Cultural Pilgrim » Nonfiction

Obsessing well: Book review of Brainstorm by Eric Maisel & Ann Maisel

Andres Kabel — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:00:11 +0000

Eric Maisel is a humble, brilliant writer on creativity, a guru (though he would argue against the very term) to the stumblers like me. Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions breaks no new ground but instead takes Maisel’s notions of ‘making meaning’ and living through creativity to prod us towards obsession. Not the destructive obsessions endlessly named and chronicled in memoirs but what he calls ‘productive obsessions’. By giving ourselves permission to drop everything for real work, rather than everyday nothingness, by then igniting a fire underneath us to obsess over a big goal, we achieve and we light up our lives. As always, Maisel’s writing is supple and melodic, and the message set out in accessible chapters is fully practical. Quotations from an Internet ‘obsession group’ run by the author add real-life examples. Fascinating sidebar historical examples, presumably sourced by co-author Ann Maisel, illustrate how weird and wonderful, and how inspiring, obsessions can be.

Brainstorm is a solid addition to Eric Maisel’s lifesaving body of work. 3 stars.

Stunning: Book Review of Mark W. Moffett’s Adventures among Ants

Andres Kabel — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:00:33 +0000

A lifelong fascination with ants led me to read one excellent book last year (see my review of The Lives of Ants) but now I’ve chanced upon an even more remarkable book. Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions, by famed wildlife photographer and writer Mark W. Moffett, is just the tonic for anyone who stills stops to marvel at a long, bustling trail of ants on a city footpath. Moffett combines a partial memoir – that part of his life tracking down, investigating and photographing ants – with a wonderful, nuanced introduction to six ant types. From aggressive omnivore marauder ants to massed army ants, from weaver ants high up in the forest’s canopy to the weaver ant slavers, from leafcutter ants tending their gardens to the supercolonies built by the Argentine ant, Moffett dovetails his own tales of discovery with revelatory overviews of each ant species. The Argentine ant, overrunning one continent after another, intrigued me the most. Four supercolonies of them, the largest one 160 times more numerous than the entire human race, blanket California, and between these colonies lie border areas subject to never-ending trench warfare killing millions annually.

Moffett is a sparkling writer and Adventures among Ants would be superb as pure text. But it is the photography that had me gasping. Shot after short, beautifully taken and beautifully presented, brings ants to life as I’ve never seen before.

A stunning, approachable window into the world of ants. 4½ stars.

Passionate yet grim: Book review of Bill McKibben’s Eaarth

Andres Kabel — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:00:38 +0000

Before Bill McKibben started 350.org, his grassroots organization (he makes quite explicit it’s for young people, implying us older folks have dropped the ball) campaigning to roll back global warming, he asked climatologist James Hansen what number he should choose. Having just read James Hansen’s compelling semi-memoir Storms of My Grandchildren (see my review), as soon as I saw that McKibben was putting out a new book, I grabbed it. Well, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet is a scorcher, if you’ll excuse the expression, and no, the title isn’t a spelling blooper. McKibben, who has written extensively on climate change and its politics, has now declared our known planet a goner, transformed by already, and even more so in the future, into a noticeably different place. Like Clive Hamilton (see my review of Requiem for a Species), McKibben catalogues the compelling scientific evidence for unstoppable climate change. While Hamilton is a cogent writer, McKibben is genuinely stylish, lacing his pungent news with verve and humour (yes, humour, despite the grim news).

This is another contemporary must-read book. Fear grips our hearts when we contemplate mankind’s future on Earth (whoops, I must remember to call it Eaarth), so we need to let our rational minds read stories of the future, realistic stories. The tail end of Eaarth presents McKibben’s morsels of hope but they seem scant indeed – more productive, holistic, natural agriculture; distributed, small-scale energy; the Internet as a unifier. Yet the book is laced with the author’s irrepressible, instinctive call to action.

Passionate yet grim. 3½ stars.

Tour de force: Book review of Joyce Appleby’s The Relentless Revolution

Andres Kabel — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 20:00:09 +0000

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, by distinguished American historian Joyce Appleby, is a tour de force of broad historical writing. We all imagine we ‘know’ what capitalism is and how it must have arisen out of older ways of societal organization, but of course we know nothing. From the very start of her lively, erudite yet thorough account, Appleby is at pains to demonstrate that nothing in the development of capitalism was smooth or preordained. Beginning with the uneven transition from agrarian systems to trade and mercantilism, and then continuing with the hit-and-miss development of market-based notions in parts of Europe in the 17th century, she convincingly shows that capitalism is not some inevitable outcome based on mathematical certainty but a societal construct, one expressed differently in different societies. ‘Capitalism is not a unified, coordinated system,’ she writes, ‘despite that suggestion in the word “system.” Rather it is a set of practices and institutions that permit billions of people to pursue their economic interests in the marketplace.’

I found especially valuable a chapter on how the United States and Germany outstripped Great Britain over the turn of the 19th century to become capitalism’s exemplars; what fascinates me is how powerful Germany’s advance was, even though its paternalistic, rigid society was nothing like the freewheeling, individualistic American system that we often mistake as capitalism’s natural form. And a 21st century chapter focusing on China reinforces the need to guard against assuming even that capitalism presupposes democracy.

The Relentless Revolution is not just about conceptual correctness. Appleby brilliantly proclaims its sparkling triumphs over the last two centuries. She is an evocative yet precise stylist and I cannot recall a more compelling paean to the virtues of capitalism’s efficiency, vigour and promotion of innovation. Yet she is also clear on the downsides of capitalism; it is not, she illustrates plainly, a moral force. The Relentless Revolution is an ideal book for people like me who believe in the power of capitalism controlled by strong, moral, democratic government.

Scholarly, readable, thought provoking . . . a must. 4 stars.

Thick and driven by greed: Book review of The Big Short by Michael Lewis

Andres Kabel — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:00:51 +0000

Michael Lewis is one of our most compelling, original chroniclers. He combines instinctive storytelling and fascination with the hidden interstices of the human world. All his books are gorgeous reads but it’s when he explores and explains conceptual material that he soars. And in The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, he has a sublime notion to play with. The result astounds.

The GFC sprang upon the world as a huge shock, yet dozens of books since insist that the crash was quite predictable. Lewis tackles the question of cause from the most original angle of all, by focusing on those rare financial players who bet money – hefty licks of money – against the herd. A fascinating set of mavericks and misfits spent the years before the GFC seeking ways to make fortunes by gambling that the boom would turn to bust: a rebel with no social skills, a bunch of newbies with one good idea, a recluse with Aspergers, a glib salesman with brains. Lewis burrows deep into their lives, dovetailing their almost unbelievable stories as the storm approaches.

Throughout what reads like a Matthew Reilly thriller, Lewis gradually explains, evocatively and clearly, the intricacies of mortgages, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, sub-prime, and the interlocked financial markets. In the process, his portrayal of the money world is staggeringly simple: yes, there was evil afoot, but most of the supposedly ‘perfect’ market were simply thick and driven insane by greed.

The Big Short is the one account of the global financial crisis you simply must read, and it’s my pick for best book, nonfiction or fiction, of 2010 so far. 4½ stars.

The rich vegetarian life: Book Review of Jeffrey M. Masson’s The Face on Your Plate

Andres Kabel — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:00:34 +0000

Years ago, when I read Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s Dogs Never Lie About Love and When Elephants Weep, I recall being impressed by his wide-ranging, compassionate mind. So it seemed natural, after Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (see my review) profoundly affected me, to read Masson’s new book The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food. Like Foer’s book, Masson’s effort is a plea for ethical treatment of animals, by refusing to harvest, kill and eat them, but it is also a paean to the joys of vegetarianism. The author has a magpie’s instinct for collecting interesting facts and stories, and here he weaves his knowledge into a plea for compassionate, healthy eating. Especially valuable for me was a chapter in which Masson chronicles his own diet and culinary habits. How rich he makes the vegetarian life sound!

The structure of The Face on Your Plate is discursive, sometimes almost random, and anyone seeking a coolly logical treatise on the moral advantages of vegetarianism would best go elsewhere. Yet it is the humane, highly personal exploration of these issues that gives the book its strong charm. Masson is an eloquent stylist, and that style is put to the service of an emotional message that hits its mark.

Powerful but never sanctimonious. 3 stars.

Incendiary yet inspirational: Book review of Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen

Andres Kabel — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:00:54 +0000

Of course one should read books by one’s heroes, both as homage and for inspiration. James Hansen is that rare scientist, brilliantly geeky yet driven by conscience to enter the fields of politics and persuasion. In spite of his own preference to stay in the lab, he was one of the first scientists to leap from the ivory tower to warn us about climate change, and he’s escalated his public activity to the point of a recent arrest amongst an anti-coal-plant protest. Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity is an unusual memoir, one restricted to exactly that period, the times of his public attempt to persuade policymakers to do something. The book begins in the late 1990s and ends with his recent letters to state leaders. While the world is clutching at greenwashing plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions to 550 or 450 parts per million, Hansen believes anything beyond 350 signals global calamity; he is mighty persuasive.

Unusually for a scientist, Hansen is a smooth, engaging writer, and the book seamlessly meshes a fascinating glimpse into backroom climate change politics and a gentle yet deep story about global warming. If you want one broad brush introduction to climate science and how it has rapidly evolved into near certainty and quasi despair, this is the book for you. I was held spellbound. Ranging over physics, paleontology and glaciology, rigorous yet emphatically personal, Storms of My Grandchildren should be required reading for all secondary students (it seems to me adults either know or reject the truth by now, and the youth of today will wrestle with the issue far better than we seem to be able to).

There can be no excuse for not reading this. Incendiary yet inspirational. 4 stars.

Book reviews: The Conscious Cook by Giselle Wilkinson & I.O.U. by John Lanchester

Andres Kabel — Thu, 13 May 2010 20:00:51 +0000

Intelligible yet accurate beginners’ guides to complex subjects are rare:

If you’re an Australian concerned about the complexities of choosing and cooking food in a world where much of food production is environmentally degrading or downright evil, The Conscious Cook: Sustainable Cooking and Living is the book for you. Author Giselle Wilkinson, a passionate advocate of acting ethically when it comes to eating, spends over half the book discussing aspects of food and the food cycle, covering everything from health and food miles to animal ethics and water impact. Strangely enough, what affected me even more than these thoughtful essays (including plenty of links and sources to enable further reading) were the wonderful recipes in the first hundred pages, all highly attractive (and successful, at least the ones I’ve tried) and selected to illustrate various aspects of ‘best practice’ food choices. An excellent primer. 3½ stars.
And what about the GFC, the Global Financial Crisis? Here in Australia it seems to have been and gone, but what did it mean? John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay offers a layman’s (Lanchester is a novelist) introduction to the world of finance and why it imploded in 2008. As readers of his novels attest, he is a spirited, readable stylist, and in his hands the complex arcane universe of banks, shares, bonds, mortgages and derivatives springs into life. As a veteran of the finance world, he gets the facts right, although his scathing attitude towards my peers is a little overdone (only a little – who can dispute the horrible truths?). A final reflective chapter called ‘The Bill’ (as in the GFC’s costs) concludes ‘that we’ve just lived through an economic golden age . . . one based on debt and on an unsustainable credit bubble, and underpinned by a financial system which was, it turned out, taking crazily miscalculated risks . . .’ An invaluable introduction. 3½ stars.

Book reviews: Crossing the Elde Bridge by Maria Clark & David Lapham, plus John van de Ruit’s Spud trilogy

Andres Kabel — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:00:31 +0000

A couple of books sourced in strange ways and all the more enjoyable as a result:

I can recommend the first three books in a quartet by a South African author, John van de Ruit, in the vein of the Adrian Mole diaries: Spud; Spud – The Madness Continues; and Spud – Learning to Fly. It’s a coming-of-age diary of ‘Spud’ Milton, a boy with a wonderfully cracked family and a riotous collection of friends and teachers at a private school. Books like this fly or not depending on the author’s page-by-page inventiveness, and van de Ruit continually throws in minute plot surprises. The humour is, to me, a little hit and miss, but the books also contain a serious substream on South African politics that rescues them from triviality. Comedic quality. 3 stars.
World War II memoirs remain essential reading as our only visceral reminder of the horrors of global warfare. Crossing the Elde Bridge, by Maria Clark and David Lapham, tells the harrowing, remarkable story of Maria, a privileged young Austro-Hungarian caught up in the Nazi times and then the Soviet victory drive, with its looting and raping and terror. Her travails can scarcely be believed. Co-author Lapham has honed a stylish, dramatically structured narrative that compels one to read. Somehow, even at the end, surprises continue to arrive. One of the better examples of this vital genre. 3 stars.