BOOK REVIEW: A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson and The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour

I started reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything a couple of years ago, and soon found myself hopelessly bogged down. More enticing books beckoned, and I put it aside.

Similarly, it’s taken me at least a few months to get through David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy.

It’s not that these books are not interesting, because they are absolutely chockers with fascinating facts and interesting information. Between the two of them, I feel like I’ve absorbed a fairly large amount of knowledge. No, after a lot of thought, I’ve concluded that  the real problem is the lack of structure and narrative.

Both books start out with vague goals – it’s doesn’t come much more indefinite than a history of “nearly everything,” and you can’t get much more ambitious than attempting to nail down a whole country. Of the two, Bryson’s structure is more consistent throughout the book. Each chapter deals with a specific discipline and its history, such as geology, astronomy, and physics. David Gilmour on the other hand starts out by describing various aspects of contemporary Italy (which was utterly absorbing) and then jumps backwards and goes through the history of Italy in chronological order. His book picks up again towards the end, but the middle section dealing with events in the various kingdoms prior to unification is something of a hard slog. Of course, this may just reflect the fact that this was not a particularly interesting period of time (at least for non-Italians),

Because of the broad subject matter they are attempting to cover, these books don’t tend to go into deep analysis of their subject, although David Gilmour does make an effort in this direction towards the end. Both authors write well, with an informal tone that engages the reader. Bryson in particular has become so well know n that he could get away with a much lesser book, but I was impressed by the amount of research that he put in in order to explain difficult concepts in plain language. It must have been a monumental undertaking. David Gilmour’s book is similarly well-researched and unlike Bryson the author is familiar enough with his field to offer his own insights on some of the sources he cites.

I ended up taking these two books to the beach. They are not everyone’s definition of a beach read, but it turned out that they were perfect for the disjoined nature of summer reading. I would read a chapter, have a swim, come back and pick up where I left off. To extrapolate out, I think these books are best tackled in small chunks – to read from beginning to end is to ask for fact fatigue, when all the information starts to blur into a monotonous whole. These books deserve better than that, and if you make the effort they are truly rewarding reads.

BOOK REVIEW: Manhattan Dreaming by Anita Heiss

There are books that are good for you like all-bran or brussel sprouts, and there are books that are the mental equivalent of junk food – tasty, devoured in a flash, but vaguely unsatisfying (hello, Dan Brown).

In Manhattan Dreaming, Anita Heiss tries to have a foot in both camps by creating chick-lit with a message. Serious points about Aboriginal rights are disguised inside a frothy story about finding love in New York.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if the disguise was actually convincing. I wanted to overlook the constant moralising, because I liked this book a lot. But every few pages Heiss would pour a metaphorical bucket of cold water on the story by having her characters make a serious point about indigenous rights and racial equality in general. Perhaps people do have these earnest conversations in real life (although I have my doubts) but frankly I can do without being lectured when reading fiction.

So apart from the morality issue, what was my view on the book? I read it on a plane, and found it to be perfect plane reading. The characters were well-developed, and I didn’t end up wanting to shake the main character while yelling “get over it!” (always a good sign). The story was engaging, predictable to a point but not simplistic. I think Heiss has real potential as a writer.

But oh, those morals. I like the idea of an aboriginal woman in New York – the setup would have worked fine on its own to gently get the point across. But Heiss feels the need to add paragraphs like this:

“We have the same discussions back home,” I told him. “What constitutes “Aboriginal Art” and who is an “Aboriginal Artist”? It’s complex and takes the focus away from the art itself, which is problematic.”

Or, have you ever heard anyone, whatever their race, say “I hate being the exotic ‘other’?” As a line of dialogue it comes straight from a thesis and it shows.

I don’t believe that Heiss should leave the Aboriginal perspective out of her books, and I’ll admit that I learned some things about Aboriginal culture while reading Manhattan Dreaming. However, I do think that she needs to avoid lecturing readers. If her goal is putting forward Aboriginal and Indigenous perspectives, in the long run subtlety is likely to be more effective.

The verdict? I’m happy for my chick-lit to come with a message, but I don’t like to be hit over the head with it. Heiss may be a Adjunct Associate Professor but she should save the lectures for the classroom.

BOOK REVIEW: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

For a book that is subtitled “The story of success”, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers contains one strange omission. Nowhere in the book does he define or discuss the concept of success. The closest he comes is his comment that outliers are “men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary.” He discusses geniuses, business tycoons, rock stars, and software programmers, without ever identifying why he considers them to be successful. In most cases they have built a successful business and made lots of money – but isn’t there more to the concept of success than that?

After a lot of consideration, I’ve come to the conclusion that the book fundamentally reflects a male point of view and a go-out-and-conquer-the-world mentality. Most women in contrast would consider success to be a more holistic concept. I think we can all agree Bill Gates is a successful man, but would we still consider him “a success” if he had a dysfunctional family life and a drug addiction? In other words, by Gladwell’s standards, Charlie Sheen would arguably be up there as a success story.

This bias also flavours the rest of the book. Gladwell’s thesis is that environment is the fundamental predictor of success, much more so than innate talent. He claims that as a general rule, 10,000 hours of practice at something are required to become successful at it, although again it’s not clear what success is likely to mean in this context (does this get you to worlds-best standard or country-best, or only best in your city?) I don’t argue with the claim that practice makes perfect, or even that practice is more important than innate talent. However I do think that this criteria also explains why all Gladwell’s examples are men. Women’s lives are often a balancing act as they try to manage various responsibilities. Success for us is often getting through the day without dropping any of the balls we are constantly juggling. Dedicating 10,000 hours to something is often simply out of the question. If Gladwell is correct, perhaps this explains why there are not more women at the top levels of business.

To summarise, I think that Gladwell has both failed to define success but at the same time defined it too narrowly. Or perhaps the real question is whether the word “success” is the appropriate one. I enjoyed reading this book – it’s extremely well written and interesting – but upon finishing it I felt somewhat disappointed. I accept Gladwell’s conclusions as far as they go, as a model of the factors that create one type of “success,” but I think he has failed to realise the limitations of the questions he is asking. In particular, half the population seems to have been excluded from the analysis. If Gladwell couldn’t find any examples of successful women to interview, I would suggest there is a flaw with his definition of success, and the fact that the definition is never explicit to begin with only compounds the error.

So judging him by his own standards: Gladwell’s book has sold a lot of copies, therefore he’s a success. By the standards of academic rigour and gender equality however, if not a fail, I’d mark this book “can do better.”

BOOK REVIEW: Murder in the Bastille by Cara Black

 For a writer, crime novels come with their own particular challenges. As well as the usual aspects of characterisation, narrative voice, and plot, there is the additional task of posing and answering the question “whodunit?” The writer must provide enough information to give the reader a fair chance to solve the mystery, yet hide the essential clues in plain sight.  It’s the literary version of the magician’s sleight of hand – the trick is to get the audience focussing on the flimflam so that they miss what is going on elsewhere. It’s only when the magician reveals how the trick was done that we cry “Of course! The butler did it!”

I’ve been thinking about the art of the crime novel while reading Murder in the Bastille by Cara Black. This is the second novel of Black’s that I have read, and both have left me feeling unsatisfied. I’m not sure Black manages to balance giving the reader enough information, but not too much. With both novels, I turned to the final chapter thinking not “Of course!” but “Where did that come from?” It’s not a fatal flaw, particularly in the private detective genre, but it did spoil to some extent an otherwise enjoyable book.

There is plenty to enjoy in Murder in the Bastille. Lovers of Paris should put this book at the top of their reading lists – Black lingers over the descriptions of its alleys and passages, squares and quartiers. Most of the time she succeeds in evoking a sense of the layers of history in the city, although more impatient readers may find the level of detail irritating. Despite this, Black maintains a good pace and keeps the plot moving along.

The book opens with private detective Aimée Leduc being attacked in a passage in the Bastille area of Paris. The police believe she was the latest victim of the serial killer known as the “Beast of Bastille,” but Aimée and her partner René have their doubts. Their search for the attacker unfolds against a backdrop of conflict between conservationists and developers over the future of the Bastille area, while Aimée and René delve deeper into its past in search of the killer.

Aimée and René are both likable, and their relationship believable. Black avoids cliché and delivers well-rounded characters, police officers and villains included. Of course, the main character is Paris itself. From an armchair travel perspective, Murder in the Bastille is truly excellent. Here’s hoping that in later books, the whodunit lives up to the setting.

BOOK REVIEW: Open by Andre Agassi

I picked up Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open, with a number of preconceptions. I was expecting the usual drive-to-succeed, how-I-found redemption motifs of the sporting memoir, seasoned with a hint of scandal. After all, this is Andre Agassi we are talking about – the enfant terrible of tennis who fell in love with the Hollywood lifestyle and spiralled into drugs and scandal, only to work his way back to the top, fall in love, and re-emerge as one of the elder statesmen of the sport. I might have picked up the book, but I thought I knew how this story went  already.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Agassi spent his career being drawn by the media as a caricature of himself. This book is his chance to finally present the whole story, and he does so with brutal honesty. A childhood dominated by a tyrannical father features prominently, and is one of the most memorable parts of the book. In a real sense, Agassi’s father shaped both his tennis game and his personality, and Agassi seems to have been searching ever since for a separate identity. There is a wistfulness and a paradox at the heart of the book – Agassi desperately wants to know what kind of a person he would have been without his father’s influence, but accepts that he will never find out.

Agassi’s love-hate relationship with tennis is also a central theme of the book. Dropping out of school and turning pro at seventeen, he never had a chance to explore other career options. For a while, he stubbornly maintains that he hates tennis, but eventually the media pressure becomes too much and he starts to give them what they want, lines about how much he loves the game. But while Agassi never comes to love the game in the pure sense, it does give him a great deal of satisfaction over the years. More importantly, by earning money it enables him to help others. The Agassi who dropped out of school discovers through others the value of education and it is genuinely moving to watch him try to create for others the opportunities that he was denied.

While the book is well-written enough, it’s not the prose that I will remember. Rather it is the sense that Agassi mined his soul for the book and laid himself bare on the page. I started the book thinking that I knew who Andre Agassi was; in the course of it I discovered I was wrong and I didn’t know him at all. It’s the rediscovery that takes place on reading the book that is the real revelation. You discover a man who has always been more of a thinker than a doer, who has struggled to free himself from his past and only partly succeeded, and who has made his peace with that. At the end of the day, you can only respect his courage and hope that his life post-tennis continues to give him the happiness that was missing in his early life.

BOOK REVIEW: The God of the Hive by Laurie R. King

Sherlock Holmes has had a strange afterlife in fiction since Arthur Conan Doyle put away his pen. Most readers will have heard the famous story of how the public wouldn’t let Conan Doyle kill his most celebrated creation; judging by the number of fictional tributes it seems Holmes’ popularity is undiminished even today.  A number of these fall into the ‘novelty’ category (Holmes re-animated after death to fight crime in the 22^nd century?) but most have simply faded away. The problem is that borrowing such a famous character inevitably leads to comparisons with the original, and Conan Doyle was a hard act to follow.

You may have gathered by now I’m something of a Sherlock Holmes fan. So when I say that in some respects I think Laurie King’s Mary Russell series actually improve on the original, it’s not a statement I make lightly.

King’s series (beginning with The Beekeepers’ Apprentice) feature Holmes but furnish him with a couple of elements missing in the original – a young female apprentice and an emotional life. It’s the second of these that is the true heart of these books. If I have a criticism of Conan Doyle it is that he hinted at Holmes’ inner life while never providing enough information to satisfy the reader. The cases always came first. While this can be refreshing in an age when fictional detectives seem to require a messy divorce and a ton of emotional baggage, it leaves a modern reader burning to know more.

I don’t want to talk in too much detail about King’s latest, The God of the Hive, in case it discourages readers from going back to read the earlier books. Suffice to say it features international espionage and master criminals, in the best Holmes tradition. It is also likely to keep you awake long past your bedtime – King is truly a master of suspense. My only criticism would be that occasionally the suspense is artificially heightened, for example by exaggeration or cutting off a chapter at a particularly inopportune point. At these times I felt like the joins of the work show a little, and it feels slightly forced rather than appropriately effortless.

The setting, however, seems absolutely effortless, though I have no doubt a substantial amount of research has gone into it. The London of this book is recognisably the same London of Sherlock Holmes; yet it has layers and textures that are far more detailed than Conan Doyle’s work. On the other hand, when you think that most of he Sherlock Holmes stories were originally published as newspaper serials, it makes sense that unnecessary description is omitted.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice stands beside The Complete Sherlock Holmes on my bookshelf. I think it’s appropriate. This is one fictional tribute that bears comparisons with the original, and in my view there is no higher praise.

BOOK REVIEW: Love and Punishment by Wendy Harmer

Chick-lit usually focuses on the falling-in-love phase of a relationship. If there is any falling-out-of-love, it usually occurs when the heroine breaks up with her clearly unsuitable boyfriend to clear the way for Mr Right. So Wendy Harmer deserves credit for writing a novel almost exclusively devoted to that messy post-breakup phase.

We first meet Francie when she’s been dumped by her boyfriend of five years. That single fact and her grief over it forms the central theme of the book, as Francie journeys from total-mess to not-such-a-total-mess.  It’s hard to emphasise with Francie’s self-loathing at times, but Harmer writes honestly and does not pull any punches. I particularly liked her refusal to have Mr Right turn up in the end and save Francie from herself. Similarly, the gay character is not the camp stereotype that seems to infest chick-lit these days, but a fully realised chacter. In many respects Harmer has written a very original book.

Unfortunately, the structure and writing of Love and Punishment don’t always live up to expectations. For example, the role of the therapist who Francie visits to talk about her problems seems contrived, a device to move the plot along rather than a realistic character. Similarly, Francie’s repeated dreams featuring her ex and his new girlfriend are less than subtle.

On a personal level, I occasionally found Francie a bit irritating. I suppose that was a risk that Harmer took when she decided to have a main character who spends the entire book in floods of tears feeling sorry for herself. In the end she does pull it off though because you sense that the book was written honestly, self-pity, snotty noses and all.

My feeling is that Wendy Harmer is still in the process of development as a writer, trying to develop comedic one-liners into sustainable and believable characters. I think she’s got guts in taking on a fairly unattractive subject and she’s tried hard to avoid the usual clichés. This book was written in 2006 so I would pick up another of her more recent books. I have the feeling she’s not finished yet.