Tag: Non-fiction

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.

I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK by Michelle McNamara

This book is about a journalist’s fixation with a particular serial killer, the Golden State Killer. A very prolific offender, he committed 13 murders and more than 50 rapes over about 15 years. Curiously, despite this, he was not especially famous. This journalist, Michelle McNamara, spent a large amount of time with people she met on internet message boards, and with the police, researching the case and trying to solve it, and this is her account of her fixation. In the end, he was not caught by any of this work, but by genealogical DNA. She was important not because she solved it but because she drove interest in it, even giving him the name the Golden State Killer.


Two things struck me about this book, the first being how awful it is that in fact serial murders are completely capable of stopping. This one did. Their crimes are not compulsions, but choices. This makes it much worse. In this case, as the offender was a police officer, they think he stopped when he became aware how powerful DNA was.


The second thing was that the book was not finished by McNamara. She died part way through, in her sleep, from an undiagnosed heart condition mixed with prescription medication. It was sad to see the second author trying to find a way to end the book from her scribbled notes. It reminds you you do not know the day or the hour. In any case, the Golden State Killer was caught a few months later.

SUMMER OF BLOOD by Dan Jones

Here is a piece of non-fiction about the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381. I’d never heard of it. Apparently after the plague, there were so few working people that they were able to up their day rates, which the nobles didn’t like. Hilariously, they therefore tried to fix prices at the pre-Plague rates. In addition to this great idea, they were also busy trying to rule France by means of an expensive war, and decided that peasants should accept the introduction of taxation to pay for it.

This did not go down well. Inspired by a priest called John Ball, who was basically miles ahead of Marx with the communism (and from who the famous line “When Adam delved and Even span, who then was the gentleman?” comes), the peasants marched on London, killed a lot of nobles who deserved it (and some who potentially did not), and took the Tower of London. Richard II, then fourteen, granted them all their demands, and the revolt started to ease. So then he set up vindictive kangaroo courts and had thousands of peasants executed in revenge. Rich people got to rich I guess.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim McQuarrie

Due to being an insufferable swot I always like to read a book from a country I am in when I am in it.  Thus THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim MacQuarrie while I was in Peru.  This was some hair-raising non-fiction.  I knew very little about South American colonialism, and now I know a little more all I can say is YIKES.  These sixteenth century Spanish were intense.  However so also were the Incas. 

Basically the tiny amount of contact the Incas had had with Europeans had spread smallpox, which the Inca Emporer (Sapa Inca) died of.  This triggered a civil war between two of his sons, and when I say a civil war, I mean the winner (Atahulpa) aimed to exterminate his brothers whole blood line down to hanging the unborn babies BY THEIR UMBILICAL CORDS.  Then the Spanish turn up.  There were only 163 of them, and Atahulpa had a victorious army in the tens of thousands.  So you can see where he was not worried.  He went to meet them the day after he found out his brother was dead, so he was really finally the Sapa. He was mostly just interested in seeing the horses, as they did not exist in his Empire and he saw how valuable they could be.  They immediately kidnap him.  Poor guy: one day as the Sapa.  So unconcerned was he about the capacity of the Spanish (who he thought were strange savages, which is of course exactly what they thought of him) that from his prison he ordered the continued execution of senior figures in the Inca opposition, instead of – for example – asking them to rise up and save him.   You can see where he is coming from: there are only 163 of them!  But what he did not bargain on was that they had iron.  I guess I did not appreciate the importance of iron, but it meant that their armour made them basically invincible, especially with the horses.  

It just gets worse and sadder from there on all sides.  These Spanish were not representatives of the Crown but really just independent entrepreneurs, who risked their lives on the chance there was gold somewhere out there in places they did not even know existed yet.  Pizarro, the main one, grew up really poor, as did most of the others. I guess you need to be really desperate to get on one of those ships.  I got the impression that these were some seriously traumatized people before they even left Spain, and it went downhill from there.

There are about a million more things I learnt, like how the Incas kept everything the Sapa touched (eg., left over food) and burnt it once a year, or how the Sapa executed a whole batallion once for flinching the first time they saw a horse, or how this poor 19 year old the Spanish put in place as a puppet emperor grew into a guerilla leader, or how his wife was tortured to death in public but shamed the Spanish by not saying a word, but anyway I guess you will just have to read it.  

It was strange to read so much history while in a country.  I had a coffee in a central square about which my only context was that 3000 Incas died defending it.  

THE SINGULARITY IS NEARER by Ray Kurzweil

This book is a fantastically named sequel to his first, THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR. The Singularity is moment at which our brains are able to meld with a computer, so we will – according to him – be able to be fantastically more intelligent. A bit like the leap from Neanderthal to today.

It’s a book absolutely bristling with ideas – I highlighted lots of it. Like, for example, do you know the odds of the sperm and egg meeting to make you was 1 in 2 million trillion? And then go back through all the people who had to meet and mate to produce your parents, to see how lucky you are to be alive. Even wilder, he talks about how many things had to go right for life to have emerged on earth at all; apparently it is the same likelihood as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747.

He has lots of big ideas for the future – for example, for when nanotechnology will be able to print anything, because it will be able to assemble stuff at atom level. So lithium will no longer be precious; nor will diamonds. He believes the world is getting better (did you know deaths from war in prehistory were about 500/100K; now they are 4/100K, even counting nuclear weapons?), and will continue to get better quickly. He makes some good arguments, pointing out how unimaginable landing on the moon was in the early 1900s, when no one had even flown yet.

I struggled a lot with all this talk of the ‘one way march of progress.’ I see what he means, but on the other hand, I’m not sure I do. What about the fall of Rome? What about the dangers of AI? I hate to say it, but all this boundless optimism just said one thing to me, and that one thing was: boomer. I get it, your life has just been one long upward swing. Here’s fingers crossed for the rest of us.

THE EMPEROR by Ryszard Kapuscinki

Here is a book in which a journalist seeks out and interviews members of the court of Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia, immediately after he is deposed. This is not too easy, as they either dead or in hiding. He is mostly able to find the most junior servants. The guy whose job was to put the pillow under his majesty’s feet; the guy whose job was to clean up after his majesty’s dog; the guy whose job was to bow every hour on the hour, so the emperor could keep track of time passing. It’s an interesting picture of what power does to people. Some say that the interviews are a bit too on the nose, and that in fact the whole thing is a commentary on the dictatorship in Kapuscinki’s native Poland. I don’t know that it makes that much difference; one great truth in life is that one autocrat is much like another.

Particularly interesting was how Selassie lost power, in inches, to the military council named the Derg, which itself became a pretty robust dictatorship basically immediately. I have been to a museum about this in Addis, where they directly display some of what they dug up from mass graves of the period, including heart-breaking passport photos of hopeful students with enormous 70s hair who laid down their lives for a better Ethiopia. I’ve also been to Selassie’s palace, where you can see the his-n-hers bathroom set up he had (pink and blue) complete with bullet holes in the mirrors from when things got real at the end.

A sad and weird read.

THE DAIRIES OF MR LUCAS: NOTES FROM A LOST GAY LIFE edited by Hugo Greenhalgh

I just love an ordinary person’s diary.  This one is from a man who kept a diary from his 20s till his 80s, and is mostly extracted from his 40s (during the nineteen sixties).  They are mostly about sex, and especially about sex workers.  I have no idea if this is what all of the diaries are about, or if this is just this editor’s interest. 

The editor inserts himself into the story quite a lot.  He was a TV researcher when he first met Mr Lucas, looking for people who were willing to talk about their experience of rent boys.  He maintained a friendship with him for decades after that, in part because he wanted the diaries, and in part because he grew to like him; and indeed Mr Lucas gifted the dairies to him in his will. 

They are a charming/predatory picture of a certain slice of London life. It’s fun to hear places about places you know well .in a very different context.  Picadilly Circus was described as ‘the marketplace of the bugger boys’ by one judge, and it’s north railing was known as the ‘rack’ of the ‘meat market’.  Or, here’s Tower Hamlets:“’Victoria Park is a great haunt of inverts.  I must explore its possibilities,’ he writes in April 1949. . “

It was extremely sad to be reminded of how recently people’s lives were destroyed for being gay in the UK.  At one point, the actor Sir John Geilgud was found by police ‘cruising for sex in a public lavatory’.  They were worried his career was over, but Sybil Thorndike insisted he come on stage with her

“She grabbed him and whispered fiercely, ‘Come on, John darling, they won’t boo me,’ and led him firmly on to the stage.  To everybody’s astonishment and indescribable relief, the audience gave him a standing ovation.”

That’s quite some allyship!  Mr Lucas ended up living a bit of a lonely life, despite all the sex.  He lived for decades in a house about 10 minutes walk from mine, and I plan to go past it, to salute him.  It’s just amazing to think every house in London is packed with not just its current inhabitants stories but those of decades, sometimes centuries, before.