactive volcano Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador which went from tropical rainforest to a snow-topped mountain. He went from the equator to the north pole in one go and his eyes were opened to the diversity that existed in this one place. But what happens when these finely balanced ecosystems are changed?

In this book, Thor Hanson looks at the way that climate change is forcing the world’s flora and fauna to adapt. Some can cope where they are, but the consensus has been that species will move further north to remain in their zone as temperatures rise, but it is much more complicated than that. Life on this planet can cope with slow change, but rapid change, as has happened in the past and is happening now is forcing evolution at an unprecedented rate.

Hanson takes us through numerous examples. As well as the two mentioned in the title, hurricane lizards and plastic squid I learnt about bears that are changing their diets from salmon to berries which are having wider effects on the health of the forests alongside the rivers too and plants that are relying on new species to help them migrate. He travels all over the world finding these stories of failures and successes and at times it makes for grim reading.

Compared to a lot of environmental books that can be a bit doom and gloom, this took a very different view. Using lots of examples he looks a the way that a variety of flora and fauna are adapting to the spectre that is climate change. And they are adapting much faster than we are. I have read a couple of his other books before and I think that this is the best of his that I have read so far. The writing is clear and concise and a warning about what is happening on our only planet.