December 2014 – Page 2 – Scott's Book Review

Germany: Memories of a Nation

Dr. Neil MacGregor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_MacGregor and http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/management/directors/neil_macgregor.aspx and ), http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jan/02/neil-macgregor-british-museum-history Director of the British Museum, offers this sumptuous history of Germany through objects and art. Whilst Germany’s past is too often seen through the prism of the two World Wars, this book investigates a wider six hundred-year-old history of the nation through its objects. It examines the key moments that […]

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Modernity Britain: 1957-1962

PAST PRESENT - What's new in History

This appealed to me because it deals with the 5 years immediately preceding my birth. What was going on as I lay ‘mewling and puking’, uncomprehending of the world around? David Kynaston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kynaston) offers this whopping 880 page social history to set the scene. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period in their own right: neither

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The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

This is a big, powerful, compelling and illuminating novel set in West Bengal in the late 1960s from Neel Mukherjee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neel_Mukherjee_(writer) and http://www.neelmukherjee.com/). The book explores power, oppression and rebellion both in the household of the Ghosh family and the society that surrounds it. From its unforgettable and shocking opening to its thought-provoking conclusion, it’s

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Once Upon a Time by Marina Warner

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

Distinguished academic Marina Warner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Warner and http://www.marinawarner.com/home.html) offers a short history and analysis of the fairy tale. I was alerted to this by the Guardian review (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/once-upon-a-time-a-short-history-of-fairy-tale-marina-warner) which turned out to be a splendid summary. What is a fairy tale? Where do they come from and what do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us

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Mr Weston’s Good Wine by T.F. Powys

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

Mr. Weston’s Good Wine (1927) by Theodore Francis Powys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.F._Powys) is a strange and delightful book. The story and the style are unfathomably simple. Accompanied by an assistant called Gabriel, a woolly-haired wine-seller drives into a small Dorset town called Folly Down. Time stops, and the sign on the battered van appears in the sky. Some

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The Establishment by Owen Jones

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

Have you ever been mildly irritated that there is a class of people in this country who simply can’t lose? More likely you’re boiling with rage at the fact. Casino Capitalists in the City of London can’t lose. When times are good they’re trousering fortunes. When times are bad, the tax payer bails them out.

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How to be both by Ali Smith

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

Ali Smith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Smith) was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Like (1997), Hotel World (2001), Other Stories and Other Stories (1999), The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003), The Accidental (2005), Girl Meets Boy (2007) and The First Person and Other Stories (2008), There but for the (2011).

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Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

Jenny Offill’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Offill and http://jennyoffill.com/) slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments, observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and

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On Immunity

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

In this spellbinding blend of memoir, science journalism and literary criticism, Eula Biss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eula_Biss and http://eulabiss.net/) unpacks what the fear of vaccines tells us about larger anxieties involving purity, contamination and interdependency. Deeply researched and anchored in Biss’s own experiences as a new mother, this ferociously intelligent book is itself an inoculation against bad science and superstition,

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The Sixth Extinction

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Elizabeth Kolbert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Kolbert and http://elizabethkolbert.com/) reports from the front lines of the violent collision between human civilization and our planet’s ecosystem — from the Great Barrier Reef to her own backyard — in this, her third, book. Traveling to some of the world’s remotest corners, she examines how man-made climate change threatens to eliminate 20 to 50

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Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life

LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Fitzgerald ) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower (first published 1995), was acclaimed as a work

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The Good Life

CRIMINALLY MINDED - Tales of the behaviourally challenged, FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

Martina Cole (http://www.martinacole.co.uk/) was born and brought up in Essex. She is the bestselling author of fourteen novels set in London’s gangland, and her most recent three paperbacks have gone straight to No. 1 in the Sunday Times on first publication. Total sales of Martina’s novels stand at over eight million copies. The summary of her

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Opening a Mountain by Steven Heine

SPIRIT MATTERS - Reaching for the Divine

With the growing popularity of Zen Buddhism in the West, virtually everyone knows, or thinks they know, what a koan is: a brief and baffling question or statement that cannot be solved by the logical mind and which, after sustained concentration, can lead to sudden enlightenment. But the truth about koans is both simpler—and more

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

Are you looking for a Christmas present in the form of a book? Here is one that almost anyone could enjoy – The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It’s January 1946. London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject.

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The Arrival of the Fittest by Andreas Wagner

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

The power of Darwin’s theory of natural selection is beyond doubt, explaining how useful adaptations are preserved over generations. But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded him: how those adaptations arise in the first place. Can random mutations over a mere 3.8 billion years solely be responsible for wings, eyeballs, knees, photosynthesis, and the rest

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