William Leith

Thursday

10 Oct 2019
William Leith

Living on a nuclear submarine does your head in

Richard Humphreys spent a good part of five years, between the ages of 18 and 23, living inside a nuclear submarine, which he describes variously as ‘sleek, black and athletic looking’, and ‘this fierce black messenger of death’, and ‘this huge, black leviathan’, and ‘a killing machine’, and ‘silent as death’. The first time he sets foot on it, he tells us, ‘I was shitting it.’ This is not the last we will hear of his negative emotions, or the state of his bowels. We are in the latter part of the Cold War. Humphreys is a sailor. The submarine is HMS Resolution, part of the Polaris fleet. It is 425ft long, 33ft wide and 30ft from top to bottom. Humphreys describes it as ‘cigar-shaped’. From the outside it looks huge; from the inside it feels tiny.

Thursday

1 Aug 2019
William Leith

Closure at last | 1 August 2019

This is horrible. But it’s a book by Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, so it’s compelling: an almost perfect true crime story. Two sisters, aged ten and 12, disappeared from a shopping mall in 1975 and were never seen again. What happened to them was a mystery for 40 years. In The Last Stone, Bowden tells you about two things. He tells you how the mystery was solved, and he tells you what happened to the girls. The first thing is compelling. The second will make you sick. The girls, Kate and Sheila Lyon, went to the Wheaton Plaza shopping mall in Montgomery County, Maryland on 29 March. They were supposed to be home by 4 p.m. They weren’t. They vanished. The police interviewed lots of people.

Closure at last | 1 August 2019

Thursday

24 Jan 2019
William Leith

A deadly box of chemicals

Do you remember the swine flu panic a decade ago? Jeremy Brown, the author of this book, describes it here. In March 2009, 60 people died in Mexico. The cause: a flu-type virus. The Mexican government ‘closed schools, banned public gatherings, and ordered troops to hand out face masks at subway stations’. This flu crossed the border into the United States. The media monitored the outbreak with grim enthusiasm. Soon, people in 74 countries were infected. The WHO ‘declared it a pandemic’. Or perhaps you don’t remember the swine flu panic of 2009. Not many people do. The main reason I do is that I met an epidemiologist on a train in March of that year; he was having the most intense week of his life. People really thought this swine flu virus, a variant of the H1N1 strain, with components from pig flu, bird flu and human flu, might be the big one.

A deadly box of chemicals

Thursday

13 Dec 2018
William Leith

The spirit of Christmas past

This book, an excellent history of Christmas, made me think of a Christmas cartoon strip I once saw in Viz magazine. There’s a couple. It’s Christmas Eve. The man goes out to buy the woman a present. On the way, he steps into a pub for a few drinks. Much later, drunk, having missed the shops, he tries his luck at a petrol station. But too many people have had the same idea; the only thing left to buy is engine oil. This, anyway, is how I remember it, ending deliciously with the man in a terrible dilemma. Why, you might ask, would this genteel book about the history of Christmas, with its sections on carols, and Christmas trees, and the choir of King’s College, Cambridge — why would all this remind me of a drunk in a petrol station? I’ll come to that in a minute.

The spirit of Christmas past

Thursday

21 Jun 2018
William Leith

Soaked in blood and symbolism

We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave, Rawls. Seeing this, Emily’s father, Bob, beats her with his belt and kicks the dog. Of Rawls, Bob says: ‘Now leave him be so he can get about my business!’ A girl, a dog, a slave, and a slave-owner.The owner addresses the girl with words and violence, and abuses the dog. He helps the slave get down from the fencepost he’s standing on. But he does not talk to the slave. He talks about the slave. Thinking this over, Rawls looks at Emily,‘sprawled out and wailing in the grass’, and envies her. Her pain is temporary; his is permanent. ‘Tomorrow she would leave the house, and pain would be as incomprehensible to the girl’s mind as the map of a foreign country in a schoolbook.

Soaked in blood and symbolism

Thursday

22 Feb 2018
William Leith

Drugs, guns and blood

The Spanish journalist Alberto Arce worked for Associated Press in Honduras in 2012 and 2013. After a year, he says: ‘My wife and daughter left me. It was the right choice.’ Arce stayed on in the capital, Tegucigalpa, ‘fighting against addictions, sadness and depression’. He believes he ‘won’ that fight, ‘but only because each morning I counted down the days until I could leave’. So: Honduras, says Arce, is bad. How bad? He tells us that ‘Tegucigalpa is the most dangerous capital city in the world without a declared war.’ And that ‘in 2012 and 2013, more people were murdered in Honduras than in Iraq, even though the population in Honduras is three times smaller’. Also that in 2012, there were 7,100 murders. That’s 598 per month, or ‘20 daily homicides,’ in a country with a population of 7,000,000.

Drugs, guns and blood

Thursday

2 Nov 2017
William Leith

Sweet dreams are made of this

I’ve read several books​ ​about​ ​sleep recently,​ ​and​ ​their​ ​authors​ ​all​ ​tell​ ​me​ ​the same​ ​three​ ​things.​ ​The​ ​first​ ​is​ ​that,​ ​in​ ​the modern​ ​world,​ ​it’s​ ​hard​ ​to​ ​get​ ​enough sleep.​ ​The​ ​second​ ​is​ ​that​ ​sleep​ ​is​ ​very important.​ ​Every​ ​night,​ ​we​ ​pass​ ​out.​ ​Every morning,​ ​we​ ​regain​ ​consciousness, half aware​ ​that​ ​time​ ​has​ ​passed.​ ​For​ ​a moment,​ ​we​ ​might​ ​have​ ​the​ ​impression we’ve​ ​just​ ​been​ ​flying​ ​through​ ​the​ ​air,​ ​or that​ ​we’re​ ​about​ ​to​ ​be​ ​executed.​ ​The whole​ ​thing​ ​is​ ​totally​ ​weird.​ ​That’s​ ​the​ ​third thing. Before​ ​I​ ​get​ ​into​ ​the​ ​weirdness,​ ​I’ll​ ​say something​ ​about​ ​the​ ​importance​ ​of​ ​sleep.

Sweet dreams are made of this

Thursday

24 Aug 2017
William Leith

Manning up

Is this the best book I’ve ever read on the subject of masculinity? Maybe it is, I thought, the first time I read it. And then I thought, Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is about masculinity. So is Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, David Vann’s Goat Mountain and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. But this book is different. It is really about ​masculinity. The maleness here feels very raw. I say raw for a particular reason. I’ll get to that in a minute. But first let me introduce you to William Giraldi. He was born into an Italian-American family in blue-collar New Jersey. ‘My hometown’s name, Manville, lets you know precisely what you’re getting: pure Jersey,’ he writes. When Giraldi’s parents divorced, he grew up among men — his father, Bill, his grandfather, Pop, his Uncle Tony: ‘men for whom masculinity was not just a way of being but a sacral creed.

Manning up

Thursday

29 Jun 2017
William Leith

Two dark tales

Just over halfway through this grim and gripping book, the author describes herself and her girlfriend ‘lying on my bed kissing’. She says: ‘I love kissing her.’ And: ‘We kissed and kissed, and soon my hands were at her shirt and I was tugging it off.’ And: ‘I kissed her again.’ And: ‘I reached down between her legs.’ And: ‘She reached down to touch me and then we were moving together and it felt good and I moaned and it felt good again.’ Then she says: ‘And then it didn’t.’ The sex feels good. Then it doesn’t. Something has happened to the author, deep in her past, and it comes back to haunt her. ‘I realised I was going under, into the memory,’ she tells us. ‘My breath quickened. I gulped air. I fumbled for something to hold on to.

Two dark tales

Thursday

25 May 2017
William Leith

Cold comfort | 25 May 2017

All animals, Scott Carney tells us, seek comfort. But human beings are a bit different. We don’t need to spend much time actively seeking it. He’s right: it’s all around us — in your nice warm house, your air-conditioned car, your shoes, your bed, the temperate shopping mall you visit. Here in the affluent west, we eat comfort food in comfortable chairs, and then we recline on cushions, tweaking our dimmer switches and thermostats and adjusting the brightness on our screens. Good for us, you might think. We can ‘control and fine-tune our environment so thoroughly that many of us can live in what amounts to a perpetual state of homeostasis’. That’s a scientific way of saying we’ve designed the world around us so we can feel good all the time.

Cold comfort | 25 May 2017

Thursday

13 Oct 2016
William Leith

His and her healthcare

When I started this book, I have to admit, I did not think it would be as absolutely fascinating as it turned out to be. It’s by a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology, and it’s about the medical differences between men and women. There are lots of medical differences between men and women — something doctors in general should bear in mind during treatment. But they don’t, says Dr Glezerman — or, at least, not enough. This is all in the realm of the fairly interesting. Men and women are hormonally different from each other, they store fat differently, their brains are not quite the same, they respond to heat and cold in slightly different ways, they are affected by anxiety and depression and cancer and heart disease in different ways, their immune systems are not exactly the same, their muscle mass is different.

His and her healthcare

Thursday

2 Jun 2016
William Leith

A force for good

When I saw this book, a biography of Huw Wheldon, who was managing director of BBC Television between 1968 and 1975, I thought ‘Aha!’ Inevitably, my mind was filled with images -of Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall, of the Led Zeppelin guitar riff at the start of Top of the Pops, of the men in charge who had no idea what was going on. Might Wheldon have been one of the guys who had no idea what was going on? I tried to put this thought to one side. The book is by Wheldon’s son, Wynn. It’s a very moving account of a son’s love and regard for his father. Wynn is telling the story of a man he reveres and misses. He thinks Huw was a wonderful person — charming and brilliant, a huge life force. He believes he was one of those rare people who lives to inspire others.

A force for good

Thursday

17 Mar 2016
William Leith

A sex vampire on wheels

The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked as a personal assistant to Michael Stipe, the singer in REM and, later, to Mickey Rourke. He also worked as a limo driver in Hollywood. A drug addict, he gravitated toward crystal meth, which can make you both wired and horny, sometimes for days on end. So we know to expect a particular brew of glamour, indignity and recrimination that perhaps some readers (including me) have come to enjoy. Sutherland certainly delivers — with a bit of glamour, an awful lot of indignity and not too much recrimination. But there’s something else going on here. This book is a collaboration between Jack the addict and his adoptive father John Sutherland.

A sex vampire on wheels

Thursday

5 Nov 2015
William Leith

Warning: this book only contains strong language

Dan Marshall, the author of this memoir, loves to swear. ‘It’s very difficult for me to write a sentence without using a bad word,’ he tells us. ‘That last sentence, for instance, was fucking impossible for me to write.’ Dan is young, rich and American. One day, in his twenties, he and his girlfriend, Abby, were on holiday, lying poolside at the Marriott resort in Desert Springs, California. He is in a world of material and sexual abundance. ‘My siblings and I were lucky, living with the proverbial silver spoon jammed firmly up our asses,’ he tells us. He has lots of sex. So does his gay brother Greg. His mother’s cancer was ‘under control’. As for his father, ‘He’d start every day with a cup of coffee and a dump, and end it with a glass of wine.

Warning: this book only contains strong language

Thursday

9 Apr 2015
William Leith

Even worms and vampire bats do it

I used to think we had five senses — sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. And I used to think I knew how they worked. Using specialised instruments, such as eyes, ears and fingertips, they gave us information about the outside world. I imagined that the eye saw things, and then told the brain what those things looked like. I imagined that the fingertips touched things, and then told the brain what those things felt like. But now, every time I look at a book on neuroscience, I see that this nice cosy picture is absolutely wrong. Before I continue with this line of thought, let me say that this book is about the sense of touch, it’s by a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and it’s excellent.

Even worms and vampire bats do it

Thursday

19 Mar 2015
William Leith

Stuck at K: we know very little about vitamins except that they’re good for us (in small quantities)

Before I read this book about vitamins, I thought I knew what it would be like. It would be vaguely reassuring. It would tell me that I was consuming the right vitamins, but perhaps in the wrong quantities. Medically speaking, I expected it to point me in a certain direction. There would be chapters about scurvy and beriberi, and how these diseases can easily be cured, now we know about vitamins. There would be stuff on cancer. For a while, I would eat a lot of carrots. Well, I was partly right. Catherine Price, a fastidious reporter, has given us the stories of scurvy and beriberi, and how these scourges were cured with vitamins. She also tells us about night-blindness, a condition that can make your eyes develop ulcers, but that can be cured with small doses of vitamin A.

Stuck at K: we know very little about vitamins except that they’re good for us (in small quantities)

Thursday

4 Dec 2014
William Leith

Your immune system’s war isn’t Saving Private Ryan — it’s Homeland

Before I read this book, I imagined the immune system as a defensive force, like the Germans on the beaches at Normandy on June 6 1944. When you’re young and vital, your immune system is the Germans in the early morning — scanning the horizon for movement, with plenty of ammunition in reserve. But life is a process of attrition; as you get older, you become like the Germans later that afternoon — your machine guns get jammed up, and then you use rifles, and pistols, and eventually bayonets, until the invaders finally destroy you — just like the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. That’s what I used to think. Now I’ve read this book, I see things a bit differently. Of course, I was right in part — our bodies do have a border patrol, the mucosal immune system, which is responsible for more than 300 square metres of vulnerable territory.

Your immune system’s war isn’t Saving Private Ryan — it’s Homeland

Thursday

2 Oct 2014
William Leith

The hell of being Michael Palin

In these diaries, which I found excellent in a very specific way, Michael Palin tells us about his life between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. At the start of this period, he was about to become a hugely successful presenter of travel programmes. Ten years later, he was wondering if this was, in fact, what he wanted to be. ‘Should I accept that this is what I’m best suited for?’, he writes. Or should he try to do something else, like be an ‘arts presenter’ or a novelist? His own verdict: ‘I don’t know.’ Palin is obviously a man of great qualities. For instance, he’s almost always an optimist, but never a bore. He’s clever, he’s charming, he has good taste. But he has something else, too, and he has this thing in such abundance that it’s become the main quality he’s known for.

The hell of being Michael Palin

Thursday

4 Sep 2014
William Leith

A book about human nature that makes your head spin – in a good way

Vincent Deary is a therapist, and this book is the first part of a trilogy. How We Are is about human nature. Books two and three will be called How We Break and How We Mend. Three serious tomes, backed by a serious publisher. You open it thinking: this is not going to be an easy self-help book where everything is mapped out for you. It won’t be a walk in the park. In fact, pretty much the first thing Deary does is to examine the concept of walking in a park. ‘“A walk in the park” is a synonym for ease,’ he tells us, ‘because the park knows how to walk.’ In other words, when you enter a park, you don’t have to make any decisions, because the park has already made them for you. The paths are marked out. All you have to do is follow them.

A book about human nature that makes your head spin – in a good way

Thursday

26 Jun 2014
William Leith

Having a moral compass just gets in the way of being smart

Steven D. Levitt was a Harvard economist who specialised in politics and spent a lot of time watching cop shows on TV. Then he had an idea: why not switch from politics, which he found dull, to crime? Soon he was studying the crack cocaine economy. Stephen J. Dubner was the guitarist in a rock band called the Right Profile. But he didn’t like the rock’n’roll lifestyle; he was a bookish type. So he became a journalist, got a job at the New York Times, and found himself interviewing a go-ahead Harvard economist who had written interesting stuff on the crack cocaine economy, among many other fascinating things. This, of course, was Levitt. Dubner made a suggestion: why not write a book together, based on Levitt’s work? The result was the bestseller Freakonomics, and its sequel, Superfreakonomics.

Having a moral compass just gets in the way of being smart

Thursday

20 Mar 2014
William Leith

The thrill of cutting into a human brain

In the first sentence of the first chapter of this book, Henry Marsh, a consultant brain surgeon, says, ‘I often cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing.’ What a compelling start! Marsh takes us through an operation. First, he looks at a scan. A middle-aged man has a tumour of the pineal gland, which means a very tricky operation. Brain surgeons, says Marsh, look at pineal tumours ‘with both fear and excitement, like mountaineers looking up at a great peak they hope to climb’. And with this, he sets the tone for the book, which is excellent. For Marsh, brain surgery is terrifying, but also addictive. You become obsessed. Cutting people’s heads open, it turns out, really does your head in. On the positive side, the fear and the self-doubt usually fall away once the operation has begun.

The thrill of cutting into a human brain

Thursday

6 Feb 2014
William Leith

Why you shouldn’t keep elephants

On 15 September 1885, the world’s most famous elephant, Jumbo, was killed by a train. Jumbo, the star attraction at P.T. Barnum’s travelling circus, was crossing the track at a station in Ontario, Canada. His handler, Matthew Scott, saw the danger. But ‘the elephant, fatally confused, trumpeted wildly and ran towards the oncoming train’. The force of the locomotive crushed Jumbo’s skull and drove one of his tusks ‘back into his brain’. But was this really an accident, or had Barnum, or Scott, or both, committed  elephanticide? When the engine hit him, Jumbo was dead within minutes. A bull African elephant is no match for a freight train. But if, for whatever reason, you needed to kill an elephant in 1885, there would be no better way than to engineer a train accident.

Why you shouldn’t keep elephants

Thursday

21 Nov 2013
William Leith

Why worship Prince Philip?

In this travelogue, Matthew Baylis, the novelist and TV critic and former Eastenders screenwriter, goes to Tanna, a Melanesian island, where, he believes, the locals worship Prince Philip. This sounds weird — to worship a man from far away, who knows little about them, about whose life they weave complex myths. But then again, some Melanesian people worship Christ, and yet others follow an American who might or might not have existed and who might or might not have been called John Frum. Baylis sets out to investigate. Prince Philip, he says, has interested him since he was a boy. Growing up in Southport, near Liverpool, the 11-year-old Baylis was aware of Philip’s visit to Salford university in 1982 and one of his reviled gaffes.

Why worship Prince Philip?

Thursday

10 Oct 2013
William Leith

Clumsy and heavy, Goliath never stood a chance

When we think of David and Goliath, we think of a young man, not very big, who has a fight with a terrifying opponent, and wins. We think of David as puny and Goliath as towering and strong — not to mention heavily armed. We see David’s victory as something that happened against all odds. The story of David and Goliath is, as Malcolm Gladwell puts it, ‘a metaphor for improbable victory’. Well, that’s how we think about it, anyway. But the thing is, apparently, we’ve got it all wrong. Gladwell, one of the most influential non-fiction writers in the world, often asks his reader to take a closer look at things. In The Tipping Point, his subject was epidemics. If you study epidemics, he showed us, you can gain insight into lots of other things — like, say, the American Revolution, or the behaviour of consumers.

Clumsy and heavy, Goliath never stood a chance

Thursday

18 Jul 2013
William Leith

Sane New World, by Ruby Wax - a review

Ruby Wax, who is best known as a comedian, dedicates this book ‘to my mind, which at one point left town’. She says: ‘I am one of the one in four who has mentally unravelled.’ She tells us what it’s like to fall apart, why she thinks so many people fall apart, and what you can do if you start to fall apart yourself. ‘The feeling is that of being a corpse,’ she says. It happens because our brains are not adapted to live in the relentless global village we’ve created. And: ‘YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND AND HOW YOU THINK.’ More on this last bit later. It takes courage for a rich, famous person to write about depression; most people, depressed or not, can’t imagine feeling like a living corpse if you have a big house in London and a car waiting to take you to a TV studio for your latest performance.

Thursday

13 Jun 2013
William Leith

Consolations of the Forest, by Sylvain Tesson - review

In this book, the French writer Sylvain Tesson spends six months, mostly alone, in a log cabin in Siberia. ‘Cold, silence and solitude are conditions that tomorrow will be more valuable than gold,’ he tells us. So, Tesson grabs these things while they are still relatively cheap. He is, you might say, a modern-day Whitman with the soul of a speculator. He escapes into discomfort, and finds it bracing and thought-provoking. In the end he’s quite sad to leave. But you never get the impression he wants to stay for ever. He packs vodka, cigars and ten boxes of painkillers to deal with his hangovers. He also takes along a mini-library — Tournier, Lawrence, Camus, Sade, Casanova, Mishima. Uh-oh. Required reading for the young man in crisis, you think.

Consolations of the Forest, by Sylvain Tesson - review

Thursday

16 May 2013
William Leith

The Society of Timid Souls, by Polly Morland - review

In this book about courage, Polly Morland talks to lots of people who should know what it is. She talks to soldiers, surfers, a matador, firefighters and professional daredevils. She interviews a man who fixes the upper sections of skyscrapers, and is afraid of heights. She meets people who have been diagnosed with terminal diseases. She quizzes a former armed robber. It’s well worth reading. Morland is slightly more humanistic than scientific; she wonders what courage is, without being absolutely determined to come up with a definition. I started the book thinking that courage is the ability to do something you think is right, even when you’re scared. It means not wavering from your core beliefs, or feelings, when things get difficult or dangerous.

The Society of Timid Souls, by Polly Morland - review

Thursday

21 Feb 2013
William Leith

Destroying angel in the ether

A few years ago, James Lasdun wrote The Horned Man, a novel about Laurence Miller, an English lecturer in an American college who descends into paranoia. At first, he thinks someone is tampering with things in his office, and making calls from his phone. Then he thinks his colleagues are spying on him, and, perhaps worse, that they think he is spying on them. He worries that someone might think he is trying to plagiarise their work; that people can read his lascivious thoughts; that, whatever he says or does, he is leaving a damning trail of evidence against himself. Meanwhile, he is part of a sinister academic committee devoted to policing the behaviour of others. It’s chilling and very convincing; Lasdun is making a good point about the difference between the private and the public worlds, and about how the relationship between them is changing.

Thursday

6 Dec 2012
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