Review: Ever since the 19th-century English historian Lord John Dalberg-Acton wrote "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely", power has had a mixed reputation. In 7 Rules of Power Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University, is quick to acknowledge that it can be used for ill. ......Read More
7 rules of power: surprising but true advice on how to get things done and advance your career
Ever since the 19th-century English historian Lord John Dalberg-Acton wrote "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely", power has had a mixed reputation. In 7 Rules of Power Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University, is quick to acknowledge that it can be used for ill. ...
Review: The conceit is beguiling: Words that to us are axiomatic in their spelling are pronounced quite differently among other peoples in the world. The letter A, which, in English-language alphabet books, typically introduces words such as Apple or Astronaut or Airplane, is in other tonguesRead More
A is for bee: an alphabet book in translation
The conceit is beguiling: Words that to us are axiomatic in their spelling are pronounced quite differently among other peoples in the world. The letter A, which, in English-language alphabet books, typically introduces words such as Apple or Astronaut or Airplane, is in other tongues
Gabriel Maralngurra, 2022, Enchanted Lion Books; 9781592703562
Subject: Fiction
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Review: Written by Gabriel Maralngurra and Felicity Wright, and illustrated by Mr. Maralngurra, this lovely volume evokes the language and ancient artwork of the indigenous Bininj people. The pictures are rendered with stylized silhouettes and crosshatching known as rarrk, all done in earthy colors of black, white, yellow ochre and terracotta. ...Read More
A Kunwinjku counting book
Written by Gabriel Maralngurra and Felicity Wright, and illustrated by Mr. Maralngurra, this lovely volume evokes the language and ancient artwork of the indigenous Bininj people. The pictures are rendered with stylized silhouettes and crosshatching known as rarrk, all done in earthy colors of black, white, yellow ochre and terracotta.
Philip Dray, 2022, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 9780374194413
Subject: History
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Review: On Thursday, June 2, 1892, Robert Lewis, a 28-year-old African-American teamster and bus driver in the village of Port Jervis, N.Y., was killed by a mob. Earlier that day, a light-skinned black man had been seen arguing on a riverbank with a young local woman, Lena McMahon, who emerged from the altercation with torn clothing and wounds on her body. She said that a black stranger had assaulted her ...Read More
A lynching at Port Jervis: race and reckoning in the gilded age
On Thursday, June 2, 1892, Robert Lewis, a 28-year-old African-American teamster and bus driver in the village of Port Jervis, N.Y., was killed by a mob. Earlier that day, a light-skinned black man had been seen arguing on a riverbank with a young local woman, Lena McMahon, who emerged from the altercation with torn clothing and wounds on her body. She said that a black stranger had assaulted her (she withheld details but did not contradict a physician and others who later said the attack was sexual in intent).
Elisabeth Leake, 2022, Oxford University Press; 9780198846017
Subject: History
Source: Financial Times
Review: It is difficult to read such accounts in Leake's exhaustive Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan and not think of the parallels with the Kremlin's more recent invasion - and wonder whether Vladimir Putin considered the decade-long war that ended in Soviet ignominy before launching his own Ukrainian misadventure. Like Putin, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev consult...Read More
Afghan crucible: the Soviet invasion and the making of modern Afghanistan
It is difficult to read such accounts in Leake's exhaustive Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan and not think of the parallels with the Kremlin's more recent invasion - and wonder whether Vladimir Putin considered the decade-long war that ended in Soviet ignominy before launching his own Ukrainian misadventure. Like Putin, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev consulted only a small circle of Kremlin yes-men before greenlighting the Afghan offensive; Alexei Kosygin, Brezhnev's prime minister, who opposed the invasion, was intentionally cut out of crucial meetings in late 1979 where plans were agreed. And much as Putin may have been lulled into a false sense of triumphalism in recent years by relatively successful Russian interventions in Georgia, Belarus and Crimea, Leake notes that Soviet suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring, as well as the successes of Soviet proxies in Angola and Ethiopia - not to mention US withdrawal from Vietnam - convinced Brezhnev and his aides that they were on a winning streak. "The preceding decade had given Soviet leaders a (perhaps false) sense of strength in their Third World dealings," she writes. "Sending troops into Afghanistan in December 1979 followed the same rationale, of supporting a local vanguard party that seemed capable of leading the country's socialist transformation." The most significant difference between Kremlin decision-making circa 1979 and its more recent variant is that the Russians had a pro-Soviet government to work with in Afghanistan, even if it had come to power in a coup a year earlier. Leake goes into exhaustive detail about how ineffectual the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan was in implementing its socialist agenda. But at least Moscow had a proxy in Kabul; it has nothing of the sort in Kyiv. Afghan Crucible was completed well before the war in Ukraine, of course, and unlike previous studies of the Soviet invasion - particularly Steve Coll's magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars (2004) - it focuses less on the Kremlin's military failings and more on its inability to execute what foreign policy professionals invariably label "nation-building". In that respect, it is a cautionary tale not only for the current occupants of the Kremlin. Gone unstated by Leake is that another superpower tried its own hand at nation-building in Afghanistan far more recently, with not dissimilar results. Indeed, Leake's account is replete with vignettes - hundreds of technocrats sent to Kabul to shore up Afghan agencies, the failure of the central government to expand its influence beyond a handful of urban centres, endless desertions from the Afghan armed forces - that read like a Pentagon after-action report in 2022. Even after spending 20 years in Afghanistan - twice as long as the Soviets - Washington failed to grasp the fragility of the government they were propping up in Kabul until the very end, when it collapsed almost overnight. At least Mohammed Najibullah, installed by Mikhail Gorbachev shortly after he took the Kremlin helm in 1985, managed to cling on to power in Kabul for three years after the Soviets withdrew.
Philip Augar, 2022, Simon & Schuster; 9781398505414
Subject: Biography
Source: Financial Times
Review: Perhaps the most striking revelation is that three prime ministers, Wilson, James Callaghan and more surprisingly Margaret Thatcher, colluded to keep his spying secret. The first two for the damage it would do to their party. Thatcher initially went along with the cover-up when in opposition because she understood the claims to be unproven - a decision that she kept secret even after later citing ...Read More
Agent twister: the true story behind the scandal that gripped the nation
Perhaps the most striking revelation is that three prime ministers, Wilson, James Callaghan and more surprisingly Margaret Thatcher, colluded to keep his spying secret. The first two for the damage it would do to their party. Thatcher initially went along with the cover-up when in opposition because she understood the claims to be unproven - a decision that she kept secret even after later citing the importance of transparency in the exposure of the spy Anthony Blunt. Stonehouse himself comes across a venal narcissist convinced of his own greatness, who seeks to flee when the realities of his inadequacies begin to crowd in. And yet for all the detail there remains something elusive. The book ends rather abruptly and one is left with a sense of wanting more, of wanting to better understand this fantasist and serial betrayer. Perhaps this absence explains Stonehouse's final disappearance - from public memory. The reader is left trying to understand the story of a man who dreamt he was destined for greatness but is no longer even remembered for the scandal which briefly defined him.
Review: All the Lovers in the Night, the third of Kawakami's novels to appear in English in quick succession, follows "Breasts and Eggs (2020), winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, and" Heaven, which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.Kawakami was a blogger and a poet before becoming a novelist. Deftly translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, her prose retains the accessibility of...Read More
All the lovers in the night
All the Lovers in the Night, the third of Kawakami's novels to appear in English in quick succession, follows "Breasts and Eggs (2020), winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, and" Heaven, which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.Kawakami was a blogger and a poet before becoming a novelist. Deftly translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, her prose retains the accessibility of a blog, with glimpses of lyricism. "Why is the night made up entirely of light?" marvels the narrator of?All the Lovers in the Night. Each year on her birthday, which falls on Christmas Eve, Kawakami's protagonist takes a walk in the darkness - the only thing that comes to mind that she can do on her own.Thirty-four-year-old Fuyuko Irie lives in Tokyo, freelancing as a proofreader - "a lonely business, full of lonely people". Working from home exacerbates her isolation, although she had been shunned by colleagues at her previous office job. She is friendly with Hijiri, her supervisor, but laments that she has "no friends to go out to eat with or to chat with for hours over the phone".?n
Ed Yong , 2022, Penguin Random House; 9780593133231
Subject: General
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Review: Ed Yong's "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us" is about entertaining possibility, stepping outside one's own Umwelt and attempting to enter another's-whether it be that of a tiny treehopper, mantis shrimp, dolphin, vulture or elephant. Read More
An immense world: how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us
Ed Yong's "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us" is about entertaining possibility, stepping outside one's own Umwelt and attempting to enter another's-whether it be that of a tiny treehopper, mantis shrimp, dolphin, vulture or elephant.
Review: Time is catching up with the trio of 30-something gay black men in Aaron Foley's "Boys Come First." Dominick, an advertising agent, has returned to his hometown of Detroit after an ugly breakup in New York, and is desperate for a committed partner before he gets too old. Read More
Boys come first
Time is catching up with the trio of 30-something gay black men in Aaron Foley's "Boys Come First." Dominick, an advertising agent, has returned to his hometown of Detroit after an ugly breakup in New York, and is desperate for a committed partner before he gets too old.
Review: "Build," which is less a memoir than an "advice encyclopedia," imparts nuggets of wisdom in six sections: Build Yourself, Your Career, Your Product, Your Business, Your Team-and Be CEO. An engineer's engineer, Mr. Fadell presents a series of bullet-pointed chapters, numbered like a software product for easy cross-referencing ...Read More
Build: an unorthodox guide to making things worth making
"Build," which is less a memoir than an "advice encyclopedia," imparts nuggets of wisdom in six sections: Build Yourself, Your Career, Your Product, Your Business, Your Team-and Be CEO. An engineer's engineer, Mr. Fadell presents a series of bullet-pointed chapters, numbered like a software product for easy cross-referencing
Review: Do you find you wake up in the morning with your brain swimming with thoughts and you don't know where to put them? Or you have an idea, or several ideas and later on have completely forgotten them? Building a Second Brain provides a possible solution to storing and later utilising these somewhat messy nuggets. We are subject to a daily information overload, so Tiago Forte has over many years trie...Read More
Building a second brain: a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential
Do you find you wake up in the morning with your brain swimming with thoughts and you don't know where to put them? Or you have an idea, or several ideas and later on have completely forgotten them? Building a Second Brain provides a possible solution to storing and later utilising these somewhat messy nuggets. We are subject to a daily information overload, so Tiago Forte has over many years tried and tested ways to help decide what kinds of information are worth preserving when we don't know how we might put it to use - whether it be at work or other areas of our lives. Here he lays out a detailed approach to using digital tools to feel less bombarded and have more time to think. "To properly take advantage of the power of a second brain," he says, "we need a new relationship to information, to technology, and even to ourselves." One of the first steps is to pick a note-taking app that best suits the way you want to organise your thoughts - bearing in mind that your note-taking doesn't have to be perfect, notes are just that, notes. And these "notes" can include everything from useful quotes scanned from a book, to images and half baked ideas that may come to you at random times. Forte argues that over time you'll develop four "essential capabilities", which include revealing new patterns between ideas and honing the new perspectives you discover among them. Chapters guide the reader through the "Code" - capture, organise, distil and express - and conclude with insights into essential digital organising habits. However, the book can, ironically, feel a little overwhelming. So it's best to build your note-taking capabilities a little at a time or cherry pick the bits that work best for you.
Terence Dooley, 2022, Yale University Press; 9780300260748
Subject: History
Source: Financial Times
Review: In Burning the Big House, Terence Dooley, professor of history at Maynooth university, draws on decades of research to weave together social, political and cultural history in a stunning portrait of a landscape and a social milieu changed for ever. As he shows, there was no top-down IRA strategy to eradicate the big houses; rather, attacks were piecemeal, driven from the grassroots and locally ena...Read More
Burning the big house: the story of the Irish country house in a time of war and revolution
In Burning the Big House, Terence Dooley, professor of history at Maynooth university, draws on decades of research to weave together social, political and cultural history in a stunning portrait of a landscape and a social milieu changed for ever. As he shows, there was no top-down IRA strategy to eradicate the big houses; rather, attacks were piecemeal, driven from the grassroots and locally enacted. They can only be understood through attention to decades of local grievance and the accumulated tension of everyday social dynamics. The conventional explanation for the relative conservatism of the Irish Revolution has been that the social revolution preceded the political one, with the land war of the 1880s prompting a series of laws enabling extensive transfer of ownership from landlord to tenant. Although this simplistic narrative has been challenged by the historian Fergus Campbell and others, Dooley's achievement is to demonstrate the extent of land hunger as a mobilising factor during the revolution. The burnings were "as symptomatic of the continued land question as [they were] of the aristocracy's continued loyalism". Arresting detail is to be found on almost every page: paraffin-soaked furniture piled up on the lawn outside Moydrum Castle; a Rembrandt (perhaps apocryphally) used as a dartboard at Mitchelstown Castle; the stench of urine after IRA forces used the drawing-room walls of the same house as a latrine. "All bedding, mattresses, carpets, sofas, etc will have to go to Dublin to be thoroughly disinfected," was the verdict of DH Doyne after St Austin's, his French Gothic country house at Tullow, was occupied by IRA men. Despite extensive compensation schemes, most of these houses were not rebuilt. Families moved away, usually to England, and demesne lands were parcelled up and sold off. Dooley's empathy abounds: for the Anglo-Irish families whose world disappeared, for the houses and their contents, scattered to the winds - or, more likely, looted or "acquired" by Dublin antiques dealers - and for the tenants, driven by hunger for land. Some ruins of big houses dot the landscape in Ireland, forming as Dooley puts it, "icons of revolutionary mythology". Moydrum Castle was immortalised on the cover of U2's The Unforgettable Fire album. Others were razed to the ground, materials removed for building projects elsewhere, leaving only ghostly grassy imprints whispering of a world and a way of life erased by conflict. These two books are tangentially linked through the destruction of Henry Wilson's familial home at Currygrane House, but they are also connected at a deeper level. Both McGreevy and Dooley deal with the complex, tangled layers of national, religious and cultural identity that were squeezed by the obliterative certainties of revolution. Like the London-born ex-soldier IRA volunteers who killed Wilson, the Irish Revolution forced the inhabitants of big houses to choose sides. As Britain's empire fractured, new boundaries were created in men's souls as well as on the new map of the UK. Some, like Wilson, Dunne and O'Sullivan, chose willingly; others, like the inhabitants of big houses, were forced at the point of a gun or in the heat of flames.
Vic Gatrell, 2022, Cambridge University Press; 9781108838481
Subject: History
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Review: In "Conspiracy on Cato Street," Vic Gatrell describes a plan, hatched in early 1820, to murder the members of the British cabinet, including its head, the prime minister. Not since Guy Fawkes's Gunpowder Plot in 1605-intended to blow up Parliament and assassinate James I for the sake of Catholic emancipation-had there been such a sensational threat of violence against the government....Read More
Conspiracy on Cato street: a tale of liberty and revolution in regency London
In "Conspiracy on Cato Street," Vic Gatrell describes a plan, hatched in early 1820, to murder the members of the British cabinet, including its head, the prime minister. Not since Guy Fawkes's Gunpowder Plot in 1605-intended to blow up Parliament and assassinate James I for the sake of Catholic emancipation-had there been such a sensational threat of violence against the government.
Review: In Tomi Obaro's loving and lively debut novel we meet three women, lifelong friends - "essentially sisters, though Funmi would chafe at the sickly sweetness of such a term." Read More
Dele weds destiny: a stunning novel of friendship, love and home
In Tomi Obaro's loving and lively debut novel we meet three women, lifelong friends - "essentially sisters, though Funmi would chafe at the sickly sweetness of such a term."
Review: Many have come to rely on middlemen. Amazon and Walmart are just two examples Kathryn Judge draws on in this book, detailing how they give consumers access to lower-priced food and other goods. But they also use these benefits to make consumers actually buy stuff they do not need while also building significant power within the US economy. The things that make middlemen so useful "also enable them...Read More
Direct: the rise of the middleman economy and the power of going to the source
Many have come to rely on middlemen. Amazon and Walmart are just two examples Kathryn Judge draws on in this book, detailing how they give consumers access to lower-priced food and other goods. But they also use these benefits to make consumers actually buy stuff they do not need while also building significant power within the US economy. The things that make middlemen so useful "also enable them to serve their own ends at the expense of the rest of us", Judge writes. As a law professor at Columbia University, the author has studied the middleman economy for more than a decade and here dissects how it operates in the US - from retailers to estate agents and banks - and why people need to change habits and, where possible, start to go "direct". Judge knows that breaking a reliance on a huge supermarket on your doorstep is not easy and acknowledges "conflicted shoppers" who would like to rely on Amazon less but often find the service is the only one that serves their needs (which, she points out, is what gives these behemoths their power). Her analysis of the middleman economy reveals its dark sides, such as fragile supply chains and the pressure on suppliers to provide products at ever lower prices. But Judge recognises the limitations of going "direct": she highlights that some direct-to-consumer brands may not in reality live up to the positive image they cultivate or stick to the values on which they were originally founded. Judge argues that modest shifts towards direct exchange can contribute to a more resilient economy, but she also provides guidance about how to choose a middleman more carefully when it is necessary to use one.
James Burrows, 2022, Ballantine Books; 9780593358245
Subject: History
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Review: There is no such angst here. If this book were a television show, it would fall squarely in the workplace-comedy category. The closest thing to a villain is "the network," which merits an occasional swipe. Practically the only negative comment to be found is about Ms. Long from "Cheers," who, Mr. Burrows reports, "was never the easiest to work with." He hastens to add, "But she was terrific."...Read More
Directed by James Burrows: five decades of stories from the legendary director of taxi, cheers, frasier, friends, will & grace, and more
There is no such angst here. If this book were a television show, it would fall squarely in the workplace-comedy category. The closest thing to a villain is "the network," which merits an occasional swipe. Practically the only negative comment to be found is about Ms. Long from "Cheers," who, Mr. Burrows reports, "was never the easiest to work with." He hastens to add, "But she was terrific."
Review: "Dirt Town" by Hayley Scrivenor, arrives with a Harper encomium, and offers a painterly slice of literary crime fiction, with sharply observed character, rather than synthetic plot twists, to the fore.Sydney-based DS Sarah Michaels becomes obsessed with a murder involving children in a grubby Australian country town. Durton is the sarcastically named "dirt town" of the title, and as in Dashiell Ha...Read More
Dirt town
"Dirt Town" by Hayley Scrivenor, arrives with a Harper encomium, and offers a painterly slice of literary crime fiction, with sharply observed character, rather than synthetic plot twists, to the fore.Sydney-based DS Sarah Michaels becomes obsessed with a murder involving children in a grubby Australian country town. Durton is the sarcastically named "dirt town" of the title, and as in Dashiell Hammett's corrupt Personville/Poisonville in Red Harvest, the sprawling cast of culpable characters is as important as the unravelling of the murder mystery.
Review: Largely self-taught in atomic physics, Higgs was fascinated and appalled by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred when he was 16. While beginning his career as a university researcher, he became active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, through which he met his American wife Jody. The marriage lasted until the early 1970s, the physicist "putting his scientific career before ...Read More
Elusive: how Peter Higgs solved the mystery of mass
Largely self-taught in atomic physics, Higgs was fascinated and appalled by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred when he was 16. While beginning his career as a university researcher, he became active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, through which he met his American wife Jody. The marriage lasted until the early 1970s, the physicist "putting his scientific career before his family" when choosing between a holiday or a conference.
Marina Warner, 2022, New York Review Books; 9781681376448
Subject: Fiction
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Review: In 1944, when Lt. Col. E.P. (Esmond) Warner arrived at the port of Bari, on the Adriatic Sea, after serving a long World War II stint in North Africa with Britain's Eighth Army. He was an aging boy, 36, cast in the Bertie Wooster mold. When he met Emilia (Ilia) Terzulli, 21, the youngest of four radiant, penniless, "strictly brought up" sisters who typed and translated for the Allied troops, he wa...Read More
Esmond and ilia: an unreliable memoir
In 1944, when Lt. Col. E.P. (Esmond) Warner arrived at the port of Bari, on the Adriatic Sea, after serving a long World War II stint in North Africa with Britain's Eighth Army. He was an aging boy, 36, cast in the Bertie Wooster mold. When he met Emilia (Ilia) Terzulli, 21, the youngest of four radiant, penniless, "strictly brought up" sisters who typed and translated for the Allied troops, he was instantly smitten but didn't ask her out. According to "family legend," Ms. Warner writes, when he introduced her to a fellow officer, laughingly saying, "Here's just the thing for you," Ilia forthrightly retorted, "But why not you?" Within weeks, he proposed.
Stephen J. Riegel, 2022, Syracuse University Press; 9780815611349
Subject: History
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Review: Mr. Riegel is a diligent researcher and writes well for a lawyer although with considerable tolerance for cliches. Quotable lines aren't his strength. No matter. It's a good yarn and the author even provides his own credible solution to the mystery at the end.Read More
Finding judge crater: a life and phenomenal disappearance in jazz age New York
Mr. Riegel is a diligent researcher and writes well for a lawyer although with considerable tolerance for cliches. Quotable lines aren't his strength. No matter. It's a good yarn and the author even provides his own credible solution to the mystery at the end.
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