Author: sarahwp

THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS by James Fenimore Cooper


Well, this one is a doozy. I am sorry I could not find you an electronic image of the cover of my edition. It shows the Native American fighting the British guy, and for some reason the wind is blowing up the former’s loin cloth so you can see his butt. Full on, dead centre, a big butt, in the middle of the cover. It is very strange. Very strange. What is that supposed to mean? Borderline gayness combined with borderline racism? Actually, possibly this is also a good strapline for this whole book.

Basically, there are these two British girls and this British guy who is protecting them. They are betrayed by their evil Indian guide(!), Magua. They are then saved by the good Indians(!), a young one (Uncas), his dad, and this other white guy (whose always going on about how he is a man ‘without a cross’) who has been totally absorbed into the Native American lifestyle (thus he has to tell us all the time about his lack of cross). I can see why they made this book into an action movie, because it is just action sequence after action sequence after action sequence, enlivened by a bit of romance and some stupid disguises.

I don’t know which is more racist in its portrayal, the evil Indians or the good Indians. At first I was thinking, wow, way to write to the stereotype; but then I read on the internet that I guess Cooper’s book was actually a huge part of what created the stereotype. Interesting. There’s lots of ‘savage’ this, and ‘uncivilized’ that. But on the other hand, when Uncas dies, his father is mostly comforted by the white guy (WITHOUT a cross, let’s emphasize) who says how they serve the same god and will run on the same paths on the happy hunting grounds, which is sweet. And I guess at the time Cooper wrote it, a lot of people thought he was too kind to the Native Americans, because he often writes in admiration of their fortitude, courage etc etc. So, obviously, let’s not judge him by our standards.

Let’s not even get into the women, because its a close run thing as to whether it’s more sexist than it is racist. And we are not judging him by our standards.

We’re fairly lucky I can even tell you this much about it, as I almost gave up on page 17. This guy is some WORDY. And we know I like wordy, but this was almost too wordy even for me. Check it out: “Receiving no reply to this extraordinary appeal, which, in truth, as it was delivered with the vigour of full and sonorous tones, merited some sort of notice, he who had thus sung forth the language of the holy book, turned to the silent figure to whom he had unwittingly addressed himself, and found a new and more powerful subject of admiration in the object that encountered his gaze.” Ye gods. I kept going, but I almost gave up again when instead of cooking he referred to “undergoing the culinary process.”

Onwards and upwards. (In which series of childrens books is this an important phrase, at least in the last book? Extra points if you know)

FAST FOOD NATION by Eric Schlosser


After all that 19th century morality I thought it was time for 20th century immorality. FAST FOOD NATION provides that in spades. Spades of offal, eyeballs, fat, salt, animal cruelty and poor working conditions for illegal immigrants.

This book is about the way in which fast food has shaped global culture. He begins by discussing the genesis of fast food as we know it. Apparently, it arose in Southern California, a place built very much around the motor car. There were lots of places selling burgers and so on, but it was all cooked from scratch by experienced cooks, with waitresses on hand. Then the McDonald’s brothers – who were sick of their teenage clientele, apparently, who came mostly for the young pretty waitresses – came up with a new system, based on the production line concept. They cut their menu to only those things that could be eaten without a plate or cultery, and simplifed the food preparation process so that no experience was necessary – each worker just did one simple part of preparation, so experienced short order cooks were no longer necessary. They were thus able to massively cut prices, and business boomed. Apparently this was the first time working class people could afford to eat in a ‘restaurant.’ Other people copied, and the idea spread. The McDonalds – now this is heartening – after they got really really rich, weren’t interested in getting any richer. So they weren’t looking to expand. But this other guy, Ray Kroc, convinced them to let him franchise for them. And that’s the real birth of the chain. He always said he wasn’t in the food business, but in show business – interesting, no? Anyway, he always resented doing what he perceived as all the work, and was eventually delighted to buy them out, and in the end force the closure of their last restaurant (now called M) by opening a McDonald’s up the road.

Interestingly, practically every big fast food chain was started by a high school drop out.

The book also talked about how fast food restaurants market primarily to children, especially toddlers. 25% of Americans eat fast food in any one day, and 90% of American children under 9 visit a McDonalds in any one month. Oh yes. It’s not good news. I in 8 Americans has actually worked for McDonalds at some point.

Also, something I never knew is that fast food in itself is made to be bland, as the flavour actually comes for added chemicals – just a few drops, that are carefully controlled. Most of the flavour in all fast food is made in New Jersey, apparently.

Obviously, the treatment of the animals is not great. But it’s actually getting better. However, the treatment of the people who work in meat packing is APPALING. That was really depressing. Lots of exploiting illegal immigrants etc. The treatment of the kids (the majority of workers are under 19) who work in the restaurants is not brilliant either. McDonalds works hard to fight unions, and sends in crack teams to stop any incipient unionizing. Not a single US restaurant is unionised. WOW.

One interesting thing was how much these big corporations, that drivel on about the free market, and competition, etc etc, are happy to take government handouts. Lots of franchises are begun with money from the fund meant to help small businesses. In fact, big corporations use it when they’re not sure an area can stand another Burger King or whatever, as they know the government will just take the loss. Also, they’ve worked hard to make sure franchisees have none of the normal consumer protections -eg, they corporations can cancel the contract at any time; they can limit who you can sell it too; they can make you use their suppliers, no matter what the cost, etc etc.

And yet, I have to tell you that all this talk about french fries made me want to eat french fires. What does this mean?

THE LAST CHRONICLE OF BARSET by Anthony Trollope


After SMALL HOUSE I decided I just couldn’t face life without Trollope, so the binge contined. This is the last of the series of six Barset novels. Now, I’m kind of sorry the series is over, but let’s face it: this isn’t Austen, who only wrote like 6 books total. This is Trollope, and this guy isn’t kidding. He wrote more words than any other English novellist. After this Barchester series, there’s the Palliser series, which some people tell me are even better, and then tons of individual novels. So I could read like mad without any fear of running out.

I could, but I’m not. I’m taking a break. I’m Trolloped out. All that order, and morality. Anyway, let’s talk about it real quick. This book focuses on a minor character who has appeared in previous books, Mr Crawley. He is a low paid curate with a wife and a ton of children, who he can sometimes barely feed. He cashes a cheque which it later emerges was lost by someone else. Mr Crawley can’t account for how he came by the cheque. Thus, he’s accused of theft (terrible for a clergyman) and has to face the magistrates. He suffers terribly, because he is a intelligent and dedicated man, but so bitter about how unlucky he’s been that he is a tiny bit bonkers. He refuses to take help, of any kind, which is VERY irritating for the reader. He even refuses to have a lawyer. Eventually, we find it was all a mix up and he is innocent. Which means his beautiful but poor daughter can accept her wealthy lover as a husband. (Trollope loves poor girls and rich boys getting together, I’m realising).

The person who reveals the mixup is Johnny, who we’ve met in previous novels. He is in love with Lily Dale, who refuses to marry him. It’s not clear, even to Lily, if she does this because she does not love him enough, or because she is still so scarred by being jilted (as she was in SMALL HOUSE). We also meet the man who jilted her, Crosbie, once again, and find he is suitably miserable. I thought for sure when Johnny and Lily came back in this book it was because Trollope was going to put us out of our misery and GET THEM TOGHETHER. Oh no. They just randomly DON’T GET TOGETHER. Goddamn 1400 pages later, they DON’T GET TOGETHER. What the hell?!! I am bitter.

THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON by Anthony Trollope

Yes, I’m on a massive Trollope kick. There’s no denying it. He’s just orderly. His world is rational. I LOVE it. I specifically saved this book for a long plane ride I had, and it was awesome. It’s just amazing how a book with a strong plot can erase an airport, annoying seat mate, etc etc. Not that I also didn’t watch 3 movies (Dear John – AVOID!, Remember Me – Robert Pattison and 9/11 – nuff said; and Green Zone – MOSTLY AVOID!) Anyway, in the small house at Allington lives a young lady called Lily Dale, apparently one of Trollope’s best loved heroines. Her cousin brings a young man Mr Crosbie down to stay, and the two fall in love. He asks her to marry him and she accepts.

This is usually where most Trollope novels end, but with this one our problems are only just beginning. Mr Crosbie is much admired at the Civil Service, where he works, and uses his small income to impress. He realises that if he gets married he’ll be trapped in a small house with babies and have hardly any income at all. A very modern worry really. So like two weeks later he asks this titled lady he’s known for some time to marry him instead. She also doesn’t have much money, but he thinks a titled connection will be good for his career, and he likes her well enough. She’s been on the market 14 years, so decides to cut her losses and accept.

Lily is made totally miserable by this desertion. Interestingly, so is Crosbie. He finds he has nothing in common with his new wife, and is expected to keep up a way of life way beyond his income. In addition, his social circle are not impressed with him for jilting Lily. He gets attacked at a train station by one John Eames, who is in love with Lily, and wants to avenge her. He asks Lily to marry him, and she refuses, saying she is married to Crosbie in her heart. Which is a bit bizarre.

What I loved about this book was the writing style (smooth as butter!), the dilemma of Crosbie (it was very interesting to see someone make personal calculations of that kind) and of course meeting people from the other novels in the series. It’s like coming across a different period in your life, quite unexpectedly, because I read some of these novels ages ago.

Last: did you know Trollope wrote every day for three hours, without fail? 250 words every 15 minutes, and he said he didn’t understand all the agonising and wall staring; it’s just discipline. He said he attributed his whole success in life to the discipline of early hours. Let’s put that in our lazy pipes and smoke it.

CIDER WITH ROSIE by Laurie Lee


This is an apparently quite famous memoir of a childhood spent in the Cotswolds immediately after the First World War. This guy is one of the youngest in a family of eight. His father has taken a job in town, and never comes to the country, simply sending money (and not exactly tons of it) to his wife to look after the children. Not all of them are hers; some are his from a previous marriage. But luckily for him he is not too bothered by any of them.

The book is quite poetic in style, and evokes quite beautifully the country life. It’s also quite interesting from a historic point of view. On the one hand, everyone seems very happy, in a sort of wasn’t village life wonderful kind of way, but then on the other hand people keep killing themselves. So that was weird.

Anyway, it was a good book I guess and has sold 6 million copies but it didn’t do much for me.

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS by Joseph E Stiglitz


This book could also be called WHY I FUCKING HATE THE IMF by Joseph E Stiglitz. This guy but really hates the IMF. He goes through various economic crises – the East Asian one of the 90s, and the end of Communisum in Eastern Europe being the main ones, and castigates the Fund’s mindset, policies and practices. In short, there’s nothing he doesn’t fucking hate about the IMF.

Basically, the Fund was set up to ensure that if any country got into deep economic trouble, there would be a body that existed to help it out. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, it was found that government spending helped resuscitate the economy. I guess that’s kind of Economics 101. The Fund was supposed to help countries stay stable, and when they weren’t, help them out.

According to Stiglitz, the IMF was run by fundamentalist free market thinkers. Thus, their definition of what was best for a country was always less government, no matter what the circumstances. This worked well when the Fund dealt with some South American countries, which had massive governments and bloated budgets, but not so well in many other countries, especially when their economies were having a downturn. They’d insist on less government, and less government spending, which tended to make everything worse. They’d also try and prop up the exchange rate through billions in loans (which the residents of say, Indonesia, had to pay back in the end). However, they’d somehow only manage to prop it up for long enough for foreign banks and local fat cats to get their money out and then the whole place would fall apart, with the poorest hardest hit.

So anyway, the problem I have is that I don’t much about economics, and he doesn’t present the opposite view, so I’ve no idea how right he is. I have to say, it sounds pretty right to me. One thing he points out is that most of the people who run the IMF are from a very small group – finance ministers and bankers, who all tend to have very similar ideas about what is best. Apparently it’s common to go from the IMF right to a major global bank and back again. I mean, even if you’re not a monster or whatever, it’s clear whose interests you’ll be serving. Certainly not the starving village guy in Indonesia. And despite the IMF being a public institution, there’s not much accountability to any public, or much public debate. Thus, while a guy in a village in Indonesia is paying, for sure, he doesn’t have a say.

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S by Truman Capote


Well, you won’t be surprised to hear that this is not very much like the movie. I seem to recall the movie is some kind of half love story or something. Yes, well, the short story is not. In fact, it’s quite a sad meditation on feelings of belonging and home. It’s about this writer, whose upstairs neighbour, who he becomes friendly with, is a young woman who is sort of high class prostitute. She doesn’t feel at home anywhere, and is looking for a place where she feels safe, like Tiffany’s. It is sad, and kind of literary. Not so much like the movie.

There were other short stories in this book, which were enjoyable too, if slightly odd. One was about a Haitian child/teenage prostitute who falls in love and gets married. Honest to god, what is Truman Capote doing writing about this? Wasn’t he like mega wealthy and as gay as possible? How did he hit upon this as a subject about which he knew something? Anyway, it was sort of weirdly romantic tale of child abuse. Now that’s not something you get every day.

WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel

This one won the Booker this year. It got quite famous as far as literary novels get famous. The sides of buses carried adverts for it saying ‘Stop talking about it and start reading it’ which I thought was quite funny. So anyway, I’ve read it. It’s about an assistant of Cardinal Wolsey’s, called Thomas Cromwell, who, after Wolsey’s fall from grace, takes over as a helper to Henry VIII in his attempts to ditch Katherine for Anne Boleyn.

On the one hand, it was kind of a ye-olde-strong-on-the-plot historical novel; on the other, it was kind of literary. The plot part told how Thomas Cromwell was a blacksmith’s son who ran away to fight in wars on the continent. He got all tough and brilliant and spoke a ton of languages and got very close to the king. This was kind of fun front seat of history stuff, it was interesting how they loved to eat thin sliced apples in cinnamon, and how people dropped dead of various diseases left and right. I found it a bit dubious that everyone was supposed to be terrified of our hero, but then he was as written totally sympathetic. But the literary-ish stuff was lovely. Here’s a good bit – mid historical drama, it’s suddenly: “He stares down into the water, now brown, now clear as the light catches it, but always moving; the fish in its depths, the weeds, the drowned men with bony hands swimming.” It’s also kind of a love letter to London, in the way she writes about it.

One thing I found very weird was that it’s called WOLF HALL, right, but we never get to freaking Wolf Hall. It’s mentioned, but it’s not even important. Not even metaphorically. Not so far as I can tell. Maybe I’m missing something.

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS by Tracy Kidder


This one was a true story about a man called Paul Farmer who has had a lot of success in improving public health for the poor. It all began when he went to Haiti during college, and was appalled. Impressively, bit by bit, he managed to set up an extremely good public health system in a very poor area in Haiti. His work spread to other countries, and he’s had a wide impact. Apparently the way in which TB was being treated globally was encouraging the development of MDR (multiple drug resistant TB) which is obviously very dangerous. The central problem in treating it was that the drugs were deemed too expensive, and managing patient lifestyles (food security, etc etc) too difficult. He managed to get the drugs made cheaper, and also entirely shift the paradigm for what was possible in monitoring patient lifestyles.

So all very impressive. He is really dedicated to the idea that you ought to work for the poor, because that’s a good in itself, a clear area of moral clarity. He doesn’t think you should work for money, or even for a feeling of personal efficacy (which was interesting, as I’d just been feeling jealous of just that aspect of his life!). In fact, he himself feels deeply guilty when not focused on working for the poor. I have often noticed that when Americans come to Africa they are amazed by the poverty. They can’t believe it is possible, or should be allowed. They just think it shouldn’t be possible, and is some kind of insult to the world. Which is maybe the right way to see it, but it’s also a very first world, naïve view. But whatever. He still saved thousands and thousands of peoples lives. You can’t argue with that.

Well maybe you can a little bit. It was an interesting book, but I had a couple of difficulties with it that made it a slightly uncomfortable read. For one thing, I’m not really sure I think that much money should be being spent on health. I’m not sure that there’s any point in just keeping people alive, basically through donations, without creating jobs, environmental sustainability, political stability etc. You shouldn’t just be pumping up population levels, because that will just make all the other problems worse, which will mean more issues for health, and thus more donations etc etc. So I’m not sure it’s actually the right priority. I know it sounds really cold, but if I was running a government, I’d spend much more money on education than on health. I think education starts to feed back and fix problems on its own, in a way improving health just doesn’t. Though then the books tells how one of Farmer’s clinics was bombed by the Shining Path guerillas, because they thought that these small improvements of the poor’s life just delayed the necessary revolution. I can’t deny I do sort of see the logic. So that made me feel a bit Pol Pot.

THIS SEPTEMBER SUN by Bryony Rheam


I realised a couple of years ago that your average American and I were very different, in that a 30 year old American has seen versions of themselves and their lives in books, and in films and TV, thousands of times. In fact, they rarely see anything that isn’t about some version of their life. Whereas, for a Zimbabwean, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen me or someone like me represented in the arts, or in media. In fact, as a Zimbabwean in the diaspora, I can’t think when I’ve ever seen me. Until I read THIS SEPTEMBER SUN.

Ms Rheam was born in 1974, and thus this is, thankfully, not another how-we-survived-the-war white person story, because like me she doesn’t really remember the war. This book is about life in Zimbabwe since Independence, and then about life in the diaspora – London to be exact – with a classic what-am-I-doing-with-my-life story line, that I am familiar with not from fiction but from the actual diasporic Zimbabweans I know.

Basically, the book tells the story of a young girl, Ellie, who is very close to her grandmother. She leaves Zimbabwe to got to university in the UK, and her gran dies. She comes back and gets involved in reading her gran’s letters and diaries, and the second half of the book is largely flashbacks to her grandmother’s early life, when she moved to Zim from the UK and had a tortured romance. It ends in the present, with the young woman getting married and moving from London to Mocambique.

The book is in general very well observed. At one point, for example, Ellie rejoices in sleeping in a Zimbabwean bed, noticing particularly how the sheets smell of sunlight, from being dried outdoors. Occasionally there did seem to be a little too much tolerance of the sentimental cliche; she closes one chapter by saying something along the lines of how she loved her daughter, but just didn’t know how to show it. Oh dear.

I went to a talk with the author, who seemed a very nice woman. She said that she is struggling to get her book published outside Zim, and she thinks it is because no one wants personal stories, or romances, from Zim – they only want political tales, and the obviously topical. There was a Shona man there who lectures I think at a University in Zim, and he said he had never really read any white Zimbabwean literature before, and how he felt it ought to be on the syllabus, as minority work. It was very sweet, because he was explaining to us what he learnt from the book about the white community; that it’s a very small one, and that people are constantly leaving it.