"The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande

Gawande is a surgeon whose failures led him to devise an aeroplane-pilot-style checklist approach to operations. He claims that this reduces failure and complications hugely and significantly.

He suggests that "Know-how and sophistication have increased remarkably across almost all our realms of endeavor, and as a result so has our struggle to deliver on them." (p11) This is because the systems delivering have become too complex for individuals to master. This causes deep customer dissatisfaction. "Failures of ignorance we can forgive. .... But if the knowledge exists and is not applied correctly, it is difficult not to be infuriated." (p 11) This is the point at which failure becomes negligence.

His examples are mostly from surgery. Most operations involve a team of people, often including newcomers, attempting to apply standard procedures to a very individual patient. In the barely controlled chaos of an operation obvious steps are sometimes missed. Furthermore, the team is often handicapped by a lack of communication or by hierarchy and subservience preventing people from over-ruling the god-like surgeon. Gawande believes that checklists have two functions: firstly they prevent obvious steps being missed (he says that since using checklists he has not spend a single week without discovering that a step was about to be missed in his own operating theatre) and secondly they increase team spirit and help to flatten the hierarchy.

He claims that the classic hospital checklist is the four 'vital signs' (temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate) chart which was introduced by nurses not doctors in  the 1960s.

Builders have used checklists since buildings became too complicated for a single 'Master Builder' to construct. Builders use two sorts of checklists: one for which jobs have been done and one for ensuring that everyone who needs to be informed has been informed.

His checklist rules.

• Every item on a checklist must be non-ambiguous.
• Some checklists are proactive and should be read out before performance, others are retroactive and should be a check after performance.
• One's procedure needs to incorporate one or more 'pause points'. Each pause point contains a single checklist.
• Checklists should be physical; ideally the whole team should agree that each item can be checked.
• Each checklist should take no more than sixty seconds.

When Gawande was designing a surgical checklist he took a lot of time to reduce the list to the barest bones (sorry about the pun!). He deliberately left out complicated items (because they might be ambiguous) and he only included items that had leverage. Operating theatre fires kill many fewer patients than post-operative infections so the checklist focuses on antibiotics rather than asbestos. This keeps the list short enough that surgeons will use it even in high pressure situations.

He emphasises that checklists help communication and team working.

He also points out that there has been significant resistance to introducing checklists into surgery despite the remarkable success rates of the WHO research that he worked on. Human beings (and perhaps especially prima donna surgeons) don't like discipline.

I would add that his checklists typically operate in situations where the system is complex but each part can be broken down into simple steps. Can they be equally successfully in the arcane mystery that is persuading pupils to learn?

Like many American books his message is very small; I think I have encapsulated it above. He spins it into a (short) book by telling stories and adding lots of detail in the stories and lots of statistics. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

December 2011; 193 pages

"The Greatest Traitor" by Ian Mortimer

This life of Roger Mortimer, deposer of Edward II, is a cracking good read.

Mortimer as a young man enjoyed the company of young Prince Edward and his mates, including Piers Gaveston, at the court of Edward I. But when Ed I died and the Prince became King things began to turn sour. Ed II was besotted with Gaveston, flirting with him whilst marrying his Queen, Isabella, beautiful blonde daughter of handsome King Philip 'the Fair' of France. Gaveston became greedy and arrogant, mocking the royal Earls and stealing castles, manors and estates. Finally the noblemen got so pissed off they kidnapped and murdered him. In all this Roger supported the King.

Then it all started again but with a bloke called Hugh Despenser who was Roger's sworn enemy because Roger's grandad had killed Hugh's grandad at the battle of Evesham when Hugh's grandad had been fighting with Simon De Montfort. These families were like warring Mafia clans! But King Ed II favoured Hugh and Hugh got greedy and stole loads of land and then the Parliament insisted Hugh was exiled which he was for a while (becoming a pirate) but then he came back and got even more too big for his boots and Roger opposed him which led to Roger being done for treason and thrown into the Tower. Roger's whole family suffered, his sister-in-law being locked up in Chicksands Priory.

Roger then became one of the very few people ever to escape from the Tower. He fled to France where he got together with Isabella (on a visit to her brother who was now King) and they had an affair. They came back together and there was a rebellion and they arrested King Ed II and forced him to abdicate in favour of his son who became King Ed III. But the real power behind the throne was Roger and his mistress Queen Isabella. There was some truculence among the Lords which led to the Earl of Lancaster surrendering at Bedford and the Earl of Kent being executed for treason despite being the new King's uncle for the crime of trying to rescue his brother Ed II from Corfe Castle (even though Ed II had supposedly died at Berkely Castle).

Finally a group of men went through a secret passage into Nottingham Castle with the assistance of Ed III and arrested Roger who was hanged naked at Tyburn.

English History: better than fiction.

December 2011; 264 pages

"The Prague Golem": Vitalis 2004

I bought the book of Jewish fairy stories in Prague; it is an English translation. It is a little like the Brothers Grimm meet Orthodox Judaism. There are stories of men who discover Gold and Rabbis who cheat death. In particular the stories focus on one Rabbi, Rabbi Loew, who creates the Golem, a man fashioned from  clay and brought to life. The purpose of the Golem is to protect the Jewish community but he never seems to be used for this and shortly afterwards the Rabbi, by saying the original prayers backwards, returns the Golem to clay.

The trouble with these sort of religious stories is that morality is repeatedly confused. In Rabbi Loew the Benefactor of the Jews in Prague the good Rabbi persuades Emperor Rudolph  that "the whole community should never in future be held responsible for the guilt of the individual." This is clearly right and proper and a bedrock of decent law. In the story after next, Beleles Street, the very same Rabbi discovers that the cause of the plague which has been killing the children of the community is that two couples are wife-swapping. It is apparently OK for God, or Death, to make the whole community suffer for the sins of a few but it is not OK if the Emperor does it.

Double standards. Superstitious nonsense.

December 2011; 63 pages

"Teacher Man" by Frank McCourt

This is the third volume in Frank McCourt autobiography and follows the award winning Angela's Ashes and 'Tis. It tells the tale of McCourt becoming a teacher in New York and later a writer.

He misquotes Pope: "Know thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man" (Pope's version is Know then thyself ...).

He is very eloquent about teaching in his usual rhythmic 'I am Irish' style. There are moments which are funny and moments which are interesting but I didn't catch my breath until McCourt the teacher is interrogating a rich kid in his creative writing class about his dinner. He asks who cooked it. The maid. And served it. He asks about the table - mahogany - and the chandelier and the music. Not Mozart. Telemann. "He's one of my father's favourites," says the student. And where is your father? Then comes the brutal pay-off line: "He's in Sloan-Kettering Hospital with lung cancer and my mother is with him all he time because he's expected to die."

Instantly the world of privilege of the spoilt little rich kid dissolves into a world of despair and a little kid.

Every teacher has had a moment like that. Mine was when I asked, rhetorically, what Sabir's mother would say if she found out what he had done to be told, through tears, that his mother wouldn't say a word because her windpipe had been crushed in a car accident and it was still uncertain whether she would survive. I put my arm around Sabir and hugged him till the tears subsided.

Although at the start of the book I thought it was McCourt churning out the old Irish brogue formula that powered his previous two books (but Angela's Ashes rather more than 'Tis), when he started describing his Creative Writing classes at Stuyvesant High and the unusual (bizarre!) strategies he adopted (eg getting the students to sing recipes) his love of teaching and his characterisation of the kids he taught caught me and held me in a magical enchantment. By the end I loved the book.

December 2011; 258 pages

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Irish fiction reviewed in this blog:

• Strumpet City by James Plunkett: a book about the poor in Dublin in the early 20th Century
• Teacher Man by Frank McCourt: the sequel to Angela's Ashes: an Irish exile in New York
• Dubliners by James Joyce: the classic short stories
• Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgworth: a classic first published in 1800
• Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle: a boy grows up in Ireland
• The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan: set in the recession of the early 21st Century

"After the Quake" by Haruki Murakami

This is a collection of short stories by the lyrical Japanese writer.

After the Kobe earthquake Komura's wife leaves him. He flies to Hokkaido carrying a small wooden box that a colleague has given him. He is empty inside.

After the Kobe earthquake Junko watches Mr Miyake build a bonfire on a midnight beach. They decide that when the bonfire goes out they will die together.

After the Kobe earthquake Yoshiya follows the man with the missing ear to a deserted baseball stadium. He believes the man to be is father although his mother insists he is the child of God. The man with the missing ear disappears and Yoshiya dances at night in the empty stadium.

After the Kobe earthquake Satsuki,a menopausal thyroidologist, goes on holiday in Thailand. Her driver, who claims to be half dead, takes her to a fortune teller. Satsuki hates her ex-husband, hoping he was swallowed up by Kobe's liquefied earth, and mourns the children she never had.

After the Kobe earthquake a giant Frog comes to call on bank debt-collector Mr Katagiri to enlist his help in a subterranean battle to the death with Worm who is planning to destroy Tokyo with an earthquake. Katagiri may or may not get shot and wakes up in hospital.

After the Kobe earthquake Junpei tells stories about bears and honey to Sala who is scared of The Earthquake Man. Later he makes love to Sala's mum, his best friend since college, who went off with his other best friend at college.

Six stories told in Murakami's bald prose. The dialogue is stark and people often say things which have no bearing on what was said before. The characters are outlined with the efficiency of a cartoonist; there is no attempt at the multi-layering of an oil painting. They are all empty, nihilistic, hollow. The situations are all ordinary with a hint of extra-ordinary. It works at the level of fairy tales and this must be because Murakami's words, while flat, have a lyrical magic. These are haiku stories.

But while haikus often reveal beauty, these stories chronicle the dark, materialistic, violent soulessness of Japanese society.

Strange and powerful.

Dec 2011; 132 pages

"50 Literature Ideas you really need to know" by John Sutherland

I think I expected this book to be more about creative writing than it was. It started well with Mimesis (which just means imitation ie writing that tries to mirror reality) but very quickly it got into the world of literary criticism. What is a classic? Does a text belong to the writer or the reader and where does the meaning reside? Deconstruction means that every text is inherently indeterminate of meaning. Where does plagiarim begin and hommage end; where does this leave fanfic and the e-book? These topics might be fascinating to an academic but most of them came nowhere near my conception of the 50 Literature ideas I wanted let alone needed to know.

Disappointing.

December 2011; 203 pages

"The Invention of Air" by Steven Johnson

This is the biography of Joseph Priestley, Unitarian minister and Chemist. In his early days he was the author of a best-selling history of Electricity (a friend of Franklin). Later he invented soda water' He discovered that plants produce the air that flames and animals need to stay alive (but he never really discovered Oxygen, leaving that to the more careful Science of his friend Lavoisier). He was sponsored by the Lunar Society. He then wrote a controversial book debunking Christianity (he was one of the inventors of Unitarianism, denying the Trinity and the divinity of Christ). This and his radical political views at the time meant that the Birmingham mob burned his chapel and his house down and he had to go into hiding. He then emigrated to the newly independent USA. He was a great mate of 2nd President John Adams until his belief in the Book of Revelation got in the way. Later, unable to resist meddling in politics, he fell foul of the newly enacted Alien and Sedition Laws but President Adams kept him out of jail. He was quite a mate of third president Jefferson.

In other words he was a political hothead who could not restrain himself and an amateur scientist whose haphazard methods (and unwavering belief in phlogiston) made him unable to make real progress in his science.

Along the way this book muses on the Philosophy of Science. It does not really believe in the Great Man theory of history. Rather, it believes that what it calls a 'hot hand' is just a lucky streak: "a fantasy of misinterpreted probability" (p43). This fits in with the ideas suggested by eg Nate Silver in The signal and the noise and Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, fast and slow.

He also muses on the coincidence that Priestley's discovery of the interdependence of plant life and animal life came as a result of the leisure time he had due to the industrial revolution based on coal from the carboniferous era when plants evolved lignin and decomposers took some millions of years to learn how to rot lignin so it got buried and metamorphosed into coal. We tend to think of money encouraging innovation because it functions as an incentive  ... but accumulated wealth ... allowed people like Joseph Priestley to pursue scientific breakthroughs without the promise of financial reward." (p129)

A delightful book although it tends to show what a shallow scientist Priestley was and ekes this out by an American-centric account of his relationship with Americans Franklin, Adams and Jefferson.

December 2011; 240 pages

"Fifty Management ideas you really need to know" by Edward Russell-Walling

This is full of lots of interesting ideas although the concept of management seems to be restricted to commercial, preferably industrial, companies. From time to time I got a really good idea from it, rarely a paradigm-breaking idea, occasionally an idea I could directly use. But it was fun.

December 2011; 203 pages

"The Moon and Sixpence" by Somerset Maugham

This delightful book is the fictionalised story of Paul Gaugin. The narrator, a writer, meets Mrs Strickland and ,through her, Strickland, a stockbroker, who shortly abandons his wife, his family and his career to travel to Paris to become a painter. The wife persuades the narrator to go to Paris to persuade her husband to return but Strickland is rude and obsessive. If one is a genius one submits to the tyranny of one's art and normal human relations go out of the window. Later the narrator returns to Paris. Another 'chocolate box' artist, Stroeve is the only person who recognises the genius in Strickland but Strickland treats Stroeve like dirt, mocking him and his work. After Stroeve and his wife nurse back to life a seriously ill Strickland, Strickland seduces her and she leaves her husband. Later Strickland abandons her and she commits suicide, leaving 'ridiculous' Stroeve doubly betrayed. In the last part of the novel the narrator happens to be in Tahiti. Strickland went there, painted, a died a terrible death which the narrator pieces together with witness statements from the people who knew him.

What makes this a great book is the elegance of the prose (suggesting that the narrator is a prissy non-entity) coupled with the brutality of the ideas (standing for the rawness of art; Strickland is a man possessed by the terrible demon of art and at the same time a sensuous and brutal man loved by women). Perhaps this duality reflects Gaugin's art: simplistic and naive but full of power. The characterisations are all remarkable:

• Mrs Strickland is a women who seeks the company of artists and writers while never suspecting that her dull stockbroking husband has artistic genius; after being abandoned she opens a typing agency but after Strickland's death and subsequent fame she begins to bask again in the attention given to her as his wife.
• Dirk Stroeve the fat untalented but commercially successful artist who was ridiculous in his devotion to his wife and ridiculous again in his grief; but he was the first man who recognised the genius in Strickland.
• Mrs Stroeve who was afraid of Strickland and then left her husband for him and then killed herself when Strickland left her.
• The Tahitians: the jovial obese hotel owner with a wonderfully relaxed attitude to sex even though she was now to fat to have any; the Captain who knew Strickland in Marseilles although he was probably making his story up to please the narrator who paid for it in whisky and cigars; the doctor who attended Strickland in his last days.

Wonderful characters.

And the book is remarkable for the amount of sex in it. It was published in 1919 and it is so frank. Tahitian 17 year old Ata has "never been promiscuous like some of these girls - a captain or a first mate, yes, but she's never been touched by a native." p182 Frank and funny. And the narrator himself suggests that when sex it over "you feel so extraordinarily pure. You feel like a disembodied spirit, immaterial, and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing, and you feel an intimate communion with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the iridescence of the river. You feel like God." p78

There were so many gems and bon mots in this book:

• "Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour." p46
• Conscience is "the policeman in all our hearts, set there to watch that we do not break its laws." p51
• "I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the death-bed of those they love. Sometimes it seems as if they grudge the longevity which postpones their chance of an effective scene." p56
• "Le Maitre de la Boite a Chocolats" [Stroeve] p62
• "Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part. I know lust. That's normal and healthy. Love is a disease." p140
• "Here lies the unreality of fiction. For in men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not very interesting ones." p152
• "The sadness which you may see in the jester's eyes when a merry company is laughing at his sallies and his jokes are gayer because in the communion of laughter he finds himself more intolerably alone." p157
• "Neither wit nor whisky could detain him then." p161

The ending is equally brilliant. The narrator meets Mrs Strickland and her now grown up children (a soldier and a soldier's wife; perfectly conformist members of society with no genius) and the son quotes 'The mills of God grind slowly , but they grind exceeding small.' The narrator feels "sure that they thought the quotation was from Holy Writ" and when he contrasts this boy with Strickland's Tahitian bastard "a quotation from the Bible came to my lips, but I held my tongue, for I know that clergymen think it a little blasphemous when the laity poach upon their preserves. My Uncle Henry, for twenty-seven years Vicar of Whitstable, was on these occasions in the habit of saying that the devil could always quote scripture to his purpose. He remembered the days when you could get thirteen Royal Natives for a shilling."

This ending combines obscurity and scholarship (the Mills of God quotation is actually Longfellow but Maugham doesn't tell us that) and then teases again by offering a Biblical quotation but we are never told which. It then falls from fiction into fact: Maugham's Uncle was really the Vicar of Whitstable. It ends with another little character vignette which Maugham has peppered throughout the novel. This character, like a few of the others, has absolutely no part to play in the story. Uncle Henry is utterly incidental and yet he finished the book. Royal Natives are Whitstable oysters.

Apparently it is called The Moon and Sixpence because you can stare at the Moon whilst ignoring the sixpence at your feet.

A beautiful brilliant book.

December 2011; 215 pages

Also read Maugham's much weightier but brilliant On Human Bondage

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The fears of Henry IV" by Ian Mortimer

Ian Mortimer writes mediaeval history so readably. This biography of "England's Self-Made King" starts with 14 year old Henry in the Tower during the Peasant's Revolt and a retainer persuading the invading mob not to murder him. Henry had a glorious youth: son of John of Gaunt, England's richest and most powerful lord, grandson of Edward III (named as heir after Richard II and John of Gaunt), cousin and boyhood playmate of King Richard II, a talented musician, a big reader, a student who (in exile) attended lectures at the University of Paris, a star jouster from the age of 14, a crusader (with the Teutonic Knights in Lithuania) and a pilgrim (the only mediaeval English King to enter Jerusalem), and a key member of the opposition in Parliament to Richard II's increasingly arbitrary and tyrannical rule. All this potential seemed dashed by Richard's hatred (possibly caused by jealousy since the dashing Henry was everything that Richard was not). Richard continually promoted others over him (including naming them as heir) and slighted or spurned him. Finally Richard exiled Henry. In exile Henry must have felt that all his promise was for nothing. But he returned from exile to lead a rebellion against Richard, to depose Richard and to be recognised by Parliament as King in Richard's place. Then things began to go wrong.

All the early promise evaporated. His vow to be merciful was falsified almost immediately when he (probably) gave the order to ensure that Richard was killed in imprisonment (possibly starving him to death). Two harvest failures and an inability to be good with money meant that his manifesto commitment not to impose peacetime taxes plunged him into debt. Scotland, Wales and France all fought against him. There were many rebellions at home (including eight assassination attempts) culminating in the Battle of Shrewsbury when Henry decisively defeated and killed Harry Hotspur. Even peace left him at the mercy of a hostile and penny-pinching parliament. Finally some dreadful skin disease left him crippled and dying, dead before he reached fifty.

Mostly uncommemorated (Mortimer claims that his only statue is in Shrewsbury's Battlefield church) Henry started the tradition of giving to the poor on Maundy Thursday (his birthday) an amount proportional to his age. He owned an early (perhaps the first) portable clock (p93). In exile he stayed at Sangatte, outside Paris and in 'Newenham' Priory (I presume this is Newnham Priory which around this time was involved with Mowbray who was the Earl of Norfolk involved in a dispute about a rebellion with Henry which led to his and Henry's exile; Newnham Priory received a grant from Henry IV on 15th February 1409) in Bedfordshire on 7th July 1403 (p265). 

Fabulous history of a fascinating king. 

November 2011; 387 pages

"The Devil's Cup" by Stewart Lee Allen

An interesting history of coffee is turned into a mesmerising thriller by the adventures of Stewart, following coffee from Ethiopian genesis to the USA. On the way this beatnik turned author travels on a gun-running boat from Djibouti to Yemen while these two countries are at war, negotiates a people-smuggling deal, is conned whilst trying to participate in an international forged art smuggling business, meets low-lifes of all sorts, travels from Italy to Rio, has his passport confiscated and his car searched, interrogates entranced mediums, and drinks every variety of coffee possible from Ethiopian brewed with the leaves to Yemeni, to Turkish, to Viennese, to Parisian, to Italian, to Brazilian, to American.

Unbelievable. Why have I never heard of this book before?

November 2011; 230 pages

"Possession" by A S Byatt

A penniless literary researcher discovers a love letter from the Victorian poet whose biography he is working on to another Victorian poetess. He and a lady lecturer trace the details of an unknown and illicit Victorian love affair. What happened and why?

Despite acres of Victorian allusive poetry, pregnant with myth, and a whole chapter of letters from poet to poetess, mostly discussing nothing, this book draws you in. But oh how shallow the modern world appears and how unromantic our couplings and uncouplings are compared with the enforced chastities and unconsummated desires of the past.

A mystery but also a satire on the obsessions of the modern biography industry.

Delightful. The winner of the Booker Prize in 1990

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

November 2011; 511 pages

"The Enchantress of Florence" by Salman Rushdie

Longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize.

This book reminded me of a silk and velvet version of my own 'Don Petro de la Hoz'.

It was certainly lavish. A yellow haired wanderer and magician of Florentine descent related to Amerigo Vespucci and named after Niccolo Machiavelli but calling himself the 'Mughal of Love' arrives at the imperial Moghul court of Akbar the Great. He tells a story of Qara Koz, the woman he claims to be his mother, a princess of the line of Tamburlane and Genghis Khan, who was multiply abducted through the fortunes of war until she found love with a Florentine Janissary. This makes him Akbar's uncle.

His stories weave magic around the Mughal court and enchant the great emperor (who has himself conjured up a fantasy queen). And the tale weaves back and forth from past to present, from India and Persia and  Ottoman Asia to Transylvania and Italy and the Nuovo Mondo, from history to fantasy, rich, gorgeous and romantic.

Selected Quotes:

• Philosophical: "If there had never been a God, the Emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was." (Chapter 19). 
• Political: "Was foreignness itself a thing to be embraced as a revitalizing force bestowing bounty and success upon its adherents, or did it adulterate something essential in the individual and the society as a whole?" (Chapter 19)
• Witty: "Only the humble did not stumble" (Chapter 19)

Spell-binding.

November 2011; 443 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Pocket Encyclopaedia of Impressionists"

The Impressionists were an brilliantly talented bunch of artists who happened to meet in Paris  and studied together and worked together and exhibited together and in some cases lived together.

This books explains their incredible history and then gives an authoritative analysis of some of the leading lights including the incomparable Monet, anarchist Pisarro, unwillingly controversial Manet, balletophile Degas, working class Renoir and gentle landscapist Sisley. It explains about their key beliefs, such as painting landscapes in the open air and their use of brilliant colours and concentrating on patches of light but it also explains which artists followed which styles.

My only complaint about the formidably impressive book is that the illustrations rarely co-ordinate with the text so that you are reading about one painting while seeing another or you are flicking through the book to understand what they are talking about. Perhaps a slideshow version of the book might be the answer.

"After Me, the Deluge" by David Forrest

This tells the story of a young priest in a tiny French village who receives a telephone call from God commanding him to build and Ark for the forthcoming flood that is going to destroy the world. The eccentric villagers including a massive, ex-para, whore-mongering, poorly endowed barman, an officious policeman and a pompous mayor help construct the Ark. But word gets out via a cod-Jewish newspaperman called Morry. The government send the police in but the Vatican send a Cardinal.

It reminded me very much of The Mouse that Roared which I read when I was about 12 and so I assumed initially that this book was written about the same time (late fifties/ early sixties) but the rather more explicit sexuality of this book firmly placed it in the seventies.

Light comedy; a fun easy read (but with a disappointing ending).

November 2011; 189 pages

"Appleby House" by Sylvia Smith

A chronicle of a year in rented accommodation.

Sylvia rents a bedsit with kitchen in a four bedroom house, sharing with lonely Laura, Susanna and her sister Beverley, Sharon and her boyfriend Peter, and later Tracey. The girls bicker about the domestic arrangements and the noises they make to keep the others awake. They surf the highs of sharing a bottle of wine and getting a little tiddly and the lows of being ill at Christmas and redundancy. The characters are grey and thin, the dialogue is stilted and colourless, the book is banal and humdrum.

"The East End minimalist is back," says the Observer. "If her style were to be translated into an object, it would  be an antimacassar or a crotcheted white-lace doily." Which is fair enough. If that is your idea of literature.

Boring.

November 2011; 160 pages

"Veronika Decides to Die" by Paolo Coelho

Veronika attempts suicide and wakes up in a mental hospital to be told that her heart has been irreparably damaged and that she has only a week to live. She spends the week interacting with the other inmates and the staff.

The inmates are all good and the staff are all bad.

Every character is cardboard. I know Coelho has this parable-like way of narrating but this can get rather tedious and he reduces the complexity of human characters into two dimensions. At the same time he spouts a lot of crap about crystals and astral projection and saints.

The best thing about this book is that it is brief.

October 2011; 191 pages

"1492: the year our world began" by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

This book considers individual events across the world in 1492 and shows how each led to the development of the modern, western-dominated world.

It is sometimes not very well written. He meanders disjointedly. He repeats himself. Sometimes it seems as if the book has been composed in short sections that have not been integrated properly.

I also have problems accepting his thesis (which he himself disavows) that so much depended on a single year. I also wonder how he can be so authoritative  (eg "The conventional explanations [for how the Spaniards so easily defeated the Aztecs]  - that the Spaniards were inherently superior, that they were mistaken for gods  and preceded by omens, that their technology was decisive, that disease undermined defence, and that their enemies were subverted by corroded morale - are all false."; pp287-8 and his rubbishing of the theory that the Chinese fleets under Zheng-He circumnavigated the globe as espoused by Gavin Menzies in '1421' p226) when he is dealing with the whole world. When you paint a big canvas you expect broad strokes but you shouldn't deny the art of the miniaturist.

Nevertheless I enjoyed this book because he gave me alternative perspectives for some things I thought I knew:

• "The idea that the demand for spices was the result of the need to disguise tainted meat and fish is one of the great myths of the history of food. Fresh foods in mediaeval Europe were fresher than they are today, because they were produced locally." p17; 
• "Mediaeval Castilians eschewed olive oil and used lard as their main source of dietary fat" p88; 
• "Few of the people foul-mouthed as 'motherfuckers' in gangland parlance actually practice incest" p89; 
• The Turks were unable to conquer the western Mediterranean world because the prevailing winds were against them and the straits of Messina south of Sicily effectively bottled them up p112; 
• Columbus sold his plan of a voyage across the Atlantic with a different spin for whichever audience he had, sometimes talking of new islands like the Canaries, sometimes of an unknown continent and sometimes of a route to Cathay p183; 
• Maritime exploration is encouraged by winds that blow into your face because then you know you are likely to be able to get home p241 but Monsoon systems with regular seasonal winds are best and led to early and well-established trading routes across the Indian Ocean p242; 
• "Whatever modernity is, the high valuation of the individual is part of it" p272

But possibly the very best bits of this book were the things I didn't even know I didn't know:

• How Islam came to dominate Western Africa
• The economic effects of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492
• The explanation of how Muscovy became Russia
• The origin of pre-Berber cultures in the Canary Islands and the hundred years it took the Spaniards to conquer them despite the fact that they had no weapons other than sticks and stones

So a great little introduction which has opened my eyes and made me want to read at least half a dozen more specialised histories!

October 2011; 321 pages
The richness of the pre-Mediaeval Indian Ocean

"The Stars' Tennis Balls" by Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry brings the Count of Monte Cristo to the twentieth century.

Ned Maddstone, the son of a Tory MP, is Head of School at Harrow, a star cricket player, destined for Oxford. He meets and falls madly in love with Portia. On a school sailing trip he accepts a sealed envelope from a dying man. Before he can deliver it a schoolboy prank causes him to be arrested; following his arrest he is spirited away to an isolated existence on an island.

This is the story of Edmond Dantes (an anagram of Ned Maddstone) and the three conspirators who tore him away from his wedding feast (his one and only shag with Portia) and had him consigned to the Chateau D'If. The remainder of the story plays out exactly, from the mad Abbe (called Babe, another anagram) to the escape in Babe's coffin, to the appearance of the fabulously rich Simon Cotter (yes, you guessed it, an anagram of Monte Cristo) who engineers his revenge.

Like the original in every sense except literary merit. This is a shallow conceit. It has the usual public school boy Fry hero and the usual snobbery about class; in the teachings of Babe one can even hear Fry pontificating on QI. A pleasant enough read. It has the merit of being far shorter than the original which is, I suppose, essential for today's market, but this in itself gives it the demerit that it does not have the time to delve deeply into the evil that revenge undoubtedly represents.

A good game but a disappointment as a novel.

October 2011; 371 pages

"The Lost City of Z" by David Grann

A true story which reads like an adventure from the pen of Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle.Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, one time spy and legendary British explorer of the Amazon jungle, travels with his son and his son's best friend into the rain forest in search of a mythical city which sounds like El Dorado but which he refers to as Z. The little party disappears. What has happened to them? Over the years many go to seek them; many fail to return. This brilliant book is a biography of the eccentric colonel, a history of white colonial exploration of the Amazon, an investigation into what might have happened to him, a search for Z, and a wonderful analysis of obsession.

If nothing else it has made me NEVER EVER want to venture into an insect ridden swamp. The list of predators was awesome. Not just hostile Indians with poison tipped arrows who seek to enslave you, or torture you, or kill you, or cannibalise you. Not just Piranhas but fish that lodge themselves into your ureter causing such pain that penilectomy is required. Not just mosquitoes and death from malaria but a bug that 'kisses' you on the lips inserting a protoplasm that, in the next twenty years, will cause your heart or your brain to swell fatally. Not just maggots who eat you from the inside out but vampire bats.

October 2011; 275 pages

Other books about exploration and explorers, and travel, that are reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Emergence: from chaos to order" by John H Holland

This is a worthy book. It is an academic book. It contains the intricate details of mathematics and algorithms. And at the same tine it attempts to be a general and genial introduction to the network science written by one of the earliest workers in the field.

A good book but not an exciting book. Some interesting concepts but it didn't hook me as much as the other similar treatises I have read over the last few years:

• Six Degrees
• Smart swarm
• And others such as Complexity, and the classic Critical Mass by Philip Ball.

But probably Emergence is the one to quote when I wirte my textbook.

September 2011; 248 pages

"The Devil and Sherlock Holmes" by David Grann

Twelve real-life stories of murder, mystery and madness. Sort of. Actually a remarkably eclectic collection which makes one wonder how one man, albeit writing for The New Yorker, can have found the time and sources to acquire such a miscellany. Even the title stores are as different as chalk and cheese: a 'was he killed or did he commit suicide?' puzzle about the wannabe biographer of Conan Doyle to an assortment of interviews with and biographical fragments of an exiled Haitian politician. In between we learn about an arson that wasn't and a criminal gang that terrorises US penitentiaries. My favourite story is the murderer who used the details of his unsolved crime as material for a bizarrely surrealist novel; this led to his eventual conviction.

A fascinating and unusual collection of articles.

September 2011; 334 pages

"Britannia: 100 Documents that shaped a nation" by Graham Stewart

This is perhaps a somewhat eclectic collection of documents from the Treaty between Alfred the Great and Guthrun the Dane to the sergeant Pepper Album cover via the Laws of Cricket and the Great Reform Act. I often wanted more detail and more authentic quotes from the documents (every document is reported upon but not always quoted and hardly ever quoted in full). I was a little disappointed by the selection which is heavily weighted towards the modern era. Nevertheless, it was so interesting and compelling that I changed my annual long distance walk from the second half of the Thames walk to the River Lea so that I could walk along the boundary between Wessex and the Dane Law as agreed by Alfred and Guthrun above in about 885.

Some wonderful moments of history are represented by this magnificent book. I don't always agree with the selection but I have learned a great deal from it.

 September 2011; 422 pages.

"Death in Holy Orders" by P.D.James

A theological college for just 20 students on an isolated and wind-swept headland on the East Anglian Coast where Adam Dalgliesh, poetry writing Commander of Police at New Scotland Yard and son of a Norfolk vicar, stayed when he was a teenager. An industrialist called Sir Alred, a detective who studied theology, a padeophile priest, another priest who is aristocratic descendant of Prince Bishops, a barmy old maid, an unnaturally beautiful bastard and a vitriolic Archdeacon. An exquisite work of art and a papyrus purporting to be the command from Pontius Pilate to release Christ's body. High Anglicanism and low crime. The classic ingredients of a PDJames murder mystery.

Pure hokum. I don't know that you could ever begin to believe in some of the bizarre characters but the plot is almost worthy of Agatha Christie, the descriptive writing is lyrically brilliant and there are some moments of wonderful comedy. An entertaining read.

September 2011; 548 pages

"The Accidental" by Ali Smith

The Smart family are on holiday in Norfolk. The story is told in episodes by each of the family in turn. Mother Eve is a blocked writer. Step-father Michael is an English lecturer who fucks his students. 17 year old Magnus never washes or eats because he photoshopped the head of a girl from school onto a porn body; the girl killed herself; now Magnus wants to kill himself. 12 year old Astrid is being bullied at school and is obsessed with her new DVD and her estranged father.

Amber walks into the house. Michael assumes Eve invited her; Eve assumes Michael did. Over the summer Amber  turns their lives upside down. Who is she? Why is she there? And is she real or magical?

This is literary fiction and sometimes too obviously so (Michael the lecturer spends pages worrying about cliches and making silly puns; he writes a sonnet sequence). But there are also moments of wonderful humour. Magnus the geek, who has had his virginity taken by Amber and who spends all summer fucking her has to explain what he is thinking about at family dinner. He says he is thinking about a lighthouse (phallic!): "to measure the total inside area in cubic metres would be really difficult because of the changing size of it as you went further, uh, further up inside. Magnus has gone a really really red colour" so his mum thinks he has been sun burnt and asks "weren't you using any protection?"

I was disappointed by the ending. The holiday is magical. After the holiday, reality seems somewhat banal.

August 2011; 306 pages

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Whitbread Novel Award in 2005; shortlisted for the 2006 Women's prize for fiction.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

“The other hand” by Chris Cleave

A Nigerian girl is released from a British detention centre. She phones a journalist, then walks to Kingston-upon-Thames to meet him. She turns up two hours before his funeral; in the intervening ten days he has committed suicide. She helps his widow look after the four year old son, who thinks he is Batman.

But these two women have already met on a beach in Nigeria. And what is the secret of the missing finger?

The prose is lyrical, the plot twists and turns. This is a magical book.

August 2011; 374 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

“Six degrees” by Duncan J Watts

This is a description of the science of networks by a physicist turned sociologist. In many ways it reiterates and explains the concepts found in other books such as ‘Wikinomics’ and ‘Critical Mass’. It is brilliantly readable but a little too popular to allow me to understand the mathematical ideas properly. But it is sufficiently in depth to make it clear that Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’ was the froth on the waves on the ocean compared to this book. It is full of amazing insights and brilliant ideas; at the same time it is a beautifully biographical and frequently amusing chronicle of the process through which mathematical discovery is achieved. I was utterly entranced.

And networks are important. An obvious example of network failure Watts doesn’t use is death. He starts by talking through the much cited example of when a power line in Oregon touched a tree and half the Western US was blacked out. By the end of the book we have learned about the Small Worlds phenomenon, epidemics and computer viruses, tulip bubbles and information cascades, how revolutions start and how hindsight makes history useless, and how information flows within hierarchies and what this means for the future of the firm.

Loads and loads to think about. Wonderful.

August 2011; 306 pages

Duncan Watts worked with Steven Strogatz who wrote sync
Other great books in this area include:

• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman about fitness landscapes
• How Nature Works by Per Bak about sandpiles and self organized criticality; an excellent explanation of complexity science
• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is a brilliant introduction to this whole field
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

“The Tesseract” by Alex Garland

In a seedy hotel room in the least salubrious part of Manila, Sean waits for a meeting with Don Pepe, a gangster who will probably kill him. In the pretty suburbs, Rosa puts her children to bed and talks to her mother. Street urchin Cente talks to psychology researcher Alfredo before meeting Totoy. These lives collide.

This is not just an exciting thriller. Garland, author of ‘The Beach’ draws vivid and realistic characters and treats them with understanding and compassion.

August 2011; 336 pages

"Wikinomics" by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

“If you’re going to be naked, you better be buff.” (p293)

A fascinating book although a little out of date despite being “fully revised and updated for paperback”. The pace of internet change is such that 2008 is long ago. Thus it recognises that facebook is growing and on the horizon but doesn’t realise quite how massive it will be by 2011. It applauds del.icio.us although that service has been effectively closed down by Yahoo. Twitter isn’t mentioned.

My biggest reservation is that although I could understand the many reasons for going open and sharing and collaborating etc that companies demonstrated and although I understood that all these things helped massively cut costs and improve rapidity and market responsiveness they failed in their ultimate promise in that I failed to understand how these things could be used to make money (rather than just saving on the costs front). Google is basically an ad company. Amazon sells books. eBay is a traditional auction house taking a cu of the selling price. But how else do you make money? Ask Twitter.

August 2011; 315 pages

"Our Fathers" by Andrew O'Hagan

Hugh ‘Mr Housing’ Bawn lies dying on the 18^th floor of one of the tower blocks in Ayrshire which, as Municipal Planner, he helped to build. His grandson Jamie who demolishes tower blocks in England, is with him for his final months. Jamie’s alcoholic, wife-beating father Robert, has disappeared.

This book, written in crisp and original elegiac prose, explores the relationship between Jamie, Robert and Hugh and their women. It explores modern Scotland and the lives blighted by poverty, unemployment, alcohol and the built environment. It seeks to redeem the heroes of the sixties who built this urban landscape in the name of progress and with the vision of escaping from worse poverty and the worse housing of the Glasgow tenement slums. If there is a poetry of the assembly line this book describes it. If there is nobility lurking within the wife-beating drunk, this book finds it. The images of girls in hair nets at superstore checkouts beside roads from an auld village centre to nowhere are haunting. Drunks quote poetry (alright, it is Burns so it is mostly doggerel) in the working men’s club. History is just beneath the surface whether it is the bell tower of the church mentioned in Tam O’Shanter or the monastery where Robert Bruce murdered Red Comyn (now a supermarket) or the housing estate all of whose Drives are named for a forgotten Scottish Socialist.

And there is comedy. Jamie meets his mum’s mates and they try to chat him up. He watches Gaelic breakfast TV with his Gran (the only people in the world who watch it, he believes) and questions the credibility of the item on swimwear fashion in Uist.

A remarkable book, full of the romance and dignity of everyday poverty.

July 2011; 282 pages

"The Angel's Game" by Carlos Luis Zafon

This book is tangentially a prequel to ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ in that it uses some of the same characters and it has the same obsession with the dark side of Barcelona as a backdrop to sinister and labyrinthine plots. This book adds a substantial supernatural element.

It is pure melodrama, despite damning Grand Guignol very early: GG “does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it’s downhill all the way.” But it does GG very well indeed. There is a mysterious house with locked rooms and secret chambers and a secret. There is the charming old gentleman who is quite literally the devil in disguise and who manipulates the narrator into a murky and devious world. There is the Inspector of Police who always just prevents his two thugs from torturing the narrator. There are the women: Cristina whom the narrator adores from afar (very Pip and Estella) and Isabella the narrator’s competent and wise-cracking Dr Watson (a wonderful character: the dialogue between narrator and Isabella is brilliant, robust and full of humour). There are mysterious buildings that are one moment brothels, surgeries or mansions and the next are burnt out ruins; libraries; a newspaper office that once housed a sulphuric acid factory; graveyards including the Cemetery of Forgotten Books: nothing and no-one are what they seem except perhaps the saintly old bookseller with his shy son.  The atmosphere is dark and derelict.

On the first page I wondered whether there was a connection to Stendahl’s ‘The Red and the Black’ when the Barcelona skyline was described (in an image that occurred later in the book) as “a perpetual twilight of scarlet and black”. But there wasn’t. There were references to other book’s such as ‘Great Expectations’ but somehow all these were just there to set the scene. There is repeated reference to Angels, to Mausoleums, to Spiders and their Webs, to Death, but these seem to just be ways of painting the picture. In the end the reader is led into a labyrinth of clues and motives and false trails and then abandoned. There is no consistent ‘solution’ to the mysteries. The ‘boss’ is the devil but much of the evil is perpetrated by the last man whose soul the devil stole.

In the final analysis this is a wonderfully atmospheric book with a convoluted plot but in the end it failed to deliver the satisfaction it promised.

July 2011; 504 pages

"The Red and the Black" by 'Stendahl'

This overlong and over-violet romantic novel overanalyses the thoughts and feelings of protagonist Julian Sorel and he agonises and soliloquises over how to find his fortune. Starting as the pretty book-loving son of a carpenter (religious theme?) in a small town he becomes the tutor to the Mayor’s children and seduces his wife. Then he makes his way to Paris, becomes secretary to a Marquis and seduces his daughter.

What makes this book special is the character of Julien. He is driven by the ambition to be someone special although he has no clear picture of whether that special someone will be a cardinal, a general, a rich merchant or a lover. Agonisingly, although to succeed he has to worm his way into rich households he has a massive chip on his shoulder and hates both the society he is desperate to join and himself. He is a social climbing peasant who wants to start a revolution. There is a lot of suppressed hatred (which is perhaps why seduction is his route to the top). He has to do a lot of dissembling and equivocation. Stendahl makes this, which he calls hypocrisy, a central theme of the novel, although it does seem unjust to describe Julien as a hypocrite; he is simply trying to win a game when the cards are marked against him.

Magic moments include the scene in chapter five when he is about to enter the gates of the Mayor’s house for the first time. As in a fairy tale when the hero is about to embark upon a path that will lead to his eventual damnation (as if these are the gates of hell) he is warned. He discovers a torn newspaper cutting which reports the fate of a man whose name is Louis Jenrel, an anagram of Julien Sorel. He does not realises the importance of the warning and so he is damned.

In chapter 23: “The traveller who has just climbed a steep mountain sits down on the summit, and finds a perfect pleasure in resting. Would he be happy if he were forced to rest always?”

In chapter 34: “One can lean only on what resists” says the Marquis to himself when debating whether to employ the sullen and obstinate Julien.

In chapter 39 “The end justifies the means ….I would hang three men to save the lives of four.”

In chapter 72: “Man has two different beings inside him … What devil thought of that malicious touch?”

Improvements I would make to the translation:

• More comprehensive end notes which I would put as foot notes so you don’t have to keep on flicking backwards and forwards
• Some sense to be made of the money which includes (forever unexplained as to their values relative one to the other) sols, francs, crowns, livres, and louis d’or.

Could be abridged and definitely of its time but the originality of the character of the  hero redeems the book.

July 2011; 511 pages

"The Dice Man" by Luke Rhinehart

New York Psychoanalyst Luke Rhinehart is seeking to escape the numbing tedium of his ordinary life.  So he begins to subject himself to the laws of probability. Because of the throw of a dice he rapes his partner's wife (more to her satisfaction than his). His life becomes increasingly irrational as everything he does including the roles he plays are dictated by dice. At first justifying his actions in terms of cod psychology (a search for the self) he later becomes high priest of the religion of the Die.

I suppose it is meant to be satire, lampooning psychoanalysis, religion, conservative America and the hippy movement at the same time. It is utterly of its period with plenty of drugs and graphic sex all washed down with a naive and heavy-handed philosophy: Timothy Leary meets the Valley of the Dolls without the pace, the humour and the characterisation of the latter.

Even the premise doesn't work. It is all very well choosing what you do by throwing dice but you have chosen the options. It really isn't a rediscovery of free will.

A brilliant concept ruined by elephantine prose and intrusive cod philosophy.

July 2011; 541 pages

"The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho

This short novel is the story of an Andalusian shepherd boy who seeks treasure in the Pyramids of Egypt. On his way there he encounters an Alchemist and learns the secrets of the Soul of the World. The book is essentially an extended parable, told in a simple poetic style, to encourage you to 'follow your heart'.

A pretty story but it is more concerned with the message than the characters.

July 2011; 177 pages

"God's Philosophers" by James Hannam

The Scotsman says this book "makes enjoyable reading out of some seriously dusty history". Yes! The reading is wonderfully enjoyable but No! the history is not in the least bit dusty.

Hannam's thesis is that the philosophers of the misnamed "dark" ages laid the foundations for modern science. Contrary to received opinion the church did not repress their ideas. On the contrary, by an early decision that natural philosophers should not stray into theology the church protected natural philosophers. The monasteries and universities (sponsored mainly by the church) were fertile grounds for new ideas to breed. Although the official philosophy was Aristotle's, and this was such an integrated system that it was difficult to create an alternative because all parts had to be replaced, the natural philosophers were free to chip away at Aristotelian beliefs. This was difficult because, at least in mechanics, Aristotle's ideas are intuitive and seem to conform to observation. Until a society has the resources and technology to make systematic detailed observations it cannot really progress beyond everyday beliefs. Thus the Earth seems not to move and if it did move one should be able to observe parallax effects with the stars. But the stars are so far away that you can't observe parallax without a telescope and therefore the Earth does not move.

Despite these handicaps the mediaeval philosophers made substantial progress chipping away at the corners of Aristotelianism and developing new logical and mathematical tools.  Progress was further slowed until the printing press was invented. Shortly after that the fashion for humanism (clearly the boo-hiss villain in Hannam's eyes) meant that Aristotle was valued far beyond the mediaeval ideas purely because it was older. But the new scientists Galileo and Kepler owed a tremendous (often unacknowledged) debt to mediaeval philosophers many of whose ideas they quoted verbatim and unattributed.

Wonderful things I learned from this book:

• Aristotle considered that all things eg sheep have two categories of properties:
• substance: those properties without which they cannot be sheep (eg being an animal)
• accident: those properties which are not essential (such as whiteness)
• Archbishop Lanfranc (yes, that one, Anselm's teacher too!) used these properties to explain how the bread and wine could become Christ's body and blood in the mass despite appearing to still be bread and wine. He said the accidental properties were retained but the substantial ones altered; hence transubstantiation!
• Philosophers who believed that the concept sheep can exist independently are realists. Those who believe that  categorical concepts have no separate reality but that there are only lots and lots of individual sheep are called nominalists. William of Ockham used his razor to suggest that adding concepts was wrong, hence he was a nominalist. Science is impossible if you can't believe in concepts such as the Law of Gravity; scientists are relaists. Ockham's razor has been much misused to cut in a completely different way from that intended.
• Throughout the middle ages everyone knew that parts of the Bible were not to be taken literally. Despite the Bible suggesting that the Moon produces its own illumination Pope Innocent III (died 1216) knew it shone by reflected light.
• There was loads of scepticism about both alchemy and astrology for the simple reason that they did not appear to work. Nevertheless, both acids and alcohol were isolated by Christian mediaeval scientists in the thirteenth century and misattributed to earlier Arabic scientists.
• Thomas Bradwardine (c1290-1349), one of the 'Mertonian Calculators' used proto logarithms in his study of motion 250 years before they were 'invented' by Napier.
• Jean Buridan developed the idea of impetus. With the Mertonian analyses he more or less solved the problems of motion before 1360, at least 200 years before Galileo.
• Albert of Saxony (c1316-1390) drew the first picture of a curved trajectory, even though it is straight in its first part.
• Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference to be between 24,000 and 30,000 miles (it is actually 24,900). This was known through Pliny the Elder's work. Ptolemy miscalculated it to be between 17,000 and 22,000 miles. Ptolemy, translated in 1406, became popular so Columbus used it to 'lose' 10,000 miles from his sea trip from Spain to the Indies.
• Paper was affordable compared to parchment. The first recorded paper mill in Italy was 1276 and France in 1348.
• Printing had the edge in the West because, unlike China and Japan, we have an alphabet which means it is far quicker to typeset a page.
• The mediaeval people invented spectacles, the mechanical clock, the blast furnace and the windmill all by themselves.

Two very minor criticisms. First there is a feel that the book is one long list of very short potted biographies of some very interesting people. Second, I was disappointed that more was not made of the inventions.

This was a wonderful book.

July 2011; 342 pages