#BookPost

Thank you to Elliot and Thompson and Unbound (via Lev Parikian) for these two:

Review: Warrior Herdsmen

Warrior Herdsmen by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

In a post-colonial Africa and before the modern age had overtaken events, the Dodoth were the people who had inhabited the northern fringe of Uganda. The anthropologist Elizabeth Thomas was fortunate to be able to visit these people and live among them for three expeditions. Whilst there she dovetailed in with the people and learnt to understand their traditions, customs and way of life.

Thomas immersed herself in their way of life, experiencing everything in their community, she describes their way of life from sowing seeds to collecting the harvests, seeing cattle bled from the veins in the neck to provide food for the tribe, the shamanic rituals of reading the intestines to gauge the future and witness the men would ready themselves for battle against the raids from the Turkana telling the gripping accounts of a the raids and battles between the two main tribes of the area.

It is a snapshot of a way of life that was never to be the same again. Not only is the modern world just appearing in these people's lives as spears give way to guns but this was shortly before the brutal regime of Idi Amin took over and their entire culture was diluted somewhat. This books leans heavily towards anthropology rather than purely travel writing, but it is no less fascinating despite that. Thomas takes time to understand the people, their way of life and the subtle nuances in their personal relationships as well as sharing their successes and tribulations. The writing is clear without being dry and academical helping you grow an emotional bond with the Dodoth people as they go about their daily lives. An interesting book that was well worth the time to read it.

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Review: The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything

The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything by Marcus Chown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the story goes, in 1666 Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree, and it was this simple action that gave him the inspiration to develop the theory and the mathematics that was first published in 1687 in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) where he laid out the foundations of classical mechanics. These new laws meant that for the first time people could track the progress of the planets across the night sky, and Halley used the laws laid down by Newton to predict the elliptical path of the celestial object to predict the return of Comet, an event that he was never to see, but it carries his name to this day. They were used to predict the presence of a new planet, Neptune, the first to be discovered using these principles.

Variations in the path of Mercury, lead astronomers to search in vain for another planet amongst the inner planets, a subject covered very well in The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson, but this was to show the limitations of Newton's laws.
These limitations were not addressed until a chap called Einstein who was unhappy with the anomalies that the current theory threw up. It took eight years for him to demonstrate that the concept of gravity as everyone understood it was better described mathematically as the curvature of space-time. The ten equations in his general theory of relativity can be distilled down into this elegant equation:



From this, all sorts of things can be deduced and predicted and it is only recently that one of those predictions was finally detected; gravitational waves. This final part of the books ventures into the strange, surreal and occasionally baffling world of string theory. The physicists working on this are trying to reconcile special relativity and quantum theory to one theory of everything and the current consensus is that the present theories, along with years of understanding will have to be totally re-written.

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off ― Terry Pratchett

Chown has given us a well written and thankfully, given that this is a physics book, a comprehensible text on the history and the most recent developments in research into gravity.
He goes some way to answering the big questions; what is space? What is time? How did it start, but I can't help but have the feeling that the next breakthrough in this field will make Einstein's theory as irrelevant as he made Newton's work at the turn of the 20th Century.

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Review: Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was first broadcast at 22.30 on a Wednesday evening in 1978 where the BBC almost hoped that no one would hear it. Radio programmes in those days almost never got reviews either, so there was a collective dropping of jaws when it turned out that there were two in the papers that weekend praising the show. Word of mouth recommendations meant that this obscure comedy sci-fi series grew to have a cult following very soon and it was to permeate the national culture in ways that Douglas Adams could never have conceived when he had the idea in a field in Innsbruck in 1971.

Don't Panic…

So began a much-loved trilogy that just happened to spread itself across five books. But Douglas Adams created far more things than just this. Born in Cambridge in 1952 he moved to London a little while later and after his parents divorced ended up in Essex. He stood out at school, mostly because he was very tall, 6 foot at the age of 12 and finally reached 6' 5", but was also known for his stories that were published in the school paper. University beckoned and he ended up at Cambridge where he tried and failed to join Footlights. He had written material that Footlights wanted to use, but they still didn't want him in it! Post university, the desire to get into TV or radio as a writer. He was fortunate to have his Revue shown on the BBC and this lead to a brief sketch writing with Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame. Then nothing, so a series of odd jobs ensued; was his brief writing career over before it started? Thankfully no, he kept plugging away and suddenly the thing that he had desired the most was happening. The rest is history; or is it the future.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Neil Gaiman in this fondly written biography of Adams, has written a fitting tribute to the man, who was taken from us far too early. whose work has seeped into the British psyche; even my children knew the answer to everything is 42, but they didn't know where it had originated from. This has been corrected now and a second-hand set of the books was acquired and pointed out to them on the shelf and they were strongly advised to read them. The book is crammed full of facts and details such as the asteroid named in his honour was 2001 DA42. It is enough to warm the transistors in the heart of a depressed robot. A touching tribute to an author with an amazing imagination and has one of the most amusing dedications written that I have read in a while. Great stuff.

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Review: The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite

The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite by Laura Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At the young age of fourteen, Laura Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia. Where everyone saw a really thin girl with almost transparent skin, she saw something utterly different in the reflection in the mirror. It was the culmination of months of avoiding certain foods, before almost stopping eating completely until she reached the point where she was starving to death. While she let very little pass her lips in the form of nourishment, she still devoured books, and it was literature that was to hold the key to her recovery.

The road to recovery for an anorexic is long and fraught and it was no different for Laura, but where others just had the mental battle, she had the extra support from the books she was reading. In between the covers of Dickens, Sassoon, Woolf, Lee and Leigh Fermor, she would discover how they were able to consume vast plates full of roast beef, bowls of soup and exotic sounding breads without a care in the world. She reads of soldiers who treasure the moment of a scalding hot cup of tea after an intense battle in World War One. In fact, what she discovered was that these authors loved food; they reveled in the taste of what they were eating and sharing the moment with others. These passages in the books, slowly gave her the confidence to rediscover food for the pleasure of eating it rather than purely as a fuel.

Even though her mind had driven her to the point of abhorring food, one thing that she never lost was her love of reading. Most people do not realise just how debilitating anorexia is and there is some painful moments in here as she recalls the lowest points of her illness. But there are the moments too, where she is sustained by her mother's love, an invitation from a friend that arrived at just the right moment. I have read a fair number of the books that Laura talks about in here and whilst the eating and celebration of life between friends and strangers is a key part of them, it is not something that particularly stood out for me, until now. Just reading the descriptions quoted in the book made me very hungry! However, it did for Laura and this list of childhood favourites and other classics has played a crucial role in her accepting that food is not something to avoid and can be enjoyed.

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Monthly Muse - February

 February - the shortest month in the year, and somehow I managed to read 17 books... Not quite sure how. Was a good month too, my first two five star reads too along with some sci-fi, history, science and natural history. So here they are: 

This is the second in the Empire Games series and Stross has raised the stakes in this one. Multiple plot lines, the two America's on the cusp of another nuclear war and the discovery of an alien series. Lost left unfinished ready for the next book.









I have only read one of Tom Cox's books in the past, Bring Me the Head of Diego Garcia, but I had been hearing so much about this book, how it was funded in seven hours on Unbound, and how his proposal for a book could not fit in the neat boxes that marketing could understand. Not quite a natural history book, not quite a family memoir, not quite a polemic; what it is though is brilliant.

This is the latest book from Neil Ansell. It focuses on him returning to the same part of Scotland and also the way that his perception of the natural world is changing as his hearing slowly fails. Poignant and beautifully written.

Hadrian Wall is the 2000 year old frontier of the Roman Empire that you can still see across the landscape of northern England. More than that it tells the history of Roman ambitions and the stories of the people who lived there.









I finished this on the day that Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon Heavy Lifter blasted off from Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral and put a car into space. I loved the Don't Panic message on the screen on the dashboard, but most impressive was the return of the boosters bask to Earth, landing in perfect synchronicity. This is a really good introduction to the current state of space technology and those seeing it as just another investment opportunity. There are going to be few winners and lots of losers in this very expensive game. One day this will all be history; but at this very moment, it is the future.

A book about a favourite author written by another favourite author. Crammed full of facts, it is enough to lift the heart of a depressed robot. A touching tribute to an author with an amazing imagination.









There is something about owls that has captivated us for millennia. The way that can float silently across a field or hunt in the dark has endowed then with mystical properties. Woven together with the touching story about her adult son's illness this is a touching natural history book.

I have always loved woodlands and in this sumptuous coffee table book, Robert Penn shows how much life there is in one. Glorious pictures in here that you will want to return to again and again.









A book about books. What could be better? This was sent to me by the author along with her book on libraries and it is full of facts about how books are made, the smallest, the longest and the oldest. 









This is the companion volume to Claire's book on books and it is just as wonderful as the other one. A cornucopia of snippets, facts and figures about libraries that bibliophiles will treasure. 












Poetry has a way of reaching into your very soul that fiction doesn't always seem to manage and this is a collection by the anonymous author, lady Grey, has the capacity to do just that. 








The second sci-fi book that I read this month is a mass-murder mystery set in the universe that Reynolds has created. People are starting to die with increasing frequency as their implants kill them and no one knows why. Great stuff with some excellent tech and twists and turns.








 A touching story of a very strange family written in an engaging way, but there is a greater depth to the story as Gameson addresses the issues that all parents face as children grow up and change into adults capable of independent thought and now aren't the person that you remembered. There are a variety of threads that start tangled and are brought together in unexpected ways. So very different to a lot of fiction that is out there and well worth reading.





There are still secrets that the universe is yet to relinquish and one the most mysterious is what lies in the 6-inch gap between your ears. If you want a well written popular science book on the possibilities and limits of intelligence, then you can't go wrong reading this.








If you are wanting wide panoramas of the beautiful landscapes of the lakes then this is probably not the book for you. The majority of this book is about John caring for a young roe deer that was to become a great, semi-wild companion. Wyatt may not have had many possessions when he was a woodsman, but he had a life that had riches that no one else could buy.






A haunting bleak story about a Cornish fishing village with a lot of unrequited ghosts. Short and intense storytelling

A fascinating book, full of detail on a country that stepped into the abyss and almost took the whole of Europe with it. There are echoes in here that have a resonance today and we would be wise to remember.

Review: The Gift of the Gab: How Eloquence Works

The Gift of the Gab: How Eloquence Works by David Crystal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

We have all been in situations where someone has just stood up to speak and by the third sentence in, your eyes are drooping and after five minutes their droning noise is only just louder than your snoring… And yet there are others who can stand up and speak for 30 or 40 minutes and whose every word is captivating and interesting, leaving you wanting to hear more.

So how do these people do it?

The man best placed to answer this is the linguist David Crystal. Using the electrifying “Yes we can” speech of 2008 by Barack Obama he analyses the essential elements of public speaking, from the pitch to the pace and rhythm, when to make a joke and when to interject a dramatic pause, the best technologies to use and that fine line between eloquence and verbosity.

Whilst most people who pick this up are not going to be speaking to millions, there is something in here for anyone who has to do any form of public speaking, for those that have to speak to colleagues, peer groups and at family gatherings. The little interludes between the chapters are amusing, offering a little light relief in between the detailed breakdown of the best way to enhance your public speaking.

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