Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Dalibor Rohac

Going ethnic

Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, has been keenly interested in food for years. Besides being a blogger, scholar and the youngest chess champion in the history of New Jersey, he is also the author of an online dining guide to the Washington DC area and an opinionated foodie. This is a delightful book that will broaden horizons to people uninitiated to the economic way of thinking. Cowen’s fans will enjoy it too — although some of the arguments will be second nature to followers of his blog, MarginalRevolution.com. It answers the question of why American food got so bad over the course of the 20th

Andrew Lambirth

A fine and private painter

Prunella Clough was a modest and self-effacing artist who nevertheless produced some of the most consistently original and innovative British art of the second half of the 20th century. She was by no means reclusive, enjoying an extensive social and teaching life, but she deliberately kept a low profile, being famously guarded with biographical details. So much so, that a couple of young artists I knew in the mid-1980s were convinced that Clough was already dead, though she continued to paint and exhibit sporadically until her death in 1999. How refreshing this is in an age of seemingly unbounded artistic egos, when relentless self-obsession has to make up for lack

Molly Guinness

The attraction of repulsion

Take some boiled maize, chew it, spit it out, put the mixture into an urn, bury it, dig it up several days later, and Bob’s your uncle: the Ecuadoran delicacy chicha. It turns out that ‘controlled rot tastes good’; the particular rot you favour will depend on where you come from. In Sardinia casu marzu is highly prized: it’s sheep’s cheese crawling with maggots. Reading Rachel Herz’s book, it’s astonishing what people enjoy, even before you get to the section on Japanese pornography. Herz knows whereof she speaks: she has acted as nose judge in the annual National Rotten Sneakers Contest, where finalists aged six to 16 vie for the

Robert Chandler

Searching for a saviour

The central themes of Russian history have remained constant for over a millennium.  Russia’s vast spaces and lack of any natural borders have always made her inhabitants terrified of invasion. And to protect the country against invaders, and to preserve its unity, Russia’s rulers seem always to have felt it necessary to assert their authority with great brutality. All this is at least hinted at in the very first introduction to Russian history. The Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kiev around 1113, tells us that there was no law among [the Slavs], but tribe rose against tribe…  Accordingly they …  said to the people of Rus [who were probably Scandinavians]: ‘Our

Graham Stewart

Special providence …

When Ed Smith became a full-time professional cricketer for Kent in 1999 the county side was preparing for the new millennium by shedding anything that smacked of old-fashioned amateurism. Professionalism was to be a state of mind. Players were henceforth required to sign up to a new code of conduct. This Core Covenant consisted mainly of a succession of abstract nouns, though it also proclaimed its faith in the transformative power of setting targets by requiring a ‘pledge’ from all players that they would take at least 50 extra catches during every practice session. What was more, it took personal responsibility to a higher level by abolishing bad luck as

Sophia Waugh

… in the fall of a sparrow

Set in Romania in the 1950s, this is the story of two people, Augustin and Safta, who are both very different and yet very closely linked. Safta is the daughter of the big house, while Augustin is the deaf mute illegitimate son of the cook. Safta’s mother, high-minded, overly religious since the death of a baby, disappointed in her marriage, takes Augustin into the schoolroom until it becomes clear that while the boy has an impressive artistic talent he can learn nothing, and so he is returned to the stables. War comes, the house is dismantled, Safta, mourning her lost love, leaves the countryside and becomes a nurse and Augustin

Jonathan Mirsky

Pawns in the game

The authors of this book have attempted a difficult thing: to ‘write about something that could never be known’. Here is a terrific and scary story about a group of American, British and European trekkers kidnapped by jihadists in Kashmir in July 1995 and slaughtered in December. Their wives were allowed to go free, and one of the men escaped. Another was decapitated. Four were reportedly, but only reportedly, shot dead. At the book’s core, the authors remark, ‘is an event that only one person survived’. The original purpose of the kidnap was to force the Indian government to free a number of prisoners, principally Masood Azhara, a key crony

William Leith

A gruesome sort

Everybody knows that the heart pumps blood around the body, and that a man called William Harvey somehow discovered this fact. Before Harvey, people thought that blood moved around the body in a sluggish fashion. But then Harvey — who was born 14 years after Shakespeare — noticed that, actually, blood shoots out of the heart with great force, travels through the arteries, and then makes its way back to the heart through the veins. To find this out, in an age before X-rays, sonograms or heart monitors, you would, if you think about it, have had to be a pretty gruesome sort of person. As soon as I started

James Walton

To thine own self be true

Azazeel comes to Britain as the winner of the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, inevitably known as the ‘Arabic Booker’. It’s also been both a source of controversy and an unexpected popular hit in Youssef Ziedan’s homeland. According to the translator’s afterword, within months of publication, ‘piles of the novel appeared on the pavements of Cairo, alongside the self-help manuals, political memoirs and Teach Yourself English books that are the staple of the Egyptian popular book market.’   The action takes place — and this is the controversial bit — during the relatively brief period when Egypt was a Christian country. By the early 5th century, the temples to

Ian Thomson

Speeding along the highway

Back in the Sixties, if you wanted a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, you might have called on Mrs Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, where she lived as a beatifically attuned Buddhist adept until her death in 2007. Aldous Huxley, her husband, had emigrated to America 70 years earlier in search of spiritual solace and the ‘benediction’ offered by psychotropic drugs. Evelyn Waugh was not alone in thinking that the States had driven Huxley dotty. Jim Morrison, the psychedelic Frank Sinatra, named his California band The Doors after Huxley’s crackpot hymn to the mescaline experience, The Doors of Perception. Tim Lott’s sixth novel, Under the Same Stars, dilates entertainingly on British

Anne Chisholm

What was it all for?

What happens to a novelist who becomes the conscience of a nation? Nadine Gordimer, who is now 89 and whose writing career began in the 1940s, has represented the progressive white intelligentsia of South Africa through a large corpus of fiction and essays, exploring personal and political morality with passionate lucidity through the apartheid years and beyond. She has long been internationally admired, winning the Booker Prize with The Conservationist in 1974 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. This latest book, a study of the troubled state of her nation after apartheid, is outspoken and unflinching. Her courage and her moral stature are unquestionable; but as this novel

Friday

The Spectator

Interview: Mark Pagel and the origin of the species

In his new book, Wired for Culture, Mark Pagel — a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Reading — argues that social structures and culture are vital components in human evolution. Human beings are altruistic, helpful, and cooperative in ways that other mammals are not. Pagel says our facility for culture is the key to our success as a species. Without a propensity for culture, the traits that make us stand above other mammals — in Darwinian terms — such as: consciousness, language and intelligence, would not exist. He spoke to The Spectator about the idea of “the self” as an illusion, how most human behaviour is a

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Potter power

Voldemort was second division as an adversary; Amazon was Harry Potter’s most implacable foe. But the bespectacled wizard has seen off the virtual giant. The major books story this week is the arrival of official eBook editions of the Harry Potter novels. But these books are not for sale through Amazon’s e-commerce system (or Barnes and Noble’s and Waterstones’). Click on any Amazon link to the Potter eBooks and this message will appear: ‘Harry Potter Kindle books can be purchased at JK Rowling’s Pottermore Shop, a third-party site. Clicking on “Buy at Pottermore” will take you to Pottermore Shop, where you will need to create a separate account. Like all

Thursday

David Boyle

The dangerous history of allotments

There are now thought to be about six million people interested in having an allotment, with waiting lists as long as 40 years in one London borough.  There have also been huge numbers of words written trying to explain their revival.   Perhaps the real question is why they ever went away, given the success of the Dig for Victory campaign in the Second World War, one of the most successful attempts to galvanise the public into action.    There were 1.4m allotments by 1943, by which time over a million tons of vegetables a year were being grown in gardens, parks and waste land.  There were radio programmes (3.5

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: In praise of paperbacks

Lately, I have been giving rather a lot of thought to the humble paperback. I say humble, for this is a format with no pretensions of grandeur, no fancy binding, no place-keeping ribbon, no dust-protecting jacket that can be slipped on and off as you will. I have always been told that modesty is a good thing, yet I worry that it is the paperback’s quiet humility that has so endangered it. Everyone in the book world seems to agree that the rise of eBooks is at the cost of paperbacks. Towards the end of last year, Victoria Barnsley, C.E.O of HarperCollins, said that for paperback fiction, ‘the market this

Wednesday

The Spectator

Shelf Life: Mike Skinner

Perhaps one of the best things to come out of Birmingham, Mike Skinner, mastermind behind The Streets, lets us know what he’s reading in this week’s Shelf Life. He reveals an interest in 20th Century history, what he once managed to get 10,000 people to do and a fondness for Philip Marlowe’s bon mots. His memoirs The Story of the Streets are out now. He tweets @skinnermike.  1) What are you reading at the moment?  All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Both in their different ways incredibly well researched. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?  I

Stewart King

21st century demons

Dr Gregory L Reece’s fascinating book, Creatures of the Night, is an enjoyably macabre stroll through the misty swamps of folklore where myth and religion are intertwined. Why do we create monsters and why is there such a desire and appetite for the darker side of the human soul? Whereas one reader may dismiss the concept of lycanthropes or vampires the point of Reece’s exhaustively researched study is to highlight how that same reader may partly or wholly accept the concept of ghosts or demons.  Why would one fantastical concept seem more acceptable than another? Can we scoff at Arthur Conan Doyle for believing in the existence of fairies when

David Blackburn

Go west… middle aged man

The march of David Mitchell continues. The author of Cloud Atlas and other acclaimed novels has won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s E.M. Forster Award, worth a princely $20,000. The prize is intended to assist a ‘young writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland for a stay in the United States.’ Every little helps, but Mitchell (43) is hardly a ‘young writer’ whose horizons are limited to the British Isles. He is international; an author who has lived in Japan and written about the country and the history of its relationship with Europeans. Mitchell is commercially successful. Cloud Atlas was a global bestseller, and it has been adapted for

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Great literary feuds: Updike vs Wolfe

Everywhere one goes these days, people are talking about John Updike. Death, it seems, concentrates the mind. Updike died more than 2 years ago, but he is the talk of the town. His name crops up at book launches and at literary events around London, usually accompanied by words like ‘genius’ or ‘under-appreciated’. That last word is strange. You might imagine that Updike sold novels in bulk, bought by the Main Street masses of whom he wrote. But Updike sold quite modestly in his lifetime — Couples was a major commercial success, earning him a place on the cover of Time in April 1968, but beyond that he struggled to crack the

Samantha Kuok-Leese

North Korea’s darkest secret

There are concentration camps in North Korea. We can see them clearly, via high-resolution satellite images on Google Earth. There are six of them, according to South Korean intelligence, and the largest is bigger than the city of Los Angeles. Of the six, four camps are ‘complete control districts’ where ‘irredeemable’ prisoners are worked to death in gruesome conditions, under threat of starvation, torture and public execution. While inside, they are shut off from the rest of the world so totally that those born within the high voltage barbed-wire perimeter are unaware even of who Kim Jong Il was.  The other two camps have ‘re-education zones’, from which ‘loyal’ prisoners