Category: non fiction

EMPIRE OF PAIN by Patrick Radden Keefe

A thoroughly depressing book about what money can buy. It tells the story of the Sackler family. They are personally and primarily responsible for the opiod crisis, and have faced no significant penalty for it.

The story begins with Arthur Sackler, born early 1900s, the only one of them who could be said to have earned his money. He was smart, inventive, and pathologically hard-working. He basically invented modern pharmaceutical advertising. He generated the idea of marketing directly to doctors; of data management, so they knew who was prescribing what (for better advertising); and of advertorial. He got very rich off Valium and Lithium.

One of his many business ventures was a small pharmaceutical firm. They produced a kind of covering that allowed a slower release of medicine. They used this covering on a very strong opiod, twice the power of regular morphine, called Oxycodene. As everyone has known for centuries that opiods are extremely addictive, the demand for this drug was naturally limited. Once Arthur was dead, Richard took over and directed his team to a) claim, without any proof whatsoever, that <1% of patients would become addicted to it; b) incentivize reps to always push doctors to prescribe the absolute highest dose for as long as possile and c) ignore the data systems of his uncle which clearly showed exactly what doctors were massively over-subscribing because they were selling direct to the street

More people died from opiods in America last year than from guns or traffic accidents. Despite clear and extensive evidence of criminality, the Sacklers have managed to pay <1% of their fortune in reparations. I won’t go into it, it’s a long story, but basically it’s a lesson for all of us: you can do whatever you want, as long as you have the right lawyers

STRANGER IN THE SHOGUN’S CITY by Amy Stanley

Here is a touching tribute to an ordinary life.  It’s a carefully researched, incredibly detailed account of the life of a real woman in 19th century Japan.  She didn’t do anything very impressive. She got fired a lot, from various jobs as a domestic worker, and  went through husbands at an incredible rate.  And yet this author has gone into her life in such detail that we know where she lived in her first two weeks in Edo (now Tokyo); who her neighbours were; and how much she ended up owing her landlord.

In addition to learning a lot about this woman’s, private life, at least as far as she described it in her letters, there is much that is super interesting about Japan in the early 1800s.  She grew up in the countryside, and had an unusually large number of siblings.  Her parents were religious, and thus they “believed that infanticide – fairly common among other peasants – was a sin.”   (I love how casually she chucks in that families were small because babies were being murdered.)

Apparently not just baby’s lives were a luxury, so too were clothes.  Many families had fewer clothes than people.

The shogunate even commended virtuous daughters for going without clothes in the dead of winter so that their parents could wear robes. 

Manual labourers were apparently always pretty much naked, and compensated by covering their bodies in tattoos.  Some made clothes out of paper (preserved with persimmon juice, as you do).  Often the paper had already been used for its normal function, so you could still read letters on it, and for a while among wealthy people clothing with writing on it became a sort of ironic craze. 

The woman moves to Edo to work for a wealthy family, and we learn about the rigours of attending the shogun.  She is disappointed to find out that the ‘Edo hair’ everyone talked about in the countryside is worn by no one at all in Edo.  Everyone had to look the same, so bald men had to glue false topknots on; and they had to wear so much clothing they could not easily take it off, meaning they carried around brass tubes to pee into.

Okay I have a LOT of other interesting factoids.  But I’ll stop.  

THE INVENTION OF NATURE by Andrea Wulf

In this book a man with a large unearned income has a great time and inspires lots of others to do the same.

Alexander von Humboldt was so famous that at his centennial in 1869 there were huge parades for him across cities in Europe and America.  He has more things named after him than anyone else who has ever lived (rivers, plants, geographical features, a part of the moon).  And yet, today, it is a bit: Humboldt Who?

Humboldt did not identify or discover anything in particular.  What he is famous for is his worldview.  He put forward the idea, revolutionary at the time, that nature was fragile, heavily interconnected, and at great risk from human intervention.  It’s an insight that was so influential that today it sounds obvious. 

It was not an easy road for Humboldt.  Okay, I lie, it was a pretty easy road.  He had a wealthy mother, so the second she died he stopped pretending to study medicine and was off to South America with his boyfriend (or as he liked to call him, his botanist).  He went there allegedly to discover the tributaries of the great Orinioco river, which surprised the locals, who knew them well and to his disappointment could describe them in detail.  While there he studied everything from the colour of the sky to the nature of the soil, and came to a forest of conclusions, almost all of which are correct: he invented isotherms, he identified deforestation, he called it on tectonic plates; he even flagged the dangers of ‘great masses of steam and gas’ coming from cities.  He categorically condemned slavery and the idea of racial inequality in terms that are almost shockingly modern.

After covering Humboldt’s long and cushy life, the book goes on to cover all the many other naturalists who were inspired by him, including Darwin, Thoreau, and Marsh.  Probably not coincidentally, these guys also had a ton of unearned income.  They also had disapproving parents, who either died or got worn down by their sons’ enthusiasm.  And there is a LOT of enthusiasm.  Here’s Darwin to his father:

I am at present red-hot with Spiders!  

Humboldt got so excited that when he ran out of paper he would just scratch away at his desk rather than stop writing, and he did begin to worry he was losing his mind.  Muir, meanwhile, is reported by a guest to have run out of his cabin when the earth started to shake shouting happily: “A noble Earthquake!!!”   He was apparently excited to study it.  But one does wonder on his methods, as he later wrote to Emerson that “he had asked two violets what they thought of the earthquake, and they had replied ‘it’s all love’.”

Marsh was probably my favourite, partly because he was one of the only ones who had to find a way to fit his passion in around actually having to work for money.  As he put it, earnestly, in a letter, explaining the kind of job he was after:

small duties and large pay . . .

I mean aren’t we all.  Eventually he gets a job as an ambassador, which gives him lots of time to consider irrigation around the Nile, but still he complained:

I have been entirely disappointed as to the rest and relaxation I looked for

Oh sweetheart.

I have been strangely educated on many topics by this book. That there were 15,000 ships a day entering London in 1802; that the state of Nevada was nearly called Humboldt; etc.  But I think what I mostly take from it is the fact that you can for sure live your best life.  Now, I am rather jealous that probably no one can ever be as true polymath, as Humboldt was, as there is now just too much to know.  And of course, the money thing is a problem. But I am inspired by the joy these guys took in what they were doing, how they poured all their lives into having a wonderful time. 

As John Muir put it:

I’m in the woods, woods, woods, & they are in me-ee-ey

And who cares what anyone else thought. 

CREATE DANGEROUSLY by Albert Camus

Camus has clearly never heard the advice that you ought to begin a speech with a joke. In this collection of three short speeches he dives right in with the super serious thoughts on the big topics: art, politics, relationship between art and politics.  As always, when reading from this period I am surprised, and almost ashamed, by the sincerity with which people speak.  We seem to be many miles away from feeling we can speak with authority today on any subject. 

He has a lot to say about Soviet realism, and how impossible ‘realism’ really is:

But under what conditions is such a (realistic) film possible?  Under purely imaginary conditions.  We should have to presuppose, in fact, an idea camera focused on the man day and night and constantly registering his every move.  . . (and such a film) could be seen only by an audience of people willing to waste their lives in watching someone else’s life in great detail.    

Best he not know about BIG BROTHER and SUN, SEX AND SUSPICIOUS PARENTS.  He has a lot to say about the responsibility of the artist in the post-WWII world:

An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era.  As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. 

I love this.  I don’t especially admire Lord of the Rings, but I often used to think of this bit when I was feeling depressed about the Zimbabwean situation:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Last point, I was interested to learn in writing this blog that in fact Camus was not French but Algerian.  I mean he held the former passport, but he was born in and spent the majority of his life in Algiers.  Interesting that I’ve only ever heard him described as French. Also, he was the second youngest person ever to win the Nobel, at 44, and was dead at 46 in car accident.  A sentence the first part of which makes me feel rather disappointed in my life, the second part of which makes me feel very grateful.  Rollercoaster.     

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris

There was a period in 2011, not coincidentally not a great time in my personal life, when I read a lot of David Sedaris.  And by a lot, I mean it all, and mostly in the early hours of the morning. 

Recently  I googled for authors ‘like Sedaris,’ and was surprised  by how few options there were.. I gave the options a go (Crossley, Burroughs, Rakhoff) and can report that the options are even fewer than Google suggested, in fact essentially nil.  No one is writing the comic personal essay like Sedaris.  And by no one, I mean no one.  Really, I find this remarkable.  Everyone has a personal life.  Most people have a sense of humour.  It’s incredible that Sedaris has, at least in my opnion, not one truly viable competitor.

I started a re-read of him, to try and figure out what he is doing.  My blog tells me this is the third time for FLAMES.  And three times round, I still can’t tell exactly what it is he is doing so well.  Here he is on glasses:

Today these frames sound ridiculous, but back then they were actually quite stylish.  Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment.  What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.

And on smoking:

As with pot, it was astonishing how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life was a play, and the prop mistress had finally shown up.  Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill, and then empty. 

I tried to map out a couple of the essays, and my theory is the success is the apparent ease: conversational and yet so artful.  In later years he has got a bit sappy, one has to hear about his feelings, and in particular his feelings about his father, but at his best: he’s quite alone in his medium. 

THE GUN by CJ Chivers

This book is a history of the AK-47, and thus essentially a history of war for the last century. It makes for depressing but enlightening reading.

We begin in the nineteenth century, with Richard Gatling finally managing to create the world’s first workable automatic weapon. So much more deadly was any one gun than a platoon of rifles, that he, and many like him, genuinely believed that it would effectively end war, as no one would be insane enough to send men marching against it.

The gun is first used against people in Africa and Asia, as part of the colonial project. Lobengula’s whole army is effectively wiped out in five hours, as later is the Mahdi’s army. One wonders how different the world would look if Gatling had been just a little slower off the mark, and the British had had to face the Ndebele nation with just bayonets.

Despite the first hand experience the British had with the kind of death the machine gun could mete out, they were appallingly unprepared when the First World War broke out. They didn’t let a little thing like automatic machine gun fire stand in the way of their time honoured traditions: advancing in solid blocks, in bright clothing, with bayonets. “The English came walking, as though they were going to the theatre or as though they were on parade ground,” one German soldier said. “We felt they were mad.” This might have been understandable for the first couple of days, say, but the British kept this up for the first TWO YEARS OF THE WAR. Even after the Battle of the Somme, when 30,000 British soldier were killed or wounded in the first SIXTY MINUTES. The commanders, far back from the front lines, just weren’t willing to give up on their idea of glorious war and the terrifying bayonet. It’s interesting really how idealistic military people are.

The AK-47 (which stands for Automatic designed by Kalishnikov in 1947) was designed in answer to a competition in the Soviet Union, and was rightly selected as the winner not so much because of its accuracy, as because of its durability and ease of use. So simple and sturdy is the AK-47 that it can stand the worst of conditions, and be assembled and disassembled by a child. As the LRA will tell you.

One of the first major outings for the AK-47 was the Vietnam War. Here a major power found out what it was like to face an armed native population, and one that was armed better than they were themselves. As so much of what the Soviet Union produced in the way of shoes and elevators was crap, the US assumed its guns would be too, and only gave the AK-47 the most preliminary of glances, categorizing it, embarrassingly, simply as NIH: Not Invented Here. US troops were sent out to fight with M-14s and M-16s, which while they might have been invented here also tended to jam horribly after a few rounds, and rust immediately in the swamps of Vietnam. Here again we see the romance of the military man: so in love was the American high command with the ideal of the John Wayne sharp shooter that they entirely ignored the fact that in jungle war you virtually never actually even see your opponent, and thus do more praying than aiming when you shoot.

It is the world’s misfortune that the AK-47 was first produced in a planned economy, because that meant that guns could be produced way beyond any imaginable need. At one point there was one particular factory in the USSR producing 12,000 AKs a day. That’s 50 tons of steel a day. So durable is the AK, that these weapons are still with us – AKs from as far back as 1953 show up in Afghanistan today. In an old salt mine in the Ukraine, for example, in the 1990s, there were some three million guns stockpiled. Less what some horrible man from Croatia shipped to Uganda for use by Joseph Kony. One almost hopes there is a hell, so they can both burn in it. (On that subject: wow, Kony is crazy. Apparently his army used to march into battle chanting “James Bond! James Bond!” and covered in gun-repelling shea butter).

So an interesting if very sad book. Sometimes its a bit naively American, with sudden burst of discussion of the Second Amendment for no reason, and weird judgements. At one point, for example, he writes with shock about the first time an AK-47 is used by an ordinary citizen. In Hungary, someone shoots a secret policeman on the street and Chivers takes it for granted that this is a terrible thing to have done. I can only say, whatever. Not everyone needs a trial. Also, there are some factual issues: eg, apparently the flag of Zimbabwe has an AK-47 on it. Surely even the briefest fact check would have caught that?

Whatever, it’s a great book, and there are 100 million AKs in the world today, which won’t be disintegrating till long after we’re all dead, so we better care.

BRIGHT SIDED: HOW THE RELENTLESS PROMOTION OF POSITIVE THINKING HAS UNDERMINED AMERICA by Barbara Ehrenreich

I make it a policy not to read books with a colon in the middle of the title. The colon is a sure sign of a certain kind of heavily edited, heavily marketed non-fiction that makes me want to hurl. I particularly can’t bear the idea of the earnest publishing meeting where they tinkered with the title to get it ‘right.’

That said, for some reason I decided to read BRIGHT SIDED: HOW THE RELENTLESS PROMOTION OF POSITIVE THINKING HAS UNDERMINED AMERICA. A terrible title, but a rather good book.

The author is diagnosed with breast cancer, and immediately begins to feel that she is drowning in a sea of pink sugar. She is confounded by the relentless positivity that surrounds cancer, leaving no room for the obvious emotions: anger and grief. The idea that a positive mindset is a central part of conquering cancer is endless repeated, and Ehreneich, who in her youth acquired a Phd in cell biology, looks into this claim, and finds the science behind it very weak. The mere fact that it’s all nonsense does not deter the cancer industry one bit however, and so Ehrenreich begins an examination into the whole idea of positive thinking.

She studies its roots in nineteenth century religion, right up to its current status as a quasi-religious movement led by preachers called ‘motivational speakers.’ The fact that the universe is incomprehensible and probably meaningless is no obstacle to these ‘motivational speakers,’ whose message is that you can have anything you want if you just want it badly enough. This sounds like a hopeful message, but its dark underside is of course that if you don’t have what you want (if you lose your job, for example) it is entirely your own fault.

This idea obviously works very well for corporations. Unhappy employees do not need better working conditions, raises, or health insurance: they just need a better attitude! Thus a large percentage of the ‘positivity industry’ is funded by businesses, who buy the books and CDs for their unfortunate employees.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this book was the link Ehrenreich posits between ‘positive thinking’ and that pretty negative event, the global recession. I was surprised to learn that apparently, in the last decade or so, the majority of important CEOs made use of coaches, almost all of whom push the message of positive thinking: that is, imagining the best outcome, excluding negative people, manifesting success through the power of your thinking, and so forth. She includes many anecdotes of ‘negative people,’ that we might also call ‘realists’- fired Cassandras – who tried to tell CEOs that their mortgages where dodgy, their credit default swaps dangerous, their real estate bubble about to burst. They did not fit into the triumphant visions of men making $60million a year, and so were ignored, with disastrous results.

BRIGHT SIDED is an interesting book about how psychology can effect the real world, though not perhaps exactly in the way positive thinkers imagine.

Depressing Trivia! Rhonda Byrne, who wrote the positive thinking Bible THE SECRET, apparently said that the tsunami of 2006 could only happen to people ‘who are on the same frequency as the event.’ I’d like to put her on the same frequency as a fat slap.

JOYCE GRENFELL REQUESTS THE PLEASURE by Joyce Grenfell

I am now reduced to reading celebrity memoir. And worse yet, a celebrity I have never even heard of: Joyce Grenfell. She was, it appears, famous in the 1950s as a monolguist. I can only say: monologuist?

Regular readers will understand from this that my Kindle has not yet arrived in Harare. I am thus reduced to reading whatever I can find on my parents’ bookshelves. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for someone else, as my parents own a lot of books, but unfortunately as my parents’child I have had an entire lifetime to read them. Thus, there is not much left. Thus, Joyce Grenfell.

In a move of striking originality, Grenfell begins her autobiography with her birth, which took place in a very nice part of London. Everything thereafter also seems to happen in a very nice part of London, unless it is happening in a very nice part of New York, or of Vancouver. Grenfell is born into a very wealthy family, and one of the more interesting aspects of this uninteresting book is an insight into the life of someone who does not ever need to work for a living. Her life appears to be a round of nannies and tea parties and dances. Family friends include theatre luminaries such as Noel Coward and Ivor Novello. Call me a cynic, but I’m going to go ahead and suggest that her success in show business may not have been down 100% to sheer talent and drive.

Here’s a taster, a comment on her father’s military service: “Like many men, he did not enjoy his time in the first world war.” Profound! And indicative of the book as a whole. Indeed, what I found most striking about this book was how very little Grenfell managed to share about her life, while writing a book about her life.

Even poor writers, when writing about themselves, usually manage to provide some insights; but this book is a miracle of emptiness. I wish I could give you some summary of her later life, and even reveal what after all a monologuist is, but I never got past adolescence, having to give up on Joyce Grenfell after the first hundred pages.

KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST by Adam Hochschild

I’ve reviewed KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST here for Africa Book Club. It’s the history of Leopold II’s brief period of control of what is to today the DRC, and makes for grim reading, recounting how the local people were in essence enslaved in order to produce huge amounts of rubber. Here’s a snippet, in case you don’t click through, to one rubber company employee’s account of his day:

It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day’s work. Some women . . . were making banana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing . . . I opened the game by shooting one chap through the chest. He fell like a stone . . . Immediately a volley was poured into the village.

The mind boggles. So appalling was the treatment of the people of the area that an outcry was raised in Europe. Leopold tries to silence this by sending a hand-picked Commission to ‘investigate.’ In a darkly comic turn of events, so horrified are Leopold’s toadies by what the local people tell them, that they actually return, to Leopold’s shock, an honest report!

People often lazily group missionaries and businessmen together as all part and parcel of one monolithic colonial machine. This book most interestingly debunks this myth, highlighting the huge role the missionaries played in trying to protect local people from the business interests of Europe. The above, terribly sad picture, is taken by a mission lady on her verandah. I’m sorry to have to say that this gentleman is looking at the hand of his five year old daughter. Hands were cut off because soldiers needed to prove that they had not ‘wasted’ ammunition, and needed to prove they had actually killed one person for every bullet used.

Much more, obviously, in my full review here.

FEVER PITCH by Nick Hornby

Everybody has embarrassing hang-ups. Most people do not talk about these hang-ups, and certainly most people do not write books about them, so I feel Nick Hornby is to be applauded for the horrible honesty which he brings to his autobiographical book, FEVER PITCH, in which he discusses his relationship with football.

Nick Hornby likes football. He likes football a lot. More than he should really be admitting.

His obsession began when he was taken to a football match by his father, after his parents’ divorce, and this is where the book begins. Hornby theorizes that he may have become so involved with football at that time in an attempt to bond with his father, or to model masculine behaviour, now he lived only with women. This sounds to me like the sort of ‘explanation’ you get from books such as ROOTS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS FOR DUMMIES, but whatever the reasons for his obsession, it came to dominate his life.

Hornby went to Cambridge, where he did not work very hard, and then found himself to be rather lost for a while, working at various times as an administrator, and as a teacher. After losing his first serious girlfriend, he struggled to maintain a relationship. He attended the matches of his team, Arsenal, religiously, and in many ways lived through their successes and failures, more than his own. He never, ever, misses a match, even when very ill, and is emotionally bound up in their successes and failures to an extent that is basically creepy. Thus for example, when Arsenal wins some big championship (I don’t know which, I’m sorry, I found the straight football bits boring) he actually begins to turn his own life around, eventually becoming a writer.

In addition to being rather sad, for Hornby clearly struggles very painfully to sort out his life, the book is in many ways very funny. Thus, discussing a man he sees who has died of a heart attack immediately after a match, he comments: ‘It worries me, the prospect of dying in mid-season like that,’ and continues, ‘The whole point about death, metaphorically speaking, is that it is almost bound to occur before the major trophies have been awarded.’

So a painfully honest, strangely intimate, and very funny book, about what it means to love something more than you should.