Non-fiction Archives -

CATAPULT: HARRY AND I BUILD A SEIGE WEAPON by Jim Paul

Here is a book about a two guys who decided to build a medieval catapult. It is a story about many things, only one of them being catapults. But let’s start with them. Apparently when the catapult was first invented (by Archimedes!) it was a major shift in warfare. Fortified cities, for centuries the height of defense, were suddenly useless. At first, people though it must be gods sending bolts from heaven, because they could not imagine humans moving objects so large. One Roman commander is said to have cried “Oh Hercules! Human martial valor is of no use anymore.” This guy needs to get a load of the atom bomb.

Side bar, I also learnt that there are iron tools from 4000BC, about 2500 year before humans invented iron. GET THIS – It’s because early people learnt to carve iron out of meteorites! One community in Greenland used to pilgrimage annually to one they called ‘the mother.’

It’s not all about medieval weaponry. It’s also, probably more, about male friendship. It’s sort of charming the bloke-y way they build this catapult. And it’s kind of disturbing how amazed they are that they are managing to have a functional platonic relationship. Truly, men are lonely.

CATAPULT was first published thirty years ago; I have read it in re-issue. This has added another layer, because this means they are trying to build this catapult before the internet. I was alive before the internet, and I guess even I have forgotten what it was like. They go to the library to look at old pictures of catapults. They draw the catapult on paper. They look in the YELLOW PAGES for suppliers. They ask their friends for ideas. It’s just incredible how slow and how human the whole process is.

RANDOM FAMILY by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

I cannot now recall how I decided that what I needed to read was 400 pages of reportage of a family in 1980s Bronx, but I am glad I did. This was really banging, and unlike anything I have ever read.

The author embedded herself with a single family and tells about their day to day lives over the course of about a decade. I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece of non-fiction before that totally avoided commentary or context. It just plunges you right into the day-to-day of these peoples’ lives, and tries to very deeply understand the inter-personal dynamics that are driving the decisions they make. And by deeply, I mean DEEPLY. It’s clear she has interviewed people about stuff like how they first started having sex, and who was cheating on who and why, and so on. It’s interesting to read about any family’s interpersonal dynamics in this degree of objective detail, but this one is particularly so, because there is almost nothing else going on. Almost no one has a job, and many are in jail. All the family’s girls are pregnant at 14. 14! And then go on to have at least one more child before they are 18. They are caught in a very, very difficult spiral, and they handle it with extraordinary courage and good spirits. What I found particularly astonishing was how open they were to helping each other. One woman (Jessica) has 5 children before she is 21, and then goes to jail at 23. All of her children are absorbed by her family, rather than being put into care, despite the fact that her family really has no space or money for more. I was also astonished how appalling the prison system was. Apparently a single 15 minute call cost $4! And this for people who are often trying to make $10 do for two weeks of groceries.

One side point is I read this over the course of a delayed flight – MUC-LHR – and I note I read continuously for 4.5hrs. This makes me happy: clearly the phone has not totally eradicated my attention span.

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN by David Foster Wallace

I guess other people have noticed that David Foster Wallace is a good writer, but damn. I don’t even especially like essay collections, and still: damn. To be fair, I did skip a couple of the essays that seemed boring, but the ones I read were wonderful, especially the one about his time on a cruise ship.

Some of his descriptions are so perfect I think of them often. As for example a wide sky with “one or two clouds always in the distance, as if for scale,” and then later in the day the clouds “begin very slowly interacting like jigsaw pieces, and by evening the puzzle will be solved and the sky will be the colour of old dimes.” Or Montreal’s “EKG skyline.” Or when he could not see a powerpoint presentation because the room he was in was “so abundantly fenestrated.”

When are descriptions ever so interesting!?! This cruise essay is chock a block with ideas. Cruises he says “appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age-50+ people, for who their own mortality is something more than an abstraction.” As someone nearly 50+, I can only say: ouch.

And on the ship itself:

“It’s not an accident they’re all so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea”

It’s also very funny. Try:

“Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor”

I had a vague memory that he killed himself, and Wikipedia tells it was even before he had a chance to get to that 50+. I couldn’t tell you why, but as well as being clever and funny and beautifully written this essay was just overwhelmingly sad.

A WOMAN IN BERLIN by Anonymous

I am amazed I never heard of this book before, and had to randomly come across it in a secondhand book store. It’s a the real diaries of a woman in Berlin over three months in 1945, as the Russians invaded. AS Byatt called ‘one of the most remarkable war diaries ever kept’ and she is not wrong.

The first few weeks are spent in the basement, as Berlin is pounded with artillery, and they are cut off from water, from electricity and from news. And then the Russians arrive. I’m sorry to say she gets raped multiple times. Here she is waking up one morning:

“I felt rested and refreshed after five hours of deep sleep. A little hungover, but nothing more. I’d made it through another night.”

This was how bad it was; that just being alive was an achievement. She speaks a little Russian so manages to identify the highest-ranking Russian she can, in the hopes this will ringfence her from the others. The guy she finds is not nearly so bad as some. He does not ‘force’ her physically, and he apologizes, as he has not ‘had a woman’ in so long. She is so touched to be spoken to gently that she bursts into tears in his lap.

One thing I found interesting was that the experience of rape was so widespread, that the women all talked to each other very openly about it. She said it helped a lot, that it was a common experience and there was no shame. But get this: when he fiance comes home, she lets him read his diary and he is SO DISGUSTED BY HER RESILIENCE in the face of the sex violence that HE LEAVES HER. I mean: I can’t.

And this despite these sort of heart-breaking sections:

“I don’t want to touch myself, can barely look at my body. I can’t help but think about the little child I was, once upon a time, the little pink and white baby who made her parents so proud, as my mother told me over and over. . . . So much love, so much bother with sunbonnets, bath thermometers and evening prayers – and all for the filth I am now.”

Apparently there was a very bad reaction when it was published, as ‘people’ (men) thought it besmirched the honour of German women. So she insisted it not be published again till after her death, and never with her name. Her name came out eventually, and guess what: she lived till she was ninety, in 2001. She made it.

JOURNEYS OF A GERMAN IN ENGLAND: A WALKING TOUR OF ENGLAND IN 1782 by Carl Philip Moritz

Okay this one killed me. It was just so incredibly charming. It is the real letters of a young German who visited England in 1782. And et me tell you, he is LOVING it. Sample this from the day of his arrival:

“How different did I find these living hedges, the green of them and of the trees – this whole paradisical region – from ours and all others I have seen! How incomparable the roads! How firm the pathway beneath me!”

It rejoices in chapter headings like “Richmond: A Perfect Town.” He finds the street lighting amazing; though apparently this wasn’t just him – a German prince who was there shortly before found it so unusual that he assumed they had illuminated the town just for him.

Weirdly I just read another book by a young man who went on a long walk – Laurie Lee’s WHEN I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING, and it has just the same vibe. While I was impressed that Laurie Lee could relax just by looking at the view (no podcast, nothing), I was even more impressed by Moritz who relaxes by reading Milton. What could make you chill out like PARADISE LOST?

It was a deeply charming window into 18th century London. For example, apparently it took so long to get from the mouth of the Thames to London that most travellers got off at the coast and took a carriage. The river was so busy that you always knew where it was because of the forest of masts.

But to be honest the appeal was not so much the historic fact, as it was the joy and enthusiasm of this young man, dead these two hundred years.

JOE CINQUE’S CONSOLATION by Helen Garner

Apparently I’m on a real Helen-Garner-true-crime kick. This one is another account of a real trial. It is about a university student who hosts a dinner party to celebrate the fact that she is going to kill herself and her boyfriend. The boyfriend is not aware that this is a farewell party, but – get this – most of the other people there are (?!?). She goes on to kill the boyfriend but, in true cowardly form, not herself.

It is really a jaw-droppingly weird story. The girlfriend seems to be pretty sane-ish, but struggling with self-obsession. The judge believes she has some kind of personality disorder, which I could kind of believe, except for that part where she doesn’t even try killing herself, but stands over her boyfriend while he dies slowly over the whole weekend (heroin, rohypnol). She only get four years. Her best friend 100% knew what she was planning, is 100% sane, and gets off scot free. It’s wild. Only of their friends, a 21 year old, gets even close to calling the police, but is shamed into thinking they are not serious. This was in many ways the most interesting part of the story, how none of these students had the courage to follow their gut.

This was an earlier piece of reportage than THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF, and I did not like it as much. It was, for my taste at least, a little bit over-written and overwrought. It was still interesting though, and I don’t doubt that if she has written more of these I will read them.

THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF by Helen Garner

I chose this book on impulse because Amazon recommended it to me. I had just read a book by the same aurhor, her first, which is why the algorithm though I might like it. That one was a deeply personal memoir of her life in a commune with her junkie boyfriend. This one is wildly different, being a straightforward piece of courtroom reportage.

It was pretty interesting. It tells the real life trial of an Australian man who drove his three children into a dam. They were drowned, but he survived. He claimed he had a coughing fit. His ex, and his family, all testified in his defense, saying he loved his children and would never have killed them. He was also however in the middle of an apparently amicable divorce – his wife was leaving him for the contractor who was doing up their house – and it became increasingly clear over the course of the trial that this mild-manner man in this polite divorce had actually murdered the children to get his revenge.

The story in itself was pretty interesting, but what really elevated it was Garner’s clear, lucid writing, and her close observation of how ‘justice’ actually gets served. The part that I can’t get over is that these poor kids were found unbuckled. It looks like the five year old unbuckled the two year old’s car seat, and the eight year old actually managed to get the window down; but just not quite in time to escape.

THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle

This is the second time I have started this book, and the second time I have not finished it. Weirdly, both times I have got something out of it. It is a quite famous self-help book, and I think is the basis for some somewhat culty organizations. I don’t hold this against it, indeed I would query how good your self-help book is if no one can get a good cult out of it.

In the Introduction, Tolle tells us how he was suicidal one night, and thought he just couldn’t stand himself anymore. Then he wondered who was this ‘he’ who was experiencing himself. He had a sort of major insight, where he was able to see that his thoughts and feelings were not his inherent self. He then went to sleep, and woke up in such a state of bliss that he spent the next three months on park benches.

It sounds kind of crazy, but the point is very much the basic point of mindfulness – that we don’t have to identify ourselves with our thoughts. He goes on to build out this idea at some length, and I particularly liked some of his ideas – that you really, really, don’t need to think about your past. That it’s largely irrelevant. Also that you can decide not to create more pain for yourself. That you don’t have to accept anything as a ‘problem.’

He then gets a bit loopy, one-ness, Spirit, etc, and that’s where he keeps losing me, though one of these days I will get through it.

THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by Erik Larson

Here’s a piece of non-fiction about the 1893 World Fair in Chicago and the ‘Murder Hotel’ a serial killer set up to profit from it. Clearly anything called a Murder Hotel is going to be pretty interesting, but to my surprise the World Fair was even more so.

Paris had just had a spectacularly successful World Fair (for which the Eiffel Tower was built!), and Chicago was determined to better it. They only had 2-3 years to pull it off, and they had an unhinged level of ambition. As the organizer, Burnham said: “Make no little plans; they have no power to stir mens’ blood’ (which btw I have always found to be very good advice).

They built an entire display city, that used THREE TIMES the electricity of all of Chicago. For many people, it was the first electric lighted streets they’d ever seen. They also had a wild array of displays from all over the world, even sending an explorer out to Africa who was ‘confident he could acquire as many pygmies from the Congo as he wished’ (spoiler alert, he died of fever almost immediately because Africa does not play). They had new products – it’s where Juicy Fruit, Cracker Jack, and Shredded Wheat come from. And then they had what their competitor to the Eiffel tower – a structure designed by a young engineer called Ferris – which seemed so dangerous and insane it nearly did not get built at all.

The highest point of the Ferris Wheel was as high as the highest occupied floor in the highest skyscraper in the world; the axel alone at 142K pounds was the heaviest thing ever lifted into the air, and that was only the beginning of their problems. Ferris’ wife took the first ride in the wheel, to prove his confidence in it. The fair ended up being a huge success, with more people gathering in one place than ever before in the world in peacetime.

All these people were obviously a gold mine so lots of hotels were built to accommodate them. One of these was by this HH Holmes. Holmes did not like to pay his workers, so they would often walk off the job, which was good for him because it kept the costs down and because it meant no one really knew what he was building. Because what he was building was a murder hotel. Some of the rooms were airless, with gas jets he controlled in them. Some were soundproof. There was a chute from the top floor to the basement, and in the basement was a FURNACE. He was especially fond of killing young woman, of which there was a large supply, because girls were getting their first freedom and excited to come to the big city. He also managed to convince four different women to marry him (none survived). Estimates of how many he killed range from 50-200. He was eventually caught when he killed – for zero reason – the three children of one of his accomplices.

Who knew Chicago in 1893 was so interesting!

RIVER OF THE GODS by Candice Millard

Okay this one is really interesting. It just shows you that some people are miles ahead of their time. It’s about the identification of the source of the Nile, a topic of great interest in the west since Roman times, during which it a commonplace to call anything challenging ‘as difficult as to find the source of the Nile’. Several legions died trying. The mystery was eventually solved by John Speke. However, the hero of the tale is one Richard Burton.

This remarkable man, while British on paper was brought up all over Europe. (Big props to Burton as a schoolboy, who observed: ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire, but then it never rises either’). He grew up to be incredible at languages, speaking 25 well, and many dialetics. He had a system in which he could acquire a new language in two months, and never seemed to understand why others found it hard (!) He was the first Western person to go on the Haaj, managing to disguise himself as a Muslim (incredibly impressive, also very problematic).

He got the commission to try and find the Nile, though the voyage was underfunded, and at the last minute added Speke. So rough was Africa on European biology that people kept dying between agreeing to join and actually going. Speke managed to stay alive. Totally different to Burton, he was an aristocrat who spoke one language (English), and that not well. His main interest in going into the interior was, get this, hunting, so he could have specimens for the private museum he planned for his estate. It’s beyond satire. To give a flavour of the man, he was offered at one point the chance to dress as an Arab to make one section of the journey safer, but declined because he thought the Arabs were just trying to demean him by making him dress like them. Burton outright LOL-ed at the idea that Arabs would think themselves inferior to the English.

The two men and their army of porters endured many terrible things, starvation, fevers (a LOT of them), attack (in Burton’s case a spear through the mouth), etc. To give Speke his due, he was tough as hell. Once he was cover in beetles and tried to get one out of his ear with a knife, which ended up leaving him deaf. Here is Burton describing one incident, saying that he had set out to do or die, and: ‘I had done my best, and now nothing appeared to remain for me but to die as well.’

At the end of the expedition they were able to more or less figure that the source was in one of three lakes they had found (i.e., been led to by locals). One of these lakes only Speke had been to, Burton being too unwell. Speke became convinced this was the source. Getting back to England before Burton, he controlled the narrative, and the posh people in the Royal Geographic decided this posh man was clearly a better choice to lead the second Expedition than Burton. He was obviously heartbroken. Speke went back, established it was the lake he had seen, and then renamed it from Nyanza to Lake Victoria:

“Burton had found the renaming of the Nyanza not just presumptuous but preposterous: ‘My views . . . About retaining native nomenclature have ever been fixed, and of the strongest. Nothing can be so absurd as to impose English names on any part, but especially upon places in the remote interior parts of Africa’”

How contemporary is this man?!? Side bar, here he is on the Indians: Writing that Indians would soon decide that ‘the English are not brave, nor clever, no generous, not civilized, nor anything but surpassing rogues.’
You can see where he was not popular with the upper classes. Burton went on to variety of minor civil service roles while Speke had a fatal hunting accident that sounds a lot like a suicide. He had told Burton years before that “being tired of life he had come to be killed in Africa.”

Burton went on to translate the Kama Sutra (!), which made him a rich man. I loved this: “I have struggled for forty-seven years, distinguishing myself honourably in every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment nor a thank you nor a single farthing. I translate a doubtful book in my old age, and immeditaely make sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we need never be without money.”

While Speke has the honour of identifying the source, Burton is the one about home multiple biographies are written; poor Speke has one monograph from over a hundred years ago. So I guess there’s justice in that somewhere.