All about those flaming flowers that brightly blaze. The Sunflowers Are Mine by Martin Bailey

Did you get the lyric reference?  I really hope so.  If you did, I like you, you are my type of people.

In a once-in-a-blue-moon serendipitous alignment of my reading progress and actual worldly events, I finished my most recent NetGalley request on the 30th of March – Vincent van Gogh’s birthday.

If you weren’t already aware – and why would you, this is a pokey little blog on an empty corner of the internet – I am something of a Vincent fan.  In fact I’ve made an entire video all about the books, films, and tear jerking Doctor Who episode I think everyone should look up if they’re interested in that dear Dutchman.

 

I make no apologies for my enthusiasm or amateurishness.

So, you can imagine my dorky little delight when I found out a few days prior a new exhibition opened at the Tate Britain Van Gogh and Britain.

The exhibition brings together the largest collection of Van Gogh paintings to the UK for nearly a decade, including some of his most famous works like Starry Night on the Rhône and, on loan from the National Gallery, Sunflowers.

It’s on until August the 11th, all the prices and times are listed in the link above.  I am already forwarding it to friends and family in the hopes I can convinced them to trade a peaceful evening for a walk around a gallery while I chew their ear off about Van Gogh.

Now, speaking of sunflowers…

The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh’s Masterpiece by Martin Bailey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh’s Masterpiece by Martin Bailey, a re-edition of the 2013 book of the same name, takes Vincent van Gogh’s iconic flower and examines, the hows, whos, and wheres of those famous paintings.

The book is comprised of essentially two halves. The first examines how Van Gogh came to choose the sunflower, his influences, Van Gogh’s situation when he painted each of the seven canvases. The second half follows the story of each painting once they left the easel, both their own adventures through galleries and wars, and as a wider look at their influence on modern art.

As I would expect from someone who has written several books on Van Gogh, Bailey’s investigation of the sunflower still-lifes is thorough, enlightening, and clearly painstakingly researched. I did find the tail-end of the second half a little dry, the story behind a painting petered out to a perfunctory description but I can’t hold that against the author; only so much can be written about a painting that has sat peacefully in a gallery or on someone’s wall for years. Otherwise the text is very readable, whether you have a casual interest in Van Gogh or are an art history student. I have read quite a bit about Van Gogh already and even I found myself learning something new. For example, I was not aware of the painting Five Sunflowers existed, let alone had been destroyed in Japan in 1945 during an air raid. Fortunately it was photographed in colour in 1921, and is featured in this book, in all the jewel-like intensity emblematic of Van Gogh, making it the first time it has been reproduced outside of Japan.

The reproduced pictures are almost worth buying the book alone. Vincent’s paintings are printed in marvellous, glossy and vivid detail. Even though they are digital reproductions you really get to share the sense of all those 1880s gallery goers shocked out of a pastel stupor. With pictures to reference to a reader can clearly see where Van Gogh influenced others, or where he found inspiration, as well as a visual context to contemporary art movement. There are also brilliant, fascinating photographs where possible. There was one in particular that stood out; a photograph of the artist’s nephew, Vincent Willem ‘the Engineer’ van Gogh, from 1973 at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. An elderly man in a black and white photograph but it immediately reminded me Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1887 Portrait of Vincent van Gogh. It completely struck me, seeing an actual person – not a painting – that was only one generational step away from such a key figure in modern art.

Martin Bailey has written a wonderful exploration of Vincent van Gogh and some of the most famous sunflowers in history. An informative read and utterly beautiful, I think it would be suitable either as an introduction to Vincent’s life or as part of a deeper study, and highly recommend The Sunflowers Are Mine.

Maybe pick it up from the Tate Britain gift shop on your way out of the exhibit

~

I received my copy through NetGalley in exchange for a review, all opinions my  own etc etc

Like my reviews? You can read all of them, and more, over at my blog!

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Yes, yes I am including a gratuitous Doctor Who gif

Take me back to Titanic. Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage by Hugh Brewster

We’re only a fortnight away from April and I’ve already read three books about the Titanic. Don’t worry, I won’t put you through three posts.  Two of the three have been passenger accounts, The Loss of the Titanic by Lawrence Beesley, and Women of the Titanic Disaster by Sylvia Caldwell, both second class passengers who survived the disaster.  While I have opinions on them as pieces of literature, it doesn’t feel quite right to review them.  After all they are personal accounts of one of the world’s worst maritime disasters and biggest losses of life at sea before the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945.

My journey with Titanic began long before James Cameron convinced Hollywood to build him replica in Mexico*.  The Titanic is a favourite topic of my father’s, our staircase is a mini exhibit of paintings, a reproduction of the ship’s bell, an airfix model that I glance at every time I leave my bedroom, and I know there is more to the collection in the loft.  Unsurprisingly the interest passed on to me.  Apart from getting to see the ship intact (for which I’m very thankful to the team behind Titanic: Honor and Glory), I have never wanted to be on the Titanic, I have never wanted to know how I would react to being on a sinking ship.  I have, however, never felt satisfied with just knowing the details of the sinking, I have always been more interested in the people on board.  Who were they, where had they come from, why were they going to America, did they live, did they lose anyone in the sinking, how did they survive?    Enter on the port bow, Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage, by Hugh Brewster.

Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster

Much has been written about the sinking of the Titanic and everyone knows the stories, the band playing to the very end, the lack of lifeboats, the freezing water, and so on. In Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World, author Hugh Brewster draws on twenty-five years of experience with the Titanic to explore the lives and times of the ship’s first-class passengers. There are the most famous names of the Titanic story, like Molly Brown and J.J. Astor, and some more unfamiliar, like Frank Millet, all illustrating just what a microcosm of Edwardian society was on board.

Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage can be roughly divided into three; first-class passengers boarding at Cherbourg with biographies of passengers either as they appear in the Titanic story, or in relation to a subject of life on board, such as segueing from ladies evening wear to Lucile Lady Duff Gordon’s life. Up until the collision when the focus is turned to the experience of previously mentioned passengers during the sinking; using both survivor accounts and a certain amount of expert conjecture to piece together the last moments of those who didn’t make it to a lifeboat. Then lastly it deals with the aftermath with short epilogues to the passenger’s stories, what they did with their lives after the sinking, when they died.

It is an incredibly detailed book, exploring histories and lives of passengers that even some ardent Titanic enthusiasts may find themselves learning something new. I certainly did, although having a lifelong curiosity of the Titanic I had barely heard of Archie Butt, Francis Millet and W.T Stead, and certainly not in connection to the ship, and I very much appreciate not having to read over the same quartet of Astor, Strauss, Guggenheim, and Ismay. That is something this book has in spades, evidence that there’s more to the Titanic than the glimpsed details in James Cameron’s movie. However, if you are new to the topic, perhaps have only seen the 1997 film, I don’t think any of the information within will be lost on you. Brewster writes in a style that is accessible, unsurprising perhaps considering he has written middle-grade books also on the Titanic, and can easily be dipped in and out of, or read in long sittings.

I recommend it with a warning, however. If you want a step-by-step guide to daily life on the Titanic as a first-class passenger a la The World of Downton Abbey you might want to stick with Julian Fellowes and A Night to Remember, though I would suggest that book if you’re interested in the Titanic regardless. That’s not to say there is no detail about the voyage, only that I found much of it was used to link one paragraph and another, one passenger and another. In some places the wealth of detail can be difficult to parse through. Biographies of highlighted passengers can be a little drawn out and tangent away, describing the lives of a passenger’s siblings, or a murder one was associated with but not a witness to. If I’m honest there were times when I forgot which passenger was connected to the sentence I was reading. To a degree I wonder if that was caused by the book’s structure, it felt as though Brewster (or his editor…) couldn’t decide whether chapters should be divided by the progress of the voyage, or if each chapter should focus on one passenger in particular.

While a part of me was a little frustrated with the digressions, having finished the book I can see how even the most distantly related person or event was tied to the voyage of the Titanic. It gives an impressive insight to the context of the disaster, both historically and at a more general society level. Teddy Roosevelt’s military aide shared the same deck space with a chairman of the White Star Line; Madeleine Astor, a teen bride to one of the richest men in the world, walked down the iconic grand staircase at the same time as women, such as Lucile Lady Duff Gordon and Edith Rosenbaum/Russell, who were using fashion to assert their independence and agency six years before the Women’s Suffrage would make headline news. Yes, perhaps an opportunity was missed to show the glamour of the Gilded Age; how it was concentrated in one ship whose voyage would signal not only the end of the golden age of transatlantic liners but of Gilded Age itself before it would be shattered by World War One. But, I think the title must be kept in mind, Gilded Lives, not Gilded Voyage. If you are interested in the Edwardian world, in the world of the Titanic’s passengers, then do pick up this book.

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*  Yes, yes, Titanic is my favourite film, sue me, I’m a dumb romantic, Kate Winslet is pretty, and it was the perfect fusion of the Titanic story and 90s lipstick.  And did you know you can see mountains in the background of the famous ‘flying’ scene in the non-remastered edit of the film?

Great Women, Greater Voices. So Here I Am by Anna Russell.

It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent. —Madeleine Albright

It’s Women’s History Month in the UK right now, I don’t know if that applies internationally but either way it’s a good time to think about the voices that have been lost to history.  Were they just ignored and failed to be written down?  Were they actively suppressed because of their sex, their gender identity, their race, or their sexuality?  In most cases it would be both, let’s be honest.  Even the Bronte sisters submitted their works under male pseudonyms, works that went on to define Gothic fiction, just in case the mere suggestion of *gasp* the feminine would have their manuscripts ignored as scrap.

In fact there’s a brilliant lecture by Mary Beard on the topic of women’s public voices, “Oh Do Shut Up Dear”, and here’s a link to a transcript and audio version.  If women of the past found getting published hard, getting a spot on a stage or behind a microphone was worse.  So how fortunate is it that I just finished “So Here I Am: Speeches by Great Women to Empower and Inspire” by Anna Russell.

 

So Here I Am: Speeches by great women to empower and inspire by Anna Russell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So here we are, 2019. We know the suffragettes, we know jokes about 70’s feminists burning their bras, and when asked to quote a woman we could probably rattle out “Ain’t I a Woman?” even though Sojourner Truth* never said it. Not exactly a great legacy for 150 so years worth of women’s activism, right?

So Here I Am: Speeches by Great Women to Empower and Inspire by Anna Russell aims to equal the balance. Drawing together some of the defining speeches by notable women of the last two centuries, touching on topics from gender equality, to race, LGBT+, civil and human rights, war, and science.

There is an obvious comparison to be made with Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and I would recommend So Here I Am as a companion for it on your bookshelf. The language is a little denser, so maybe have it on your shelf, not the kids’, but it does follow a very similar structure. Each entry includes a short biography of the speaker with some context of their speech, in e-book this was about a page worth, followed by an illustration (done by Camila Pinheiro) and an extracted version of the speech, again about an e-book’s page worth of text.

Going into it I admit I was worried it might be a little ‘white feminism’s greatest hits’, but Russell’s choices for this compilation give a great view of the scope of women’s activism, both in terms of diversity and their causes. Yes, there are the ‘big names’ like Michelle Obama, and J.K. Rowling, but there are also women you may have heard of but not known why they were influential, and others, like Wangari Maathai, that may be entirely new. In particular Victoria Woodull’s speech struck me for it’s relevancy. Her speech concerned ‘free love’, for contemporaries that meant that a relationship, particularly marriage, be easily dissolved, that the law should not get in the way of love. Even in that vaguest of summary I assume you can see the echoes of the equal marriage debate ongoing still.

The collection also diversifies as it follows a timeline of activism; it might start with Emmeline Pankhurst and Elizabeth I, but it goes on to include women such as Alicia Garza, Asmaa Mahfouz, Wilma Mankiller, and Sylvia Riveria. Further to that, in lieu of an epilogue there is a ‘More Women to Inspire’, encouraging the reader onto discover more women who fought for their cause but due to book space, or rights issues, didn’t get an individual mention.

My only grievance is that where the speeches were excerpted, it sometimes felt as though they’d been edited down a bit too much. I know this may be the fault of various estates/licences/etc only allowing so much to be quoted but some of the speeches still felt sapped. A speech is inspiring not for some choice lines that can be easily quoted, or turned into snippets for the news; the power it builds in the body of the speech, the winding up, before delivering a proverbial knock-out punch. I know, I know, most if not all the included speeches can be found in-full online, and that this book is much more something to dip into for inspiration, or as an appetite wetter; but sometimes the cutting was too exacting and a speech seemed like reading the notes prepped for a Women’s Studies written exam.

So Here I Am: Speeches by Great Women to Empower and Inspire by Anna Russell is a fantastic compilation of outspoken women, and is a wonderful salve if you’ve ever rolled your eyes after seeing the same twenty men, and the same twenty speeches listed ‘the greatest speeches in history’. Whether you have only just found a cause to champion or are a veteran, whether you want to know more female voices or just want some oratorical badasses on standby to empower you, I would heartily recommend making room on your bookshelf for this.

*The speech was transcribed twelve years after the fact, by Frances Gage who wrote Truth as having a southern slave dialect even though she was a lifelong New Yorker. Thankfully the version included in this book is from Truth’s friend, Marius Robinson, which better demonstrates Truth’s articulation.

 

I received my copy through NetGalley in exchange for a review, all opinions my own, etc etc

 

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Waste a couple of days in Glen Cove with cosy fiction. A Country Gift Shop Collection, by Vivian Conroy,

A Country Gift Shop Collection by Vivian Conroy

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Bringing together all three of Vivian Conroy’s Country Gift Shop cosy mysteries, A Country Gift Shop Collection offers fun, easy reads, perfect to cosy up with by the fire or by the pool.

In the one bundle are; Dead to Begin With, sees Vicky Simmons return to her childhood home of Glen Cove, Maine, to open her own gift shop with a British twist, only for a twenty year old murder mystery to resurface and turn simple shop owner into sleuth. In Grand Prize: Murder!, a cosy crime writer is in town but how will Vicky cope when life becomes deadlier than fiction? Then lastly, Written into the Grave, Vicky reads a grisly instalment in the local newspaper serial at breakfast and before lunch there are police cars at the cliffs just as the story predicted.

Conroy captures suspense with the best of them, and the mysteries are quite good and well thought-out. They’re not so difficult that you feel cheated when the killer is revealed (side point: I did find it a bit odd that a town with a low crime rate suddenly had three consecutive murders immediately following Vicky’s arrival), but not so obvious that you get bored three chapters in because you’ve already worked the mystery out. They compare well with the Agatha Raisin series by M.C. Beaton, and if you like those you will definitely like these.

Conroy also has an obvious talent for location descriptions, however, sometimes I found she indulged a little and that could distract from the story. For example, mid mystery, not shortly after a heated exchange with the town sheriff, our attention is directed instead to how soaps are packaged at the gift shop. Such info would have made sense at the beginning of the story, establishing the calm before the storm so to speak, but it did mess up the pace a little. Same with the characters, even Vicky meandered a little – one minute suggesting that the sheriff treat a suspect with more caution, only for the next chapter to open with her appealing for compassion.

Of course there are bits that are slightly cheesy but these are cosy mysteries, if there wasn’t a bit of melodrama I would think I’d picked up the wrong book!

I admit, these books probably weren’t for me (with that in mind take my rating with a large pinch of salt), and I admit, perhaps that was because I read all three one after another and may have reached – and crossed – my own upper limit for the genre. Regardless, if you like your cosy mysteries sweet and fun, A Country Gift Shop Collection is well worth treating yourself to, perfect for holiday reading or sneaking a chapter or two over the weekend.


A Country Gift Shop Collection is published by HQ Digital, and available for Kindle and Kobo.

I received my copy through NetGalley in exchange for a review, all opinions my own etc etc…

Like my reviews? You can read all of them, and more, over at my blog!  
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If you enjoy my writing, want to see more, or enjoy being randomly generous, you can leave a tip in my ko-fi jar.

Victorian True Crime and not a single Ripper in sight. The Lady in the Cellar by Sinclair McKay

Victorian London is almost synonymous with murder thanks to the infamous Ripper murders.  However, our image of such a place is often in the din and squalor of the slum boroughs, the middle and upper class districts are the preserve of Mary Poppins and A Christmas Carol in our public consciousness.  Grizzly murders never happen here, don’t they?

In The Lady in the Cellar, Sinclair McKay takes readers on a guided tour of the world surrounding 4, Euston Square where the body of an elderly woman was discovered, mostly decomposed, in the coal cellar of Severin and Mary Bastendorff’s boarding house.  McKay documents both the discovery and trial of the crime, but also the fallout for the suspects involved.  Not only a briefing of a tangled criminal case, McKay builds a detailed history of those involved, whether recreating the journey of an idealistic country born housemaid with music hall stars in her eyes, or the challenges faced being an immigrant in the bedlam of in one of the biggest and busiest cities in the world.

Written in prose it is fairly easy read, however, around halfway where McKay more or less transcribes and paraphrases court transcripts, and pamphlets the pace does lull to a drag as descriptions give way to ‘he said, she said’.  The book was at its greatest strength when McKay’s attention was given the freedom to examine the details that were not included in court or police reports.  For fans of true crime that prefer their books to have a single minded focus on the crime it may feel like a detour, or tangent, to explore the tense between wives and maids, or the social hierarchy in boarding houses; but for me it provided vital context and a view in to an alien time period.

Unlike many true crime books McKay does not linger on his own theories, rather the reader is directed to the actions and circumstances of those involved in the years that followed the trial.  The information is laid out for us to draw our own conclusions without dramatic suppositions.  There are gaps, for which I assume is the fault of time, and the reaction of press and public who were more interested the macabre details of the body, and suggestions of sexual scandal.  As such, I think it was appropriate for McKay not to throw theories around, and add to any sense of morbid exploitation of a woman’s death.  Perhaps that would bother you, not to have a concrete answer but that’s never stifled interest in the Ripper case, now has it?

Yet I feel something was missing, like McKay was asked to trim his word count by several thousand words.  As the book stands it’s a fantastic glimpse in to the Victorian world, and McKay’s descriptive prowess is remarkable.  I would heartily recommend this to any one interested in the Victorian period as it is more than just a ‘whodunit’, and fans of historical true crime alike.

 

Full disclosure: I received an advanced copy through NetGalley for free in exchange a review.  All opinions are my own, content of the final product may vary.

All Souls and Pumpkins

How are we all? Gotten used to the days being short and the afternoons barely existing? Not that I mind, I love this part of the year where it’s just a little too cold to be Autumn anymore but it’s not quite winter yet.

Okay, okay, some of that might be because there’s also Halloween and my birthday (I was 28 by the way).

Did you have a good Halloween?  Fed up with the sound of bells faintly jingling in the distance ominously?  Me too, that’s why I made Soul Cakes!

We all know Halloween stands for ‘All Hallows’ Eve’, right?  If not, go google it, enlighten yourself.  November 1st is ‘All Hallows’ Day’, or All Saints’ – Hallows being an old word for saints – and November 2nd is ‘All Souls Day’.  Traditionally (i.e. the UK before the reformation, puritans, and the civil war) all three days were celebrated as a way to commemorate the dead and the saints.  I would assume in typical Christian re-branding fashion the part involving saints was tacked on to a preexisting pagan holiday.

Halloween took all the attention for itself and we were cheated out of cake.  Delicious, delicious cake.

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A soul! A soul! A soul-cake! Please good Missis, a soul-cake! It's All Souls' Day, have all the soul cakes 🤤 #AllSoulsDay #SoulsDay #AllSouls #AllSoulsCake #SoulsCake #Baking

A post shared by Laura (@lauradftba) on Nov 2, 2018 at 11:09am PDT

These little buggers are called Soul Cakes, and they are the tasty lovechild of scones and hot-cross buns.

On All Souls they would be handed out, possibly creating the basis for Trick-Or-Treating, and for every cake eaten a soul would escape purgatory.

This is the recipe I used but tweaked it a little, using half plain flour and half self-raising flour for slightly fluffier cakes.  If you can’t find currants I assume dried raisins will do, and I have absolutely no idea how to translate this in to cups.  Buy some scales.

Something to tie us over until Bonfire Night and compulsory birthday cake, and blockade early November from being swallowed up by Christmas promotions.

Speaking of baking, did you know that if you save the parts of the pumpkin that are removed while carving* you can puree them and make a good looking pumpkin bread?  Just leave out the water from the recipe, though maybe keep a closer eye on the baking time than I did…

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Puuuumpkin breeaaad! First try, looks good (ignoring the patch that caught in the oven), fingers crossed the taste is right🤞 #pumpkinbread #baking

A post shared by Laura (@lauradftba) on Nov 7, 2018 at 10:04am PST

Review of The Lady in the Cellar coming next week(ish), before I share a new NetGalley title with you.

 

 

 

 

*don’t use the body of the pumpkin after a candle’s been in it, fumes get in to the flesh and that is not good to eat

New Book! The Lady in the Cellar, by Sinclair McKay

Okay, okay, I admit, I picked this based on the cover.  It’s almost Halloween, I can’t be blamed for wanting a couple of Gothic thrills.  Plus, I’ve been playing a lot of Sunless Sea; throw me a book set in Victorian London with a murder mystery in a part of London that isn’t f__ing White Chapel, and I’m yours for the week.  Or how ever long it will take me to read it…

The Lady in the Cellar: Murder, Scandal, and Insanity in Victorian Bloomsbury.  

 

A corpse found in a coal cellar, written in prose like a good documentary, from the same author as The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, potentially upturning some presumptions about the Victorian middle class?  Add in some dramatic motives and you’ve basically got fives items to put in a pentagram to summon me.

It’s already available on Kindle and Harcover, I got mine through NetGalley – aren’t I lucky.  Because what would autumn be without a Gothic true tale of murder most mysterious.

 

Follow the link to get your copy of The Lady in the Cellar by Sinclair McKay.

We like Hive.co.uk.  Hive pay their taxes.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Noah Yuval Harari.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Having examined humanity’s past in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and questioned its potential in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari returns to the present in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century to explore some of the challenges facing our immediate future. Through a collection of essays, Harari breaks life down in to I – Technology, how our relationship with technology could affect our future, II – Political, the need to draw political stories away from old habits like nationalism, III – Despair and Hope, old and new enemies like War and Terrorism, IV – Truth, our means of examining our present, and V – Resilience, what we have in us to not let the century down.

However, if you are coming to this expecting it to be a The 48 Laws of Power style manual for navigating the 21st Century, you will be disappointed. As stated in the introduction of the book, this is much more for prompting discussion than offering solutions. Think ‘lesson’ as in Socratic Method, debating over definition, rather than a school lesson teaching exam answers.

Harari offers incisive, thought provoking opinions on the challenges that may face us in the next one hundred years. The topics up for discussion are worthy of entire books themselves so there were points were I felt ideas were glossed over, Harari indulging his notion of a biotech dependant future at the neglect of discussing the potential social, economic, or perhaps martial consequences of Climate Change. That isn’t to say the shorter essay-chapters were not interesting; his thoughts on Terrorism, how the relative safety of the modern world made an echo chamber for, statistically, the minor threat of being caught in a terrorist attack, this was a point I found the most engaging. The discussion whether our current education system is still appropriate too was a subject I wanted him to explore further. I also found these the most relevant since it could apply to next week, not in ten or fifty years’ time like some of Harari’s other suppositions.

Harari stated his aim was to promote discussion, if I walked away from each reading session continuing the discussion in my head then he certainly accomplished that. Though to meet this goal you do need to step away from the book intermittently. Every essay-chapter would end with a question that neatly segued in to the next topic. A very handy structure for an editor, but for the reader looking for some kind of conclusion, or place to reflect it was obstructive. If this were a conversation Harari would be talking over your response because he thought of another point to add.

This was the key weakness for me. His tone felt condescending, not just in pace but in the treatment. Smartphones, and social media couldn’t be mentioned without a whiff of superiority, not wholly dissimilar from the attitude some journalists hold towards ‘millennials’. When it came to his opinions on religion the cynicism verged on patronising. I couldn’t find the beats of humour, or empathy, Harari misses the James Randi charm. If you can’t explain something without sounding superior, maybe rethink the wording.

I found this highlighted in the controversial final chapter. Minor spoiler, the last essay-chapter is on the benefits of meditation. Harari presents the opinion, based on his experience, that prioritising the development of mindfulness as skill through meditation may help humanity face the problems of the 21st century. In both standalone essay-chapters, and as supporting statements Harari points to religion as one of the most decisive and destructive influences on humanity’s progress; the dependence on myth and reinforced tribalism keeping us from forging a coexistent future. Only to turn and recommend Vipassana, a Buddhist meditation technique, as salve. While I recognise that meditative thought is not unique to Buddhists or religion in general, you cannot cherry pick the practice of Vipassana and ignore its religious origins. It felt appropriative and hypocritical, ‘No, no, you monks can’t meditate since you mix it up with God, I on the other hand can because I’m an atheist’, all too close to the kind of intellectual supremacy that gets waved around by online trolls, and cosmopolitan yuppies.

It was like Harari, rushed for an ending as his editor’s deadline loomed, scrambled for the nearest thing to a cohesive conclusive. Then in the acknowledgements Harari mentions that his publisher came up with the idea for the book. Red flags ahoy. One of the largest essay-chapters is on the future of our relationship with technology and data. Given the extent of research Harari must have done for Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow it makes sense that this would be something of a specialist subject for him. However, on the topic of Climate Change, easily one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century, Harari is rather brief. An important topic but also a complex problem which requires plenty of reading. Reading that would have been difficult to finish in time if writing on a short deadline. There were references to writing the book in early 2018, this might have just been a bit of date editing for the sake of relevance, but if it’s true, for a September 2018 release that’s a very quick turnaround for a writer – even if Harari was adapting previously released articles. That would also account for why there’s such a difference between Harari’s aim in the introduction, and the marketing approach.

I was torn how to rate this, my opinion falls somewhere near 2.5. I might not be one of the converted preaching it as revelatory but I’m not going to tell you it’s not worth reading. It prompts introspection and for us to assess the narratives at work in our own lives, a critical thinking skill rapidly growing. Harari raised some insightful points and left me thinking about his opinions for days, yet I’m not able to see past the feeling that this was rushed, or that I could hear the echo of a thousand 4chan users sneering ‘sheeple’.

Full disclosure: I received a digital copy through NetGalley in exchange for a review. The opinions are all my own. The content of my copy may not reflect that of the final product.

View all my reviews

 

P.S.

WordPress bonus, I requested this book because Tom Hiddleston quote Harari in an interview.  Yes, I know, sounds ridiculous but can you see how that would make it disappointing when the authors tone sounds rude?

Dawn French should definitely adopt me.

TSUNDOKU – Japanese -the practice of buying a pile of books & then not getting round to reading them… pic.twitter.com/GluQS37W7E

— Dawn French (@Dawn_French) 23 August 2018

Welcome, welcome, kettle’s just boiled, shoes off by the door, ta!

So, here we are!

If you follow me on twitter you’ll know why I’ve made the move but let’s get the rest of you caught up.

Previously (and it will remain as something of an archive) I ran a tumblr blog under the same name, thecurvybookcase.  Sometime between September last year and this May, Tumblr marked that blog as explicit, entirely without any notification or reasoning – no idea whether it was reported by another user, if something I posted or re-blogged had been deemed explicit, or if it was just the work of an overzealous algorithm.

What did this mean for the blog?  No one would be able to see it unless they were signed in to Tumblr and had ‘safe mode’ turned off, it would be hidden from searches on the site, and it would be hidden from search engine results on the wider web.  Pretty much everything a host site could do to prevent a blog gaining any traffic.

Given that it’s been almost month since I appealed the status I highly doubt Tumblr staff will respond so I’m cutting my losses and moving to WordPress!

While I’m still getting used to the site any feedback on layout would be super, SUPER appreciated – I want to know how easy you find it to look at (if you’re dyslexic please tell me which fonts are best for you!), to navigate, what’s missing, gimme all your opinions.

In the meantime, go ahead and follow me on any of my social media accounts, stay tuned for actual content.