3 out of 5 stars

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

This is Chris Emery’s first collection since Departure and he has a variety of themes from the natural world to the contrast of modern life on the part of the country that he lives in. His poems on the natural world are about the bittern, seals and snowdrops and his poems on the region concern the way that the place has changed as the years past.

To stand and see beyond motionless blackthorn
The sweet chestnuts sweeping our silent blue,
The far gold hills, a single jay
A single buzzard blithely turning where
I will ask you to forget this white hour

Even though it is very short, there are only ten poems in here, Emery has a rich imagination. His form changes in each poem moving from the longer style to a shorter style add to the interest. That along with the imagery that he can conjure with the words adds to the charm of this collection.

Depth Charge has been privately published in a limited edition of 100 signed and numbered copies. It may be purchased from the author here

4 out of 5 stars

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

Rosa always dreamt of a simple life staying close to her parents in their village in Iceland but circumstances in 1686 can and do change very rapidly. Before she knows it she is swapped for a dowry and is to be married to the trader, Jón Eiríksson. She knows that she is going to be missing her Mamma and her childhood friend Pall, and she knows all the rumours about him burying his wife in the middle of the night.

Jón ‘s friend, Pétur, who is thought to be some kind of changeling or part demon by others, takes her to the remote village of Stykkishólmur where she is to join her new husband in his croft. It is a bleak and unsettling place, she can feel the evil in the landscape. He gives her a glass figurine on a necklace and a list of instructions that forbid her from talking and mixing with the other people in the nearby village and commands her to remain in the croft. The villagers are wary of outsiders and given Jon’s history, thy do not trust him.

It is a lonely life there as Jón and Pétur are often working in the fields or our fishing and she has been expressly told that she is not to mix or talk to the villagers. Jón barely talks to her too, only to bark commands and instructions to her. Their croft is unusual as it has a loft, but this is locked and she is told that she is never to enter. The thought of what went on up there with his previous wife, Anna, sends shivers down her spine. This unease turns to terror when she starts hearing noises from there. Not having anyone to comfort her, she begins to surreptitiously talk to her neighbours and it dawns on her that the rumours about her husband may well be true.

Far from home and very alone, it feels like the darkness is closing in on her and she fears that she may be her husbands next victim…

I don’t read that much historical fiction preferring to get my history from facts normally, but I do like to read the odd one now and again. This is the first of Lea’s book that I have read, and I must say that I quite liked this. She has managed to pitch it such that the dark, brooding and atmospheric coastal village feels authentic. On top of that, she has made the very atmospheric and at times really creepy. Plot-wise it isn’t too bad either, there are layers of meaning that unpeel as you go through the story. The Christian faith is present on the island and whilst its influence is strong, however, I liked the fact that the Viking and Icelandic folklore have been neatly woven into the plot, the old Gods showing that they still have power over the people. If there was one small flaw, I would have liked a little more of the landscape to shape the style of the book, as Ben Myers does with his stories. It has a stunning cover too.

3.5 out of 5 stars

As a child, Kate Harris wanted to be an explorer, to discover parts of the world that had not been seen by any human. It was as a teenage though that she realised that this dream was almost impossible as almost everywhere had been mapped and explored. As our planet had been so extensively explored, she decided to become a scientist and follow her dreams and explore Mars.

The appeal of seeing some of this planet first grew on her after trips to Italy and hearing the Dali Lama talk. Reading about the Himalaya’s brought out the desire to travel even more and decided to write her thesis about the Siachen Glacier. Knowing that a good result in this would mean she could qualify for her doctorate that she wanted to do, she poured her heart and soul into the work but feared for her marks after a conversation with her tutor. MIT beckoned… Her new tutor was not that keen on fieldwork, preferring to work in the lab, so she was dispatched to Yellowstone with some others. But all the time she was there, the silk road beckoned, and one day she decided that she wanted to cycle along it again.

Departing from Istanbul with her friend, Mel, they hear a young lad tell them not to crash. They choose to ignore him, preferring to savour the smell of the spices in the bazaar and head to the boat to cross the Bosporus where a chance meeting with a really old school friend means they miss their stop. Quickly resolved, they climb onto their bikes and set off. Turkey was a bit of a mixed bag, lovely people and food, but dirty and busy roads tarnished their opinion of it.

Passing from Turkey into the countries of the Caucasus is a reminder that this is an unsettled region and often subject to closed borders and warring enclaves. It is a change they can feel too, as they go from paved road to a cratered and potholed road and their speed drops accordingly. As they pass through Tbilisi in early March, the winter is just starting to lose its grip, trees were just showing the first buds and the light increased day by day.

They couldn’t cycle all parts of the journey, various sections were passed in trains or other transport, but they relish the time that they spend cycling, moving in the early morning to avoid the heat of the desert, deciding that they are too tired to wave at every driver that passes and trying to find somewhere to camp on the Tajikistan and Afghanistan border.  The thing that they still don’t know is if they will be able to ride up onto the Tibetan Plateau to be able to complete their journey.

Our bicycles cast long cool shadows that grew and shrank with the desert’s rise and fall, its contours so subtle that we needed those shadows to see them. The severity of the land, the softness of the light – where opposites meet is magic.

Harris is not a bad writer and I thought this was a reasonable book overall. Sit feel like she is an observer of the people that she meets rather than fully engaging with them. There are lots of lovely little details and descriptions of the towns and villages they pass through. It was a shame that they couldn’t complete the whole journey by bicycle, but other factors made that almost impossible. Just didn’t have that extra something to lift this though.

3 out of 5 stars

Life is full of decisions; they can be a low impact as to what to eat, which route to take around a town or whether to buy a particular book or not. Other decisions have a much greater impact on our lives, the partner that you want to spend more time within the long term, the place that you choose to live or the path that you take in a career.

We are supposedly living in the age of the shortest attention span, not even being able to read the 280 characters from a tweet before the next notification attracts our attention. Other books have been written on the best way to make that instant decision when presented with the scantest of facts. But in this book Johnson wants us to change the way that we make decisions using a more deliberative decision-making approach.

1. Mapping
2. Predicting
3. Deciding

He argues that this multi-dimension way of thinking about all the factors in a decision helps us make a better decision. He uses various real-life cases to explain the show the methodology behind it, including influence diagrams for the mapping stage to comprehend all of the factors about making a decision.

People who have deemed themselves super-forecasters have been shown to be no better than a primate with a dartboard when their predictions are assessed against their results and in predicting he explains the methods of ensuring that the decision is correct by contemplating all manner of possibilities.

The end result of that is then having to make a decision based on all the information provided. Not easy for very complex problems, but the tools like cost-benefit analysis and weighting assist with this part of the process.

You’d like to think that we as a species would be a better place to do this, but sadly we’re not. Vested interests often ensure that the decision process is skewed or flawed from the very beginning. Also having more diverse teams selected from people with a variety of experience and knowledge and give them the tools to challenge conventional thoughts will produce much better results than similar minded people.

I hadn’t read much about the Bin Laden takedown, so it was fascinating to read the level and layers of detail that went into the investigation of the site he was staying at and the suite of methods that they had at their disposal to accomplish the mission. In theory, then you will have come to a better decision if you follow these principles. Organisations with red teams provide the proverbial spanner in the works, also improve this by testing the resilience of the decisions that are being made. The bottom line is though that people make better decisions by planning in much more detail. Not just what you are intending to do, but the various possibilities could be and what the short and long term implications are.

I thought that it was an interesting book about a subject that we seem the fallout and failure from every day. I would have liked to have had more on the Marine Corps Planning Process that is mentioned in the book, and I’ve not read Middlemarch, so some of what he was describing about the fiction of George Elliot, and how it helped with decision making wasn’t relevant to me. However, I don’t think that this is his best work, my favourite of his Everything Bad is Good For You. has a much superior premise and narrative. That said, he is a good writer and I always find his books entertaining and informative and this was no different.

4 out of 5 stars

My other half is a gardener and out front and back gardens are full of flowers in amongst the fruit trees, it does make sitting in the garden quite nice, and even when I’m in the office, the view out the front window is a sight to behold. Flowers are the beautiful and occasionally garish parts of a plant that are primarily evolved to attract an insect or bird to aid pollination. For some people, they are an irrelevant part of their lives, but their impact has permeated our culture in many ways.

Fiona Stafford has had a lifetime of enjoying flowers, from the gaudy red and yellow snapdragons, soft mounds of aubretia gladioli spikes and a huge rambling clematis, that made her childhood summers. Every time they moved her mother would begin to garden once again in the new property. The way flowers permeated her life is reflected in wider society, the loss of a loved one is often marked by flowers by the roadside, a couple on their wedding day have some sort of spray to hold and poppies are worn to remember those lost in wars long gone.

In this book, Stafford has selected fifteen flower species that are significant to her in one way or another. Beginning with the first of the late winter flowers, the snowdrop, that for me is the first hint that the world is still turning and spring is coming, she moves through the other flowers, such as daffodils, foxgloves and thistles as they appear in the year.

For each flower she has chosen there is a little potted history of each mixed with some personal memories and a little folklore and cultural and contemporary anecdotes mixed in. She talks about some of my favourites, bluebells, roses and lavender and ends on that most elusive of plants the ghost orchid.

I think overall I preferred this to her first book, the Long Long Life of Trees. Good as that was, this had the edge in a couple of ways. First her passion for her subject is very evident in the prose and secondly her writing as she deftly weaves between contemporary and historical anecdotes about her subject plants is a pleasure to read.

4.5 out of 5 stars

If you were to pop the name of Roumeli into Google maps then all it would bring up is a tiny place on the island of Kriti. For Patrick Leigh Fermor though this name brought to mind an entirely different region of Greece. For him, it is the northern counterpart to the southern Mani and is the ancient name for the lands that went from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth.

Even though this region isn’t known by that exotic and slightly mysterious name now, the people and places that formed it are still there, and Leigh Fermor is there to tease the stories out from them. He begins in Alexandroupolis, a town that normally elicits a groan from the civil servants who have had the misfortune to be posted there, but he had grown to like it partly because it was the first Greek town that he stayed in after a few years absence. But in this town, amongst the bored civil servants, walked a man dressed mostly in black with curving shoes that had a pompom on the end. He was a Sarakatsan shepherd and he was as out of place as a wolf walking through the streets.

This nomadic style of life still existed; part of the population moved from one area to another seeks grazing for their flocks. This practice had been honed over hundreds if not thousands of years and the rituals and traditions were deeply embedded in their culture. Even though the orthodox church had a certain amount of influence over peoples lives, the pagan spirits of old inhabited the land and still need to be placated and resisted.

This book is full of stories like this, a visit to a substantial house of yellow stone to shoes of Lord Byron, rising at dawn to travel by bus to the hinterland of Aetolia, climbing up the steps to the monastery perched onto of rocks and learning that guests used to be winched up, and the rope was only changed when it broke. This is a wide-ranging series of encounters and vignettes as he travels around the region. You can tell he deeply loves this country from the evocative writing as he travels through the landscape. As I have come to expect, it is such beautiful writing from Leigh Fermor. However, I think I of the two Mani just has the edge for me. But this is still a really special book.

4 out of 5 stars

In the Northwest of Ireland is the country of Donegal, it is a beautiful part of the world, but with that beauty comes a price, it is often on the receiving end of the worst that the Atlantic ocean can through at it. Monica Connell Had many fond memories of the place, leaning into the wind of a gale whilst having the cold sea wash around her feet. They shout, but the noise of the storm drowns out their words. It bought happy and sad memories in equal measure.

Then in 1990 her and her husband, Mark, decided that they wanted to move to Donegal, but trying to find a place was proving challenging, but after a conversation in a pub, someone suggested Wattie’s house. They followed a man from the pub to where the house was located and he told them who the owner was. A visit to him the following morning proved productive and they were to be the new tenants of the house. It needed some work though, and they spent three weeks drying the house out and taking the detritus left by the previous residents down the dump. They obtained a bog trespass to allow them to cut peat. Learning to cut peat using a slean to get neat unbroken turf proved challenging at first. As summer faded away, getting the peat cut ad dried before the arrival of the winter storms was the priority.

She met Margaret after stopping to pick her up when driving one day, as they chatted they realised that they had many things in common and they agreed to meet again. She visited her home and was plied with lots of tea, biscuits and cake and Margaret asks her if she would interested in gathering carrageen and dillisk. Connell jumped at the chance to do this with her and at the next full moon headed down to the sea. Connell is shown each of the seaweeds and told to take care as she is walking over very slippery rocks to collect it. The area they are living in provides for them, she catches mackerel and pollack at Leic na Magach and cockles and whelks from other parts of the coast and goes out in a punt with men to collect lobsters from their pots.

One of the highly significant moments of her stay is the pilgrimage that she makes to Lough Dearg. Even though she wasn’t a practising catholic she was informed that she could still participate. It is supposed to be one of the toughest in the Christian world and encompasses a three day fast with only tea or coffee and bread served once a day and a 24-hour prayer vigil at the basilica. There is also a trawler trip to catch herring for a few days with Mark. It is supposed to be unlucky to have a woman aboard, but nothing befell the crew of the boat. She spent a lot of it feeling ill, and the nausea was only relieved on the bridge where she could see the sea. She attends a wedding that went onto 6 am in the morning, the band had gone home at 1 am but there were enough people there to continue playing instruments to keep the party going.

It is a glorious and evocative book about life on the west coast of Ireland. She is a wonderful writer too, you can sense the smell of the sea and hear the howling of the wind or feel the whiplash of hail in a storm, from her prose. But more than that as an anthropologist she has a good measure of the people that she befriends in her stay there, teasing out the stories of their lives and routines. Highly recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time – Winston Churchill

You would think that in the 21st century most of the world would live in a democracy of some form or other, but it doesn’t seem that way. Of the 195 countries in the world, 39% of the world’s population in 87 countries are deemed free. Some are partially free and 49 countries make up around 25% of the population. However, there are still 49 countries with 2.6 billion people in the world that have some form of dictatorship or strict authoritarian government.

I was shocked when I read those facts, as it is something that I thought was ebbing away gradually. The people who live there are subject to injustice in all its forms, from the endemic corruption, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and when incarcerated a lot are subject to torture and often killed or ‘disappeared’. The methods that these dictators use to gain control are well documented, but the questions Alaa Al Aswany wants to explore here concern the nature of dictatorship? How does it take hold? In what conditions and circumstances is it permitted to thrive? And how do dictators retain power as the society that they have dominated starts to crumble?

Al Aswany has written a fascinating book exploring the answers to these questions and he gets right to the crux of what makes a dictator, control of the media and police and army and the way that their personality diffuses deeply into the culture and fabric of society of the country. In a lot of cases, the populace can start behaving like the acolytes of a cult, not questioning any of the often erratic behaviours of the dictator. It becomes a self-enforcing vicious circle as the majority of citizens make the deliberate choice to deny themselves their freedom; instead craving stability and will support this individual totally.

It is a very worrying but readable for a book about a fairly grim subject matter. He grew up in Egypt and was seen as a dissenter before taking the sensible decision to leave the country. He has a very personal grasp of his subject and he eloquently describes just how normal people in a democracy can become inadvertent enablers and supporters of this type of person.

3 out of 5 stars

My wife teaches chemistry all the way up to A-Level and one of her favourite joke for new students is:

Why can’t you trust an atom?

Because they make everything up…

I’ll get my coat.

But it is true, every single thing that you will come into contact with today is made from some of the 118 elements that exist in the periodic table. There are some that you are very unlikely to come into contact with, polonium, for example, but there are others like nitrogen and oxygen that are in contact with your body 24 hours a day.

These fifty elements that they have chosen each has a test tube full of facts and anecdotes on them, for example which element loosely connects cockroaches and tanks, which one of the hardest known and which is one of the most abundant of the earth. Each element has snippets of information on the person who discovered it, the atomic number, and where the name was inspired or derived from.

There is very little depth to this book, but then you may have already worked it out from the title. Rather this is a thin patina to give a flavour (not literally some of these are poisonous) of the selected elements with lots of details and information about them. Nice little gift book.