(2023)

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, by David Mitchell

A Rising Man, by Abir Mukherjee

A Necessary Evil , by Abir Mukherjee

The Mimosa Tree Mystery, by Ovidia Yu

Breath, by James Nestor

Galileo, by J.L. Heilbon

The Lost City of Z, by David Grann

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diana Setterfield

The Easy Life in Kamusari, by Shion Miura

Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage, by Stacy Schiff

Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov

A Hero of our Time, by Mikhail Lermentov

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, by Vladimir Nabokov

The Candid Life of Meena Dave, by Namrata Patel

Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Céspedes

Parisian Days, by Banine

A Waiter in Paris, by Edward Chisholm

The Mayflower Pilgrims, by Derek Wilson

The Other Renaissance, by Paul Strathern

The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova

Days in the Caucasus, by Banine

Life's That Way, by Jim Beaver

Albert Camus: A Life, by Olivier Todd

The Plague, by Albert Camus

From Warsaw with Love, by John Pomfret

Prime Obsession, by John Derbyshire

Mrs Jordan's Profession, by Claire Tomalin

The Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins

Jane Austen: A Life, by Claire Tomalin

A Plague Upon Our House, by Scott W. Atlas, M.D.

Miles from Nowhere, by Barbara Savage

A Cabinet of Byzantine Curisoities, by Anthony Kaldellis

Perfect Rigour, by Masha Gessen

The Young H.G. Wells, by Claire Tomalin

The First Four Minutes, by Roger Bannister

What We Fear Most, by Dr. Ben Cave

    This is about madness. The author is a forensic psychologist, dealing with the criminally insane; those put into closed psychiatric hospitals rather than prison. He tells us that after many years he has gotten a new position, and he is clearing out his old office, looking at the cases he has dealt with in all that time. And so the book describes various levels of mental disturbance and insanity by describing in detail some of these cases. Some were indeed fearful. Forensic psychology is not a profession for the weak of heart. But for me, who has practically nothing to do with it, I can think of other things which seem to me to be much more fearful, For example the situation of a man in Ukraine being dragged off the street and immediately thrown into the senseless slaughter. Or the possibility that it will suddenly lead to nuclear war.
    We are told how wonderful it is that there are psychoactive drugs which often help these people. Given the very extreme cases the author describes, we appreciate the role they play. But then when we are told of the various mass shootings in the United States, it often comes out that the shooter had been taking prescribed psychoactive drugs which in some way had caused his behavior. It is easy to say that society itself is mad, and so it is no wonder that some people act out the madness in disturbing ways. But in the end, despite having read this book, I realize that I don't really want to think about such things.

Lessons, by Ian McEwan

    Ian McEwan was born in 1948. This must have been the most ideal, perfect time to have been born. Our generation has experienced the growing prosperity of the last 75 years. Life has been easy. And so McEwan celebrates this life with a novel about an imagined life with all of its ups and downs. The protagonist is Roland Baines, also born in 1948. And as with McEwan, Roland Baines' father was in the military, looking after the various areas of British imperialism in the world so that, as with the real life McEwan, he spent his early years in North Africa. He is then sent to boarding school in England.
    The little 11 year old Roland has a strange experience at school. He is enrolled in piano lessons, and his teacher, the seemingly straight-laced 25 year old Miss Miriam Cornell suddenly kisses him on the lips and places her hand inside his shorts, touching him. Roland is confused and he is glad to be assigned a different piano teacher with whom he makes great progress. He avoids Miss Cornell, quickly tuning away if he happens to see her in the distance. But in the evenings, in their dormitory, while the other boys in the boarding school discuss their sexual fantasies, Roland thinks of Miss Cornell, dreaming of her, imagining what it would be like. And so when he is 14 he gets on his bicycle and rides a few miles to the village where Miss Cornell lives in a small house. It is as if she has also been waiting these years for him to finally come. She first instructs him to clear things in the garden. To do a few chores about the house. She is in control. Guiding Roland from step to step. She puts a piece for four hands onto the piano and they play it together. Roland is at first nervous, making one or two mistakes while sight-reading; then they play it together again and it floats forth in beautiful harmony. Miss Cornell guides Roland upstairs to her bedroom and then through the full experience of sexual intercourse. He is completely overwhelmed. He keeps coming back. Miss Cornell is once again assigned Roland as her pupil and they spend many days together, playing music and sex. Gradually as time goes by Roland reaches his 16th birthday; he cannot be bothered with his other school work and so, at the end of the year, he fails his exams.
    Thus he leaves school without graduating. He works at odd jobs, house construction, whatever. His life develops. It is a long book with many different characters, women he marries and those he dosen't marry. Various lessons of life. He ages. His profession is to play sentimental "old time favorites" in the evenings on the piano of a lounge in a London hotel. Soft, meaningless background music. A dead end job. He achieves nothing in life; perhaps he can no longer be satisfied with anything after all his emotions as a 14 year old boy.
    He has now become 60 years old or so. A policeman tells him that there have been rumors of a female music teacher who sexually assaulted a small boy. He seeks out Miriam Cornell who he finds living in a large, elegant London mansion, and he pretends to be someone who wants to take lessons from her. She is still an elegant woman. Roland, who is hardly elegant, confronts her with his wasted life. He threatens to report her to the police, and she tells him an elaborate story about her feelings all those years ago. The guilt and so forth. It is an empty threat. He has no intention of going to the police.
    In the final parts of the book Ian McEwan tells us through Roland, his apparent alter-ego, about his views on politics and everything else which fill the pages of the present-day Guardian newspaper. In fact we learn that McEwan even writes articles for the Guardian. Thus Roland's son has become a major scientist for the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research, or whatever it is called, writing computer programs to show that the world is burning up.
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Remark: The weather here is cold and wet despite the Guardian claiming that the world is hotter than it has ever been before. Or at least the last 100,000 years, or a million, or whatever.
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Then Roland wears his medical mask everywhere, telling his family that they cannot visit him. He is angry about Boris Johnson for not locking everybody down much earlier and longer than was the case. He is especially angry about the people who have not taken their mRNA injections. They should be put into prison, or at least into enclosed camps where the authorities can concentrate on teaching them the proper respect for authority. He cannot get over the fact that the British people voted for Brexit. And on and on. Still, I enjoyed the book.
    In a few places Roland compares his vacuous life to that of Marlow, the figure in Joseph Conrad's Youth. And so I read that, downloading it from Gutenberg.org. It is a short novella, or longish short story. Similar to William Golding's Fire Down Below. Good books to read.

Five Tales, by John Galsworthy

    Going back to older books. John Galsworthy published this one in 1918. I started reading his famous Forsyte Saga but got bogged down in the maze of characters which were introduced right at the beginning and I was turned off by their unpleasant characteristics. But these short stories were well worth reading. In contrast with a lot of the stuff I have been reading lately, Galsworthy writes of higher moral principles. People finding themselves in one dilemma or another and we wonder what should have been done.
    For example The Juryman has a comfortable, complacent, if not cynical man being called to sit on a jury, much against his wishes. It is the middle of the Great War. An unfortunate little man who has been conscripted has tried to commit suicide. He is charged with treason, and so on. If he had killed himself then England would have lost a soldier which could have then more patriotically died under German fire. The other jurors, who have themselves avoided becoming soldiers, express their outrage at the cowardly behavior of the accused. But the protagonist of the story is repelled by these false emotions and refuses to vote for guilty. Thus the accused is pronounced not guilty and is returned to his regiment, rather than being thrown into jail. Perhaps not the best outcome.
    The First and Last is about a successful, established lawyer whose loose living brother is in trouble. He tries his best to help him, putting himself in jeopardy, advising the brother to flee. All to no avail. The Apple Tree is about a young man on a walking tour with a friend from university. He injures his leg and so stays in a farm while the friend returns to his studies. He falls in love with the farmer's daughter, an innocent child of nature who is unfamiliar with everything in the world of the young man. He says that he will take her into his world and they will be married. When his leg is recovered he travels to the nearby town to buy her fashionable clothes in order for her to fit in with her future life, promising to return in the evening. What should he buy? Everything seems wrong. Suddenly he meets an old friend who is holidaying nearby. The friend's sister and others are there as well. They insist that he come swimming with them in the afternoon. Everything is so friendly, so natural. The sister is beautiful. They are part of his life, his natural circle of friends. He stays the night in a hotel. They have a wonderful time the next day as well. The story then jumps years into the future. He has a beautiful family; his wife is that sister and they have a number of children. On a drive in the countryside they stop for a picnic and he recognizes the farm where he had stayed. He asks about the people there and he is told about the young maiden, such a lovely, wonderful girl, who had died of a broken heart.

Romance, by Joseph Conrad and F. M. Hueffer

        Hueffer was the son of Francis Hueffer, the German-born chief music critic of the Times newspaper. The book was first published in 1903, before the first World War. Hueffer changed his surname in 1919, becoming Ford Madox Ford and thus apparently less Germanic. It is said that Conrad and Hueffer were good friends for many years.
    A young Englishman, John Kemp, suddenly finds himself aboard a ship bound for Jamaica, filled with various shady characters. Although Kemp is impoverished, his uncle is an earl and he seems to have various aristocratic Spanish relations, all resulting in connections with wealthy plantation owners in Jamaica and Cuba. It is a swashbuckling story, perhaps reminiscent of Robert Lewis Stevenson. Kemp falls totally in love with Seraphina, a Spanish maiden, a cousin, the most wonderful, perfect person in the world who is also the fabulously rich heiress to the greatest fortune of Cuba. They escape from pirates, prison and lots of other things in an unlikely sequence of implausible adventures to finally live happily ever after in the last few sentences of the book. I read on, curious to find out how things develop from one scene to the next, but we really can't compare this with Conrad's more famous volumes: Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and all that. If we are to assume that this is basically a book by Joseph Conrad then it would seem that Ford Madox Ford's influence disrupted his style. On the other hand if this was basically a book by Ford Madox Ford then Conrad would have done better to have just left him to it.

Unfinished Victory, by Arthur Bryant

        The author was an English historian. According to the Wikipedia he was the favorite historian of three prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Wilson. The present book was published in 1940, describing the catastrophic aftermath of the First World War and how it led to the Second World War. The responsibility lay chiefly with France, and in particular with the brutally rigid prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, while the other powers of the Entente stood by and let it happen. After publishing the book, as the hysteria of the second war led into an even greater catastrophe, the author, being an advisor in the corridors of power, found his book to be an embarrassment, and so he tried to suppress it, buying up as many copies as possible, destroying them. It was no longer a popular idea to try and understand the enemy.
    How easy it is to make generalizations: Germans mindlessly obey orders; Russians are drunken brutes; Ukrainians are Nazis; Americans are gun-loving killers. If we don't know anything else then we might accept such ideas, especially if the newspapers and television have been bought up by powerful financial figures and turned into a virtual monopoly, broadcasting such ideas. Indeed, the author, Arthur Bryant has been accused by some of being an anti-Semite, a Nazi. Such people have either not read the book or else they distort the truth for whatever reasons they have. There is a YouTube video of an interview with the author as an old man.
    The book describes the situation in Germany during the First World War. Owing to the blockade of the North Sea by the British, large sections of the German population began starving, living in destitution, there was abject poverty everywhere. The war ended when sailors of the German navy refused to sail out in a hopeless, last ditch, suicidal mission to finally break the blockade. Terms were agreed for the surrender on the basis of a fair plan put forward by President Wilson of the United States. But as soon as the Germans, Austrians and Hungarians gave up their arms, these terms were thrown aside and crushing, very unfair terms were imposed. It was specified that Germany must transfer impossible amounts of money to the victors. This led to the inflation, destroying most peoples lives. The author describes how as a young man he had traveled to Germany, living like a prince in great luxury while only spending a pound or two of English money. Similarly people in Germany with relatives or friends in England or America who sent them small amounts of money could buy up huge amounts of value, becoming suddenly rich out of the suffering of others. This led to great resentments. And still, even ten, fifteen years after the end of the war, into the Great Depression, the financial interests in France, England and America kept insisting on huge reparation payments from Germany. Is it any wonder that this led to the catastrophe of the Second World War?

Wind in the Fire, by Bobbi Gibb

        Bobbi (Roberta) Gibb was the first woman to run in the Boston marathon. In fact she was the first woman to run in any marathon. The whole idea of a marathon run originated when the first modern Olympics were organized in 1896. The ancient Olympics - which didn't allow women - had no marathon. It continued in an uninterrupted sequence every four years from 776 BC to 261 AD when the 260th Olympiad was held, marking the last of the continuously recorded list of victors. Wars were suspended to allow the Olympics to go on, plagues were ignored; the Olympics were more important than such things. What a contrast with modern times.
    The author was born in 1942 and thus she was 23 when she first ran the marathon in 1966. As I remember 1966, just starting the first year of university, I cannot imagine the restrictions on women which Bobbi Gibb describes. The hall of residence at the Australian National University where I stayed consisted of two large buildings containing identical rooms for students. One of the buildings was for women and the other for men. We all had our meals together in the central hall. There were certainly no restrictions on women coming into the men's building or men coming into the woman's building at any time of the day or night. People just come and went as they pleased. It is true that few women were taking the courses I was taking: mathematics, physics, and in the first year, geology. But there was no suggestion that they would not be welcome.
    What sports there were: tennis, running around the sports ground, were done as much by women students as men. But for formal sports competitions (which were nonexistent at the ANU) there was the division between men's and women's competitions. After all, most sport involves some sort of test of strength, and as a general rule men have more strength than women. Therefore it would be unfair for men to compete in women's sport. And if a woman were to feel unfairly handled if she were to lose to a man in a woman's competition, I am sure many men would equally feel unfairly handled if they were to lose to a woman in a men's competition.
    Bobbi Gibb tells us that her father was a professor of chemistry at Tufts University in Boston. Her mother was a frustrated housewife. The father laid down the rules and the mother and daughter suffered. The mother drank wine to drown her sorrows, together with pills, psychopharmica, prescribed by the doctor. Bobbi took to sleeping outside in her sleeping bag, covering herself with a camping sheet if it rained or snowed. She ran with the local dogs through the woods. To escape the tensions at home she moved in with a more open-minded family. In 1964 she stood on the sidelines and watched the runners of the Boston Marathon pass by, and she resolved to enter and run herself.
    She had studied at Tufts: mathematics and physics, philosophy, but for some reason she had not taken a degree. Instead she was studying art at an institute in Boston. She describes all the restrictions she feels that she suffered as a woman. When I compare this with the women students I knew in those days, I simply have to wonder what sort of a world Boston must have been like.
    In any case she tells us that in the summer of 1964 her parents left for an extended holiday, leaving her in charge of the house and their VW bus which the father had fixed up for camping. Bobbi decided to take the bus and drive across the country to California, and she also bought a puppy dog to accompany her. This was a great act of rebellion since the bus was her father's special project and also he was strictly against dogs, saying he was allergic to them.
    There follows long passages describing her trip, sleeping rough, taking long runs through beautiful landscapes. She tells us of her love for nature, for the world. And when running she is meditating about the world. Half of the text is in italics, representing her inner thoughts when running. What is God? Is he - or it - the creator of everything? But then what created God? She sees that life creates itself and so she realizes that the whole of everything is self-creating. Everything is love and beauty. She thinks about the physics she has learned at Tufts and much of her philosophy revolves around such ideas. In the middle of all this the following sentence appears:
    Existence creates space and time within it, or rather space and time are just the way we order events, so the events define the distances and times, which we think we are measuring.
    Well, indeed, this sentence can be thought of as being a question in pure mathematics. She would have done well to have thought further about how to formulate an appropriate mathematical theory to make this idea precise rather than submerging it in loads of vague philosophical speculations.
     She tells us about her boyfriends. First there is Will who went running with her and they had lots of talks together about philosophy and all that when she was studying at Tufts. But he had joined the Navy two years ago and was gone. Then there was John who was studying medicine. She loved John and he loved her. But when she had proposed to set off on her own to California in the VW bus he tried to stop her, saying it was dangerous for a woman alone. Maybe he was right. But Bobbi detected something of her father in this and so was angry with him. Halfway to California the VW bus began making unpleasant noises. Pulling into a VW dealer, she was told that the engine was broken; it had to be replaced with a new engine. So she sat in an armchair for a couple of hours, giving us pages of further italic philosophical musings, and then the car was finished. The whole operation cost $135.
    Oh for those good old days of 1964! Just put in a new motor and drive off into the sunset. No worries. She had earned $400 being a "den mother" at a summer camp for children the month before, earning enough money for her drive across America. That was three times the cost of a new VW motor together with the labor of installing it. What a contrast with the world of 2023! A new motor for a VW transporter would cost well over $10,000, and it would take a week to put it in, whereas being a "den mother" for a month these days would hardly earn much more than $400.
    She had lost a third of her funds for the trip, but despite that, in San Francisco, after camping out on the beach with a bunch of hippies, she decided to splurge and check in to the most expensive hotel in town and eat the most expensive dinner in their restaurant. Her funds were reduced almost to zero. She put an advertisement in the paper asking for people who would share the expenses of driving back to Boston. A group of (male) students answered, and they set off, apparently intending to drive nonstop. When she was sleeping in the middle of the night and one of the students was driving, the car suddenly left the road and tumbled over. A write off. Nobody was really hurt. They spent the night in a motel room together, Bobbi on the bed and the students on the floor, and then she bought a train ticket and returned to Boston. When the father learned about all of this he was hysterical, accusing her of being a prostitute, saying she was no longer his daughter. I suppose he was also upset about the loss of his car. She was confined in the house as punishment (a 21 year old!) but John secretly came in and they became intimate in the middle of the night by the fireplace. The father suddenly stormed in in his pajamas. Shouting, screaming. She was shut up in the bedroom as punishment. He rang up John's father, a pastor of the church, who in turn shouted and screamed at John, telling him that if he ever saw Bobbi again he would no longer be allowed to study and his life would be ruined. And so John broke off all contact.
    Then came Brandon. A suave student at Harvard. Rich parents with an opulent Manhattan residence. Stockbrokers. Finance. Money. She was taken to parties, became friends with the girlfriends who wanted to marry into all this money. She even moved in with them in a large house in Boston. But Brandon's rich father, uncles, the rest of them, smelled of the smoke, the alcohol, the rich foods, the sleepless nights. Bobbi wished that she was away, alone in the woods with her sleeping bag, under the stars.
    And then on Christmas Eve the telephone rang; was it John, finally coming back? No. It was Will, on leave from the Navy base in San Diego. He came over, they talked through the night, they agreed to marry. And so she moved to California, now a married woman, training for the Boston Marathon. She tells us that back in Massachusetts she had run 40 miles a day through woods, following the course of a cross country rally for horses and riders. And in California she runs long distances, well beyond a marathon distance. Her new husband, Will, seems strangely distant. He is more friendly with his shipmates, leaving Bobbi alone in their small house. But she has made a friend in California, a woman who has inherited all the riches of a great beer empire, having an extensive ranch with horses and all that. They stay together in the luxury of her house into the night, Bobbi explaining the various points of her philosophy of life and the world.
    The time comes for the Boston Marathon of 1966. She writes to the organizers, asking for an application form but instead receives a letter telling her that women are not physically capable of running such distances. The longest distance allowed for women's competitions according the Amateur Athletic Association of America was 1 1/2 miles. But she decides to run anyway. Suddenly Will, who, unusually, is home, is angry, refusing to have anything to do with it. He refuses to drive her to the bus station in San Diego. Her rich, esoteric friend, the beer heiress, does not suggest buying her an airline ticket to Boston. She takes a taxi to the bus terminal and with the last of her money buys a Greyhound Bus ticket to Boston. And so she sits in the bus nonstop for 3 days, day and night, arriving in Boston the night before the big race, exhausted, and she calls her parents.
    Why is she not with her husband? What is she doing here? They decide not to explode with anger. They just ignore it, giving her a huge dinner and putting her to bed. The next morning she asks them to drive her to the start of the Boston Marathon. Anger, shouting. The father storms out, slamming the door, saying that he is going to the regatta with the mother. Bobbi pleads with her mother, saying that she will be setting a signal for women, something of lasting value. Eventually her mother does agree to drive her to the start, but she quickly drives back to Boston to join her husband at the regatta.
    Bobbi hides in bushes, wearing a sweatshirt with hood to hide her long hair. The race starts and she joins in. She feels good despite the three days sitting in the bus and the heavy meal the night before. Some of the runners behind begin to ask, "Is that a girl?" The runners next to her tell her how wonderful it is that she is running. She should take off the heavy sweatshirt and run freely. She does and everybody begins to say that a girl is running. The local radio picks it up and her progress is breathlessly followed. Women along the road cheer, weep. A girl is running the Boston Marathon! The runners around her say that this is a pace of under three hours. She is feeling good. Everybody is cheering. She reaches Heartbreak Hill, but then she hits the "brick wall". She must go on, staggering on for the sake of all women, and finally she finishes in 3 hours and 20 minutes. Ahead of 2/3s of the other runners. The governor of Massachusetts congratulates her. Everybody is happy. She is driven back to her parents house and finds the street full of cars, people everywhere, reporters clamoring for photos, interviews. Her parents are back at home, not at their stupid regatta. They pretend that everything is wonderful, that they are proud of their daughter. What nonsense. What hypocrisy. And what an extraordinary book this is.
    We read that Bobbi Gibb has become a person of historic importance for the Boston Marathon and for women's liberation. She is an artist, a scientist, a philosopher. No longer married to the simple-minded Will. Did she marry John? She gives us a few hints, but perhaps not. She is famous. But could it be that if had she not become famous then she might have had the peace of mind to think more deeply about her thoughts on physics and develop ideas of more lasting value?

Never Out of Season, by Rob Dunn

        The book starts off by telling us that our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate hundreds of different kinds of foods. Different things in the winter and the summer, during a rainy patch or a drought, there was always something to be found. They simply ate what nature happened to be producing. I remember reading that the native peoples of Australia or the San of Southwest Africa only needed to "work" for an hour or two each day in order to gather enough nourishment to satisfy their needs. In contrast with this, we modern people rely on very few plants: rice, wheat, potatoes, maize, and so on. Huge fields are planted in mono-culture, and this is necessary in order to feed all the millions and billions of people in the world. But doing so we are open to sudden crop failure: insects, bacteria, viruses, fungi. The author tells us that we live precariously. As in the potato famine in Ireland in 1845, suddenly from one day to the next a whole crop can fail. Indeed, the potato blight which was the cause of that famine still exists and it remains a problem for modern agriculture.
    We are told that almost all bananas which we have today are essentially identical with one another. They are all produced by a huge number of clones of a single plant and so they are practically genetically identical with one another. Every banana you have ever eaten is from the same plant. Surely this is a very fragile, hardly sustainable situation.
    Particularly interesting is the example of rubber trees. In the 1930s, Henry Ford established a huge plantation in South America in order to make rubber tires for his cars. But it failed. He tried again and his second project also failed. He didn't take into account the complicated ecology of rubber trees. Most raw rubber came from Southeast Asia, and that was cut off by the Japanese in World War II. A substitute of artificial rubber was invented, but it is inferior to natural rubber. In particular, even today, airplane tires must be made of natural rubber since artificial rubber would fall apart during the extreme conditions of landing. But also the sidewalls of radial tires for cars need natural rubber. Therefore if you were to go out now and kick the tires on your car, you will be kicking natural rubber which has dripped slowly from a rubber tree, probably from somewhere in Southeast Asia.
    Why does rubber come from Asia rather than from South America where the rubber tree originated? The answer is that the natural enemies of the rubber tree, the fungi, the caterpillars and all that, do not exist in Asia. They remain in South America so the trees can grow easily in Asia, free of these pests. Yet what will we do when they suddenly begin to appear in the vast rubber plantations of Asia? Or perhaps native Asian insects, fungi, or whatever will adopt and attack the trees. The same situation applies to cacao, which is mainly produced in West Africa, away from its origin in South America. And coffee is mainly produced in countries which are far away from where the coffee tree originated in Ethiopia and Yemen.
    The book describes how over the millennia farmers have bred crops, crossed them with strains which are resistant to one thing and another. But this is dependent on the existence of a large diversity of wild strains. And so it is important to maintain large areas of undisturbed natural landscapes. It would be ideal if half the land of the Earth was left undisturbed, leaving the other half left for human activities. Of course this will never happen. And so countless numbers of important plants will become extinct. People only think about the animals. Those horrible, nasty polar bears. The pandas. They are made to look like cuddly little furry babies on television. When imagining scenes of ancient dinosaurs we look at the animals, the vegetation providing just a basic greenish background. But it is not these animals that are really important. It is the plants and the unimaginably complicated relationships between them and all the other forms of life which is invisible in the picture. There is an interesting Youtube video where Rob Dunn talks about all the microbial matter found in our homes.
    The "green revolution" of 30 or 40 years ago increased crop yields at the price of restricting plant diversity even further and spraying everything with artificial poisons. And now we have glyphosate - or "Roundup" - which is supposed to exterminate all plants except those which have been genetically modified to survive a dowsing of glyphosate. The author does not condemn these developments. He treats them as if they are necessary for feeding the billions of people in the world. He also describes positively the technology for genetically altering the genome of plants, causing them to spontaneously produce artificial insecticides. But surely this is making agriculture even more fragile, prone to disastrous failures. The groundwater is becoming poisoned. As I have written here somewhere before, in contrast with 10 or 20 years ago, we see few bees and other insects in our garden. When traveling on the motorway for a few hours in the summer, the windscreen does have numbers of insect splotches, but much fewer than what used to be the case.
    We buy almost exclusively "organic" food, that is, food which is derived from plants which have not been sprayed with poisons and which have not been altered using genetic engineering. It is somewhat more expensive than sprayed foods, but not that much. More and more farmers in Europe are changing to organic farming. The fields of organically grown wheat, potatoes and all that look just as green and abundant as those of "conventional" farms. Many people say that it is simply false to assert that artificial poisons are necessary in order to feed the world. Often the yields of organic crops exceed those of conventional crops.
    Time and again Rob Dunn finds it necessary to invoke the meme of "climate change". New crop varieties must be developed to endure the imagined horrors of future climate. The last chapter I reached was about Syria. He recounts the famine of 3000 years ago which is thought to have resulted from an extended dry period lasting perhaps 200 years. Then we are told that "climate modelers" have shown that Syria will in the next few years experience a drought which will last for thousands of years. The story then lurched into something about how evil President Bashar Assad is, at which point I stopped reading the book.
    Looking at the video, Rob Dunn seems to be an interesting, intelligent person who has much to tell us. But he would do well to switch off his television and let his brain recover from the garbage it seems to have assimilated there. And he would also do well to realize that the computer programs which "climate modelers" write are unable to predict the "climate" even a year or two into the future, let alone a thousand years. As they say: "garbage in, garbage out". But despite this garbage it is a worthwhile book, describing the very important yet little recognized work being done by a few individuals to try to protect and preserve the diversity of plants in the world.

Old God's Time, by Sebastian Barry

        This one reminded me of all the John Banville books I read last year. An old police officer, retired for nine months, unsteady, frail, confused, progressing beyond the first stages of dementia. He is living in an apartment attached to an old castle overlooking the sea on the west coast of Ireland. We learn that as a child he was an orphan in a Catholic orphanage. He was beaten daily by the vicious priests. At night he lay awake in bed, a small child of five or six, frightened of the footsteps of the priest coming ether to beat him again or to homosexually rape him. When he was 16 he was finally able to leave all of the horror and torture, joining the army to become a sniper in Malaya, killing many people, and eventually becoming an Irish policeman. His wife was similarly an orphan in a Catholic institution who was continuously raped as a small child. The criminal priests behind all this evil had been protected by the Catholic Church, but some time in the past of his career as a policeman he has resolved the situation. His wife has long since died, as have his two children. He sometimes hallucinates about them. But now the past is catching up. It is not an hallucination.
    Just this past week I had a long and pleasant talk with an Irish fellow who is even older than I am. He was an opera singer in Italy, England, Ireland, and wherever opera is sung. He told me that he attended a Catholic school as a child in Ireland, and so I asked him if he knew of any suggestion of sexual abuse. But he said no, of course not. The priests and nuns were fine, honorable people. His school was not a boarding school, and certainly not an orphanage. Perhaps Ireland is not always as horrible as John Banville and Sebastian Barry would make us believe, despite their poetic prose.

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, by Lisa Feldman Barrett

        The simplest of those first multi-celled animals which appeared in the pre-Cambrian era almost 600 million years ago were just tubes, digestive systems drawing in water and expelling it out the back. No nervous system at all. Indeed, such simple animals exist in the oceans even today. But as things became more complicated, brains evolved to control the complex bodily functions. The author tells us that this is the real purpose of our brains. They are not there to philosophize about life, the universe and all that; to write books or obscure reviews as here. The main function of the brain is to regulate things like our blood pressure, breathing, digestion, coordinating all the muscles, and generally to see to it that the body keeps on functioning normally.
    Just yesterday I read a very interesting article written by someone who has "dystonia". She is a medical doctor who has also been studying music, playing the baroque flute. She played a concert as part of her masters degree for the flute, and then the next day the ring and little fingers of her left hand cramped up into a claw every time she tried playing. The little finger of the left hand is not used on the baroque flute, but the ring finger very much is. She tells us that when doing other things her left hand is normal. It just seizes up whenever it touches the flute. The condition persists for years, perhaps forever. Apparently some percentage, 1 or 2 percent, of professional musicians are struck down with this condition, destroying their careers. Surely this is an example of the brain making a very definite statement. Stop playing. It is bad for you. You are not in harmony with life, the world and your body.
    The book debunks the idea of the triune brain: the "lizard" brain which is supposed to make people sometimes act like lizards, the paleo-brain controlling the "limbic system", and the neocortex which is the wonderful thing distinguishing we humans from all those base animals. Instead we are told that all of these components are present, to a greater or lesser extent, in lizards and all the rest of those animals.
    Then it goes on to describe how the brain is continuously changing its structure, adding or subtracting synapses. The human baby is born with much too many synapses. Trillions and trillions of them. Only after 25 years has the brain reached a state of maturity. And after the interesting first lessons of the 7 1/2 of the book, we are told how important it is to lead a nice, harmonious life with interesting, loving interactions with all the people about you. In this way the brain can develop and proceed nicely, not suddenly hitting you with dystonia or some similar act of protest. The author, who tells us that she lives in New York City and is thus in loving contact with society as it is there, tells us that if we meet people who are not in agreement with the general tenets of society, then, for the sake of our brains, we should try to understand what those people think, rather than arguing with them. Indeed, I do try to understand the various popular ideas: climate change, electricity for everything, Russia bad, covid shots good, and all that. We should live and let live. On the other hand I do think that it would be good if people were sometimes more rational, taking the time to find out about the facts on both sides of these questions, but that is the way the world is.
    The book ends when it is only half finished. There follows a long Appendix titled "The Science Behind the Science", giving a sort of running footnote, running through the text of the first part, describing actual facts. But that was not organized in a way to read smoothly and coherently which was a pity, since it would have interested me more than the moralizing lessons which I had just waded through up to then.

Stay With Me, by Ayòbámi Adébáyò

        It took me a while to get into this one. The characters all have names with bizarre spellings. For example the main male character is a 16 year old youth named Ęniǫlá. I don't know if that's quite right since in the book, at least as it is displayed in my Kindle reader, there are dots beneath the letters E and o in the name, rather than the squiggles this HTML composer which I am using has in its "Latin Extended-B" font library. Hopefully your browser also has the Latin Extended-B supplement as well. And then the main female character, who is a newly qualified medical doctor approaching 30, is named Wúràǫlá. Not to mention Ęniǫlá's sister Bùsǫlá. Actually I have not spelled her name correctly since the ǫ should also have an accent on the top of it. Even my Kindle has trouble displaying that character, shrinking it in relation to the others for some reason. And I have also cheated when writing the name of the author since she has dots, or perhaps squiggles under some of the letters of her name.
    It was a tedious exercise for me to try to insert these unusual characters into this text, and I wonder if the author also had similar problems. On the other hand, perhaps computers sold in Nigeria have these letters right on the keyboard. But I doubt it. After all, Nigeria consists of a collection of various different peoples, speaking different languages and with presumably different alphabets. They were all forcefully and arbitrarily united into one colony by the English who then imposed the English language upon all of them. Could it be that the author is expressing her protest against this history by inserting dots, squiggles and accents all over the names of her characters while writing her novel in the English language?
    Be that as it may, the story is brutal. Can it be brutally honest? Is Nigeria really like this? Or, remembering the books of  Chimamanda Adichie, is it the case that young, attractive women novelists in Africa simply feel compelled to write about such things. (Adichie, being a member of a different ethnic grouping, the Igbo, has not felt it necessary to adorn the names of her characters with squiggles and dots.)
    In the story Ęniǫlá's father was a teacher of history in a state school. But the government of Nigeria decided to do away with unnecessary fluff and thus eliminated history, literature and all that stuff from the school curriculum, leaving the father unemployed and the family destitute. Still, they wanted to give Ęniǫlá and his sister the advantage of a private education, not the useless public education. Choosing the cheapest possible private school, begging money from relatives and even going out on the street to beg only gave a fraction of the school fees. But rather than simply expelling Ęniǫlá and his sister for being behind in their payments, the school resorted to the tactic of beating the children with a cane on the back so hard that welts appeared, blood, every morning, before the whole assembled class, the severity of the beatings increasing in proportion to the tardiness of payment.
    How horrible! Could it be that this is considered to be normal in Nigeria? Is this similar to the schools of Ireland in the books of Sebastian Barry or John Banville? At least they describe their schools as being aberrations. Why is she writing such things? At the end of the present book, in the Acknowledgments section, the author thanks lots of people for their support and in particular her family and her father who is a university professor, and she writes "Dear Daddy, I hope I've made you proud." From this I conclude that the book must be a true representation of the moral state of present-day Nigeria.
    The other part of the story has Wúràǫlá's well-to-do father becoming indirectly drawn into a political contest, resulting in horrible and violent consequences. Wúràǫlá's fiancé, while indulging in passionate love and sex which Wúràǫlá also enjoys, occasionally and suddenly lashes out, striking Wúràǫlá, and in the penultimate scene strangling her nearly to death. At least the author portrays this as being an aberration from the norms of her country.
    Something else that was described as normal was the idea of prostrating oneself before others as a sign of politeness. Apparently this involves lying face down on the floor with the forehead resting on the floor. This is particularly often described in the descriptions of Wúràǫlá's family. But being destitute, nobody in Ęniǫlá's family is described as prostrating themselves before one another. I wonder if the author prostrated herself before her father when presenting him with the first printings of this book?
    All of this seems very strange to me. But I suspect that if I were to travel to Nigeria and have a look at things then I would detect none of this strangeness and instead everything would seem to be quite reasonable. None of the extremities of these novels about brutality.

PS: I have now discovered how to put a dot underneath a letter, at least on the keyboard I have here. First press the "AltGr" key, and while holding it press the j key. Then release both of those keys and type the letter which is to have the dot underneath. Of course accents are easy to do with my keyboard. There is a special accent key up towards the right hand corner. Press that, then release it and then type the letter which is to have an accent over it. Pressing the accent key with the shift key gives the alternative accent. Thus what I formerly had, namely "Ęniǫlá", using alternative fonts, can be easily rendered as "Ẹniọlá" directly and more correctly. Nevertheless I still find no means to simultaneously put a dot under and an accent above a single letter.

Foe, by Iain Reid

        A silly fantasy as relief from all of the heavy stuff I've been reading lately. Something to give us a good laugh. The story takes place in the future: 2070 or 80 or so. A happily married couple. But the husband is summoned away into space to do something important. Maybe cruise out to Mars, taking a year or two for the trip, spending a few years there, and a few additional years on the voyage back.
    Unlike the old days when the captains of whaling ships sailed out into the deep for years on end, leaving the wife to chastely gaze out to sea in the hope of catching a glimpse of the sails of her companion, the modern wife, at least according to the premise of the story, is unable to contain her passions. She could take a lover, sue for divorce, have a new family. But this would go against the wishes of the husband. The technological solution offered by the book is to have an exact copy of the husband, a kind of super duper robot given to the wife to satisfy her needs during the absence of the husband.
    The robot interacts with the wife as if it is a real, living man. Its conversation is convincing. Perhaps many people these days might find such a thing to be believable, based on the "chatbots" which have been appearing on the internet. What would it be like to chat for years on end with a chatbot? Some months ago the BBC internet site decided to run a short article of general interest explaining to the reader the mysterious concept of infinity. It told us that some infinities are bigger than others. As an example it stated that there are an infinity of even numbers, yet they are contained within the totality of all numbers which are thus a bigger infinity. At the bottom of the article, the person responsible mentioned that it was written with the help of the ChatGTP computer program. (Indeed, I suspect that much of what is written on the BBC website these days is the product of ChatGTP.) A day or two later I looked up the article again to have another good laugh but found that it had been corrected. Real people must have contacted the human "author". But perhaps the bored, impatient wife would not be bothered by all these nitpicking details. It would be enough for her to have the robot filling time with nonsensical chatter.
    On the other hand the robot in the book is drinking coffee, eating breakfast, having lunch, becoming intimate with the wife, exhibiting feelings. The mechanism for constructing the robot was supposed to be 3-d printing. But how does a 3-d printed robot digest all this food? Perhaps it secretly goes to the toilet and regurgitates everything undigested, then in the night plugging itself surreptitiously into a wall socket to fill up its batteries with energy. Such details were not gone into in the book, leaving us with the impression that the imitation of the husband was carried out to such an extent that all the bodily discharges were perfectly imitated, both in the toilet and in bed. This is a feat which will certainly not be achieved in the 50 years between now and the year 2073, if ever.
    A movie has recently been made based on the book. But I'm sure it was cheating, simply using the same actor to represent both the husband and the robot. How boring.

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, by Isabella L. Bird

        The author, Isabella L. Bird, traveled alone through northern Japan in the year 1878. She wrote letters to her sister along the way and then years later had them published in this book. What a contrast this is to the uptight, constrained American women of the 1950s Bobbi Gibb was running away from in the Wind in the Fire. And we think of Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, written 200 years before Isabella Bird's travels. It was 30 years after the opening of Japan to the outside world, the early part of the Meiji era, but in the small villages of the Deep North life was undoubtedly the same as it had always been for hundreds of years. This is the Japan of the bygone days which are contrasted with modern times in the novels of Tanizaki, Soseki, Mishima, and all that.
    Upon arrival at Edo she stayed for a week or two with the family of the British Consul, arranging an interpreter. Eventually she engaged Ito, a youth of 19 or 20 without references but whose English was comprehensible. During the trip he proved to be very helpful and a good companion, finding ways through all the difficulties. He had served as translator for one or two previous expeditions, learning the rough language of the male campsite, believing it to be correct English. But Isabella taught him the proper words and he was always careful to take notes and practice the language, making great improvements in the months they were together. Towards the end, in Hokkaido, they met up with another expedition and it turned out that Ito had been under contract with them for the duration of their stay in Japan. But he had secretly switched to Isabella since she paid him twice what he was receiving from the other group. She apologized but kept Ito until she had finished her tour of Hokkaido, at which point Ito was delivered to the other group with their lower pay and bad language.
    We think of the Japanese as being meticulously clean people. At the end of the day Japanese school children clean the school, including the toilets. The streets are spotless. No garbage is thrown casually about. People are carefully dressed. What a contrast to 150 years ago! Leaving Edo and traveling from village to village things became earthy, primitive. People lived in simple huts. As she starts out in mid summer, the weather is hot and both men and women strip to the waist and are sweating freely. Many of the men are completely naked (she doesn't mention loincloths). There are fleas everywhere. Mosquitoes. Mud. Everyone drinking sake to keep going. In many villages there were special houses for travelers - from the descriptions you couldn't really call them hotels. She took along a special cot to sleep on to keep above the dirt, rats and everything on the floor. Also a mosquito net which the people much admired. Despite this she was constantly bitten by all sorts of bugs. The "rooms" were separated from one another by paper walls. The other travelers stayed up late into the night shouting loudly and continuously, singing, drinking sake. The people were curious to see this foreigner, and they were continually poking holes in the paper and staring at her through the night. Wherever she went, hundreds of people gathered around to stare at her. But they were always polite, staring silently, keeping a distance, gaping at this strange creature, a female with her outlandish clothes. Ito did his best to protect her from the worst, but at one or two points along the way he wept at the dreadful impression his countrymen were giving this refined English lady.
    She had to show her Japanese travel document wherever she stayed. The local police were members of the recently abolished samurai class, and they were feared by the peasants. But when asking directions, often neither they nor anybody else knew the paths to more than the adjacent villages. As a result Isabella was often stuck in swamps or impassable mountain heights. I tried to follow her route on the map, but most of the towns she mentions are unknown - at least in her spellings - even to Google Maps. Basically speaking the route took her from Tokyo over to Niigata on the west coast, then following inland tracks up to Aomori where she took a boat over to Hakodate in Hokkaido. Then across to Mori where she took another boat to Muroran. During her stay in Hokkaido she had a travel document of the highest category, allowing her to make use of all government facilities, such as the boat, which were placed exclusively at her convenience.
    This was really the goal of her voyage. She wanted to meet and study the Ainu people. And so she traveled along the southern curve of Hokkaido as far as Hidaka, venturing up the river to the village of Biratori where she stayed for some time in the Ainu settlement. For the Japanese, and for Ito in particular, the Ainu were horribly primitive, scarcely human creatures. But of course the Japanese peasants she had seen in her travels up to now were also living in rough, primitive conditions. It took some time to convince the elders of the tribe to tell her about their customs, their beliefs. She had to promise not to tell the Japanese authorities that she was speaking to them about such things; the Ainu were afraid of the consequences they might suffer.
    For example they worshiped bears. Bears were hunted; a dangerous occupation. But also newly born bears were taken and raised as pets in the family. Then when they had reached maturity they were killed, not quickly but by teasing them with spear thrusts in an elaborate ceremony. One can understand the disgust the Japanese felt for these Ainu. The Ainu worshiped as a god a Japanese general who had spared them at some time in the historical past. Isabelle Bird was taken along a secret path through the woods and shown the primitive stone figure of this "god" which she found to be particularly pathetic. Almost all the Ainu were continuously drunk on sake. They told her that their religion required that they be kept in contact with the gods through this drunkenness. They earned money by fishing and selling the fish to the Japanese from whom they purchased the sake. One young man who she found to be very handsome was the exception to this rule. He refused to drink, telling her that it was unhealthy.
    After a week or two she returned along the coast to Muroran. But rather than simply taking the boat back to Mori she decided to travel all the way around the coast of Uchiura Bay. People told her that it would be impossible, the paths were almost non-existent. Halfway around she arrived at a kind of government guest house. One or two Japanese were stationed there, isolated for many months at a time. Eventually she returned to Hakodate and took a ship back to Tokyo, to sail on to further adventures in Asia.
    It is a fascinating book and a woman of remarkable character. I would hate to be in the situations she describes; if so I would try to get out as quickly as possible. But Isabelle Bird retained her curiosity and equanimity throughout everything.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, by Isabella L. Bird

        This one describes some of her travels five years before her adventures in Japan. She had visited Australia, which she found to be unpleasant, and then Hawaii, which was the most perfect paradise on Earth. She then traveled on to San Francisco. The present book begins with a train ride up into the mountains and an excursion to Lake Tahoe on horseback. But soon she continues on by train to that more eastern part of the mountain chains of North America in Colorado, and especially her goal of Estes Park.
    This is 1873, the "Wild West". The stuff of all those cowboy movies. And Isabella Bird did encounter a number of wild characters. She has lots to do with James Nugent, otherwise known as Rocky Mountain Jim. He was a wild looking man; one eye and the side of his face were mauled by a grizzly bear a few years before, his clothes torn, full of dirt. But she described him as a perfect gentleman, accompanying him on various treks and mountain climbs. His downfall was an addiction to whiskey, giving him a Jekyll and Hyde character. She tried to convince him to stop drinking, but he told her that it was the only pleasure left in his wasted life. At the end of the book, leaving Estes Park, she met Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quinn, 4th Earl of Dunraven and Mt. Earl. He was keen to go hunting with the famous and infamous Mountain Jim. She described him in his specially tailored hunting outfit, replete with perfectly fitting kid gloves. What a contrast to the rough mountaineer. But for her the constrast was between the truly gentlemanly Mountain Jim and Wyndham-Quinn, the rude parvenu. We are told that some months later either Wyndham-Quinn or else Griffith Evans, the owner of a ranch in the park, shot Mountain Jim dead in fight about Evans' young daughter, Wyndham-Quinn's interest, and Jim's anger.
    Isabella Bird thought of Estes Park as also being a paradise, but she rode many miles around the mountains, staying in many other places during her stay, becoming famous among the local people for her endurance and courage. She tells us that the mountain air was wonderfully pure and healthy. She enjoyed the cold, often sleeping with the temperature in minus degrees Fahrenheit, snow blowing about the room, her blankets freezing solid.
    We are told that Colorado had the reputation for being a very healthy place, and she meets various English families who have immigrated for this reason. People whose tuberculosis has been cured, but also families who have come for the healthy air but are finding it to be difficult to make a living as farmers, or perhaps by establishing guest houses.
    The rough men are happy to have her stay since in her presence they are pleasant, civilized people, yet when they are by themselves without the influence of such a refined woman, they resort to crude language and violence.

If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal, by Justin Gregg

        After getting through about 2/3s of the book I have given it up. It is concerned with the idea that human intelligence is, basically speaking, a bad thing. At the point I gave up, the author was telling us that the 18th century gardener Capability Brown is responsible for the fact that the atmosphere and all the Earth beneath it will burn up, incinerating all of humanity and everything else owing to the fact that this Brown advocated lawns for his gardens. Thus modern man (Justin Gregg uses the female gender whenever possible, so I should really say "woman" here, although this example is in a negative context so that Gregg, despite being himself a man, would use the male gender), owing to his overly developed brain, as a matter of "keeping up with the Joneses", puts lawns everywhere. This necessitates the use of lawnmowers, most of which produce loud noises and CO2 emissions. And therefore all these lawnmowers will ignite the fires of Lucifer.
    An earlier chapter was concerned with the fact that animals lie, and humans lie more than all the others combined. We are told that the idea of "bullshitting" is an accepted technical concept in modern psychology, where a bullshitter is someone who lies continuously, reveling in his nonsense. Apparently bullshitters are the successful people in society: the managers, the politicians, and all those other people. The author feels it necessary to admonish us to protect ourselves from bullshit. He gives the example of Finland - which has just joined NATO in order to aggressively confront Russia - where school children are instructed in the art of identifying bullshit. He gives no details. I suppose he means that they should put their trust in the "fact--checkers" of the legacy media which have been set up by William Henry "Bill" Gates III, and all those other oligarchs. But as a concrete example he mentions the fact that trust in vaccines in the United States has decreased from almost total trust to not quite total trust. This reduction of trust must be due to all the bullshitters out there spewing their lies. Well, OK. But perhaps for this example he would have done well to have read Turtles All the Way Down, which I read last year, and which was concerned with the many blatant lies of the industry producing these vaccines. The authors offered a monetary reward for anybody finding a single lie in the book, in which all assertions were meticulously documented. Of course nobody has claimed the reward.
    All of this is a shame since the subject of the book would otherwise be very interesting. What is consciousness? Do animals also experience time, planning for the future? Are they aware of death, even their own inevitable death? Do they have an awareness of self? He describes interesting experiments and observations. Even a bee, observing another bee performing a task which has nothing to do with the usual life of a bee, learns from that and acts accordingly.
    The author is telling us, or almost preaching to us, about his woke, "green" philosophy. Our large brains are making us sick. How wonderful it would be if we were to revert to the original state of humanity which was lived perhaps 200,000 years ago and for all those thousands of subsequent years up until the fatal moment when a child was born, perhaps twenty thousand years ago, who was the first to realize that she was doomed to die. She was Eve, who fatefully ate from the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. The author imagines that this was a genetic alteration, or a culmination of genetic alterations, leading to the downfall of the human race.
    But it seems to me unlikely that the fires of Lucifer will be unleashed by the world's lawnmowers. Much more likely are the many thousands of atomic bombs which impatiently await their destiny on all the rockets, cruise missiles and other launching systems of the world, ready to be fired by people whose overly large brains are incapable of comprehending simple reality.

Sub-Imperial Power, by Clinton Fernandes

        It's been almost fifty years since I left Australia to come here to Germany. Yet of course I am still an Australian citizen, and so I was interested to read this book which is concerned with the strategic position of Australia in the world. There was a review on an internet site which I happened to be looking at, finding some humor in the idea of someone in a minor country such as Australia imagining that it is not really an Imperial Power, but at least a little bit of an imperial power, a sub-Imperial Power.
    The author has had much to do with the intelligence and secret services of Australia. In particular he tried to intervene in the dreadful events of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, in order to stop the violence. The Australian role in this affair was not a happy one. And then there was the overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia in 1967 by that horrible dictator, murderer, torturer Suharto. This was the "Jakarta Method" which was described in a book I read a few months ago, anticipating the murder of Allende in Chile by the horrible Pinochet. It was the time of the Vietnam war and the idea that communism was a disease which infected one country after another, inexorably spreading, to be eradicated only by brutally exterminating all carriers of the disease. Such was the narrative we were told. Of course the reality was that popularly elected leaders such as Sukarno and Allende were leading their countries away from the grasp of the imperial powers: the United States and England, towards more independent and fair methods of government. Not at all the communism of the Soviet Union or Red China. All of this human suffering was imposed on those countries in order to further the financial interests of the imperialists.
    In 1967 I was in my second year at the Australian National University, just concerned with my studies. There was practically nothing in the news about this horror not far to the north of Australia. If anything we were told that also Australia was doing its part in helping the world to return to its stable, normal condition. For this, Australian troops were stationed in Vietnam, and I suppose the intelligence services of Australia were doing their part in Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, and all those other places. Being in Canberra, some of the other students I knew were children of high ranking officials in those secret services. We all saw how pleasant and peaceful life in Australia was. The "Lucky Country". Such wonderful landscapes, the beaches, the freedom to do almost anything we wanted. And many of the students were often very free indeed. We were protected from the all of the unpleasantness of the outside world.
    There was no need for the United States or England to overthrow the government of Australia with a dictator whose role was to exterminate free thinking people. (But many do say that Gough Whitlam was peacefully deposed in a secret plot by those imperial powers.  Indeed, I have only once in my life voted in an election, and in 1972 I voted for Gough Witlam.) After all, in those days the population of Australia was predominantly composed of people whose ancestry was British. Australia was an outpost of the imperialism of Britain, and after the Second World War, of the imperial USA. Australians thought of Britain as the mother country. Then they adopted wholeheartedly the Hollywood culture of the United States. It was as if Australia had almost become a 51st state of the Union, a wonderful land in the South Pacific where Anglo-Saxon people "like us" were living the good life. In Germany I was often asked what I was doing here in this overcrowded country with its often dreadful European weather. Many people had the dream of living in Australia.
    But then I was astonished to read recently that Australia has committed itself to buying a fleet of American atomic powered submarines. A contract with France to buy diesel-electric submarines was cancelled, amidst bitter diplomatic disruptions. Why does Australia need atomic powered submarines? For example, the newest German submarines are supposed to be much more stealthy than atomic submarines which loudly churn their way through the oceans. What role are these atomic submarines supposed to fulfill in the defense of Australia? How can Australia, which has no atomic infrastructure, maintain such submarines?
    As we learn in the book, it has little to do with the defense of Australia. Instead it is about being an integral part of the American imperial system. The weapons should be the same as those of the United States so that everything fits together perfectly. As with its former role with respect to Britain, the idea is to be a small but equal part of the whole imperial system. Protection lies in being a vital part of that system.
    Perhaps this made sense in the past. But this book seems to be telling us that things have changed. Australia is no longer an exclusively Angle-Saxon country. There are many people of Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish and all sorts of other cultures. The United States has been shown to be increasingly impotent in its many failed imperial wars. The book poses the question about whether it is sensible to continue pursuing military policies which seem to contradict Australia's true interests.

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

        This is the furthest I have ventured into Russian literature. Dostoevsky. I had always had the impression that it is generally depressing, sad, like a dead weight. But this book is certainly not like that at all. It is long in a Russian way, but when looking at the Wikipedia page of the author, it is said that in particular this one is Dostoevsky's longest. Perhaps the others are more approachable.
    The author had a difficult life. He began by discussing political things with a few other authors. It developed into a conspiratorial group and it was discovered by the secret police, resulting in him being thrown into prison. He was considered one of its most dangerous members. This was just after the upheavals of 1848 so that the Czar was not in a mood for leniency. Dostoevsky spent four years in a very unpleasant situation in Siberia, as described in the Wikipedia page, then a further seven years in the military as part of his sentence.
    The plot is far too long and complicated to summarize here. There is a chapter by chapter description in the Wikipedia page for the book. But the basic story is a simple one. The evil father is killed. Of course it was not the angelically simple-minded youngest son Alyosha who spends his time hanging around the local monastery with the ridiculous Father Zosima. And it could not have been the intellectual Ivan, the middle son, since he was out of town at the time of the deed. Thus the wild, disreputable Dimitri must have been the murderer. But as we learn, although Dimitri did lots of bad things, in fact he didn't kill the father. It was the wily, calculating, illegitimate son Pavel. This whole situation is beautifully described, particularly during Dimitri's murder trial. How the prosecutor sees and describes everything according to his beliefs, and then all the very true legal points and dramatic arguments of the expensive defense attorney who has been brought in from St. Petersburg. We understand the complicated personalities of these characters, and of the two young women who themselves provoke much of the conflicts.
    It is indeed a great book. But it does seem to me that it could have done without the tedious, long-winded outpourings of Father Zosima, and also the seemingly irrelevant interactions between Alyosha and all of those school children. Perhaps these parts were put in by Dostoevsky in the hope that the Russian censors would decide that the book was mainly concerned with uplifting spiritual and educational ideas and not so much with murder, patricide. Thus they would not accuse him of having bad ideas and think of sending him to another session of Siberian unpleasantness. Also the book ends by telling us that while Dimitri is to be sent to Siberia, the rich, angrily jilted Katherina has the goodness to organize a rescue, bribing the prison guards to let Dimitri escape to freedom in America.
    During his horrible years in Siberia, Dostoevsky himself must have dreamed of having had such a girlfriend and such a fortuitous escape.

Skripal in Prison, by John Helmer

        The author is an Australian journalist who for many years has been living in Russia. He has a website, Dances with Bears, which I occasionally have a look at. An antidote to the endless lies which the western legacy media spews out these days. The official narrative of the Skripal affair can be read about on the relevant Wikipedia page. It is an extremely long article, like a brook babbling endlessly through the woods and the fields on its way to bigger rivers and the sea. This is similar to the Wikipedia article on the Nord Stream pipeline affair which also babbles on in a seemingly endless string of verbiage.
    The present book by John Helmer simply reproduces the articles he wrote day by day and month by month as the Skripal affair unfolded. It is amusing to follow the increasingly blatant lies put out by the British authorities, and the obvious and increasing embarrassment of the various officials who had to voice these lies in public. The narrative was that the Skripals were poisoned by something called "novichok". Many countries, including England, are parties to a treaty for dealing with alleged cases of such poisonings. They are required to submit evidence to other countries and to independent chemical laboratories. The texts of these treaties are reproduced in the book. It is also the law of England that in the case of death, a coroner must submit a report. In the case of an alleged crime, an investigation must be held. All of these things were steadfastly refused. But it seems that the English authorities made a mistake. Perhaps some weak-minded official somewhere felt that they should at least follow one teeny, weeny part of the treaty about biological and chemical weapons, and a sample of the Skripal's blood was sent to the Spiez Laboratory in the town of Spiez in Switzerland. There the blood was analyzed and it was found that it contained much too much "novichok", so much that it would have killed an elephant and lots of other things as well. But it also contained another substance, "BZ", which we read is called "buzz" by the CIA, and which incapacitates its victims for a time, during which they can be easily captured and dealt with, after which they fully recover. Spiez Laboratory, in accordance with its obligations of confidentiality, said nothing publicly. But apparently a whistle-blower did reveal the results.
    The story of the Nord Stream affair is clear for everybody to see. The geriatric Joe Biden, in a very public press conference at the beginning of last year, in the presence of the little mouse-like German chancellor, Olaf Scholtz, declared that if the Russians invaded Ukraine then the United States would blow up Nord Stream. And they did, some six months later. But then, as a school bully who threatens and then punches a little schoolmate in the face, and then becomes afraid that the teachers will become angry with him, he accuses other people, telling lies upon lies. Why don't they simply tell the truth and be proud of it? Joe Biden was acting in the best interests of the United States. He punched Germany in the face, thus forcing it to import expensive fracking gas from the US, increasing the costs of energy and thus in turn forcing German industry to move to the United States. This was very good for the United States, increasing its foreign revenues and encouraging important foreign investment, and at the same time ensuring that Germany remains submissively true to the United States.
    Similarly the Skripal affair can be very simply understood. Sergei Skripal was a senior agent in the Russian military spy agency, the GRU. For some reason he decided to betray his position and become a double agent for the English. He was caught and thrown in prison. But then he was sent to England as part of a swap of prisoners. Of course in England he was subjected to much questioning. What were his motives? What did he know? What are his lies and what are his truths. Is he a "triple" agent? really working for Moscow again. Who knows. But it is clear that he missed his family. He wished to be able to be with them again. Perhaps he was in secret contact with two Russian agents who quickly entered England and left. And so the English secret service must have knocked him out with BZ and then put him in hospital and wherever else they confine spent agents. And on the plus side, the English were able to construct an exciting tale for the tabloid newspapers and for the Wikipedia about the evil of "Putin" and the Russians, spiking blood samples with various chemicals produced by the nearby Porton Down biological and chemical weapon factory.
    All of this makes for an interesting story. But surely the whole business of "military intelligence" has become completely useless, at least as it is practiced in "the West". Every detail of the military intelligence with regard to the Ukraine War has been shown to have been totally false and absurd. The result has been the cruel deaths and mutilations of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian people and the depopulation of that poor country. Or was that the intention all along?

The Weaverbird Collection, Akin Adesokan, et.al. (ed.)

        This is a collection of recent short stories written by people of Nigeria. The editors published a call for the submission of new stories and these are the ones they chose. It is a varied collection, full of poverty, corruption, brutality, but often with interesting twists. A woman student exists by attaching herself to a rich, old, fat politician (apparently the only way to success in Nigeria is through the corruption of politics), exchanging sexual favors for a place to live and a little money. She traps him, forcing him to marry her. They travel to her family in a remote village, but her parents are aghast. In an earlier life the fat politician was a teacher at the local school and he had fathered the young woman, having slept with her mother. Thus she was, in fact, proposing to marry her biological father.
    Other stories are of ghosts which appear as living human beings. There is one about a young man who has gone to London to study and who brings back his white, homosexual partner. A doubly taboo situation in Nigeria and a shock for the mother. The majority of the stories are written by Nigerians who are living either in the United States or else in England. They have no inclination to write pleasant things about their country.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi

        The author is a member of an ancient Palestinian family. He tells us about his ancestors who were prominent in the time of the Ottomans and even beyond. There are private libraries in the old houses of Jerusalem which are hundreds of years old. He was born and lives in the United States where he is a professor at Columbia University. But he has taken part in negotiations for Palestine, being familiar with all the various protagonists. It is an interesting, informative, and depressing book. Contemporary events are causing hysteria, and so I will restrain myself from writing further thoughts about this book.

Japan's Secret War, by Robert K. Wilcox