"The Copper Nail" by C J Lambert

A story of buried treasure which packs an enormous emotional punch.

I read this  book when I was a kid, over fifty years ago. The ending made me cry then; it makes me cry again. 

Pedro is a poor Chilean with an Incan heritage whose family scratches a living in a small-holding in the Andes. He is rescued from poverty by Father Domingo and goes to live with the monks, learning to read and write, but when he discovers that the Incas buried their treasure in the farm above his parents,  he leaves the monastery to work for the cruel and racist Don Silva. Forced away from here he goes to seek work in the city but he always dreams of returning to find the tree with the copper nail which will guide him to the treasure.

It is hugely innocent. The racism in the story is gently explored, with constant reminders that Pedro is "the son of a proud race which has lived here through the centuries" (Ch 2). But sex is absent. As he is growing up "many girls had tried to win his affection but he laughed off their obvious intentions" (Ch 9). Pedro is pure and trusting. Even when, destitute and sleeping rough, and handsome, "The butcher smiled, and patted his knee. 'I've taken a fancy to you, and I think we shall get on well together'." (Ch 8), which to a modern eye looks like the sinister start of gay paedophilia, there is no suggestion of sex. 

It is a strangely structured story: most of Pedro's adventures occur in the first half. Perhaps this is the secret to the incredible power of the denouement. It is almost an inversion of the classic story structure in which the central act involves ever greater trials and tribulations after the mid-point until the three-quarters mark when the hero starts to fight his way to success. In this tale the final trial, and it is a severe one, is left until almost the last page. By then you have completely built in to the reality of Pedro and his family and you are rooting for this charming young man all the way. And then ... pow.

Some memorable moments:

• "The boy gasped as he flirted the icy river water over his face and neck." (Ch 2) I hadn't encountered the word' flirted' with such a meaning before. 
• "After making two piles of the fruit, Father Domingo asked Pedro to choose which he fancied. 'It's the only way to make a fair division,' he said, smiling. 'One divides and the other chooses'." (Ch 2) I have remembered this all my life and have always tried to follow its precept. As a philosophy it is brilliant and I wish it was more widely practised in the world.
• "It was easy to pray when everyone around you was doing it too, but it hadn't seemed so worth while since. Most people seemed to pray when they wanted something badly; it wasn't so easy to remember when things were going well." (Ch 13)

The last few pages were difficult to read. I was weeping and gulping for air. A superb read.

March 2021; 158 pages.

This review was written by
the author of Motherdarling

"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" by Thornton Wilder

 The fictional stories of the five people who fell to their deaths when a rope bridge in Peru collapsed in 1714. The five people are all connected. Their stories are told in intricate detail with rich descriptions; this is a novella in which the dictum 'show don't tell' is repeatedly flouted and the effect is to create something of beauty. 

Selected quotes:

• "The whole purpose of literature is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vehicle in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world." (The Marquesa de Montemayor; Pepita)
• "The Abbess was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilization."  (The Marquesa de Montemayor; Pepita)
• "The women in Peru, even her nuns, went through life with two notions: one, that all the misfortunes that might befall them were due to the fact that they were not sufficiently attractive to bind some man to their maintenance; and, two, that all the misery in the world was worth his caress."  (The Marquesa de Montemayor; Pepita)
• "He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer - a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with st
• rangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon." (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "The highest attribute of a cafe singer will always be her novelty."  (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "There was something in Lima that was wrapped up in yards of violet satin from which protruded a great dropsical head and two fat pearly hands; and that was its archbishop."  (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "Some days he regarded his bulk ruefully; but the distress of remorse was less poignant than the distress of fasting."  (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "He had to repeat over to himself his favourite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune."  (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer."  (Uncle Pio; Don Jaime)
• "He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to heaven." (Perhaps an Intention)
• "She talked that night of all those out in the dark ... who had no one to turn to, for whom the world perhaps was more than difficult, without meaning."  (Perhaps an Intention)

A delightful, and short, book. October 2020; 126 pages

Winner of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923)

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

"Brazil" by John Updike

 

Black street/ beach boy Tristão meets rich white girl Isabel on the beach in Rio; they fall in love. The book records their subsequent adventures, as her family and fate try to separate them.

It is quite a rambling narrative. I thought at first, given the character of Tristão, this was a picaresque, but, despite his upbringing and profession as a petty thief, he isn't a rogue (his surname is Raposo which is Portuguese for fox-like or cunning but he is rather naive and innocent; his girlfriend's surname of Leme - 'rudder' - is rather more apt; she is usually the one who controls what is going on). I then sought Biblical parallels: Tristão could be Adam and Isabel Eve, her father being God; after they are expelled from paradise (the beach in Rio) Tristão is forced repeatedly to labour. He kills and is forced to wander, like Cain, although the only mark on him appears to be his blackness. But the Biblical parallels soon ran dry; since Tristão is infertile he cannot be, like Adam, father of us all. My next thought was that it was an updating of Voltaire's Candide, in which two innocent lovers are expelled from their garden  and journey across the continent (Europe and Brazil), meeting many adventures in which they are repeatedly separated and yet repeatedly reunite. Both books have 30 chapters. But I read Candide a long time ago and my memory of the details of its plot is vague, although I do recall people frequently dying and being resurrected, much loss of buttocks and the eternally optimistic Dr Pangloss, none of which seem to appear in Brazil. There is an element of magical realism in Brazil (the magic grows stronger the further they are from the cities) which is very much present in Candide. Are Isabel's six babies, none of whom are fathered by Tristão, three of whom are taken from her, in any way representative of something?

More than halfway through the book the chiastic nature of the plot appears. At the three-quarters mark there is a key reversal; the lovers then replay their lives, experiencing (many of) the locations of the first three quarters in reverse sequence, but (due to the nature of the reversal) differently. 

Wikipedia's article on the book suggests that it is a retelling of the story of Tristan and Iseult, and the names of the characters certainly support this hypothesis. There are many versions of the original tale but the key is that Tristan, a lowly knight, falls in love with Iseult, who is intended to be married to a King. 

There are threads that are left loose such as the gray-eyed baby born to Isabel's dad and a black woman; I suppose that this is Tristão's half brother, who betrays them. But the gold nugget, found by Tristão and later found in the possession of Isabel's father and bequeathed to his gray-eyed son, suggests that it might be Tristão himself.

At one stage, Isabel's father hears about Tristão's 'employments': "Mining, automobile manufacture ... the sequence meant something to him, it rang a bell". Is this just that he recognises the employments of the boy he has hunted over the years (although the sequence is reversed in another chiastic ploy)? Or are we supposed to recognise something in that sequence?

Perhaps if one has to search so hard for a model one should accept that this is an original novel and if the writer himself used other works as templates he has disguised them so well that they are no more than prompts for the creative process.

There is a surprising amount of sex in this book. The author seems fascinated by how sex changes through our lives, according to our age, our experiences, our labours (the harder Tristão works the less able he is to have sex) and our roles. At the start Tristão is the experienced street boy; he deflowers virginal Isabel. By the end he is the relatively innocent one.

Updike uses the narrative to repeatedly reflect upon life. Perhaps he is the Dr Pangloss who accompanies Tristão-as-Candide. These reflections include:

• "A man cannot make himself out of thin air, he must have materials." (C 3)
• "These poor, like animals, had developed a tactful politics of space." (C 4)
• "On the beach, we each seem free, naked and idle and absolute, but in fact no one is free of the costume of circumstance; we are all twigs of one bush or another" (C 5)
• "It was strange ... how the two gray guns had, like pencils, redrawn the space of the room, reducing the infinitude of possibilities to a few shallow tunnels of warped choice." (C 8)
• "Love is a dream ... as all but the dreamers can see. It is the anaesthetic that Nature employs to extract babies from us." (C 9)
• "We enslave ourselves for crumbs - for the mere image and rumour of crumbs." (C 11)
• "Even the longest life feels too short on the deathbed." (C 12)
• "There is a melancholy, a stupidity to rural landscape ... a yawning repetitiveness, as of a man who knows only a few words but will not stop talking." (C 15)
• "The stories ... on the scraps of creased and wadded paper, were timeless - the same five or six basic facts of human existence endlessly revolved ... Love, pregnancy, infidelity, vengeance, parting. Death." (C 16)
• "There is no one there ... to care what your duty is! There is no God, our lives are a terrible accident! We are born in a mess of pain, and pain and hunger and lust and fear drive us on for no purpose whatsoever!" (C 20)
• "Life robs us of ourselves, piece by small piece." (C 23)
• "The spirit is strong, but blind matter is stronger." (C 30)

Other great moments include some fabulous descriptions: 

• "The single church wore its lonely stark cross atop a scrolling false front upon whose chipped shoulders stone saints gesticulated." (C 15)
• "The patchy storefront beside the bus stop bore no new posters, only a pastel quilt of faded old ones." (C 15)
• "A distant ambulance, like an evil clown with its self-important, popping bleat, pierced the hum of humankind to come for ... the piece of litter he had become." (C 30)

And also:

• "Her companion looked alarmed, putting a hand across her breasts in their bathing-suit as if they were treasures that might be stolen." (C 1) This image is spot on, typical of how humans react, although I was intrigued by the idea that the bathing suit belonged to the breasts.
• "A handsome street boy. He is pretty, like a bird from the jungle, but he will not make a meal. He is all beak and claws and showy feathers." (C 3)
• "When its inhabitants groped out past the curtain of rotting rags that hung in the place of a door, a cruelly splendiferous view of the sun-hammered sea ... opened before their wincing eyes." (C 4)
• "He knew so many other languages that his mind was always translating; his tongue had no home." (C 9)

An intriguingly structured book with a lot of sex and some wry observations about life.

September 2020; 260 pages

Other novels by John Updike reviewed on this blog include:

• Terrorist about a teenage terrorist in New York

Other novels about South America reviewed on this blog include:

• The Pleasures of Eliza Lynch by Anne Enright

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

"The Invention of Nature" by Andrea Wulf

The core of this book is a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, a remarkable Prussian polymath who knew Goethe (and Schiller) in Jena and Weimar, who assisted the revolutionaries in the French revolution, who explored northern South America, who inspired Bolivar and Darwin and who laid the foundations of what we know know as ecology.

He must have been a remarkable man: hugely intelligent, hugely energetic, scarcely sleeping, unceasing, talking endlessly; fantastically impressive but I'm not sure he could have been a friend. He didn't really seem to empathise with people. He was glad when his mother died (partly because it released him to spend his inheritance on his passions) and a letter of consolation to his sister-in-law failed spectacularly to console. Though supposedly attractive to women he wasn't attracted by them and chose as his companions young men. But, above all, he was noted for talking non-stop and never letting anyone around him get a word in edgewise. Perhaps he was better off communicating through his hugely best-selling books (which were so expensive to publish that they ruined him).

Humboldt is important partly because of his ability to communicate his ideas through his books but mainly because of what those ideas were. He was the first to really understand the inter-connectedness of nature. This is the reason why this book is only partly a biography of Humboldt. It also explores, in a chapter for each of them, the influence of Humboldt's ideas on:

• Darwin for evolution by natural selection,
• Thoreau on the interplay of science and art: "his friend and Concord neighbour, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Thoreau as 'an intolerable bore' who made him feel ashamed for having money, or a house, or writing a book that people will read." (C 19)
• George Perkins Marsh, the US pioneer of the fight against deforestation, who believed that "if nothing changed ... the planet would be reduced to a condition of 'shattered surface, of climatic excess" (C 20)
• Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology
• John Muir who fought for the first US National Park as a way of preserving the wilderness.

As a young man, Humboldt lived in Jena, where Schiller worked at the university and Goethe often visited from nearby Weimar. (C 2) Goethe was interested in the underlying patterns of animals, what he called the urform. "He distinguished between the internal force - the urform - that provided the general form of a living organism and the environment - the external force - that shaped the organism itself." (C 2)

His first exploration started in Venezuela and early on he saw a lake whose water levels were falling and he realised the part that intensive agriculture and deforestation had played in that. When he got to the rain forest he realised that the animals were competing for food, predating on one another, and that even the trees were competing for light. He discovered the Brazil nut which he introduced to Europe. (C 5) In what would become Ecuador he climbed Mount Chimborazo, at the time thought to be the highest mountain in the world, as high as anyone else had at that time but he couldn't reach the summit because his way was blocked by a huge crevasse. But it was staring at the surrounding landscape from this vantage point that showed him the zones of vegetation and allowed him to later divide the wold into climate zones. (C 7)

Back in Europe he met 21 year-old Simon Bolivar, a rich, spoilt, womanising playboy; Humboldt inspired him so he would later abandon his life of pleasure and return to his native South America to lead the fight for independence from Spanish colonial rule (Bolivar later decreed that Bolivia should plant a million trees.). (C 9) He then embarked on a grand tour with another in a long line of good-looking, unmarried men, this time the chemist Gay-Lussac. (C 9) By luck, Vesuvius erupted when they arrived in Naples. (C 9) Later he met Alessandro Volta by Lake Como (C 10)

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein just four years after the publication of Humboldt's tale of exploring South America; she made the monster declare to Victor that he wanted to escape to "the vast wilds of South America". (C 13)

Coleridge was inspired by Humboldt (C 13), as was John Lyell who wrote Principles of Geology which in turn inspired Darwin (C 13); in this book he theorised that climate is affected by tectonic movements. Humboldt knew Gauss and George Canning. (C 14)

For Humboldt it was all about connections. "He connected the sudden appearance of a new island in the Azores  on 30th January 1811 to a wave of earthquakes that shook the planet for a period of more than a year afterwards, from the West Indies, the plains of Ohio and Mississippi and then to the devastating earthquake that destroyed Caracas in March 1812. This was followed by a volcanic eruption on the island of Saint Vincent in the West Indies on 30th April 1812." (C 15)

He turned sixty during his second great expedition through Russia and into Siberia. "Humboldt celebrated his sixtieth birthday with the ... man whom history would remember as Vladimir Lenin's grandfather." (C 16)

Selected quotes:

• "When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel." (Prologue)
• "Goethe began to fling his arms around whenever he went for a walk ... he had discovered ... that this exaggerated swinging of one's arms was a remnant from the four-legged animal." (C 2)
• "When he heard that a farmer and his wife had been killed by the lightning, he rushed over to obtain their corpses." (C 2)
• "One morning Humboldt placed a frog's leg on a glass plate and connected its nerves and muscles to different metals in sequence ... but generated only a discouraging gentle twitch in the leg. When he then leaned over the leg in order to check the connecting metals, it convulsed so violently that it leapt off the table.  ... Humboldt realised that it had been the moisture of his breath that had triggered the reaction." (C 2)
• "If everything was connected, then it was important to examine the similarities and differences without ever losing sight of the whole." (C 2)
• "Kant insisted that knowledge was a systematic construct in which individual facts needed to fit into a larger framework in order to make sense." (C 2)
• Goethe's "Faust, like Humboldt, was driven by an endless striving for knowledge, by a 'feverish unrest'." (C 2)
• "Like a wine connoisseur, he sampled the water of the various different rivers. The Orinoco had a singular flavour that was particularly disgusting, he noted, while the Rio Apure tasted different at different locations and the Rio Atabapo was 'delicious'." (C 5)
• "Humboldt had discovered the idea of a keystone species, a species that is as essential to an ecosystem as a keystone is to an arch." (C 5)
• "One particularly horrendous story involved a missionary who had bitten off his kitchen boy's testicles as a punishment for kissing a girl." (C 8)
• "Humboldt had written a book about the universe that never once mentioned the word 'God'." (C 18)
• "Neighbours reported that they saw the old man on the street, feeding the sparrows in the early morning hours." (C 20)
• "Many noticed how impossible it was for Humboldt just to sit." (C 20)
• "His finances remained precarious. He didn't even possess a complete set of his own books because it was too expensive." (C 20)
• "'Solitude', Emerson warned him, 'is a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife'." (C 23)

Humboldt is also explored by the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme in a broadcast on 28th September 2006; it can be accessed here> https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c1c2

A little bit more than a biography. May 2020; 337 pages

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

"The Golden Isthmus" by David Howarth

This brilliant book, written back in 1966, traces the history of the Panama isthmus from the first arrival of European (Spanish) explorers in 1502.  It is well-written and divides the story up into episodes which are exciting in very different ways. It starts with the Spaniards arriving and attacking the welcoming Indians. The second chapter tells the fascinating life of Vasco Balboa, the first European to cross the isthmus and see the Pacific (NOT 'stout Cortes', Keats got it wrong). Balboa started as a stowaway escaping his debts and ended up being strangled for treason in the centre of the city he founded (after being arrested by Pizarro). His is a remarkable story but I cannot find an English biography; if there is one someone please let me know so I can read it.

The Spanish established El Camino Real, the Royal Road, across the isthmus to transport the treasure they found in Bolivia and Chile back to Spain. It “was a mean, muddy track that joined the oceans, winding up and down among the hills, about 50 miles in length and 9 feet wide at its widest - Just enough for leading mules to pass each other, brushing the Virgin jungle on either side. ... it was the most important thoroughfare in the Spanish Empire” (C3 The Elizabethans 1572)The third chapter describes the attack of Sir Francis Drake on the Spanish settlements and the fourth describes the attacks of the buccaneers led by Sir Henry Morgan.

The Scots then decide to found a colony in Darien ... and bankrupt their home country by their incredible ... and often fatal ... ineptitude.

There are then a number of attempts to create a transport crossing of the isthmus. The first is a railroad ... which kills thousands of labourers as they carve their way through the jungle. De Lesseps of Suez fame attempts to build a French canal but fails, killing tens of thousands (“Two out of every three Frenchmen who went to the isthmus died there.” C8 The French Canal 1879 - 1888)  and almost bankrupting France in so doing. Finally the Americans manage to put a canal across, although the treaty which awards them quasi-sovereign rights (which they negotiated with a trickster purporting to represent the new government of Panama which had only just seceded from Colombia) has been a source of conflict with Panama.

Finally it ends with a discussion of a plan to blast a new canal through the isthmus using nuclear explosives ... which might have seemed a realistic idea in 1966.

There is brilliant writing:

• “The struggle for life is shown in every twist of the plants which grope and cling and thrust themselves up to the light. Everywhere are those which have failed or are clearly doomed to fail, to die and rot and feed the roots of those which have succeeded. The value you put on your own spark of life seems exaggerated. You know that if you have to lie down and die, the jungle would almost instantly convert you into humus. On the spot that you chose, it would grow just a fraction taller, and you would have fulfilled your natural function.” (C2 The Way Across 1513) It was worth reading the book for that paragraph alone!!

• “Meekness was a quality so long forgotten that they did not know it when they saw it, but called it cowardice.” (C1 The Spanish Explorers 1502)
• “Like any treasure-seeker or prospector who finds his hoard, Spain lost the will to seek, and became obsessed with the fear of rivals coming to rob her.” (C3 The Elizabethans 1572)
• “Their only laws were self-interest and plunder, their only pride was in raggedness and filth, and their only authentic custom was to wear breeches stiff with the blood of the animals they have killed. Like many men who history makes into heroes, they must have been intolerably smelly.”(C4 The Buccaneers 1670)
• “It was only optimists who succeeded; pessimists were never anything but idle spectators.” (C8 The French Canal 1879 - 1888) 
• “He might have been one of those men who like to be henpecked, because it is the only way they can show their love.” (C9 The Revolution 1903)
• “Never ... is often too long a word.” (C11 The American Canal 1904 - 1914)
• “A colonising power has no right to gratitude for the benefits it brings to a colony, any more than parents have a right to it for feeding and housing their children.” (C12 The Republic 1914 - 1966)

Other great moments:

• “Darien has not always been deserted. It is only within the last hundred years, since the interests of mankind were concentrated on the route of the present canal, that Darien has been left alone to return to its primitive kind of peace. Before that, centuries of turbulent history flowed across it. Here, on this coast and in this jungle, abominable crimes were committed in the name of Christianity, and dreadful cruelties in the greed for gold.” (C1 The Spanish Explorers 1502)
• “Of the ninety-eight hands [in the crew of Columbus on his fourth voyage], more than half were boys between twelve and eighteen years old, which was thought a good age for adventure.” (C1 The Spanish Explorers 1502)
•  “Four months they had been in the jungle, and most of them, at one time or another, had been left behind sick or wounded and cared for by the Indians. Yet all of them returned alive to Santa Maria. It was an amazing achievement.” (C2 The Way Across 1513)
• “As the column struggled back across the mountains, it was carrying such a load of gold that it could not carry food enough to feed itself.” (C2 The Way Across 1513) 
• “Courtiers still in the finery they had worn in Spain fell down in the streets of the village and died of starvation.” (C2 The Way Across 1513)
• “No one has ever computed the enormous wealth that came over this muddy track. All the gold that was seized from the Incas crossed it, all the pearls of the Pacific, all the silver from the vast mines of Bolivia. For the silver, an estimate exists: between 1546 and 1600, twenty million kilograms. ...To the successive kings of Spain, the riches seemed to promise world-wide power and dominion. But on the contrary, all they did was disrupt the economy of Europe ... Three times in the second half of the sixteenth century, the king was bankrupt.”  (C3 The Elizabethans 1572)
• “The Spanish commander, seeing such an invincible pirate fleet, agreed to surrender, but asked Morgan to save his face by attacking him with blank ammunition. A noisy battle was fought, with powder but no shot on either side.”(C4 The Buccaneers 1670)
• “It was implicit in the Scottish Parliament Act [for the Darien company] but if the company was a success, the prophet would be Scotland’s, but if it got into trouble the English Navy would have to get it out.” (C5 The Scottish Colony 1698 - 1700)
• “Fifty labourers had been brought from Carthagena, and all of them died or deserted for the gold trail, where they could earn more money and live in comparative comfort. Fifty more were imported, and so it went on: there was only room for fifty on the brig, but each time the labour force died out it was replenished.” (C7 The Railroad 1848 - 1855)
• “They wore their veils simply to avoid the annoyance of mosquitoes. They noticed also that men who wore veils were less subject to fever than those who did not. But they concluded that the veils kept out some of the miasma, the pestilential vapour of the swamps.”(C7 The Railroad 1848 - 1855)
• “The company went into liquidation. Eight years of grinding labour, perhaps twenty thousand deaths, twelve hundred million francs - and it was over.” (C8 The French Canal 1879 - 1888) 
• “Feelings were running so high that the government was outvoted and forced to resign on the trivial question of whether the Baron’s body should be exhumed.” (C8 The French Canal 1879 - 1888) 
• “An even shadier person called Dr Cornelius Herz, who had fled the country and taken refuge, too ill to be extradited, in a hotel in Bournemouth.” (C8 The French Canal 1879 - 1888) 
• “The parasites of malaria was seen in the blood of patients, each inhabiting a red corpuscle, by a French doctor in 1880. Italians in the next few years connected the periodic fevers of malaria patients with the periodic reproductions of the parasites already in the blood. ... the parasites reproduce asexually in their human hosts, but in the walls of the stomachs of mosquitoes they developed a form of sexual reproduction.” (C11 The American Canal 1904 - 1914)

I adored this book. It was so interesting so many times. I don't know if Mr Howarth wrote anything else, please tell me if he has.

November 2019; 269 pages

My parents were members of the Readers Union Book Club. They must have had a great person to choose the books. This is one of the many I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog. Here is a list:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony

Books reviewed in this blog which have the word 'Golden' in their title include:

• Golden Hill by Francis Spufford: a historical novel set in New York in 1746
• The Golden Strangers by Henry Treece: a historical novel for children set in neolithic times
• The Golden Isthmus by David Howarth, an absorbing history of Panama
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: a classic feminist novel of the 1960s