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Dec. 14th, 2009 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hnpccOver three quarters of my flist this morning is book reviews. So I thought I'd join the trend.
For various reasons (OK, ease of access in the library mostly and that the pensioners keep borrowing the crime novels I want to read) a lot of what I've been reading recently has been either travel or non-fiction. So, a couple of reviews of books I've read in the last 6 or so months. Not all of them because that would take too long.
My Columbian Death, by Matthew Thompson.
Most travel books are either about the journey - either the actual, physical journey; the metaphorical journey of the person on the road; or a combination of both - or the place. This book? Was bizarre. I think half the problem was that I didn't like Matthew Thompson. This was probably because he admitted fairly early on that the entire trip was a bit of a mid-life crisis for him, brought on by having worked in the same, not hugely high-adrenalin job at a Sydney newspaper for a couple of years and by his wife being pregnant with their first child. In order to quell the cravings for adventure he decided (with her consent admittedly) to leave her after the child was born for a couple of months and go hang out in Columbia and put himself in stupidly dangerous situations he couldn't control - wanting to talk to guerrillas and advertising this loudly in the marketplace for example, participating in a bullfight for another - culminating in a couple of months of coke-bingeing and finally taking a shaman-supervised drug trip in which he 'died'. This was all in aid of (as another blog commenter put it) "The quest for the edge - wanting to know life and death". Seriously, he couldn't have jumped out of a plane wearing a parachute someone else had packed? Now that is putting yourself in a dangerous situation you can't control. Part of the problem for me was that I'd read The Gringo Trail by Mark Mann a couple of months earlier, and Dangerous Places edited by Robert Young Pelham before that so I had a bit of an idea that (a) there was a thriving if somewhat drug-fuelled backpacker scene going on in Columbia - which he hung out with for part of the book - and (b) an idea of just how ignorantly and stupidly dangerous some of the crap he was doing in Columbia actually was. OK, the most recent Dangerous Places edition I've read is from 2003 and yes, things do change in that time - but if most of the Columbians you meet are warning you off something, maybe you should listen?
I don't know. It came across to me as a pretty self-indulgent exercise with not a huge amount of redeeming value in either the personal or the travel journeys, and the information about the place wasn't well done either. (And I'm amazed his wife took him back, because I'd have been in a couple of minds about that myself.) It was one of the few travel books that I seriously contemplated not finishing, not least because I was so pissed off at the author and bored to death with his self-absorption. I wouldn't recommend it, the last thing I want is for people to either emulate him or for him to get the idea it's a good thing to do and go off and do another book. Then again, he did claim at the end of the book that his cravings were quelled, so yay for that at least. Here's hoping his wife leaves him for three months with a toddler and goes off to find herself instead.
On the other hand China Cuckoo - how I lost a fortune and found a life in China by Mark Kitto was highly entertaining and fairly informative. Mark Kitto was working in the publishing business in China until he fell foul of local authorities and was forced out. The book manages to cover some of the perils of doing business in China (something that Stern Hu could probably also write a book about when/if he is released) but is infused with a love of China and its people that I wasn't actually expecting from the back cover. Kitto moved his family to Moganshan, an area which the colonial powers had used as a get away from the Shanghai summer heat until the end of WW2, and the book goes through some of that colonial history together with Chinese modern history and his own personal business history. If I ever manage to get to China I'd love to go there and check it out.
My life as a traitor by Zarah Ghahramani and Robert Hillman also graphically illustrates what can happen if you fall foul of a totalitarian regime. Zarah Ghahramani was a 20 year old upper-middle-class and fairly naive student who was involved with the 2001 student protests in Tehran. She was snatched off the street and vanished into Evin Prison in Tehran. Once there she was interrogated, beaten and abused. Her family had no idea what had happened to her, she just vanished one day and no one would give them answers. It was a difficult book to read, not least because it left you wondering about the others who were snatched at the same time - or during the more recent protests - but were either judged as being more guilty or who didn't have the connections that finally enabled her release. (Actually, from having read both this, and other novels about Iran I can probably work that out, much as I don't want to. *sigh*)
(So Matthew Thompson, you want a non-controllable situation to put yourself in? Go and protest in Iran. Or Copenhagen. Or the US. Bullshit artist. Meh.)
In Turkey I am beautiful: from carpet selling to shepherding, an Australian's chaotic adventures, by Brendan Shanahan.
OK, quick aside - what is it with books having these enormously long titles these days? Why does everything need to have an extra bit after the initial title? Don't they know how difficult this makes it to type? Is it just because there's so many similarly titled books out there? I'm curious.
Anyway, I enjoyed this book. This is definitely more a place travel book - there is some journey (particularly to eastern Turkey and the ANZAC mecca of Gallipoli), but most of it centres around a carpet selling shop in Istanbul which the author got to know very well on previous trips and which he was actually left in charge of for a few months while the owner had to leave for some business trips. (That was actually one of the funniest parts of the book. There is an art to carpet selling, and the author didn't have very much of it.) Parts of Turkish history are well covered, but it's the relationships between the owner of the carpet shop, his employees and his former employee/friend who appears to have returned to drug addiction that make up the core story.
Napoleon in Egypt by Paul Strathern was a great read. I really didn't know much about that period of history, but he describes the French, English, Ottoman and Egyptian sides of things beautifully. The complete lack of comprehension between the the invading French and the local Egyptian cultures is well illustrated - one incident in which the French asked the locally installed authorities to deal with the prostitutes who were trawling the barracks and then were shocked at the women being executed and dumped in the Nile stands out, as does the reaction of scholars from al-Azar university on being invited to the library the French scholars had brought with them. Strathern describes it as being similar to what early European scholars would have felt upon being invited into Alexandria library in its prime. It helps of course that there are written original sources for all sides (a local Egyptian scholar living in Cairo wrote most scathingly about the French and about what was happening before, during and after the French occupation). The cultural gap between the French/English and the Ottoman forces also stands out - the English may have had a tenuous alliance with the Ottoman empire for the purposes of ousting the French, but on the battlefield the French and English fought to mutually understood European rules (stopping to allow the wounded to be picked up, aiding the enemy wounded etc), while the Ottoman forces fought to completely different rules (e.g. slaughtering and pillaging the enemy wounded). In that context Napoleon's massacre of captured prisoners near Acre (I think, don't have book handy to check) made perfect sense to the Ottoman forces but was completely shocking to the English and his own forces (many of whom expressed this sentiment in journals and letters). A really interesting look at the early career of Napoleon and of the middle east at that time.
Between the Devil and the deep blue sky: domesticity, danger and deadlines - confessions of a foreign correspondent in Iraq by Gina Wilkinson was back to the middle east, but obviously in a different location and far more recent. Gina Wilkinson first went to Baghdad as the wife of a UNICEF worker in the year before the Iraq invasion and then returned as the ABC (Australian) foreign correspondent in the year after the invasion. The descriptions of the changes in Baghdad and Iraq between those two times and of the dangers and tension of both living in a war zone and trying to keep up with the never-ending news cycle back home are fascinating, and confirmed for me that I would never be able to do that job, not least because of the level of undermining that was going on at the ABC at the time. In the end though, it's the Iraqis you feel most for - the description of filming a story about mine clearing in a playground is funny (mostly for the frustration of the Australian mine clearing unit), but less so when you think about the further implications. The compromises that people made to live under Saddam and the effect of the regime on lives is also explored a lot - I found it interesting that even some years after the invasion and after Saddam was executed some Iraqis still couldn't bring themselves to use his name, referring to him only as 'he' just in case it all came crashing back to what they knew as reality again. No point exposing yourself and your family to danger unnecessarily I suppose. I looked up the webpage for the book afterwards and followed the further stories of some of the individuals mentioned. The story of Gina's 'Iraqi sister' is still the one that stands out the most for me - what lengths would you go to to survive in a regime like Saddam Hussein's?
Wilkinson was also involved in a scandal as brought up by Media Watch during her time there. She goes into this in the book, and into both how and why it happened and the effect on her. It's another reason why I don't think I could ever do her job.
Finally, a work of fiction. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon was one of the best things I've read. Both very funny and extremely sad, it follows the lives of Josef Kavalier, refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and Sam Clay, his cousin in New York and their friendship and partnership in creating and drawing comic strips from 1939 to the late 1950s. Definitely recommended, and yes,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
astrocave, I will give it back soon - I'm just finishing re-reading it.
For various reasons (OK, ease of access in the library mostly and that the pensioners keep borrowing the crime novels I want to read) a lot of what I've been reading recently has been either travel or non-fiction. So, a couple of reviews of books I've read in the last 6 or so months. Not all of them because that would take too long.
My Columbian Death, by Matthew Thompson.
Most travel books are either about the journey - either the actual, physical journey; the metaphorical journey of the person on the road; or a combination of both - or the place. This book? Was bizarre. I think half the problem was that I didn't like Matthew Thompson. This was probably because he admitted fairly early on that the entire trip was a bit of a mid-life crisis for him, brought on by having worked in the same, not hugely high-adrenalin job at a Sydney newspaper for a couple of years and by his wife being pregnant with their first child. In order to quell the cravings for adventure he decided (with her consent admittedly) to leave her after the child was born for a couple of months and go hang out in Columbia and put himself in stupidly dangerous situations he couldn't control - wanting to talk to guerrillas and advertising this loudly in the marketplace for example, participating in a bullfight for another - culminating in a couple of months of coke-bingeing and finally taking a shaman-supervised drug trip in which he 'died'. This was all in aid of (as another blog commenter put it) "The quest for the edge - wanting to know life and death". Seriously, he couldn't have jumped out of a plane wearing a parachute someone else had packed? Now that is putting yourself in a dangerous situation you can't control. Part of the problem for me was that I'd read The Gringo Trail by Mark Mann a couple of months earlier, and Dangerous Places edited by Robert Young Pelham before that so I had a bit of an idea that (a) there was a thriving if somewhat drug-fuelled backpacker scene going on in Columbia - which he hung out with for part of the book - and (b) an idea of just how ignorantly and stupidly dangerous some of the crap he was doing in Columbia actually was. OK, the most recent Dangerous Places edition I've read is from 2003 and yes, things do change in that time - but if most of the Columbians you meet are warning you off something, maybe you should listen?
I don't know. It came across to me as a pretty self-indulgent exercise with not a huge amount of redeeming value in either the personal or the travel journeys, and the information about the place wasn't well done either. (And I'm amazed his wife took him back, because I'd have been in a couple of minds about that myself.) It was one of the few travel books that I seriously contemplated not finishing, not least because I was so pissed off at the author and bored to death with his self-absorption. I wouldn't recommend it, the last thing I want is for people to either emulate him or for him to get the idea it's a good thing to do and go off and do another book. Then again, he did claim at the end of the book that his cravings were quelled, so yay for that at least. Here's hoping his wife leaves him for three months with a toddler and goes off to find herself instead.
On the other hand China Cuckoo - how I lost a fortune and found a life in China by Mark Kitto was highly entertaining and fairly informative. Mark Kitto was working in the publishing business in China until he fell foul of local authorities and was forced out. The book manages to cover some of the perils of doing business in China (something that Stern Hu could probably also write a book about when/if he is released) but is infused with a love of China and its people that I wasn't actually expecting from the back cover. Kitto moved his family to Moganshan, an area which the colonial powers had used as a get away from the Shanghai summer heat until the end of WW2, and the book goes through some of that colonial history together with Chinese modern history and his own personal business history. If I ever manage to get to China I'd love to go there and check it out.
My life as a traitor by Zarah Ghahramani and Robert Hillman also graphically illustrates what can happen if you fall foul of a totalitarian regime. Zarah Ghahramani was a 20 year old upper-middle-class and fairly naive student who was involved with the 2001 student protests in Tehran. She was snatched off the street and vanished into Evin Prison in Tehran. Once there she was interrogated, beaten and abused. Her family had no idea what had happened to her, she just vanished one day and no one would give them answers. It was a difficult book to read, not least because it left you wondering about the others who were snatched at the same time - or during the more recent protests - but were either judged as being more guilty or who didn't have the connections that finally enabled her release. (Actually, from having read both this, and other novels about Iran I can probably work that out, much as I don't want to. *sigh*)
(So Matthew Thompson, you want a non-controllable situation to put yourself in? Go and protest in Iran. Or Copenhagen. Or the US. Bullshit artist. Meh.)
In Turkey I am beautiful: from carpet selling to shepherding, an Australian's chaotic adventures, by Brendan Shanahan.
OK, quick aside - what is it with books having these enormously long titles these days? Why does everything need to have an extra bit after the initial title? Don't they know how difficult this makes it to type? Is it just because there's so many similarly titled books out there? I'm curious.
Anyway, I enjoyed this book. This is definitely more a place travel book - there is some journey (particularly to eastern Turkey and the ANZAC mecca of Gallipoli), but most of it centres around a carpet selling shop in Istanbul which the author got to know very well on previous trips and which he was actually left in charge of for a few months while the owner had to leave for some business trips. (That was actually one of the funniest parts of the book. There is an art to carpet selling, and the author didn't have very much of it.) Parts of Turkish history are well covered, but it's the relationships between the owner of the carpet shop, his employees and his former employee/friend who appears to have returned to drug addiction that make up the core story.
Napoleon in Egypt by Paul Strathern was a great read. I really didn't know much about that period of history, but he describes the French, English, Ottoman and Egyptian sides of things beautifully. The complete lack of comprehension between the the invading French and the local Egyptian cultures is well illustrated - one incident in which the French asked the locally installed authorities to deal with the prostitutes who were trawling the barracks and then were shocked at the women being executed and dumped in the Nile stands out, as does the reaction of scholars from al-Azar university on being invited to the library the French scholars had brought with them. Strathern describes it as being similar to what early European scholars would have felt upon being invited into Alexandria library in its prime. It helps of course that there are written original sources for all sides (a local Egyptian scholar living in Cairo wrote most scathingly about the French and about what was happening before, during and after the French occupation). The cultural gap between the French/English and the Ottoman forces also stands out - the English may have had a tenuous alliance with the Ottoman empire for the purposes of ousting the French, but on the battlefield the French and English fought to mutually understood European rules (stopping to allow the wounded to be picked up, aiding the enemy wounded etc), while the Ottoman forces fought to completely different rules (e.g. slaughtering and pillaging the enemy wounded). In that context Napoleon's massacre of captured prisoners near Acre (I think, don't have book handy to check) made perfect sense to the Ottoman forces but was completely shocking to the English and his own forces (many of whom expressed this sentiment in journals and letters). A really interesting look at the early career of Napoleon and of the middle east at that time.
Between the Devil and the deep blue sky: domesticity, danger and deadlines - confessions of a foreign correspondent in Iraq by Gina Wilkinson was back to the middle east, but obviously in a different location and far more recent. Gina Wilkinson first went to Baghdad as the wife of a UNICEF worker in the year before the Iraq invasion and then returned as the ABC (Australian) foreign correspondent in the year after the invasion. The descriptions of the changes in Baghdad and Iraq between those two times and of the dangers and tension of both living in a war zone and trying to keep up with the never-ending news cycle back home are fascinating, and confirmed for me that I would never be able to do that job, not least because of the level of undermining that was going on at the ABC at the time. In the end though, it's the Iraqis you feel most for - the description of filming a story about mine clearing in a playground is funny (mostly for the frustration of the Australian mine clearing unit), but less so when you think about the further implications. The compromises that people made to live under Saddam and the effect of the regime on lives is also explored a lot - I found it interesting that even some years after the invasion and after Saddam was executed some Iraqis still couldn't bring themselves to use his name, referring to him only as 'he' just in case it all came crashing back to what they knew as reality again. No point exposing yourself and your family to danger unnecessarily I suppose. I looked up the webpage for the book afterwards and followed the further stories of some of the individuals mentioned. The story of Gina's 'Iraqi sister' is still the one that stands out the most for me - what lengths would you go to to survive in a regime like Saddam Hussein's?
Wilkinson was also involved in a scandal as brought up by Media Watch during her time there. She goes into this in the book, and into both how and why it happened and the effect on her. It's another reason why I don't think I could ever do her job.
Finally, a work of fiction. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon was one of the best things I've read. Both very funny and extremely sad, it follows the lives of Josef Kavalier, refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and Sam Clay, his cousin in New York and their friendship and partnership in creating and drawing comic strips from 1939 to the late 1950s. Definitely recommended, and yes,
astrocave, I will give it back soon - I'm just finishing re-reading it.
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Sheesh,
Date: 2009-12-17 01:08 pm (UTC)Don't know that I'd be able to continue reading mr selfish mid life crisis. Wife gave permission eh? Wonder why?
We read Nicky Cambell's autobiography about adoption, (he's a DJ & daytime Tv J Springer wannabe) in my reading group a few months ago.
Book starts with him in bed with his mistress. I hadn't realised I was so easily offended!
Re: Sheesh,
Date: 2009-12-17 11:14 pm (UTC)Heh, there's a few murder mysteries and other stuff in the middle.
Don't know that I'd be able to continue reading mr selfish mid life crisis.
I had to stop myself throwing it across the room at times ("library book. library book!") and I finally just wanted to see if his wife kicked him out or not. It's weird though, reading reviews online there's quite a lot of people who loved it - I'm wondering if it is an age thing, seeing as most of them seem to be in their early-mid 20s and I'm older and possibly seeing it from a seriously different perspective.
I hadn't realised I was so easily offended!
Heh, it's funny how that goes!