Levenson - Newton And The Counterfeiter

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Excellent

This is a very enjoyable book. It is very well-written by an intelligent, deeply knowledgeable author who knows how to tell a good story, and it brings the historical events and characters fascinatingly to life.

The first section of the book (nearly half of it) is a terrific potted biography of Isaac Newton, with a really good, comprehensible account of his character, intellectual development and achievements. I am a physicist by training, I have also studied History of Science and have read a great deal about Newton, some of which has been very good and some very bad. This is one of the best short accounts I have ever read - incisive and compellingly readable, it gives a really good insight into the man, the way he worked and what motivated him. On the second page, by the way, Levinson writes, "psychoanalysis at a distance of centuries is a fool's game." I was pretty sure I was in safe hands after reading that, and I was right.

All this is essential for understanding Newton's time at the Mint and his approach to the pursuit of counterfeiters. This story is also brilliantly told, with a fascinating, wonderfully accessible account of the economic problems of the time, how the coinage contributed to them and the birth of money as we know it (or think we know it) today. This is wrapped up in an enthralling narrative of, effectively, a detective pursuing a criminal and the cat-and-mouse tactics each employed.

I often find that biography or history struggles to hold my interest and attention for hundreds of pages. This did - it was scholarly, fascinating and thoroughly engaging. I found it had the effect of a really good novel, leaving me very keen to get back and read some more, and I recommend it in the strongest terms.

Charlie Connelly - Gilbert

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A decent read

I enjoyed this book but I did have reservations about it. 

Gilbert is a fictionalised account of the later years of W.G. Grace, beginning around his 50^th birthday in 1898 and concluding with his death in 1915.  It is episodic and written more as a novel than a biography, so we get vignettes from the significant events of his later life, plus a lot of Grace reminiscing  internally about earlier triumphs and losses.  What the book does well, I think, is to give a good portrait of the man, his character and his attitudes.  It begins excellently, showing Grace in a County match allegedly intimidating the umpire into giving him not out twice (once caught, once lbw) before Charlie Kortright clean bowled him and made the famous remark "Surely you're not leaving us, Doctor? There's one stump still standing!"  This made Grace furious and resentful, yet shortly afterward he showed great and sincere support and graciousness to Kortright as they played together for the Gentlemen because he thought that Kortright had played well and bravely.  Grace was plainly a complex man who was hard to fathom, but I think Charlie Connelly paints a believable portrait of him.

I was less happy about some of the style.  There is an awful lot of Grace strolling out into the evening, taking a breath of air into his lungs and thinking long, detailed thoughts – all of which, of course, Connelly has simply made up.  This is true of a good deal of the dialogue, too, and even with good will toward the book, it began to get a bit much.  This, coupled with some rather uninteresting events in places did make the book rather hard going in places.  (And the account of Grace's death, with his dead daughter appearing to him and opening the gate for him to walk onto the Celestial Playing Area really did try my patience very badly.)

Nonetheless, this is generally a decent read and I've ended up with a much better understanding of a near-legendary figure, for which I'm grateful.  It's not a great book by any means, but Gilbert is well worth a read for any lover of cricket.

Gudrun Jonsson - Gut Reaction

Rating: 4/5

Review: 
Good but flawed

This is a book about the gut and its role in illness, and maintains that the proper functioning of the gut is essential to good health. The book has much sensible advice to offer but I do have reservations about it.

Jonsson begins with a clear and genuinely interesting explanation of the working of the gut and how it can go wrong, and talks a great deal of good sense about toxicity and malabsorbtion. There is valuable advice on general health, lifestyle and stress. She is particularly good on how and when to eat, and gives sound dietary advice.

Sadly, though, this generally well-argued book is flawed (as are a lot of books on complementary medicine) by a number of wild assertions. For example, Jonsson gives convincing evidence that a proper acid/alkali balance is essential to gut function. Then she says, "If this balance is right, it is chemically impossible for the body to become diseased." But this would mean that proper acid/alkali balance in the gut would prevent, say, HIV, or gangrene, or cholera. Really?

To make the unsupported leap from saying that a correct balance is essential to good health to saying that it will prevent all known diseases is plain silly. Jonsson weakens a powerful case with such an absurdly exaggerated claim. There are other examples of this in the book, and they do complementary medicine a disservice in two ways: they make it easy for sceptics to mock otherwise good ideas, and they may put off the open-minded.

This book is well worth a look, though. Eating sensibly and looking after your gut can only benefit your health, and for those with gut dysfunction of any kind it may well be of real help so, provided you're wary of its more exaggerated claims, I would recommend it.

Barney Norris - Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Excellent

I thought this was an excellent book.  Barney Norris writes with clear-eyed, unflinching insight into the human condition, but with real compassion and a redemptive note of hope which makes this something quite special.

Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain is a sequence of five stories, each narrated in the first person by a variety of characters all of whom live in or near Salisbury.  It becomes clear eventually that their stories are related to a greater or lesser extent, but each is an individual tale.  It's hard to give an idea of "plot" because these are chiefly character studies and the point of the book is their individual stories and the light they shed on what it is to live and to love, and how we can sometimes end up somewhere wholly other, and sometimes as someone else entirely, from what we planned or expected.  There is the ex-wild-child florist and part-time drug dealer, the adolescent falling in love for the first time just as his father becomes gravely ill, the old man whose wife dies after a contented life together, the desperately lonely, depressed army wife and the young man returning "home" to Salisbury after heartbreak in London.  It's a very disparate cast, which Norris paints with exceptional perception and skill so all of them seemed absolutely real and recognisable to me, and all of them had something important to say.

Just as examples, Sam is fifteen and falling in love.  It's a very well-worn theme, but I thought it exceptionally well done and incredibly poignant.  Norris brilliantly captures the mixture of excitement, delight and terror, and that sense that no-one, especially such a wonder as the girl you admire so, could possibly be interested in you.  I was very moved by his story, and by the others.

The voices were completely convincing to me, and Norris has a skilled dramatist's way of placing events and ideas whose significance becomes clear later on, so it's very well structured, too.  This book has an air of melancholy and loss, but also of hope and human fulfilment.  I found it very readable, utterly absorbing and rather profound in places.  I can recommend it very warmly.

Noah Hawley - Before The Fall

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good read

I enjoyed this book.  Like a lot of others, I suspect, I read it because I thought the two TV series of Fargo, written by Noah Hawley, were excellent.  This is good, but not in the same stellar league.

The plot is based around the unexplained crash of a private plane carrying two super-rich couples, two children the crew and another passenger – an ordinary sort of chap who's an artist with immense integrity with whom we can identify as he is caught up in the furore after he survives the crash and saves one of the children.  All others die, and there is huge media interest in the story.

This is vehicle for Hawley doing what he does well; creating slightly exaggerated but still very plausible characters and using them to illuminate social and human issues.  As the investigation continues the present-day narrative is intercut with the stories of the characters involved.  He takes aim especially at financial malfeasance and unscrupulous media behaviour which isn't exactly original, but it's pretty well done.

I was put in mind of The Bonfire Of the Vanities more than once.  This isn’t anything like as good or powerful a book, but the setting among immense wealth and the sense of entitlement it brings is similar, and the appalling, self-serving behaviour of the right-wing TV presenter had some parallels with Reverend Bacon.  It's very readable and quite tense at times, but the resolution, however morally desirable, felt very pat and contrived to me, which let the book down a little.

Not a classic, but a good read with more substance than many would be my verdict, and a good choice to take on holiday.

Marcus Trescothick - Coming Back To me

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A fine book

This is a fine, courageous and very readable book. The childhood and cricket reminiscences are rather better done than the usual bland fare served up by mediocre ghost writers and are quite enjoyably readable. However, as others have made clear, what makes this book exceptional is Marcus's account of his depressive illness. It is a truly remarkable description of the symptoms and the effects it had on him, on his career and on his family. He also describes vividly the shame and stigma he felt in having such an illness and how this held him back from seeking help. It's engrossing and very moving.

I have always had a great respect for Marcus Trescothick as a cricketer. Having read this, I have an even greater respect for him as a man. Never mind facing Brett Lee or Shoaib Akhtar, it took real courage and dignity to write this book. If you have any interest in finding out about depression, panic attacks or similar conditions you should read it, whether or not you are a cricket fan. I have never come across such a clear, courageous account from a sufferer's point of view and I recommend it very warmly.

Conrad Williams - Unfinished Business

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very good, involving book

I thought Unfinished Business was a very good book.  I approached it with some scepticism; a novel about authors and agents in the London literary world could well have been just more self-regarding navel-gazing, but I liked the style, I found it quite gripping and it was actually rather incisive about some important things.

The publisher's blurb blithely gives away the plot of the first third of the book, so I won't repeat it.  The book is largely narrated in the first person by Mike de Vere, a moderately successful thirty-something literary agent who cares about literary quality and about his authors, however annoying they may be.  As both his work and personal lives suffer major blows, he has to reassess much of what he is doing and try to revive his fortunes in both.  It doesn't sound all that alluring, but Conrad Williams writes so well that I was drawn in from the start by both Mike's style and the brilliant pictures he paints of the characters and the world he moves in, both in London and in rural Wales.  He is struggling against the wholly unliterary commodification of books and publishing, and in his shrewd observations about that world he makes some telling points about the direction of the world and what it values in general.  I found his characters extremely well painted and remarkably believable and Mike's sincere attempts at decency and his weaknesses and flaws rang very true.  This became, in the end, quite a tense story which has what I thought was a mature, thoughtful ending.

This fairly early passage will give a flavour of the style, in which Mike is comparing his list of authors to that of a ruthless fellow agent,

"I watched my list turn into a graveyard of mid-list fiction tryers struggling to get airborne,; of alcoholic biographers light years behind on their delivery dates; of literary pups kennelled at Faber or Picador, the soon-to-be-pelts of road-kill in the retail sector's turf wars; and just one lucrative anomaly: Melina Fukakowski, the bombshell TV presenter, acquired as a client by the guys in Film/TV and passed my way to handle her tie-in tome.  ('Handle' is too loaded, too teasing a word to describe my fraught navigation of Melina's mouth-wateringly buxom but bossy personality through a deal process that put the curvy prof on BBC Two, and then saw two hundred thousand copies of her book mince sexily from the stores.)"

If that appeals to you, you'll like the book; if it doesn't, you won't.  I did, very much – although I did find the occasional, brief breaks into third-person narrative very annoying.  It wasn't enough to spoil my enjoyment, though; I found this readable, thoughtful and rather exciting, with some important things to say, including about human frailties, fulfilment and non-fulfilment, empty commercialism, the importance of family and the pain of its lack.  I enjoyed this far more than I expected to and can recommend it warmly.

(I received a free ARC via Netgalley.)

John Preston - A Very English Scandal

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A fascinating, readable account

I thought this was a very good book.  How scrupulously it sticks to known facts is perhaps questionable, but it's a fascinating and gripping read which lays bare genuine corruption in the political establishment in the 1960s and 70s, as well as being a stark picture of the arrogance and absurdity of many of those involved in the affair.

John Preston gives a detailed account which makes sense of the tangled web which Jeremy Thorpe (MP, and then leader of the Liberal Party) and others spun in order to try to conceal Thorpe's affair with Norman Scott and his subsequent deplorable treatment of him, culminating in a bungled plot to murder Scott. The first half of the book is interesting and readable as it traces the origins of the affair and gives very good portraits of those involved.  The second half began to draw me in like a good fictional thriller, and I found it extremely gripping as things began to unravel and the conspirators were finally committed for trial.

This may not be wholly reliable as a strict historical record – there's a good deal of interpretation by Preston – but it's all very plausible and his accounts of established events are excellent.  He paints a very vivid picture of the trial itself, including the judge's infamous summing-up, and it makes excellent courtroom drama.

I wasn't at all sure I'd like this book before I started, but I liked it very much.  It's well researched and well written, and it is an extremely readable account of a fascinating, revealing story.  I can recommend this warmly.

Belinda Bauer - Blacklands

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An exciting and intelligent read

I thought this was a good book - well written in an unflashy way, thoughtful and gripping. It isn't a conventional crime novel in that there is no mystery about who committed a crime; it is a psychological study of the effect of a crime on a family for generations afterward, and of the mind of a serial child-killer. Both these aspects are skilfully handled and I found them interesting and very believable. Bauer also gets into the mind of a twelve-year-old boy very credibly, although I did find some of his actions and ideas rather more adult than was wholly plausible. Nevertheless, I would recommend this book as an engrossing, exciting and intelligent read. It is an impressive first novel.

William Horwood - Spring (Hyddenworld 1)

Rating: 3/5

Review: A bit of a struggle

I'm afraid I struggled with this book. It has its merits, but there are long portions of it in which I very nearly gave up altogether. It could just be me - I seem to be out of step with the majority of reviewers, many of whom found Hyddenworld very enjoyable. I didn't think it was terrible by any means, but it just failed to grip me and I found it a bit of an effort to get to the end.

The central premise of a parallel world inhabited by hyddens is promising, and William Horwood has a rich imagination. There are good sections but neither the story nor the characters really drew me in - indeed after 500 pages of adventures I'm still not absolutely sure what the overarching story really is. The writing is generally pretty good, but in this genre I think writers need real control of their language to create and maintain the atmosphere of their alternative reality. Tolkien, Alan Garner or Susan Cooper for example, all have different styles but all have a sure sense of what that style is and how it fits the tale. In some places Horwood's prose doesn't have the gravitas to give the story the weight of the great powers it talks about, and in other places styles clash badly. As an example, during a description of the Bilgesnipe people, he writes of "a culture...in which all is intertwined with philosophies deep and marvellous, theories extraordinary, sciences forgotten, poetry elusive..." which is a bit forced but OK, until in the next sentence we get, "...they have been frequently ghettoized..." The ugly neologism "ghettoized" doesn't belong in this world and utterly destroyed for me any atmosphere created by what went before. That seemed to happen a lot for me in both the language and narrative structure of the book.

I am sorry to be critical.  This just wasn't for me, but it obviously is for others.