Book review

Book review: Ringworld by Larry Niven

29 September 2022
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Ringworld by Larry Niven

I first read Ringworld many years ago, not long after it was published. Returning to it now, I was curious as to how well it would hold up and how much of it I would remember.

First, the remembering. The answer was, a surprising amount. The Ringworld itself, obviously. For those who don’t know, the Ringworld is a slice of a Dyson Sphere, a ring around a star with miles high mountains on each rim to hold the atmosphere in place. It’s an extraordinary idea, expanding on scale in an exponential fashion: the Ringworld is big, really, really big.

However, I do remember being disappointed that we never find out anything about the Ringworld’s creators, nor what happened to them, and in that too my memory held up. I’ve not read the sequel but in many ways the book is a stand alone story and it leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

Then, the Puppeteers. They are one of Niven’s most enjoyable creations. A race of congenitally cowardly aliens who manipulate the other races of the galaxy to ensure their own survival.

Speaking of manipulated races, the Kzin, the warrior felines who send a representative along on the expedition to the Ringworld are great too. But it’s not just the Kzin: the Puppeteers have manipulated mankind too, breeding people for luck.

Which brings us to Teela Brown, the luckiest woman in the world. The product of generations of lucky winners in the lottery of life, she’s an interesting creation: so lucky that she’s untouched by pain and can follow her whims wherever they please. But Niven, wittingly or not, posits a higher purpose to Teela Brown’s luck than just fortune: it becomes a force that wants what is good for her, not in the utilitarian sense of the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain, but a good that points towards a Platonic idea of the best Teela Brown. A person who is properly human, the Platonic Form of Teela Brown. So her luck brings her to a place where she can become who she is supposed to be. I’m not sure if this was the point Niven was making but it is the consequence of the story’s logic.

Then, there are the sunflowers. Oh, boy, I remembered those. Unending fields of reflective sunflowers that focus the sun’s energy on any threats, burning it to a crisp, like holding the point focus of a magnifying glass over an ant. I think it was the sunflowers that I remember best.

As to how the story held up: surprisingly well. Of course, the attitudes are different, but it would be strange if they were not: fifty years have passed. Some reviewers would seem to prefer that nothing had changed – or that they are incapable of appreciating another time in its own timeframe.

Book review: Catholicism: A Very Short Introduction by Gerald O’Collins

29 September 2022
Edoardo
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Catholicism: A Very Short Introduction by Gerald O’Collins

It’s what it says: a very short introduction to the world’s oldest institution. The first two chapters cover two thousand years of history well considering the constraints of space and then it’s off into an exploration of the sacraments. While personally interesting, someone with no prior knowledge of the Faith might struggle a bit, and it is all written from the viewpoint of an ageing enthusiast for the Second Vatican Council. That generation is dying off, while finding it has little to say to young Catholics around the world, so I doubt it will remain relevant into the future.

Book review: Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

28 September 2022
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Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

To hell and back. That’s exactly what the hero of Sandman Slim, James Stark, has done. He spent eleven years in hell, the literal realm of the prince of darkness, and then returned to earth. Unfortunately, the main thing Stark seems to have learned from his time in hell is, when in doubt, hit someone.

To say Sandman Slim is fast paced is to undersell it: barely half a chapter goes past without a gun, a demon, or some other device intruding into the story to put our hero in peril. And if that doesn’t work, then our hero will go and do something stupidly dangerous because that’s just the sort of thing someone who has spent eleven years in hell would do. Particularly someone whose first response to a problem is to punch something.

It’s fast, action packed and entirely implausible, with a hero I found too bone headed to want to follow in further adventures.

Book review: C.S. Lewis: A Life by Alister McGrath

28 September 2022
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C.S. Lewis: A Life by Alister McGrath

I read Alister McGrath’s biography of C.S. Lewis a few months ago but did not get around to writing a review at the time. Knuckling down to it now, I must confess I remember almost nothing about the book – except this: McGrath spends a great deal of time and effort on proving that Lewis got the dates of his conversion to Christianity wrong in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. He makes a good case but spends an inordinate amount of words and pages on it. Within the context of wider scholarship about Lewis, it is no doubt of some importance; set into a one-volume biography of the man, it distorts everything else, pulling it all towards a central point that is of vital importance to the writer but zero relevance to Lewis himself.

Not wishing to leave the reader of my reviews short-changed, however, I’ve had a look at other reviews to refresh my memory and now I do recall that McGrath also sets out a case that Joy Davidman basically set out to entrap Lewis into marriage, tempting him the bait of her correspondence and then hooking him with the feminine double whammy of wit and wiles. As many others have remarked, Lewis was indeed surprised by Joy. McGrath is also good on Lewis’s enduring influence.

In summary, a book best suited for those with a deep and scholarly interest in Lewis, rather than the general reader.

Book review: Rome: Strategy of Empire by James Lacey

28 September 2022
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Rome by James Lacey

In 1976, Edward Luttwak published The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire in which he argued that the Romans did indeed have a grand strategy. The book caused a sensation, not least for the fact that Luttwak was not a historian but rather an American military strategist and, for a time, a consultant to Ronald Reagan’s administration. While admitting its historical sweep, professional historians rushed to debunk the book and, in general, they seem to have succeeded. The consensus among Roman historians today is that Rome worked on an ad hoc basis, with individual emperors responding to crises as they arose. The view is that the Empire lacked the ongoing central command necessary for a grand strategy, as well as not having a clear view of frontiers nor any way to map them in order to conduct an overall strategy.

James Lacey, another working military strategist, enters the debate with Rome: Strategy of Empire and makes a robust case for Luttwak’s overall thesis: the Romans did indeed have a grand strategy and they were more than able to adapt their policies accordingly. Lacey answers the critics, who point out that there is a dearth of Roman historical sources detailing strategic thinking, by looking at the facts on the ground: in particular, the Empire’s unparalleled ability to field, feed and focus huge armies throughout the breadth of the Empire. Lacey also argues that for the emperor, maps were unimportant because what he needed to know was where a crisis was, which was the nearest legion and how long it would take the legion to get there. Roman itineraries, which allowed generals to estimate accurately how long it would take them to get to crisis points, would, Lacey says, have furnished the required information better than any map. What was more, the Mediterranean and the key frontier rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, allowed the Romans to deploy armies far more quickly than their enemies through their use of maritime or riverine resupply.

Rome: Strategy of Empire begins with the reign of Augustus and ends with the fall of the Western Empire, providing an overview of the interplay between the Roman economy and Roman strategy. However, it suffers, as does Luttwak’s original, from not considering in any detail the strategy of the Roman Republic, which actually conquered most of the territory that the later Empire sought to protect and consolidate.

Lacey had the experience of decades in the military before becoming an academic military strategist and this allows him to apply practical knowledge to all aspects of military operations but in particular the crucial importance of logistics. When we compare the huge armies – in the tens of thousands – regularly fielded by the Romans to the armies of the early Medieval period which, in Britain, could number as few as 35 men, we can clearly see the strength of Roman logistical efforts.

In Rome: Strategy of Empire Lacey seeks to overturn the established academic consensus. With battle rejoined, it will be fascinating to read their response. But one thing is sure: once this book is published the strategy of the Roman Empire will once again be a hot topic among historians.

Book review: The House of Godwin by Michael John Key

28 September 2022
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The House of Godwin by Michael John Key

It was so nearly so different. Having risen from relative obscurity, Earl Godwin had married his eldest daughter to Edward, the king of England, and raised his sons to the most important earldoms in the country. When Godwin died, his surviving sons, Harold and Tostig, slipped smoothly into the positions of command and influence that Godwin had earned during his life, becoming the effective rulers of the kingdom as Edward slowly released the reins of power.

With Edward childless, the question of the succession increasingly dominated the last years of his reign. Tostig, who Key argues might have been Edward’s favourite among the four Godwinson earls, was banished in 1065 following a revolt by the northern nobility, with Harold’s connivance. A furious Tostig, nursing his sense of betrayal, went looking for foreign backers to help him reclaim his inheritance and found a backer in Harald Hardrada, the king of Norway and the most famous warrior of the age.

Harold, who by this time had been crowned king following Edward’s death, was concentrating on the threat from Normandy: Duke William claimed that Edward had promised the crown to him. Hearing of his brother’s invasion, Harold rushed north, killed Tostig and Harald at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, only to hear that William had landed in Sussex…

In this fascinating book, Michael John Key recounts the extraordinary rise and the even more dramatic fall of the House of Godwin and successfully argues that, if Harold had prevailed at Hastings (and it was a very close-run thing) he would have gone on to be regarded as one of the great kings of English history, and Earl Godwin as the founder of one of the great royal dynasties. But Harold’s exhausted men, having fought one battle 19 days earlier, were unable to hold out to nightfall in the second. William won, and history took one of its sharpest turns.

Adventures in Words: Gut by Giulia Enders

21 September 2022
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Gut by Giulia Enders

Did you know that there is a poo scale? No, neither did I, until I read Enders’ bright and breezy book. ‘Bright and breezy’ might seem odd adjectives for a book about defaecation, about Enders’ fascination with what happens to what goes in at our mouths and out of our bottoms is both charming and enlightening – and renders the whole subject much more palatable (sorry!).

So the poo scale, known as the Bristol Stool Scale and only developed in 1997, divides poo into seven categories, with number 1 being little, hard rabbit pellets and number 7 dirty brown liquid with no solid bits, and all the variations in between. Ideally, we should be producing type 3 (‘sausage-shaped but with cracks on surface’) or type 4 (‘sausage- or snake-like, smooth and soft’) poos. Not only did I learn about types of poo but that the best way of expelling them from one’s bottom is, in fact, to squat. Sitting on a toilet produces a kink in the bowels that the bowel muscles have to push past where squatting smoothes out the bowel interior and enlists gravity. So the squat toilets that are still found in some Asian countries are better for defaecating while also producing a helpful hip flexion.

Apart from poo, the book goes into the extraordinary gut flora that live inside us – we are all, it seems, an ecosystem as much as individuals – and the fundamental ways in which the guts affects our health. These connections are only just being teased out but it appears that all sorts of conditions are made better or worse by our insides. It appears that the old adage that you are what you eat is truer than we ever realised.

An entertaining and informative book – and what more could you ask of a book about poo.

Adventures in Words: In Search of the First Civilizations by Michael Wood

9 September 2022
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In Search of the First Civilizations by Michael Wood

I’m afraid this is the first book by Michael Wood that I have found disappointing.

Perhaps the main reason is that it doesn’t do what it says on the cover. I thought this would be an examination and exploration of the first civilizations – it does rather say that, doesn’t it? – but it wasn’t. While it begins with the ancient civilizations of the Near East, India, China, Egypt, the Americas, it then assumes that the founding ideas of these civilizations have been transmitted down through the ages and, with somewhat cherrypicked examples, follows these regional civilizations through the ages up to the modern age, attempting to show that each is the heir of its past.

While I have some sympathy with the idea, the brush strokes are too broad and the crucial explosions of new religions, which alone are capable of redefining the ruling myths of a civilization, are glossed over. That there are continuities between the Egypt of the Pharaohs and modern Muslim Egypt I don’t think anyone would disagree with. But the discontinuities are, if anything, even more profound.

So skip this book and read Wood’s brilliant In Search of the Dark Ages instead.

Adventures in Words: The First Showman by Karl Shaw

1 September 2022
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The First Showman by Karl Shaw

It’s a real shame that this book seems to have died on the shelves. It tells the story of Philip Astley, showman extraordinaire, who astonished Georgian England, and indeed Europe, with his stunt riding skills as well as inventing a form of show, with lots of acts within a marked out oval, that was the origin of the modern circus. Astley was physically large and well built but his personality was even larger, while his life story, encompassing humble beginnngs, astonishing turns of fortune, fires, disasters, recoveries, is the stuff of a biographer’s dream.

Indeed, it’s such a vivid recreation of the man’s life and times that I earnestly wish more people would read it. Hearing of some of the stunts Astley and his team performed, one can only marvel at their skill and their courage – somersaults on the back of a galloping horse is merely par for the extraordinary course.

The book also offers a fascinating insight into the life of a Georgian entrepeneur, a man making his way into the expanding world of show business and, by his own energy and imagination, expanding it further. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the period or in the circus.

Adventures with Words: The Stranger Diaries

31 August 2022
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The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths

I don’t read much detective fiction but if it were all as good as this then I would certainly read more! What makes this story so enjoyable for a literature nerd like myself is the way that Elly Griffiths weaves the present-day detective story into the narrative of a faux Gothic short story, sitting somewhere between Edgar Allan Poe and The Castle of Otranto, which she reproduces in the course of the novel. Griffiths does a wonderful job of writing the story in the style of the early masters, a bit heightened for the sake of the plot, and then placing it into the story. A more seasoned reader of detective fiction might have guessed the perpetrator but I didn’t – and I was glad of that. For this newbie to detective fiction the story was a delight.