Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

The Spectator

Marcus Berkmann’s choice of stocking fillers

If you’re short on ideas for minor Christmas presents, then you can’t do better for expert guidance than read Marcus Berkmann’s choice of stocking fillers from last week’s issue of the Spectator magazine. There can be few phrases in the language more debased than ‘Christmas gift book’. (Well, ‘friendly fire’, maybe, or ‘light entertainment’.) Needless to say, every writer worth his overdraft wants to do one, having already spent in his head all the lovely money he is going to earn from it. But you are essentially writing something for people to buy for other people who would rather have been given something else. Having produced one or two of

Mark Mason

Rock solid

Rod Stewart once tried to convince his mother that he had made a lot of money, and wanted to buy her a really big Christmas present. After much thought, she chose a new bread bin. Feet that stay on the ground are obviously a family trait. Rod: The Autobiography (Century, £20) is excellent, like listening to the guy in the pub who became a rock star but still drinks at the local. You don’t sell 200 million records without knowing how to connect with people, and Stewart does that just as well on the page as in his songs. The young singer sets his hair with sugar dissolved in water.

Anthony Seldon

Those who can, teach

This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 40-year-old, who has never written a book before, hardly sounds promising. The topic, education, moreover is death to good literature: barely has a book been written about the subject that is not dull beyond belief. Yet, against all the odds, this book turns out to be an enthralling read. Teach First is one of the most inspiring ideas around in 21st-century Britain. The book tells the story of its first decade, from 2002-12. Rising from nowhere, it has become one of the top graduate employers in Britain and is slowly achieving its mission of transforming opportunities for socially disadvantaged young people.

Anthony Daniels

Family commitments

Twice in my career, in very remote places, I encountered lunatics who had been chained for many years to the wall or to posts in the ground. The reasons why they were so enchained had been lost in the sands of time, but their keepers were convinced that they were far too dangerous to be released. By now they were certainly mad, but whether they were mad because they had been tied up, or tied up because they had been mad, it was impossible to say. And in one of the institutions — a prison — I found prisoners who had been acquitted or whose release had been ordered by

Eric Christiansen

First pluck your crow

As fewer people write by hand, some of us who do venture to squeak a thin call of alarm, like mice behind the frescoes during the last days of Pompeii. Philip Hensher (novelist and university teacher) voices dismay more manfully in this eloquent account of what has been and will be lost by the ending of this ancient habit, now that thoughts are transferred on to screens by squirming thumbs on dwarf keyboards. He has a ten-point plan for restoring pen and ink to daily life, and urges us all, literate or semi-literate, to try it out. This may seem like advising all who feel themselves drowning in the gruel

Edmund De Waal

Not just for Christmas

New York is a strange place for dogs. As I walked back from an early morning art-world breakfast — black coffee and untouched fruit, untouched granola — the apartment buildings of the Upper East Side were disgorging perfectly groomed hounds and their staff for their walks in Central Park. I’m used to south London dog-walking, the shuffling between apology for our puppy, the avoidance of Staffies and the odd five-minute conversations with other park-goers. It is shambolic. I think of the Pont cartoon of ‘the British love for dogs’ — the total displacement of human life by a motley, shaggy array of dogs — and see a great cultural difference.

Richard Shone

Into the limelight

The online accessibility of British population censuses has resulted in an outpouring  of ‘who and how we were’, keeping amateur genealogists, local historians and social commentators extremely busy. Barry Anthony’s book relies heavily on the censuses of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, combined with a close reading of the astonishingly detailed stage magazines and papers such as the Era and the Entr’acte, to flesh out what we know of the early life of England’s most famous comic actor. Charlie Chaplin’s stage career was not long; he seems to have seen, in some flash of foresight, that film was the coming medium and by 1914 he had transferred his gifts

Adam Nicolson

Bleak beauty

Adam Gopnik’s dazzlingly knowledgeable and beautifully told essays on winter began life as the Massey Lecture Series on Canadian National Radio, the Canadian Reith lectures. But dismiss from your mind any of the rather stodged up seriousness that always seems to hang around Important Radio Talks on the BBC. Gopnik is serious, and believes and cares passionately about things, but he understands exactly what an essay is, or should be: an attempt to get at something, a stroll into the not-yet-known or only-just-thought-about. He says in a foreword that his chapters are in fact edited transcripts of trial runs for those talks, given to a few friends, at home, in

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

As dark and heavy as plum pudding

Dressed up as a child-friendly, pocket-sized hardback, just the right size for a Christmas stocking and with a pretty front-cover illustration of two dear little children in a snowy fir forest, Inventing the Christmas Tree (Yale, £12.99) is actually a learned 90-page thesis on the history of the Christmas tree by the German author Bernd Brunner, who has also written monographs on bears, the moon and snowmen. As it’s translated into American, we have gray, color, luster, skeptics and travelers. But rather than reading it in an American accent, I read it in a German one. The bibliography lists such formidable sounding books as Der Weinachtsbaum: Botanik und Geshichte des

Charles Cumming

Return of the living dead

What is it with dead American writers? Years after they’ve popped their clogs, some of the biggest names in crime fiction continue to produce novels from beyond the grave. Mario Puzo has been sleeping with the fishes since 1999, but that hasn’t stopped him clanking out Omertà (2000) and The Family (2001), the latter of which was based on an unfinished manuscript posthumously completed by his longterm girlfriend. Michael Crichton died in 2008. A year later, his fans were able to enjoy Pirate Latitudes, a novel based — once again — on an incomplete manuscript found among Crichton’s papers. Yet both men have been slouches in comparison to Robert Ludlum.

Nicky Haslam

Old King Noël

What is this I hold in my hands? Is it just a book? It’s quite heavy, but somehow, instinctively, one feels its light heart.  When I eventually prize its even glossier inner core from its glossy padded outer shell, I still ask: what is this? It looks like a book, but its pages don’t shut flat or lie open; they spring apart, gaping enticingly, as if someone had inserted bulky, once-essential memos or long-forgotten mementos between the pages. But shake it, and nothing falls out. No shopping list, no ribbon-tied bundles of unrequited love, no scrunched up scraps of half-remembered receipts. Open it at one of these many inviting gaps.

Oliver Rackham

Of knowledge, life, good and evil

The British Museum contains more about trees than one might expect: trees in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and all kinds of small artefacts of wood and bark. Frances Carey, sometime Deputy Keeper of Prints and Drawings, discusses trees as viewed through the collections. She deals not with trees themselves — for that one goes to the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens — but with trees as interpreted (or misinterpreted) by botanical illustrators, divines, etchers, literary writers, medallists, metaphorists, mythologists, painters, poets, politicians and sculptors, on a worldwide scale going back to the Neolithic if not beyond. Discussions of people’s varied reactions to trees are followed by an ‘Arboretum’: 24 chapters

James Buchan

A bloody waste

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an act of frivolity without parallel in United States history. The destruction of the Baathist state caused Iraqis to flee into their ancient sectarian and racial communities, and laid out a killing-ground where animosities suppressed in other Muslim countries could be fought out to the last Iraqi. By early 2006, when Sunni extremists (usually called al-Qa’eda) blew up the holy Shia mosque in Samarra, the country was in civil war. The United States kept its nerve. With the dogged support of President George W. Bush in Washington, five additional fighting brigades and uncounted tons of reinforced concrete, Generals David H. Petraeus and

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Doctor in distress | 12 December 2012

The passing of Jonathan Miller’s father Emanuel Miller — a very distinguished psychiatrist — was terrible. ‘His last words, as he reared up on his deathbed, were: “I’m a flop! I’m a flop!” ’ One should be cautious about being Freudian here — Emanuel might approve; his son wouldn’t; his son’s biographer might, slightly — but that is a hell of a sentiment to inherit. As theatre and opera director, author of learned papers in medicine and neuropsychology, TV presenter and public intellectual, quotable crosspatch and lightning-rod for English anti-intellectualism, Jonathan Miller looks like someone for whom not being a flop consumes a lot of anxiety. He came out of

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Mo Yan’s malignant apology for ‘necessary’ censorship

The Chinese writer Mo Yan collected the Nobel Prize for Literature last night. In his acceptance lecture, he reiterated his view that a degree of censorship is ‘necessary’ in the world, and compared it to airport security. The comparison is utterly base. Airport security is a fleeting restriction on personal liberty; a social contract entered into freely by making the decision to travel by air. Censorship is a legal mechanism imposed on entire societies by a self-appointed oligarchy that maintains itself by persecuting and prosecuting individual transgressors. Mo Yan’s logic is as flawed as his apology is malignant. Having said that, his enthusiasm for censorship was quite restrained on this occasion: he told Granta recently that

Stephen Mcewen

Simin Daneshvar, Persia’s first female novelist and hope for Iran’s future

There is a Persian proverb which states that ‘books are a man’s best friend.’ Persian literature from the kings of antiquity to the last Shah of the Peacock Throne has, for the most part, been dominated by its proverbial male companion. When presented with today’s Islamic Republic, an unfamiliar Western reader can easily believe that a female literary voice cannot possibly exist underneath the seemingly anonymising chador, the Islamic female dress most closely associated with Iran. Instead, all that would appear to emanate from Iran is a male voice: Ahmadinejad defending arms programs; the Mullahs dictating morality; Khomeini, father of the nation, ever-present from beyond the grave, still influencing the

Monday

Robert Beaken

Cosmo Lang, his part in Edward VIII’s downfall

In December 1936, following the Abdication of Edward VIII, a rhyme circulated about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang: ‘My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are! And when your man is down, how bold you are! Of Christian charity how scant you are! And, auld Lang swine, how full of cant you are!’ Lang had made a particularly ill-judged broadcast three days after the Abdication, which caused considerable offence. The widespread view of Lang is that he impotently wrung his hands on the sidelines before the Abdication, after which he made his disastrous broadcast. A different view was taken by the Duke of Windsor in his memoirs: ‘Behind [the

Sunday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Tyranny’s fellow travel writers (Part 3)

Earlier this year I noted a piece by Michael Moynihan in Foreign Policy. He looked at how the authors of the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guide books were producing apologias for tyranny. I argued that the kind words for Assad’s Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya and the Khomeinist Iran, were a result of the capitalist leftism – or politically correct capitalism – of the last decade. The whitewashing of dictatorial crimes could appear left-wing because the regimes opposed the West, or more specifically Bush’s America. But in their efforts to apply a thick covering of masking paint, the fellow travel writers had to brush aside any thought for a regime’s murdered

Friday

Tim Wigmore

Barack Obama’s best voice: Michael Grunwald

No Obama policy – not even ‘Obamacare’ – has been derided quite as much as his stimulus package and the $787 billion Recovery Act passed in February 2009. It became a byword for failed big-government liberalism, and the Republicans’ staunch opposition to it underpinned their 63-seat gain in the House of Representatives in 2010. Yet, in this engaging and insightful attack upon the received wisdom of Obama’s failure, Michael Grunwald launches a lucid defence of the Recovery Act. Grunwald’s key argument is that, whatever its imperfections, the US would have been a far worse place without the Recovery Act. Independent analysts agree that it has saved or created over 2.5

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Suzanne Collins, J.K. Rowling and the albatross of success

Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, has announced that her next book will be a picture book. Rather than writing a follow-up dystopian adventure for her teenage readers, she has decided to engage with four-year-olds in Year of the Jungle, a story about how her family coped when her father spent a year serving in Vietnam. Collins is not the only staggeringly successful children’s author who has taken an unexpected step away from her fan base with her writing. Whereas Collins is turning to younger children, J.K. Rowling turned to grown-ups with her recent adult novel about provincial life, The Casual Vacancy. Many Harry Potter fans were disappointed. While