What Book to Read?

Ramona Koval is well known to Australian readers as a radio broadcaster with a particular interest in literature, having hosted the ABC’s former ‘Books and Writing’ program for many years. This book (2005) is a collection of interviews she did with a range of writers between 1996 and 2004, mostly at writers’ festivals, with a few in writers’ homes. The list of contributors is a sort of who’s who of contemporary literature, though no doubt there could be arguments about who is included and who left out – why no Margaret Atwood, for example.

It’s easy enough to see why writers appear at literary events; they hope to sell more books. And some may even enjoy it. But what do audiences hope for when they attend sessions at writers’ festivals? Personally I like to see writers I already admire perform in public, and also to check out writers I haven’t read, but might read in the future. Part of the pleasure is the element of theatre that comes with a good public conversation. I guess I also hope to learn something that may help me better understand the work of the writer in question. When faced with the transcripts of such conversations rather than the physical reality, there is both loss and gain. Some of the excitement is missing, but the ability to consider and reflect is much enhanced.

But what is it that writers can say about their work that adds to the pleasure of reading it? I was struck by an exchange between Koval and Saul Bellow. He says: ‘I don’t want to bare my soul, or my self, to a public …’ And she replies: ‘as a writer of novels, that’s what you’ve been doing all your life – showing us what’s going on in your head and your heart.’ To which Bellow replies: ’Yes, but between me and the public, there is my art. Between me and the … audience there is no art.’ So does the work of art stand alone, without further explication from the author? Bellow’s comment didn’t stop him from talking more generally about how he sees the ‘modern predicament’ – an ‘unbearable state of distraction’ – or how he finds that this world encourages comedy more than the great and deep emotions he had initially hoped to evoke with his writing. But interesting as his views might be in themselves, I’m not sure they help me understand Bellow’s ‘art’.

Ramona Koval is an experienced interviewer who allows the conversation to take its course, rather than imposing a framework on it through her questions. However I wonder if she sees literature as offering us truths about the world, as she often asks her interviewees about whether a writer has a special wisdom. Mostly they seem to say ‘no’. Normal Mailer, for example, says a writer may approach the truth, but never find it. Saul Bellow says: ‘I don’t know the answers. I only know my answers.’ David Malouf says that going to writers for wisdom is ‘unwise’. And Harold Pinter says: ‘I never think of myself as wise’. Susan Sontag, on the other hand, doesn’t suggest that she is wise, but thinks that literature should ‘embody a certain wisdom’. Unlike many of the interviewees, she places more emphasis on reality than imagination. Others offer a whole range of reasons for writing, including a sense of ‘reflecting the tenor of the times’ (Morris West), exploring conflict (Edna O’Brien), a desire to ‘inhabit other minds’ (Ian McEwan), revealing ‘moral peril’ (Tom Keneally) or simply as ‘a form of love’ (Judith Wright). These are in a sense truths about the world, though they are certainly not prescriptions for action. I guess writers offer insights into living, rather than formal prescriptions on how to do it. Though there is also William Gass: ‘people who read novels to pretend to find out about life are just fooling themselves’.

As one would expect, Koval also asks questions that relate to the content and form of the writers’ work. Again, the answers are as various as the writers, though not of course mutually exclusive. Several said how important they found it to show what makes people do what they do. Some inhabited their characters to the point that this dictated the way the story developed. Others considered language the most important element of the novel – including the misuse and distortion of language that several saw as the scourge of official communication, like ‘humanitarian intervention’ when they mean war, or ‘freedom-loving peoples’ when they mean clients of the United States (Harold Pinter). I can’t agree with David Malouf, who thinks that readers get caught up in a relationship with a writer because of the ‘particular music’ of a writer’s language, but that just shows that writers’ concerns and readers’ responses are as various of the leaves of autumn. Note here Alfred Kazin: ‘I don’t believe for a moment that language by itself is the primary literary force in any literary work.’

Overall, I find it hard to say what I took from this book. Obviously I’ve left out a huge amount that is important. While I enjoyed reading each of the interviews and thought a number of them compelling or moving or thought-provoking, I found it difficult to think coherently about the whole collection. Possibly my appreciation was limited by the fact that I’ve only read works by about half of the writers, and often not the ones specifically mentioned in the interviews. I found it hard afterwards to remember which author said what. Each sees things a little differently. Perhaps this was Koval’s intention. One test for the book is whether reading interviews with authors I haven’t read has made me want to read them. I’ll have to think further about that. Amos Oz, perhaps.

In conclusion, I can’t go past one of the best misprints I’ve ever seen. P.D. James comments on women having to cede their property to their husbands on marriage until the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act in1882. This has been rendered here as the Mad Women’s Property Act. Perhaps the rather upper class tones of Baroness James of Holland Park got mistranscribed …

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This is a most disturbing book. Whether or not you agree with the author’s analysis, the situation he describes should be of concern to everyone. He is writing about the small town, white working poor, those who are only ‘two pay days away from homelessness’. Much of what he talks about in the years up to 2007, when the book was published, has been exacerbated by the Global Financial Crisis – which had its roots in some of the practices Bageant discusses.

Joe Bageant was born in Winchester, Virginia, of a family just like the ones he describes in the book. As a young man, ‘penniless and dumber than tree bark’, he escaped to California, got a degree and worked as a journalist and editor. There he developed a critique of the ideas and practices he thinks produce the underclass he writes about. Later in life, he returned to Winchester, where he mixed with the ‘white trash’ he had gone to school with, and chronicled their lives.

Through some of the people around him, and members of his own family, he looks at specific issues and circumstances that he says exist far more widely. An old school friend works for the one large employer in Winchester, a plastics factory, which pays him a wage of $8 (US) an hour. Another is taking out a mortgage he cannot afford on a mobile home that will start depreciating as soon as he buys it. One woman, who is overweight, diabetic and has breathing problems, cannot afford health care. Another old woman decays in a grossly underfunded nursing home. These cameos are the ‘dispatches’ – the reports from the war zone.
For Bageant believes there is a war in America. ‘The problem,’ he says, ‘is that only one side understands that a class war is going on, the side that gets to do the arse kicking.’ The people he is describing certainly don’t understand it in that way. They see their poor education, low wages and insecure work, their inability to save, to own a house, to be able to pay their medical bills as at best, just the way things are, and at worst, their own fault. Staunchly individualistic and anti-union, they see accepting public help as ‘a sign of failure and moral weakness.’ Those on the other side in the war don’t usually recognise the conflict either, but they are those who benefit from globalisation and the outsourcing of American jobs to low cost countries like Mexico, who perpetuate the inequalities inherent in the health care system, and who profit from the ‘white trashonomics’ that promotes unaffordable mortgages and credit card debt to the working poor. These are manifested at the local level in the form of rapacious slum landlords, bosses after the quickest buck, predatory lending policies and dirty public hospitals.

Bageant doesn’t blame the poor people he writes about for their situation. Indeed he is more critical of the intellectual elite who condemn ‘rednecks’ for their views without ever taking the time to understand their circumstances. For these are the ‘heartland’ of America, intensely patriotic voters who support the Republican Party, despite the fact that it is not in their economic interests to do so, and who hate college educated ‘liberals’. Bageant blames poor education and harsh working conditions. ‘Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladiatorial theatre of the market economy does not make for optimism or open mindedness … It makes for a kind of bleak coarseness and inner degradation…’

Nor does he condemn the beliefs and pastimes they take comfort in – guns and evangelical religion. Gun ownership he sees as a normal part of life, and is even a bit nostalgic for the hunting expeditions of his youth. He condemns only the fascination of some enthusiasts for guns designed solely to kill people. The fundamentalist church, he says, is ‘one of the few social structures still functioning in America, and it welcomes everyone’. He is critical of the anti-intellectual and self-referential culture these churches promote, but he can see why they are attractive to people who feel alienated from so much of mainstream culture.

As a polemic it’s great. As a book, it gets a bit repetitive. As you can see from passages I’ve quoted, Bageant writes in a colloquial style that is both amusing and horrifying. This is indeed sociology from the trenches. Even if you don’t agree with his politics, the book has a disquieting reality about it; after all, it was the very lending policies he chronicles that fuelled the Global Financial Crisis. And don’t even ask about climate change.

While Joe Bageant offers a fascinating glimpse into one group of disadvantaged Americans, it is not a snapshot of ‘the poor’ in America. Poverty more generally is a function not just of income level; it also involves race and region. Here is a more nuanced discussion of the complexities.

Joe Bageant died in 2011 at the age of 65, victim of the ill-health endemic to the poor whites of Winchester. You can read more about him here.

PS. I couldn’t helping thinking that this America is about as far from the one my book group read about in Anne Tyler’s Digging to America as it is possible to get; you can read my post on her book here. And here’s an interesting illustration of the distribution of wealth in America.

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This intriguing little book (2008) is about a nasty murder that happened at Road Hill House in Wiltshire in 1860. It’s also about public reactions to the case, in particular to the role of the detective, Mr Whicher, who investigated it. There is a whole slice of social history in the descriptions of the life of the household where the murder occurred. And Kate Summerscale also talks about the way the case influenced writers at the time, including Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

In his excellent review of the book, Ian Rankin tells the reader who committed the crime. He doesn’t, as he says, give away the end, but I’m not even going that far. I guess it’s pretty obvious who the culprit is, as there isn’t a large cast to choose from. But I found there was real suspense in not knowing until it was revealed, though Rankin is right that that is not the end of the story.

When the nursemaid Elizabeth Gough got up on the morning of 30 June, 1860, one of her charges, Saville Kent, aged 3, was not in his cot. She said she thought at first that his mother, Mary Kent, must have taken him into her room, which adjoined the nursery. But he wasn’t there. Samuel Kent, the boy’s father, had locked the house carefully the night before. Where could the child be? A window was found slightly open. Could someone have crept in and stolen him? But all too soon the body of the little boy was found in the servant’s privy; he had been stabbed, and his throat cut. Everyone in the house, family and servants alike, fell under suspicion. The local police had their own ideas, but insufficient evidence to back them up. Inspector Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard was called in.

Whicher was one of the original eight detectives appointed in 1842 by the London Metropolitan Police to deal with serious crime in the city. By 1860, he was famous for his ingenuity in catching thieves, conmen and murderers. He thought what evidence there was pointed clearly to the perpetrator, but he was unable to make out a case that convinced the local magistrates.

The case caused huge public interest on a number of levels. That such a terrible thing could happen in what was outwardly a respectable middle class home seemed to undermine the assumptions on which families’ peace and security were founded, or so newspapers editorialised. Everyone had a view of who dunnit, and wrote to the police and the papers to say so. Then there was the role of the detective himself. The initial euphoria of expectation surrounding him soon evaporated, and he was blamed variously for trampling class boundaries and invading the privacy of a respectable family and for being personally arrogant and incompetent. ‘For the country as a whole,’ Summerscale writes, ‘the murder at Road Hill became a kind of myth – a dark fable about the Victorian family and the dangers of detection.’ Had the public known what Summerscale finally reveals as the probable root of all the evil, they would have been even more disturbed. The writer does a great job of creating her own mystery story.

I found the social history personified in the Kent family fascinating. They are clearly perceived as middle class: Road Hill House was a three story Georgian affair on a hill above the village of Road, and Samuel Kent employed several servants. His friends seem to have been doctors, lawyers or other professional men. Yet Samuel was the son of a cabinetmaker. How did the son of a tradesman make it into the ranks of the middle class? He was a sub-inspector of factories, and hoped to be made a full inspector; he needed the extra money to support his growing family – four children from a first marriage, three from a second, with another on the way. His first wife was the daughter of a prosperous coachmaker, so perhaps she brought some money into the family. His second wife was the children’s governess, who he married as soon as his first wife died. He must have been a self-made man, and though Summerscale doesn’t discuss this, there is some interesting social mobility going on here.

The influence of this crime on literature is also fascinating. One of the main Hill Road House ‘clues’ was a missing nightgown; Wilkie Collins uses just such a circumstance in The Moonstone, (reviewed here). Sergeant Cuff, in the same story, is loosely based on Inspector Whicher. Charles Dickens used elements of the case in his unfinished detective story Edwin Drood. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James also has some resonances with it. Summerscale has done a good job of more generally connecting the rise of detective fiction in Victorian England to this case.

Kate Summerscale says of herself: ‘I’m a journalist playing historian, and then I try to convert what I’ve found into something like a novel’. She’s done a pretty good job. You can read an interview with her here.

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I’ve been reading this book for a while, for as befits such a big topic, it’s a big book. And Judt makes the scope even wider than some other histories of Europe by including Eastern Europe within his scope. I found it fascinating, with new insights – new to me anyway – on almost every page.

Judt looks at Europe in terms both of its common themes, and its multiplicity. He has a (mostly) dramatic story to tell. The period the book covers – 1945 to 2005 – has seen huge changes that were almost unimaginable in 1945 when Europe was mired in the chaos and destruction of war, and soon to be divided by a seemingly unassailable iron curtain. Much that has happened since, Judt argues, is a legacy of the war (and the years leading up to it), and is in that sense, ‘postwar’. ‘Shadowed by history,’ Europe’s leaders, in both the West and the East, and in very different ways, ‘built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay.’ By 2005 he considers this period to be coming to a close, though given Europe’s problem since the Global Financial Crisis, I’m not sure he’d still make this claim.

So vast a topic imposes the need for the historian to be very selective, and Judt is quite open about the personal quality of what he has included or left out. ‘Without, I hope, abandoning objectivity and fairness,’ he writes, ‘Postwar offers an avowedly personal interpretation of the recent European past.’ He identifies five main themes around which his interpretation is based. The first is the ‘reduction of Europe’, with the loss of imperial territories and aspirations – a reduction long deferred in the case of the Soviet Union, but shattering the old order when it came. Secondly, he says, the last decades of the century saw the ‘withering away’ of the ‘master narratives’ of revolution and transformation that had driven the politics of Europe. Third, he sees an emergence ‘belatedly – and largely by accident’, of the ‘European model’, which encompasses more than just the bureaucratic forms of the European Union, and amounts to a distinctively ‘European’ way that is consciously at odds with a notional ‘American’ way. Fourth is Europe’s ‘complicated and frequently misunderstood’ relationship with America. And fifth, there is Europe’s post-war history as a story ‘shadowed by silences; by absence.’ He argues that initially, nearly all European countries to a greater or lesser degree supressed the history of persecution and genocide which they had taken part in, and their versions of the war involved much ‘forgetful remembering’. The Holocaust, in particular, was ignored. Not until this has been corrected does he believe that Europe can move on; ‘a nation has first to have remembered something before it can begin to forget it’.

I’m not in a position to judge the accuracy of Judt’s history; as he says himself, his judgements may prove to be right or wrong. But I do find them illuminating. There are some phrases that will stay with me when the detail is (all too quickly) forgotten, such as the ‘forgetful remembering’ mentioned above, or the Soviet Union’s transition to free market capitalism as ‘privatisation as kelptocracy’. His arguments that totalitarian regimes cannot reform, only collapse once any piece of the jigsaw is removed, or that poorly restrained market capitalism and communism both hollow out institutions essential to civil society, to the detriment of citizens, are hardly new, but none the less important for that. I’m not sure that I agree that in retrospect, ‘Auschwitz’ is ‘the most important thing to know about World War II’, but it’s certainly food for thought. And I’ve stuck his quote from Carlyle up on the fridge: ‘if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.’ (Climate change, anyone?)

But in addition to seeing Judt’s picture of post-war Europe, the other pleasure I found in this book was filling out my own picture. How could I have lived through most of this, and yet had such selective and fragmentary memories of it? Names barely recalled from the 1950s, events of the sixties and seventies, all these were given a context that helped to make sense of, or to challenge, my own experience of the world. What was behind the American boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games? That’s right, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. What was I doing when the Berlin Wall fell? Did I then see the immense significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union? Or the tragedy of the Serbian attack on Sarajevo? Who can follow what’s going on in all those funny little Balkan states…? Judt provides a map, no doubt over-simplified, but nevertheless immensely valuable to me.

That I admire the late Tony Judt will be evident from my earlier posts on his (much shorter) recent books Ill Fares the Land (2010) and The Memory Chalet (2010). You can read more about him here.

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Subtitled ‘The Somerton Man Mystery’ Tamam Shud (2012) is a mixture of memoir, true crime and social history. Kerry Greenwood is best known for her detective fiction series featuring Phryne Fisher, set in Melbourne in the 1920s– a TV version of which is currently being replayed on ABCTV. I’m not a fan of either the books or the TV series, but I enjoyed Tamam Shud – though the Adelaide connection might be part of the reason for this.

On 30 November 1948 a man was seen sitting propped against the seawall, fully clothed, on the beach at Somerton, an Adelaide suburb. Next morning he was found to be dead. And everything about him turned out to be a mystery. His pockets contained no identification, the labels on his clothing had all been removed, he didn’t fit the description of any person reported as missing in Adelaide. His suitcase, when found at the Adelaide Railway Station, proved equally unrevealing. The only possible identifying item he possessed was a small piece of paper tucked into the fob pocket of his coat with the words ‘Tamam Shud’ printed on it. These are the last words of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and mean, in effect, the end. So was this a suicide note? The pathologist who did the autopsy didn’t think so. He concluded that the man had been somehow poisoned, though no specific toxin could be identified. And when the book, from which the slip of paper bearing the words had been torn, was found, it contained a phone number, and some letters that looked like a code. So who and what was Somerton Man?

Kerry Greenwood was told this story by her father, Alf Greenwood, ‘who felt that if a story needed embellishment to make it a good story, then he was the man to embellish it.’ So she was very intrigued to find that the story as he told it was essentially true. She uses it as the occasion to reflect on some of her father’s experiences as a signaller at Woomera after World War II, and as a wharfie on the Melbourne docks. She is also seeking to understand and celebrate her own relationship with him through her exploration of this story.

Having outlined all that has been discovered about Somerton Man, Greenwood indulges in a variety of speculations as to the motive behind his death. Could it have been one the bizarre murders for which Adelaide is known? ‘Murder is universal,’ she says, ‘but Adelaide murder always has a twist’, and she outlines some of them. (Being a fair person, she also talks about the ways in which Adelaide has a rightful reputation for being progressive.) Could it have been a crime of passion? There was a woman who might have been involved, and might have been lying when she denied knowing him. What kind of poison could possibly have been used? Could it have been snakebite? There are lots of venomous snakes around Adelaide. But more dramatically, could Somerton Man have been a spy? Greenwood looks at some of the international issues which impinged on Australia in 1948 to see if Somerton Man could have played any clandestine part in them. Adelaide is relatively close to Woomera, which is where the British were testing nuclear weapons, making it a possible target for Soviet espionage. Or could he have been a smuggler? Could he have been running arms to the nascent Israel? The code – if code it is – has never been broken, so there’s no real evidence one way or the other.

Greenwood draws on a range of evidence, in particular the research of Gerald Feltus, the detective who originally investigated the case, and who has never been able to let it rest – he published a book about it in 2010. She also summarises several other unsuccessful attempts to identify the man, and to break the code; there is an ongoing computer research project which may yet turn up something. She even has a section explaining how codes common at the time work – though I can’t say I understand it.

Greenwood concludes that whatever the pathologist said at the time, Somerton Man could have died of natural causes. But being a writer of crime fiction, she can’t resist coming up with her own hypothesis that fits the known facts. This is clever, but still only a hypothesis. For good measure, the book also includes a Phryne Fisher short story based the Taman Shud affair, using a different hypothesis again. It’s all very intriguing, but it looks as if this is going to remain one of Adelaide’s unsolved mysteries.

You can find out more about Kerry Greenwood on Phryne Fisher’s website. Greenwood also writes a series about Corinna Chapman, talented baker and reluctant investigator.

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I get a little confused by the differences between memoir and autobiography, but it seems that in so far as there is a difference, memoirs are personal reflections on some aspect of the writer’s life, whereas autobiography is a fully researched account of a whole life. On that basis, Two Lives (2005) is memoir, but in a double sense. It tells of Vikram Seth’s recollections of his great uncle and aunt, and as much of the story of their lives as he can piece together. He calls it ‘a double biography, an intertwined meditation’. He says he can’t hope to ‘grasp the whole’, but hopes that ‘some shard’ may keep their memory alive. In doing so, he reflects on some of the significant events of the twentieth century.

Seth is a very well regarded poet and author: his novel An Equal Music (1999) is one of my favourites. But we don’t really learn much about Seth as a writer in this book; his role is as great nephew, rather than famous writer. What Seth tells about himself is essentially a vehicle for the story of Shanti Seth and Hennerle Caro. He says the author is ‘an anomalous third braid, sometimes visible, sometimes not’, and notes that there is a tension between ‘authorial distance’ and ‘personal immediacy’. I found the first part of the book, dealing with Seth’s initial contact with his great uncle and aunt a little slow; he has made their stories much more compelling than his own.

Most of his great uncle’s story derives from interviews Vikram did with him a few years before he died, and from letters and papers he provided. Shanti Seth was born in India in 1908, but left in 1931 to study dentistry, first in Berlin, then in Edinburgh. He later moved to London. Soon after the outbreak of World War II he joined the British Army Dental Corps, and served in various theatres of war. He suffered a serious injury and was invalided out of the army. But he managed nevertheless to set up a successful dental practice in London, and lived there for the rest of his life, returning only rarely to India.

Shanti met Hennerle in Berlin when he was a student, and their friendship continued after she arrived in London in 1939. They finally married in 1951 – too late, they agreed, to have children. Vikram thought at first that his great uncle’s wife would be much the secondary character in the story because by the time he decided to write it, she had been dead for several years, and Shanti, in grief at her passing, had destroyed her papers and photos. However he missed a box in the attic, and its contents flesh out her life during the 1940s and early 50s in a way that is even more interesting than Shanti’s experiences. For Hennerle was one of the few German Jews to get out of Berlin just before the war began – and before Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews were fully operational. But her mother and sister remained behind, and in 1943 they both disappeared into camps – Theresienstadt and Auschwitz–Birkenau. After a brief correspondence via the Red Cross, they were never heard of again. Hennerle knew nothing of their fate until after the war, when she learnt from (Christian) friends in Berlin that there was no hope of their survival. While Hennerle’s letters give some information, Seth has exercised a writer’s privilege to imagine what happened to the Caro mother and daughter, based on research into the destruction of the German Jews. It makes grim reading.

Seth says ‘My lens has zoomed in for the most part on my two subjects. But occasionally it has become wide-angled and touched upon the history of the century they inhabited.’ After the war, Hennerle corresponded with several of her Berlin friends, and we get glimpses of some of the fraught
issues for Germans in these years, such as guilt (or its absence) about the war and support for Hitler and the genocide, and the division of Berlin. But Seth goes beyond this and gently raises issues that his great uncle and aunt may have had views on, but certainly didn’t comment about. These include Indian Independence and the creation of Pakistan, the growth of racism in England (though Shanti said he never experienced any), and the rights of the Palestinians. There is also the issue of exile – of belonging fully nowhere, a sense Vikram possibly shares with his great uncle and aunt. These broader questions in my view give greater importance to the individual lives – though equally, they are only fully intelligible through such lives. ‘Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village on this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found.’ This isn’t really a writer’s book – but sometimes Seth just can’t help himself.

You can read more about Vikram Seth here.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) is a work of creative non-fiction. It combines two narratives; that of Henrietta Lacks and her family, and that of the HeLa line of cells cultured from the cervical cancer that killed her. Rebecca Skloot is a skilled science journalist, but she also has a novelist’s capacity to write movingly about the lives of the people involved in this remarkable story.

The amazing thing about the cells taken in 1951 from the tumour in Henrietta Lack’s cervix is that they didn’t die. For the first time, it proved possible to keep such cells alive indefinitely, and they kept on dividing, as it is in the nature of cells to do. This means they are a permanent source of cells available for use in various medical experiments and trials. The first major example of their worth was in the testing of the Salk vaccine against polio, a serious epidemic at the time. Skloot explains in relatively simple language some of the ways in which the cells have been used since, up to and including genetic identification and testing, and the development of a vaccine to protect against the Human Papilloma Virus, which was eventually identified as the cause of Henrietta’s tumour. I am pretty much scientifically illiterate, but even I could follow most of it.

Along-side the scientific account is the story of Henrietta and her family. For this, Skloot conducted extensive interviews with family members as well as consulting the few written records that exist. Some of the story is told in the words of the family members, particularly those of Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. ‘I’ve done my best to capture the language with which each person spoke and wrote,’ Skloot says. The decision to use these voices is important, because up until the writing of this book, they had been largely ignored. Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman; her family did not know for years that the HeLa cell line even existed, let alone that it had come from her, and were not told anything meaningful to them about the use to which the cells were put. Skloot shows in detail their anger and confusion at being excluded from something they felt was so personal. Some of them also felt they had been cheated out of money made from selling the cells. Skloot must have had amazing persistence and integrity to gain the confidence of family members so generally hostile to white people connected to Henrietta’s cells. She rarely intrudes her views into the story, giving a careful and balanced account of events. Just once, Deborah’s manic behaviour – pushing her up against a wall – provokes a response: ‘get the fuck off me and chill the fuck out’. Deborah backs off. ‘I never seen you mad before. I was starting to wonder if you was even human cause you never cuss in front of me.’

Skloot nevertheless raises important issues about Henrietta as the ‘donor’ of the cells, and how her family ought to have been treated. These include the question of informed consent to medical procedures, patient confidentiality, the commercialisation of research and medical ethics. There is also an afterword addressing the current legal and ethical debate on tissue ownership and research. But what she also makes clear is that in the case of the Lacks family, all this must be seen through the prism of race and poverty.

The book presents a stark picture of life for poor black Americans in in the 1950s, with not much improvement for some of them today. Henrietta was treated at the Johns Hopkins Hospital because it was the only one for miles around that took black patients, though only in segregated sections of the hospital. Skloot says that her treatment – primitive as it now seems– was probably no different from what she would have received as a white patient. But her daughter Elsie’s institutionalisation and death in the Hospital for the Negro Insane was pure racism. With segregation and poverty goes ignorance; it is no wonder that the family didn’t understand and feared ‘science’, and felt exploited by white scientists. In the words of Henrietta’s son Zakariy ya : ‘Them doctors say her cells is so important and did all this and that to help people. But it didn’t do no good for her, and it don’t do no good for us. If me and my sister need something, we can’t even go see a doctor cause we can’t afford it. Only people that can get any good from my mother cells is the people that got money, and whoever sellin them cells – they get rich off our mother and we got nothing.’

Using part of the royalties from the book, which fortunately has sold very well, Skloot has set up the Henrietta Lacks Foundation to help her descendants and others who have made important contributions to scientific research without their knowledge or consent. You can read more about Rebecca Skloot and her foundation here.

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Tony Judt died in August 2010 and this memoir was published posthumously in November of that year. He suffered from the motor neuron disease ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease, which progressively paralyzed him.

Judt was a historian and self-avowed public intellectual. But he didn’t write the memoir for publication. Rather he composed it – in his head – to keep himself sane through the long nights of ‘isolation and imprisonment’ inflicted by the disease, and dictated it to an assistant next morning. That it should have been formulated at all is amazing. Judt describes how he was ‘prepared’ for bed, where he lay ‘trussed, myopic and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts’. That he should under these circumstances have had the discipline to reflect coherently is itself a major achievement. He explains that he used a memory system similar to that developed by early modern thinkers and travelers such as Matteo Ricci to store and recall detail. Ricci devised a palace; Judt was content with a chalet, a place in Switzerland where he had spent happy childhood holidays. In such memory systems the information you want to remember is somehow attached to a physical object in a room, so that you need only to think your way around the room to remember what you want to retrieve. At least that’s the theory. Judt makes it seem easy, but I think that’s because he was already a clear and logical thinker who had sensible and interesting things to say.

Judt explains that this collection of memories – feuilletons as he calls them – are not traditional ‘History’; rather they an impressionistic interweaving of ‘the private and the public, the reasoned and the intuited, the recalled and the felt’. In other words, he gives context to his recollections, which in my view is essential for a successful memoir. There are twenty-five short pieces covering his childhood, adolescence and a little of his career (as well as his illness). And he has had an interesting life to recollect. As he says: ‘Before even turning twenty I had become, been, and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist, and a communitarian settler [in an Israeli kibbutz]: no mean achievement for a south London teenager.’ After some years at Cambridge and Oxford he moved to the United States, and there are reflections on some of his experiences there.

Inevitably not all of these pieces appeal equally. I like best the ones with a political edge – though actually that is most of them. Judt rejects orthodoxies and isms, but remains a committed social democrat. One of his strongest pieces is a reflection on ’captive minds’, where he laments failure to think for one’s self. The ‘true mental captivity’ of our times, he believes, lies in our faith in ‘the market’. Even in his defence of Switzerland he can’t help questioning why what Swiss banks do ‘in servicing a handful of wealthy foreign criminals’ is any worse that ‘what Goldman and Sachs has done with the proceeds of millions of honest US tax dollars’. He is often angry about policies and practices that undermine the egalitarian public ethic he thinks once animated Western democracies. The failures of urban planning and public transport in London, the dumbing down of education, consumerism and a modern society where ‘all human relations are … reduced to rational calculations of self-interest’ come in for a serve alongside Judt’s more particular recollections of Putney, Green Line Buses, Emanuel School and King’s College Cambridge.

Judt has excited hostility in some quarters for his criticisms of Zionism, but he doesn’t shy away from that position here. He reflects – adversely – on his time in a kibbutz, and considers more broadly what it means to him to be Jewish. He loved kibbutz life at first, but later came to find it smug and self-regarding, reinforcing ‘the worst kind of ethnic solipsism’. ‘Judaism for me’, he says, ‘is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth telling’ and he praises ‘awkwardness and dissent’. He has certainly carried those qualities into his life and work.

Reading this memoir has inspired me to seek out some of Judt’s other work, in particular Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) in which he sets out to ‘integrate Europe’s two halves into a common story’. You can read my review here of another short polemical work he wrote during his illness, Ill Fares the Land, a plea for recognition of the importance of collective action through the state in the face of rampant- and failing – market fundamentalism. As a historian and a public intellectual he will be sadly missed. You can read more about him here.

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Towards the end of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), de Waal muses: ‘I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is it still a book about small Japanese things.’ It is, of course, about all of these. The hare with amber eyes is one of a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke whose history de Waal started out to write. But their story is a window into a much broader history not only of his family, but also of aspects of late nineteenth and twentieth century cultural and political life in Europe. I found the book enthralling.

De Waal sets himself an exacting task: to find out the relationship between the netsuke and the people whose hands it has been in, but in doing so to avoid the melancholy of nostalgia. ‘Melancholy, I think,’ he writes, ‘is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus. And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return’. When I started reading, I didn’t really know what a netsuke was, so of course I looked it up on Google. You can see some of de Waal’s amazing collection of them here.  Being a very good potter himself, de Waal is well placed to appreciate the look and feel of these intricate little objects. You can see some of his work here. But he proves himself also a very good story teller and a very good historian.

The story he has to tell is compelling, a case of fact being more interesting than fiction. I might have thought some of it far fetched if I read it in a novel. (Shame on me.) De Waal is a descendent of the Ephrussi family, rich Jewish bankers who came originally from Odessa, and migrated, some to Vienna and others to Paris. The original owner of the netsuke is Charles Ephrussi, who lives in Paris in the late nineteenth century and is a patron of several Impressionist painters and a collector of their works. His netsuke collection is later given as a wedding present to a cousin in Vienna. De Waal does a great job of delineating the lives of this sophisticated and cosmopolitan family. But like all good story tellers, he lays the groundwork for what we all guess is to come, first with the Dreyfus case in Paris, and then with the rise of anti-Semitism in Austria.  The story of the survival of the collection is extraordinary. I think the bravery of de Waal’s grandmother Elisabeth is also amazing.

The cultural history covered in the book encompasses the expansion of Paris under Haussmann during the Third Republic, the building of the Ringstrasse in Vienna and the rebuilding of war torn Tokyo post World War II. Clothes, architecture, furniture, paintings, literature – all are touched on and set in their historical context. Reading about Charles’s life in Paris and his interactions with painters such as Degas, Monet and Manet, and others whose work I didn’t know, made me want to see for myself. My e-book edition included a few illustrations, but I found Google an indispensible aid to reading. I suggest you look at some of the works mentioned, especially Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’ (here) which actually shows Charles in the background. But this is also a history of cultural dispossession. De Waal outlines the only too successful attempts made after the Anschluss to dehumanise Jews. ‘This is because it is important to address the old affront of Jews not looking like Jews. The process of stripping away your respectability … is a way of returning everyone to the shtetl, stripping you back to your essential character – wandering, unshaven, bowed with your possessions on your back.’ What price the Ephrussi family’s ‘lifetime gamble on assimilation’ into European high culture?  

But this is essentially memoir, not history. De Waal is present in the text throughout. He worries about what he is writing: ‘I have the slightly clammy feeling of biography’, he says, ‘the sense of living on the edges of other people’s lives without their permission’. He is pleased to find that Charles is someone he can like. He agonises over telling what happened to his great grandfather and great grandmother. ‘How can I write about this time?’ He is reduced to tears when he sees their first names written over on their birth certificates with the first names given to all Jews in Vienna – Israel and Sara. But fascinating and moving as de Waal’s exploration of his family history is, we should always remember that it is not a history of Austrian or French Jews; this is a relatively privileged family, even when dispossessed. The link between being a collector and having great wealth is not one de Waal explores in depth.  

Still, I really enjoyed this book.

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David Walker is Professor of Australian Studies at Deakin University, Victoria. In 2004, he suffered from an episode of macular degeneration that left him legally blind. Up till then, he had avoided family history with all the scorn the professional feels for the amateur. But, he says, his blindness made him ‘rethink the kind of history’ he was able to write. ‘I had to find another, more personal voice and another way of writing’, he says. Not Dark Yet (2011) is the result.

So what is this other way of writing history? It is an account ofWalker’s family from his great grandparents through to his own times, but differs from much family history in that it ties the personal and the local to broader historical events and processes. Everywhere in the story Walker highlights the links – to soldier settlement, to urbanisation, to attitudes to race and eugenics, to the war in the Pacific, to the fire-bombing of Dresden and to post-war modernity to name but a few.

The congruity of personal and national experience is easiest to establish in relation to large events like World War II, where more or less adequate documentation and secondary commentary exists about events that family members were involved in. It is much harder, however, to draw meaning for any but his own family from experiences such as his mother’s decline into dementia. This is particularly the case where records, written or verbal, are limited, and memory unreliable – ‘blind’, and ‘moth-eaten’, as he puts it. ‘Memory and vision now seem more alike than I once imagined’, he says. As with vision, so with historical perspective.

Walkeris of course aware of the difficulties of moving between the local and the broader canvas, and uses the example of his grandfather’s giant onion, grown in Burra inSouth Australiain 1917, to explore this issue. How important is the onion? There were, he notes, ‘one or two rival events’ taking place at the time – strikes, carnage, revolution. Is the ‘settled domesticity and quiet cultivation’ which the onion represents too trivial to warrant attention? ‘How do we reconcile or accommodate the competing claims of the big events of history with the constant flow of small, day-to-day trials and pleasures?’ he asks. Many questions about the significance of individual experience must remain unanswered.

Walkertells his story with humour, compassion and a good deal of self deprecation. ‘For some unaccountable reason, when I became legally blind I was instructed to stop driving’. Well, yes. For all that he deals with his blindness with rye wit, his love of collecting books sits sadly with his inability to read them. His capacity to tell a good story is central to the success of the book, and I certainly found most of it very interesting. This may in part be because I grew up in Adelaideat the same time as Walkerdid. I can’t say I read Lord Baden Powell’s ‘ambiguously named Scouting for Boys’, or had the wrong kind of hair to be a bodgie (though in my case it would have been a widgie). But the atmosphere of provincialAdelaide is instantly recognisable. I found the chapters on his parents’ overseas travel, and his own years doing postgraduate study at theAustralianNationalUniversity less enthralling, perhaps because these were not experiences I shared, or perhaps because he did not link them convincingly into the broader picture. I would have liked to know more about his life as a working historian.

Reading the book made me wonder what I’d put in or leave out of a personal history, and what would make it history rather than nostalgia. I can’t but be envious ofWalker’s amazing luck in being present at the famously vicious water polo match betweenHungaryand theSoviet Unionat the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 – that’s something no one could overlook. But is it history? I think the answer is yes, because it is from the accounts of intelligent observers of how things appear that later generations can gain an understanding of the past, remembered not in isolation, but given significance by the historian’s art.

You can find out more about Professor Walker’s academic writing here, and more about the writing of the book and his loss of vision here.

PS. While we are on the topic of history, Wendy Scarfe informs me that in relation to my earlier post, the German headmaster in her book The Day They Killed Edward was based on the headmaster at her father’s school; she said ‘he became quieter and more withdrawn as the war progressed’. So I stand corrected in my view that such an appointment was unlikely at that time. Thanks Wendy.

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‘That the science was uncertain, that more research was needed, that the economic consequences of controlling … would be too great, and that … might be caused by natural sources’. Sound familiar? Fill in ‘climate change’, and you have a summary of the argument of those who oppose action on global warming. But in this quote from Merchants of Doubt (2010), Oreskes and Conway are putting the argument made by electricity utilities in the US against taking action on acid rain back in the 1980s. And this is their point. Whether it is cigarette smoking, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer or climate change, the same arguments have been rolled out over and over against taking action. And, very often, they claim, by the same people.

Oreskes’s and Conway’s book traces the actions taken by individuals, industry groups and privately funded think tanks to defend certain positions, such as the right to smoke and the need to install weapons in space (the Strategic Defence Initiative), and to attack attempts to regulate smoking, both active and passive, phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons, prohibit DDT, and most recently, to control the emission of Co2 into the atmosphere. They argue that strikingly similar tactics have been used in all these cases. These include attacking the science that says the threat is real by emphasising any uncertainties; attacking scientists’ credibility; establishing organisations, most notably the George C. Marshall Institute, to commission and fund alternative research and cultivate scientists to at best research other areas that might be causing the ill effects of, for example, smoking; and cultivating links to politicians, journalists and senior public servants. The authors show how difficult it has been for scientists to gain the same level of public hearing when they seek to correct ‘science’ that has not been peer reviewed, and is not accepted by the vast majority of experts in the area. A letter to Science does not carry the same weight as an editorial in The Wall Street Journal.

Oreske and Conway say that the same names come up surprisingly often – first working with tobacco companies, then denying the reality of acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer. Several of the individuals they discuss had distinguished careers in physics and rocketry in the 1950s, but have done little research since, and none on the areas in which they later chose to comment. The authors suggest that their motivation was probably a fierce anti communism, and a concomitant attachment to the free market economy. Controlling environmental hazards involves regulation by the state, and it seems that this is anathema to them. They have therefore joined with organisations with similar aims, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation, to defend what they see as ‘liberty’. They do not acknowledge that the operation of the free market can ever result in market failure as evidenced by human induced climate change.

The authors have done extensive research, in particular in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, and each of their case studies is exhaustively footnoted. Occasionally the detail can become a little tedious as they seek to show exactly what happened in this committee or to that report. But I can forgive them this; they are being scrupulous in their scholarship, because they know they are likely to be attacked over it. And overall, it’s an easy, if disturbing read.

Oreske and Conway are historians, not scientists (though Oreskes’s original degree was in geology, and Conway is the historian at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory). Their aim is to recount the history of the attempts to create doubt, not to test the science. They accept that uncertainty and scepticism are fundamental tools of science, but argue for the validity of peer review in establishing what can be called scientific knowledge. They lament what they see as the misuse of the doctrine of journalistic ‘balance’ which gives equal time to the few who doubt the scientific conclusions of the vast majority of working scientists, and to those that accept them. I think they let the media off a bit lightly on this, seeing it as an attempt to be fair, rather than the result of laziness or vested interest.

What they have shown is that doubt works. And their suggested antidote of a public informed about what is good science and what is rubbish seems over-optimistic. But in the absence of anything else, read the book and apply the history it outlines to the debates that fill our media today. I particularly like the quote they use from Isaiah Berlin –‘liberty for wolves means death to lambs’.

You can read more about the book here, including an attack on it by the Marshall Institute. You can see Professor Oreskes answering climate sceptics here.

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Tony Judt was a well respected historian, best known for his work on post war Europe. This book appeared just before he died of motor neurone disease in August 2010. Unable to write – scarcely able to move – he dictated it. I mention this not just because he showed immense courage in dealing with these ‘unusual circumstances’, but because undertaking the task at all demonstrates how urgent he considered the call to action.

‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay’ is a quotation from Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village (1770). Judt thinks this sentiment is equally apt now. ‘Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today’, he says. ‘We cannot go on living like this.’

He argues that over the last 30 years, slavish devotion to free market ideology, and erosion of belief in State action for the common good, have resulted in the creation of private wealth for the few and public squalor for the rest of us. Marked inequalities in income and access to services have hastened the ills of high levels of unemployment, mental illness, crime and alienation. And yet adherence to the free market seems to be the only option open to us, despite its failure in the global financial crisis, when free market bankers and car executives rushed to seek assistance from the public purse.

This argument is not new; Judt’s contribution is to place free market thinking in its historical context, showing that all Western nations have considerable experience of eschewing the market and using the State to achieve public benefits, such as the New Deal and the Welfare State. He argues that this legacy can be used as a basis for deciding when and how the State can intervene in economic and social matters, as he clearly thinks it should, in pursuit of greater equality. He believes that State power will inevitably be used to deal with threats like climate change, with the danger that it will be in unequal and undemocratic ways if belief in the power of the State to act for the public benefit has not been restored.

He argues that the political Left has largely given up on the debate, showing how the consensus around the use of State power crumbled under assaults from both Left and Right. I found particularly interesting his discussion of how the individual rights agenda of the New Left in the 1960s, among other things, eroded the collectivism of the ‘old’ Left. ‘The personal is the political’ cuts both ways.

So what does he think we can do to revive the legitimacy of State action for collective ends? I kept hoping he’d come up with a formula that I could use but of course he doesn’t. Judt values idealism but is suspicious of ideologies: ‘the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences’. Instead he favours ‘incremental improvements’, even if they are, as is likely, on ‘unsatisfactory circumstances’. In other words, we have to figure it out for ourselves on a case by case basis. But he argues that the general principle of State action needs vocal advocates to challenge the seeming hegemony of free market ideology. He believes that things won’t change until the way people think and speak about them changes.

Judt acknowledges the depth of cynicism about politics, and the dangers for democracy of such cynicism. But I’m not entirely clear how he hopes this will change. Greater political engagement by young people and better political leadership are excellent goals, but seem far from achievement. Judt has done his bit though.

Ill Fares the Land is based on an essay Judt wrote for The New York Review of Books in 2009. You can read this short version of his argument here.

Given Judt’s (and my) unashamedly partisan social democratic bias, you might like to read another view. Here is one from the conservative historian, Noel Malcolm, though I think he must have been reading a different book.

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I don’t usually write about non-fiction books, but I found this one so fascinating that I just had to share it.

The book is sub-titled: Why the world needs a green revolution – and how we can renew our global future. The first half is about the problems, and the second half offers some ways forward. There is some very interesting – and disturbing – information and analysis in the first half, but it is the opportunities outlined in the second half that are the most exciting part of the book for me; it is just so refreshing to be reminded that while we have huge challenges, there are things we may be able to do if we have the will.

Friedman is a journalist, not an environmental scientist, but he is extremely well informed. This means that he can communicate technical information on an every day level to non-scientists. He has interviewed a diverse range of people for the book, and uses many of their stories to illustrate the points he is making.

By ‘hot’ Friedman means that the word is being adversely affected by climate change; by ‘flat’ he means that millions more people are now attaining middle class lifestyles and levels of consumption; and by ‘crowded’ he means that the population of the world is growing exponentially, to the point where resources to sustain them are becoming scarce. He sees these three tendencies interacting to create a situation that is problematic today, but which will become a crisis for future generations if not acted upon now.

Friedman’s discussion of the key problems of energy supply and demand, climate change and biodiversity loss is not new, though it is worth being reminded of the details. But he also links in two other problems: energy poverty and what he calls ‘petropolitics’, which, roughly, is the politics relating to the supply of oil from the places like the middle east and Russia. I found his discussion of the relationship between high oil prices and high levels of social repression in ‘petrodictatorships’ quite illuminating. He also makes a very good argument that all these problems are linked, and cannot be resolved in isolation. I found this section of the book to be quite depressing, as the problems seem so huge.

However, the section entitled ‘How we move forward’ is really stimulating; for the first time, I was being told about possible practical solutions and how they might work. Friedman argues that there needs to be a systems approach which encompasses a renewable energy ecosystem for innovating, generating and deploying clean power, energy efficiency, resource productivity and conservation. He believes that it is up to government to put in place the appropriate legislation, regulation and incentives, most crucially a price on carbon, but also energy efficiency ratings, sustainable building codes and the like. Within these bounds, he believes that the price signals of a market economy are most likely to drive the innovation and changes in behaviour of both suppliers and customers that will be needed to make the transition from reliance on ‘dirty’ fuels to cheap, reliable, renewable ones. He sees this as an opportunity as well as a threat. He is not suggesting that the changes he proposes will be easy – far from it. But it is still refreshing to read how a clean energy economy might work.

Friedman is an American writing for Americans, so it is not surprising that part of his argument is that American should lead the world’s green revolution. Not being an American I found this a bit annoying. He also focuses on problems that are specific to America, like the absence of a national electricity grid, and does not always give due credit to other countries that are making progress in areas where America is lagging. But his discussion of China’s response to the related problems of hot, flat and crowded is fascinating.

Despite his despair at the lack of political will to act, Friedman ultimately feels ‘sober optimism’ about our chances of finding a set of realisable solutions to the interrelated problems he outlines. Such optimism is necessary if we are to find the will to act, and he believes strongly in bottom up as well as top down action. So whatever your views on climate change, conservation, renewable energy or the politics of oil, I urge you to read this book, envisage a possible future, and act on your conclusions.

Friedman works for the New York Times. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism three times. You can find out more about what else he has written here, or at his website.

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