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Book review: Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins

15 July 2025
Edoardo
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Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins

On 17 December 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright took to the air in their Wright Flyer, a flimsy contraption of wire, wood and canvas.

On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climbed out of the Lunar Module and walked on the Moon. It had taken 65 years, 7 months and 3 days to go from a 12-second flight above the sands at Kitty Hawk to blasting up through the atmosphere and travelling a quarter of a million miles through the vacuum of space to the moon.

It still seems unbelievable. I can think of no other feat that matches it in terms of technological progress in so short a time.

I was six when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon and I was allowed to stay up late to watch it. But even at the time, I wondered what it was like for the other member of the team, Michael Collins, alone in the Command Module, as lonely as a man has ever been when his spacecraft orbited to the far side of the moon, taking him out of communication, and out of sight, of earth.

Well, this book tells us. And it does so brilliantly. It brings home the sheer amount of work, perseverance and bravery went into the Gemini and Apollo missions, and how many hurdles they had to overcome on the way to the moon. Read it, and marvel at what we were capable of.

Book review: The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll

15 July 2025
Edoardo
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The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll

We writers, we reckon we have a big job to do. We tell stories, and stories, we believe, are the bones on which the events of people’s lives are strung. We are, in effect, writing the framework of life’s histories. You’ll agree that is a pretty big deal.

Unfortunately, not many other people actually agree: they think writers just string some words together to provide a few hours entertainment when people can’t get reception on their phone, there’s nothing they want to watch on Netflix or they need some help winding down before going to sleep. This helps to explain why the median income for writers is less than £10,000 per year.

The Land of Laughs is a book for writers who don’t feel sufficiently appreciated. It takes all the deepest, darkest fantasies of creation, those moments when everything comes alive in your mind and on the page and your characters breathe and move and live, and puts them into a story. For in this story, writers, in particular one writer, really matters: the powers of creation, which we all suspect are real at some level, here actually do become real. His characters live, and breathe – and he is their god.

How much more wish fulfilment could you have as a writer? So if you’re a writer, if you feel underappreciated and underpaid, then read The Land of Laughs and enjoy the power! (It’s also a very fine story in its own right.)

Book review: The Time Machine by HG Wells

12 July 2025
Edoardo
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The Time Machine by HG Wells

Reading this book is, in its own way, to take a ride on a time machine myself, for I first read The Time Machine many years ago, as a teenager. Re-reading it now, as when Proust ate a tea-soaked madeline cake, returned me to my own youth. And the first thing I realised was the way we approach time travel is a function of our age. As a teenager, if given a time machine, I, like the protagonist of Wells’ story, would unhesitatingly have set the dial to the future. After all, what’s past is done and dusted – who’s interested in the dead and gone?

Turns out, the answer is older me. Now, if sat upon the time machine, I would just as unhesitatingly turn the handle in the other direction and travel into the past, to my own younger self to give him a stern talking to, and further back, to the mysteries and wonders, to the origin rather than the end.

I remember the impact the unrelieved bleakness of Wells’ vision of the future had on me: the degenerate Morlock and Eloi were bad enough, but the final vision, of the failing earth under the dying sun, haunted me. What is all the stranger is that vision was promulgated by one of the most devoted apostles of human progress. In that, Wells’ art was greater than his philosophy.

Read it to contemplate the abyss of time when all there is, is time itself, and the slow death of all that is good.

Book review: Autism by Uta Frith

12 July 2025
Edoardo
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Autism by Uta Frith

Reading some of the reviews of this book, you might think that Uta Frith is an example of neurotypical prejudice against autistic people. There are lots of 1-star reviews, decrying her for using language unacceptable to today’s autism advocates. But what those reviewers appear to fail to realise is that Uta Frith is one of the most important scientists in the history of research into autism. She has been at the leading edge of research for almost as long as there has been research into autism. Frith was one the people responsible for taking autism out of mental hospitals and into everyday life. To see her traduced by reviewers ignorant of her role is annoying.

But it’s worth making this clear: if you’re committed to a view that autism is purely a pyschological difference and never a disability, then this book is not for you. However, it might just be because Frith’s experience of dealing with autism is wider than most peoples. There are cases, in particular those without any language, when it’s pretty well impossible to see autism as solely a difference and not a deficit. Yes, it’s part of that person’s fundamental character but an amelioration of some aspects of that character would make life richer not just for the autistic person but also for those who have to care for him.

Read this book if you want to have a clear overview of autism and autism research from a scientist who has been involved with the subject for forty years. Don’t read it if you’re committed to a view of autism as an invariably an unrecognised blessing.

Book review: The Islander by Chris Blackwell

11 July 2025
Edoardo
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The Islander by Chris Blackwell

Although it’s subtitled ‘My Life in Music and Beyond’ the ‘Beyond’ gets barely a look in beyond a bit of a plug for Blackwell’s later business interests in hospitality and distilling rum; there’s not many autobiographies which you finish with no idea how many wives the subject has had or how many children. But, really, in this case that doesn’t matter. None of the potential readers are that interested in Blackwell’s personal life (from the odd comment, I suspect that the wives are not mentioned because they rarely lasted for long and probably left with substantial alimony and water tight NDAs); what we want to know about is the gossip.

What was it like to discover Bob Marley? Is Grace Jones as weird as she seems? How can you work with Bono without wanting to smack him? These are the questions we really want to answer and Blackwell, with Paul Morley, doesn’t disappoint. Really, for someone who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, it’s the tale of the soundtrack to your growing up, as well as a memoir of someone who was there when the record industry was still figuring what sort of industry it was going to be.

Blackwell was brought up on Jamaica, the child of wealthy socialite parents whose friends included Noel Coward, Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming. It was a gilded childhood but Blackwell took the best of it, married it with the self assurance produced by a public school education, and set about flogging records, and then musicians to the public. He’s clearly a man who suffers boredom badly. The buccaneering days of the music industry was a perfect fit for Blackwell, and he takes the reader into that time, and the making – and unmaking – of those artists. One of the most moving chapters is devoted to Nick Drake. Blackwell’s commitment to the artists he believed in is commendable. And the artist he believed in above all others was Bob Marley. These chapters are the centre of the book and, clearly, the highlight of Blackwell’s life, marrying his great loves, Jamaica and music, into a single package: one of the very few 20th century artists who will still be listened to in a hundred years’ time.

Book review: The Canterbury Tales retold by Peter Ackroyd

3 July 2025
Edoardo
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The Canterbury Tales retold by Peter Ackroyd

Read the retelling or try the original?

It’s certainly quicker and easier to go for Ackroyd’s retelling, and he brings across the gusto and the sheer vigour of the original well, but he does lose the poetry. Curiously, he also misses out on a lot of Chaucer’s wordplay, putting through one meaning and ignoring the other meanings that Chaucer hints at in his original text.

So if you want a quick, down and dirty (lots of four-letter words) retelling of the original, read this version.

But if you want the poetry, and the vulgarity too with all the double and triple meanings that Chaucer manages to inject into them, then invest in the original and bookmark one of the online Middle English dictionaries to help with the most difficult words.

Book review: Privateer by CaptainWoodes Rogers

3 July 2025
Edoardo
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Privateer by Captain Woodes Rogers

On 1 August 1708, Captain Woodes Rogers sailed out of Bristol on what would become a three-year voyage around the world. The expedition was composed of two frigates, the Duke and the Duchess, and its primary purpose was not to explore but to make money as privateers: essentially, they were government-sanctioned pirate ships that could attack countries England was at war with but not the ships of neutral or friendly countries.

The Duke and Duchess were after Spanish ships and the place to find them was the Pacific. Privateer is basically composed of extracts from the book Captain Woodes Rogers wrote of his voyage, with brief explanatory notes by the editor and, as such, it does an excellent job of bringing the world of early-18th century seamanship to life. Captain Rogers has to deal with mutinies, outbreaks of scurvy when the ships run out of limes (Rogers was unusual at the time for realising that scurvy was caused by a lack of fresh food and took limes with him on the voyage but a long period at sea led to their supplies running out), sailing further south than anyone had done before, capturing a rich Spanish prize, being shot in the mouth in the capture, enduring surgery to remove the trapped musket ball, and eventually returning home with both ships and most of his original crew. It was a personal triumph for Rogers but he probably lost money on the venture.

Perhaps the most noteworthy episode in his voyage was landing on the isolated Juan Fernandez Island to find a shipwrecked sailor, Alexander Selkirk, there. Selkirk had been marooned on the island for four years. Among the many people to read Rogers’ account of Selkirk’s rescue was Daniel Defoe, who used Selkirk as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.

It’s a short book but it packs a lot of incident into brief length.

Book review: Into the Uncanny by Danny Robins

15 June 2025
Edoardo
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Into the Uncanny by Danny Robins

For those who have not listened to the excellent Uncanny podcast that produced the material that went into this book, Danny Robins always has in the studio with him two experts, a sceptic and a believer, to try to understand the various uncanny events recounted by the witness whose story forms the bulk of the episode.

But what becomes clear from reading this book, as well as listening to the podcast, is that neither side is anywhere near to an explanation or an understanding of the phenomena being recounted. The sceptic side is easier to dismiss: in most cases the sceptic case requires so much special pleading, as well as simply ignoring the more difficult pieces of evidence, that the wielding of Occam’s razor is sufficient to dispense with it.

What is stranger – and more interesting – is that the believer case is just as inadequate as an explanation. Take poltergeist activity as an example. Sounds, knockings, objects being moved and thrown, and other such phenomena which are usually associated with a child or teenager. Yes, this is true, but it’s nothing more an observation: there’s no explanation there.

It’s clear that, in terms of understanding these phenomena, we have only reached the classification stage. There’s not even a hint of an explanation: yes, ghosts might be associated with the dead, but there’s no indication how they are associated with the dead, or why.

In the history of thought, this is like the 15th century, when thinkers were devising a method of investigation that could have easily turned into magic as it turned into science. It’s biology before Linnaeus, geology before Charles Lyell, economics before Adam Smith. As such, it would be an exciting field for a true, original thinker to enter. There’s a universe of strange phenomena happening out there that has been ignored.

Book review: The Art of War in Italy 1494-1529 by Frederick Lewis Taylor

15 June 2025
Edoardo
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The Art of War in Italy 1494-1529 by Frederick Lewis Taylor

There aren’t many academic books that are still worth reading a century after they were first written. Usually, they become outdated, the arguments they address become irrelevant and their conclusions are superseded.

Frederick Lewis Taylor’s The Art of War in Italy 1494-1529 is one of the very few exceptions to this rule. While more recent scholarship has refined and in some cases changed our views of the events during the wars that ended the medieval era and began the modern age, they have not overturned the facts upon which Taylor based his book. Taylor’s arguments are still fundamental to our appraisal of what happened during these wars and his conclusions are still very much worth considering.

It’s also helped by Taylor being an excellent, lively writer, far better than the usual run of academic authors. In fact, as a one-volume introduction to this fiendishly complicated period, there’s few better alternatives.

Book review: Fairy Tale by Stephen King

14 June 2025
Edoardo
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Fairy Tale by Stephen King

In the introduction, Stephen King tells us, his constant readers, how he came to write his Fairy Tale in the middle of the stultifying restrictions of the covid crisis. He says how, when he was trapped in his house, he imagined what would make him happy and the answer was a tunnel from a shed in his garden to another world.

To be honest, that would make me pretty happy too, covid or no covid.

Unfortunately, the story followed and that didn’t make this reader happy. For a start, the other world that we reach through that tunnel isn’t all that wondrous: a few fairy tale tropes – giants, mermaids, etc – but it’s done in the trademark Stephen King style where the fairy tale signatures include elements of 50s Americana such as tram cars and the Wizard of Oz.

The story itself is sadly predictable: our hero, a high-school lad called Charlie Reade who spends most of the story telling the reader that he’s really not as perfect as his actions suggest he is, follows the quest and succeeds in the quest, without too much trouble.

But really, where on earth did Stephen get the idea that a suitable name for the villain of the story, the man who is literally greying out a fairy tale world, should be ‘Flight Killer’? I mean, come on. If the villain was a striking air-traffic controller, maybe. Presumably that’s an allusion to how Flight Killer is busy killing butterflies but, frankly, even ‘Butterfly Killer’ would have been better than ‘Flight Killer’. It suggests someone who delays your holiday, not someone of unlimited depravity and evil, intent on destroying a world and everyone in it.

However, Charlie manages to dispose of ‘Flight Killer’ without too much difficulty – turns out his evil minions, who killed all the opposition previously, can be killed by chucking a bucket of water over them. Just as well they didn’t try to take over the world when it was raining.

I’m glad writing the book got King through the misery of lockdown. Unfortunately, it rather brought that misery back to this reader.