Non-fiction Archives -

LOVE LESSONS and LOVE IS BLUE by Joan Wyndham

I REALLY loved this one. I have already recommended it to about five people, none of whom seem enthused. It is the real dairies that the author kept as a 19 year old in London during WWII. They brought her huge fame when published in the 1980s, after her granddaughter found them in her attic.

Part of the interest is a day-by-day account of what it was like to live in London during the war. But, curiously, that’s not really most of what it focuses on. She’s a 19 year old girl, so mostly it’s focused on BOYS. She is desperate to lose her virginity, and then when she does, desperate to have an orgasm (takes 4-5 boys, all of whom we learn about). She is very jealous of her friend, who claims she can have one just by leaning on a railing (!) I don’t know what I thought a diary by a wealthy teenage girl in the 1940s was going to be like, but I did not expect it to include the taste of semen (bitter almond, in her opinion)

There is also something exceedingly touching about hearing about someone’s daily life long ago in a city you currently live in. One night, for example, just before the Blitz begins she tell us they: “climbed the hill that looks over Highgate and lay in deck chairs at the top, smoking in the moonlight.”

Or once, when she is with her friend they see an old man on that street

“Dorothea said, ‘That is Professor Freud.’ Back to Chelsea in a tube like an oven.”

Living in Chelsea she meets many artists – Julian McLaren Ross (read his OF LOVE AND HUNGER here), Augustus John, and Dylan Thomas, who gropes her. She volunteers for the WAAF, where she has a job tracking planes. She meets a man who has managed to get out of Poland, and, awfully, no one believes him when he tells them about the concentration camps, thinking it is too dreadful to possibly be true.

I find in writing this summary I struggle to capture what I loved in this book so much. I think it is partly the dailyness of it (cold peas for supper!) and the indomitable spirit of the young woman, who seems to find so much to enjoy in those days.

DIRTBAG MASSACHUSETTS by Isaac Fitzgerald

This book of personal essays was reviewed rapturously in the New York Times. I did not quite get it. You don’t need to have had an ‘interesting’ life to write interesting essays about that life. But this is not his problem – Fitzgerald does seem to have had an interesting life : Catholicism, bar work, porn work. And yet the essays were, for me at least, rather vanilla. It’s hard for me to imagine how you write a tame essay about your time in porn, but there you go, seems to have been done. I guess others loved this book, but it wasn’t for me.

TRAVELS INTO THE INTERIOR OF AFRICA by Mungo Park

Here are the deliriously wild real-life diaries of an English man’s solo effort to find the source of the Niger. He does not start off solo, but it goes that way pretty fast. In 1794 he is employed by some geographic association for the task, after the man who went before him “had fallen a sacrifice to the climate, or perished in some contest with the natives.”

He starts off from the Gambian coast, on foot. He meets a huge variety of people, and is an object of great interest. In many villages he spends hours taking on and off his coat for an audience who have never a white person, or a coat, before. In one village the women come in to find out from him if he is truly a man (!) and he volunteers to show ‘the youngest and prettiest one’ his penis. They find this hilarious.

I had always heard that one reason African people did not unite to fight off colonialisation is that they did not (understandably) immediately realize the threat, being too deeply involved in their own centuries-old conflicts. This book shows how that could be so, for a huge amount of it is about who is at war with who and what that means for Mungo. Also shockingly interesting is his estimate that only about one in four of the Africans he meets are free, the rest being slaves. (Apparently there were two levels, if you were a local, you had some rights, but if you were a foreigner you really had none)

Mungo gets robbed quite a bit, and eventually is actually imprisoned by some Arab nomads. He has more time than he wants to observe them, and notes that “ as (their) pastoral life does not afford full employment, the majority of the people are perfectly idle, and spend their day in trifling conversation . . .” WHERE DO I SIGN?

He also notes some pretty interesting female beauty standards: “A woman, of even moderate pretensions, must be one who cannot walk without a slave under each arm to support her, and a perfect beauty is a load for a camel.” He saw young girls sit weeping over their food, being forced to eat until they vomited, so they could grow fat. Again, WHERE DO I SIGN.

This part is pretty bleak actually, as the translator (a 9 year old boy) calmly explains to him that his captors are debating between putting his eyes out and murdering him. Eventually he escapes with only the clothes he is wearing and his horse. He is lost and has no water. He lies down to die, first letting his horse go (as the last ‘act of humanity’ he will ever do); and then it starts to rain. He manages to meet some more people and is able to exchange buttons on his waistcoat for food. It is hair-raising. Eventually he makes his way back to the coast, never having got near the source of the Niger, but returning to a hero’s welcome all the same. On his return, impoverished journey, it is pretty sad to see how who mostly helped him are the poor. He is grateful to tears when an old slave woman gives him a handful of mush.

I expected quite a lot of old school racism, but more got this:

“Whatever difference there is between Negro and the European in the conformation of the nose and the colour of the skin, there is none in the genuine sympathies and characteristic feelings of our common nature.”

THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS by Michael Finkel

Here is the true story of a man who camped in the woods, completely without human contact, for 27 years. I take it back: in the 1990s, apparently, a hiker said ‘hi’ to him.

This is a mind-boggling story. This guy from Maine, one year out of high school, leaves work one day and drives to Florida. Then he drives all the way back to Maine, past his childhood home, and keeps driving, deeper and deeper into the woods, until he runs of petrol. He puts the keys on the dash, and heads into the woods with nothing. And then he just doesn’t come out again.

I don’t want you to get the impression that he was there, wandering through glorious vistas and living off the land. He essentially found a small clearing, behind some rocks, that was minutes away from holiday homes, and just stayed there. All winter, he did not move. Even in summer, he only left to go steal necessities form the holiday homes. He just sat there, in this clearing, for 27 years. Once finally caught, police noticed how pale he was, and he accounted for this as follows: ‘I’m from the woods, not the fields.’ His main concern once police were in his camp seemed to be for his mushroom, that had grown from being coin-size to dinner-plate-size while he sat there. He apparently concluded he could not have a mammal pet, because he did not want to have to ever be forced to eat a pet.

This was a possibility, because every winter he got close to dying. He stole as much as he could in the summer, but it was hard to make it through the whole winter on that. He woke up every night at 2am to walk around so he didn’t freeze to death. And all the time there was a convenience store not 10 minutes away.

Probably the weirdest part of this whole story is that this guy does not seem to be crazy. In the woods he listened to the radio, and read books. After getting out of prison he went back to live with his family (who btw he did not tell that he was leaving). It just seems he did not much like human interaction, so he cut it out. He opted out.

He spent a lot of his time in the clearing apparently not fixing stuff, or reading, or whatever, but just sitting there. He cannot well describe it, but it is clear he had the experience of going out of himself. Because you don’t need a self when there is no one else to have a self for. He just listened to the wind and looked at the leaves. And then there was the pet mushroom.

I mean it does make you doubt your own choices. Somewhere the author quotes the line, attributed to Sophocles, of ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life,’ and I’ve been thinking about that.

THE WAGER by David Grann

A tale of shipwreck and cannibalism to at beat all stories of shipwreck and cannibalism. In 1742, thirty men wash up in Brazil in a makeshift open boat. They have travelled an astounding 5000kms up the coast of South America after being shipwrecked.

It is a totally astounding story. Their ship, the Wager, left the UK to go fight the Spanish. They had been desperate for sailors, so had pressganged anyone, and by anyone I include limbless invalids. They go down the coast of S America (“below the forties there is no low; below the fifties there is no god”). They are running out of food and have scurvy, so in addition to losing their teeth they are losing their minds. They shipwreck and about 140 of them make it onto a desert island, with the limbless ones drowning in their hammocks. The island has nothing much on it but seaweed, which is not so bad because at least it has Vitamin C in it so some sanity returns, but then they face the very real prospect of starving. It all goes on: manslaughter, cannibalism, and eventually mutiny. The captain has a mad plan to save them, so they go with the plan of the lowly gunner. 80 survive to get on the lifeboat, of whom 30 make it to Rio.

A few months after they arrive, 3 more make it: the captain’s mad plan did indeed fail, but then some local people agreed to walk them half way up the continent to the Spanish. On the outskirts of the city, a free Black British man who made it all this way, is kidnapped and enslaved: horrifying.

Then they make it back to Britain and there is much argument about who ate who and who mutinied when. What I found overall hilarious about this story was that a few days after the shipwreck the men were in fact found by some locals, who gave them food and tried to help. The men harassed the local women and tried to steal their boats. So the locals went away and left them to it. Can you IMAGINE? All of this was completely unnecessary. All they had to do was behave relatively normal around the locals and nobody would have had to get eaten! And still they could not do it. Colonialism was sometimes pretty intense.

AKENFIELD by Ronald Blythe

A brilliantly weird effort to capture the entire life, top to bottom, of an English village. Written from interviews made in the twentieth century, and lightly fictionalized, it focuses on their memory of life in the nineteenth, and captures the collapse of a certain rural way of being.

That collapse was no bad thing, because let me tell you, these people WORKED. Here we learn that it was not the Industrial Revolution that created exploitation. Agricultural laborers had four hours off a week, 10-2 on Sunday (i.e., just enough time to go to church). As one man, the grandson of a laborer puts it:

They bought their life’s strength for as little as they could. They wore use out without a thought because, with the big families, there was a continuous supply of labour

There is a kind of tragic over-emphasis on the quality of work, with people taking what seems to us now a really bizarre amount of pride in their work, because as another worker says:

A straight furrow was all that a man was left with

Apparently it was a very silent world, though “Television is now breaking down their silences. They are getting accustomed to the idea of dialogue”

It is perhaps no surprise that given half a chance, lots of people fled. I was stunned to learn that from from 1871, 700,000 British left for the colonies, and “It was the not the idlest and wastrels who sailed,” leaving lots of land effectively empty. As a child of the former colonies I am very familiar with what it was like for those who left, but I never thought about what it was for those who stayed.

It captures a world so small it can only boggle the mind:

Pub men stayed loyal to one pub for maybe the whole of their lives. . . now they will drive down to Southend or Clacton and let off steam

I also learnt more than I ever wanted to about agriculture in Suffolk. For example, East Anglia had 17 different types of apples (WHY?), all harvested at different times. And that sheep used to be managed by having their tails cut off with a hot iron and “the balls nicked out with the shepherd’s teeth. He ate well that day.”

I enjoyed all this interesting-slash-disgusting agricultural information, but even more I enjoyed a window into many individuals lives. One guy goes to London briefly and works in the railway:

There is a place in Broad Street Station where you can stare through the arches and see the stars, an and they were the only things I can remember seeing in London. That is the truth.

Ronald Blythe left school at 14 and taught himself from public libraries and it shows. It’s a wildly ambitious, beautiful book. I could go on and on, and be grateful you were not with me while I was reading it, because I did go on and on. I’d love to read it for lots of different communities. I can only imagine how interesting it would be if you took a single street of vendors in Harare, for example, or a Convent in HoChiMinh City.

THE RUIN OF ALL WITCHES by Malcolm Gaskill

This is a fantastically interesting recreation of a single witch trial in 1651. I am amazed the kind of records exist that enable this level of detailed understanding of individuals so long ago. The trial was of a married couple. The husband had a temper, and was always telling people how he would ‘get even’ with them. This was not smart in a time when people were living in tiny villages, barely scraping a living, and absolutely buck-wild about religion. Meanwhile his wife was exhausted with having babies, resentful of being asked to bring in the maize while also looking after the kids, and seems to have had some kind of breakdown. It all gets out of control from there. Horses buck, ghostly children walk, imaginary dogs appear, and a meat pudding splits in two (a clear sign, apparently).

What I got from this book is that you should 100% not worry at all about anything that you cannot see and touch. It is sobering to see how recognizable these people are, with their problems (e.g., I am sick of these kids), and how very sincerely they really did all believe in imaginary dogs. It makes me wonder what imaginary dogs I am worrying about.

Side bar: I also learnt how incredibly ballsy these early migrants were. The main woman got abandoned by her husband and walked twenty miles with no money to Bristol to get herself on a ship to the ‘new world.’ Can you imagine the courage.

THE MERCHANT OF PRATO by Iris Origo

Here is a book to make you feel like indeed all your problems are insignificant and death its on its way. It’s non-fiction, based on the 140,000 letters, 500 ledgers, 300 deeds of partnership, and various other paperwork left behind by a 14^th century Italian merchant named Francesco Di Marco Datini. This is apparently one of the largest records left behind by any medieval person, and it is truly astounding. His business ventures, his house, his food, his clothes, his private conversations with his wife, his worries, his medical problems, his religious crises. It’s all in there. I don’t know what I thought medieval people were doing with their time, maybe like religious mania and starvation, but apparently they were living full and rich lives that are now completely lost.

Let me give you a flavour. He is a super anxious guy, and here he is to his wife:

Remember to go to bed betimes and rise early and let not the door be opened until you have got up. And look well to everything; let them not go a-gadding. You know what Bartolomea is; she will say she goes one place, and then goes elsewhere. Ghirigora, too, has little sense . .

And here is someone else writing to him when he is getting really carried away with renovating his house, something that even today in Tuscany is called ‘rubble disease”:

Other wise and virtuous citizens do some building, but all except you in moderation! One man has a bailiff, another a friend or a paid overseer. But you are so greedy, you will allow no single groat to be misused, nor a single brick to laid lengthways, when it would look better upright – as if your little house where to be the dwelling place of your immortal soul!

I acquired some interesting historical info too. I was surprised to find that Italians had slaves at this time, actively acquired to replace people who died in the Black Death. Then at another point some town is ‘sacked by a company of free lances,’ from which I guess we get the word freelance? Also, how amazing is that it was standard to write on the first page of all your business ledgers: “In the name of god and of profit”

But I think this history stuff I will quickly forget. What I will remember is the density of his life, the huge anxieties and sufferings and drama, him and I suppose millions of other medieval people, and millions since, all forgotten.

STOLEN FOCUS by Johann Hari

It is a lot harder to concentrate than it used to be. For example, as a child I used to read for hours at a time, but now I almost never do. I wasn’t sure how widely shared this experience was, but I learn from this book it is very widely shared, and gain some ideas on what to do about it.

There are some obvious culprits, like social media, and how more-ish our phone are generally. There are some less obvious ones too. One is instant messaging: did you know the average American worker is interrupted on average every three minutes? Once you learn to be interrupted, he argues, eventually you start interrupting yourself. Another is the sheer volume of information we face, which means we feel we have to move quicker from thing to thing. Apparently the time things trend on Twitter has reduced a lot just in the last five years. Hari argues that this is why we aren’t pulling together as a society to ‘focus’ on climate change, like we did on the ozone layer, but this I think is a bit of a stretch. One very worrying point he raised was about how our constant need to be entertained means we almost never sit with an empty mind, and how damaging that is to our creativity.

The solutions are in part individual (set timers for apps, turn your phone to greyscale (I can attest, this one REALLY works)), and in part societal. If social media was subscription, for example, it would be more about making us happy (e.g. helping us meet our real friends in real life) and less about making advertisers happy (i.e., keeping us on our screens). He may have had more solutions but I don’t know because I had to quit before the end.

Clearly at journalism school you are taught that readers can’t relate to conceptual thinking, but rather need individual stories they can feel something about. This book takes it to the extreme. When representing certain ideas, even very obvious ones, he continually relates them to various dull stories about peoples’ personal lives (e.g., how my struggle with obesity inspired my ideas about how to swear off my phone). Now that I right it down this seems kind of minor, but apparently it was enough to make me quit the book.

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