4 out of 5 stars

Like many people, some of my strongest memories are about some of the foods that I used to enjoy when growing up. Inevitable they are the sweetest and least healthy ones, the penny chews, blackjacks, sherbet dib dabs, Marathons lemon bon-bons, my mum’s Yorkshire puddings and salty chips by the seaside. Just w whiff of one of these can take me right back.

Nigel Slater is another of those who looks back on the foods of their childhood with nostalgia and a very fond eye. He loved helping his mother to cook and was growing in proficiency in the kitchen helping her when she was taken by cancer when he was nine. He was distraught, as was his father and they took a long time recovering emotionally. His father was a successful businessman, who saw that Slaters’ interests were not going to make a man of him, and the cold and distant relationship that they had, grew further apart.

It was not helped by the appearance on the scene of Mrs Potter, a housekeeper. He had been employed by his father, to do things around the house. She wasn’t a bad cook, but slowly Slater came to realise that she was there for more than the cooking and the cleaning. She became the wedge that drove his and his father further apart again. She didn’t like most of what Slater was doing, but she did have moments of kindness and warmth.

He does not judge the way they treated him, knowing with hindsight that these things are often easier to understand through the prism of time. But that difficult relationship formed his character and drove him to do the things that he really wanted to do, which was cook.

I have read a lot of his food writing, but even though I have had this for ages, it is the first time that I have picked it up. It is a memoir that made me laugh fairly often and occasionally wince. Losing his mother when he did was devastating, it was the biggest contributing factor to the dislike, and almost hatred of his father and his controlling ways. It is a very open account too, it is all in here, the wanks and the walnut whips, that sit alongside some very emotional moments, like when he opens his later mother’s wardrobe and all he can smell is her. Might not be for everyone, but I really liked it.

4 out of 5 stars

Every single thing on this planet is interlinked and intertwined and often the thing that links them is fungi. They are everywhere and they bring life and death to every living entity on this planet. They can source life-giving nutrients from all manner of things, including plastic, oil and even explosives. Almost every living thing on this planet relies on them. We use them to make bread and beer, plants use them to extract nutrients. He even grows mushrooms on a copy of his book and then cooks and eats them. Their mycelium links trees in a forest in what has been called the Wood Wide Web and they can live in all manner of places from rocks to oceans.

But what exactly are fungi? The most common answer to this question is ‘we don’t know’.

However, Merlin Sheldrake sets about telling some of the fantastic and at times almost unbelievable stories of how they live, and their exploits. There are stories about how spores infect ants and take over their tiny bodies and get them to climb to a very specific height on a plant and bite it. Soon after their heads sprout fungi and the life cycle is complete. He joins hunters and their dogs searching for the elusive and expensive truffle. Slime mould is fairly unpleasant stuff, but it has a knack of finding the most efficient routes or its way out of mazes, or even Ikea… Lichens are fairly simple forms of life and yet they are made up from photobionts and fungus and they are somehow greater than the sum of their parts.

It wouldn’t be a book on fungi without magic mushrooms being mentioned. Sheldrake takes part in an LSD trial to measure just how these chemicals can have positive effects for those suffering from mental health issues. He takes a look back at the historical uses of these mind-changing mushrooms and how they have played their part in shamanism over the ages. Then there is the future, as we start to understand their capabilities we are finding uses for them that go far beyond the (very yummy) mushrooms on toast.

The mycelium world is so very strange and unlike everything else that scientists have studied in the past. The little that they do know is so different to the rest of biology that they just don’t know how and where to start explaining it, but it is slowly changing as they realise that dependency that we have on them. Sheldrake’s book takes us on a magical mushroom mystery tour and makes for fascinating reading. For a debut book, this is very good indeed.  He has a light touch in his writing style, expanding on subjects without the book feeling like an academic paper. I liked that the art throughout the book is originally made from the ink of the shaggy ink cap mushroom. Well worth reading.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

On the 9th August 1942 over 6000 infantry launched an attack on the French Port of Dieppe. They were supported by a regiment of tanks as well as naval and air cover. They were to capture the port and hold it for a short period of time, test various landing operations and gather intelligence on German defences. On leaving they were to cause damage by destroying buildings.

It turned out to be a bit of a disaster though, after 10 hours around half of the men had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The naval and air support was not as effective as it was hoped and they lost 106 aircraft and 33 landing craft and one destroyer. Whilst they learned important lessons that would serve them well when they came to invade in the Mediterranean and later in Normandy, the raid was a complete disaster.

For the past seventy years, no one has really understood why it took place at all. The horrific losses of the Canadian, American and British Troops have left a bitter taste with those who did make it back and there has been much speculation bordering on conspiracy theories at the time as to why it ever went ahead.

David O’Keefe has long been fascinated by the reasons behind this raid and it was the chance find of some comments in some declassified documents that piqued his attention. The first said: The party concerned at Dieppe did not reach their objective. It was then followed by: ‘No raid should be laid on for SIGINT purposes only. The scope of the objectives should always be sufficiently wide to presuppose normal operational objectives.’ The document concerned was talking about pinch raids, small scale operations that had the aim of obtaining cipher and code bodes and ideally a new four rota Enigma machine.

As clever as the boffins were at Bletchley Park, they could only do so much. To fully be able to understand and be able to reverse engineer the messages that had been coded using the four-rotor Enigma machines they needed to get their hands on one. This is where Commander Ian Fleming’s Intelligent Assault Unit came in. They would assess various targets and see if they were viable places to get their hands on the equipment that they desperately needed. Was these statement in the document the real reason behind the raid? It was the beginning of a search that would take O’Keefe another two decades to completely tease the story out from the secret documents.

This book is that story. It is a multi-layered story and convoluted as you would expect from the rummaging around in the secret world. He writes about each of the people involved in the raid, From Fleming to Lord Mountbatten and of course, Churchill and how they did their best to shape the direction of the war at the time. There is a monumental amount of detail in the book and quite a lot of build-up the actual raid in Dieppe, which is only detailed in the final two chapters of the book. It does occasionally lose the narrative in all this detail, but it is still worth reading, in particular for the very powerful last paragraph.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Campbell is fascinated by the White Stuff; her first book, The Library of Ice was about exploring the solid yet impermanent nature of ice. This is sort of a sequel to that book, and she was inspired to write it after that book and the time she spent in Greenland at the most northerly museum on the planet. It is always thought that the Inuit had at least fifty words for snow, but that has been proved to be a bit of a myth. They do have more words than English though.

What Campbell has done though is trawled through all sorts of languages to discover what their words are. She brings to life words from places that you’d expect, Japan, Scotland, Russia and Sweden. But there are words from places that I wasn’t expecting, Hawaii, Isreal and even Thailand, a place where you’d never expect it to snow.

Each word is prefaced by the wonderful photographs of Wilson Bentley who was the first know photographer of snowflakes. And there are some wonderful words in there too, so if you want to know the what kunstschnee, tykky and sniegas mean. Or you can learn what language needs a word for sharp ridges on the snow, what wind transported snow is, or what they call a snowman in Danish then this is the books for you.

Sadly, we rarely get snow here in Dorset, but as I sit here writing this review I have been updating a weather account that I follow on Twitter tracing the flurries of snow on New Years Day 2021 as it crosses Dorset. It didn’t quite make it from Blandford to Wimborne though, so we sadly had none. Not only is this a fascinating list of words, but it is a beautifully produced book, with a stunning cover and endpapers as well as the white and blue images of snowflakes all the way through.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Bees have been revered by humanity for generations, they have provided honey but most importantly have been key pollinators for the plants that we rely on for foods. Not just honey bees, but other pollinators that we rely on are the more solitary bees that we don’t notice as much. It is these bees that Thor Hanson concentrates on in this book, beginning 125 million years ago, when a wasp first dared to feed pollen to its young.

There are around 20,00 species of bee in the world today and even in the UK, we have 270 different species. Even though we most commonly see honey bees and bumblebees around, 250 of the bees in the UK are solitary bees, diggers, miners, leafcutters, and masons. If you know where to look then finding then isn’t difficult. I have found leafcutter bees in our garden, making homes in the holes in the brickwork of our garage.

Hanson is fascinated by them and is passing that fascination onto his son. He looks at how we have evolved with the help of these insects and how we are dependant on them for the food that we eat, going as far as to dissect a fast food meal to show what would be left if we didn’t have them pollinating flowers. There are photos of some of the species that he covers in the book, I never realise that there were iridescent blue bees, having always imagined them in the usual brown and yellow stripes.

It is an engaging book, Hanson is passionate about his little subjects and that is very evident from his prose. It is very US-centric, and if you want to read more about UK bees then I would recommend Dancing with Bees by Brigit Strawbridge Howard or any of Dave Goulson’s books.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Siberia is a vast place, in fact, 13 million square kilometres of bitterly cold tundra and has the briefest of summers. It has fifteen mountain ranges but is best known as the place where Russia has banished its people who for whatever reason didn’t fit the current political climate. It is a bleak and uncompromising landscape and has a grim history with what seems like almost countless deaths.

Even though the Soviets tried to eliminate the indigenous peoples some survived and people do choose to live there. Those that were banished to the Gulags never returned home to their home cities and brought some of their cultures with them. Sophy Rogers first came to realise that traces of their culture that they bought with them still existed in homes all over the landscape after a conversation with a talented pianist in a tent in Mongolia who didn’t have an instrument to play.

Until then, it hadn’t crossed her mind that people would have had the time or energy to play music, but it is something that runs deep in the Russian culture. She began looking for these pianos, and treks back and forwards across the continent from Khabarovsk to Sakhalin Island, Kamchatka to the Yamal Peninsula and even into the Siberian part of China

Some of these pianos have been long abandoned other which are still treasured possessions of their owners. The earliest pianos date back to the late 1700s and there are other more recent Russian made examples that she finds. Each of them has a story to tell, some about how they ended up in that part of the world, some about the people that first bought them there and other modern-day stories of their current owners, or perhaps custodians is the right word.

Some of the books that I have read about Siberia have been pretty tough going, one called the Road of Bones, in particular. This book has some of those stories, it has to really, the tragic loss of life permeates the landscape, but this is mostly about the people that tried to bright a little light, life and music to this place. What I liked the most about it was her tracing the stories of the people that made the very best of what they had there and how music can take away from some of the stresses. She has split her search into pre- Soviet, Soviet and post Soviet instruments. Even though it was written as a one-off trip, in actuality, it was a series of trips there and it felt a little disjointed at times.

3 out of 5 stars

As a child I grew up loving Christmas, there was something warm and comforting about it at the darkest time of the year. As an adult, I have grown more cynical as it has grown into something that starts as summer ends and the expectations of the perfect presents and food are forced on us.

A lot of the ‘traditions’ that we now participate in (not in 2020 though) are not actually that old. Christmas was banned under Cromwell, It was restored after King Charles was restored to the throne and then it fizzled out. In the Victorian age, Dickens and Prince Albert were two of the people who were key in making it a thing again.

This tiny little book has charming snippets of information about our modern Christmas and where the traditions that we now have originated from, what the first advent calendars were like, what mince pies actually contained, why there is a fairy at the top of the tree and gives me convincing reasons why we shouldn’t have sprouts. Great little stocking filler.