Tag: non-fiction

book round-ups, non-fiction, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Non fiction round up – Literary Figures edition

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It’s been a while, so for this Wednesday’s post I have a non-fiction Recommendsday for you. And as promised yesterday, it sort of ties in with D is for Death a little bit which is a delightful coincidence that I didn’t really realise when I started reading D is for Death after I finished Square Haunting last week – which was the last book I needed to finish reading to finish this post off!

Square Haunting by Francesca Wade

This is a group biography of literary and academic women who are loosely tied together by having lived in Mecklenberg Square. The most celebrated of the five is Virginia Woolf who is the final of the five, but the one that I was most interested in (unsurprisingly) was Dorothy L Sayers – who was living in Mecklenberg Square when she created Peter Wimsey. I’ve written about my love of Sayers’s Gaudy Night before, but the problem at the core of that book, can a woman have her own life and intellectual pursuits and identity and be in a relationship, is a key theme running through this whole book too. The early 20th century was a time when a woman’s right to an academic education was still a matter of debate, and several of the women in this book were at the vanguard of the fight. I found some of the lives more interesting than others (as is always the case) but definitely wouldn’t have heard of or known anything about some of the women without having picked the book up because of the Sayers of it all. Definitely worth reading and one of the more successful group biographies I’ve read. And just to tie it back to D is For Death, here’s a link to a podcast where Harriet Evans and Francesca Wade are talking about Gaudy Night. You’re welcome.

Five Love Affairs and a Friendship by Anne de Courcy

Cover of Five Love Affairs and a Friendship

Anne de Courcy turns her focus on Nancy Cunard in this one. Cunard was an heiress (her father was one of the shipping line Cunards) and was part of a pre-Great War literary circle and then went on to spend the 1920s deeply enmeshed in the literary movement in Paris. She was a muse to many writers of the time – some of whom were also her lovers – and set up her own literary press, before going on to fight racism and fascism. She led quite a sad life in many ways – and this book doesn’t shy away from that, but it’s a really interesting read and a good look at the Parisian side of the roaring twenties. I’m not sure it’s your best place to start with de Courcy though – if you haven’t read any of her books before I might start with The Fishing Fleet or Chanel’s Riviera.

The Crichel Boys by Simon Fenwick

paperback copy of The Crichel Boys on a sun lounger

This is a group biography of Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys who bought Long Crichel Rectory in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Later they are joined by Raymond Mortimer to form a sort of surrogate family and literary Salon (per the author) that lasted across the rest of the century. I’d never heard of this before I saw the book, but they seemed adjacent to the sort of inter-war Bright Young Things set that I’m always fascinated by (and have read a lot about at this point) so I gave it a go. The big problem for me is that there’s not actually enough to say about the core four (so to speak) so it has to expand out to the rest of their circle. And while that does include Nancy Mitford, Cecil Beaton, various Bloomsbury-set types, Benjamin Britten and more, in doing that there’s a lot of jumping backwards and forwards in time as you get sections on various people and it starts to get very confusing. So not entirely successful, but not a disaster either – Square Haunting definitely worked better!Almost the best thing about it for me was the passing mention of Gervase Jackson-Stops and Horton Menagerie – which is just down the road from where I grew up.

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: October Quick Reviews

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It’s the first Wednesday of the months and I have quick reviews for you – and one of them is even a new release! Two days in a row! Yes, it can happen! I’m almost proud of me. Except for the fact that the rest of the pile is massive. Moving on. To the reviews:

Taylor’s Version by Stephanie Burt*

Cover of Taylor's Version

I’m going to be honest and my most listened to album last month was the new Taylor Swift album. What can I say, I’m a millennial who likes Swedish pop, so an upbeat Max Martin-produced album is totally my jam. And so I was interested to read this book, which is a critical appreciation of Swift’s work, written by a professor who runs a course on her at Harvard. And it was interesting, but I had two key problems with it: one, I’m not a big enough Swiftie that I’m able to remember all the songs off all the albums without going back and listening to them again, and two, I’m not across (American?) music terminology and theory to be able to understand all the technicalities of the music and composition that Burt is explaining. I need someone to play it to demonstrate it to get it – like the Switched On Pop guys did with The Life of a Showgirl the other week – and to really understand the points that are being made. But I think it may well work for other people more than it did for me.

From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming

Paperback copy of From Russia With Love

This was my purchase in the Penguin Pop-Up back in September and is only the second of the actual James Bond books that I’ve read. I’ve watched the Connery and Bond movies a lot, so it was really interesting to see what the original was and where the plot was changed to make it into a film – and there are a few changes here and they weren’t always what I expected. There’s actually not a lot of Bond here until fairly late on – it’s mostly about the Russian side of the plot, building up to the chase sequence as Bond tries to make his way back to Britain (with Tatiana in tow). As a book it is of its time, but if you’re familiar with all the issues of the movie series, you know what you’re letting yourself in for!

The Body in the Kitchen Garden by Paula Sutton*

Cover of The Body in the Kitchen Garden

After reading the first in the Hill House Vintage mystery series last year, I’m back to report in on the second, because I said that I would come and report back on a sequel if it came. This sees Daphne helping in the renovation of the local manor house after the return of the owner after years out of the country. But when an unidentified body is discovered in the garden, she’s drawn into another murder investigation. In the first book, I had the murderer pegged fairly early on but I thought that might be because it was a debut, but also because there was a lot of series set up going on, so the mystery couldn’t be as complex as a result. But this didn’t have all that set up to do and I had the victim’s identity and the murderer worked out as early (if not earlier). And that’s a shame because I still really like the main characters and the setting. It’s just not got enough happening or complexity for me. Hey ho.

And that’s your lot for this month, as a reminder, the Books of the Week were: The Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Solving a Murder; What You Are Looking For is in the Library; Red Land, Black Land and I Shop, Therefore I Am. The Recommendsdays were a Halloween preview, mysteries set in theatres and Novelised Real People II

Book of the Week, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Red Land, Black Land

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Considering how busy last week was, I actually had choices for this week’s BotW, which was a bit of surprise to me, but these things happen and it required some serious thinking to work out what to pick. And hard thinking is tiring. So in the end I went with my first instinct. Whether that will work out in the end, who knows. Anyway…

Red Land, Black Land is Barbara Mertz’s social history of Egypt. It takes you through the daily life of an Ancient Egyptian, although perhaps unsurprisingly considering that most of what we know about them is from their tombs it tends towards the end of their lives and death!

Those of you who have been around here for a while will know that although I love history, it is rare that I venture before the Middle Ages and if push comes to shove, I would say that I’m most interested in the period after 1750*. So why did I venture more than a thousand years before my usual area of interest? Well Barbara Mertz is the real name of Elizabeth Peters, author of the Amelia Peabody and Vicky Bliss series, who did a PhD in Egyptology in the early 1950s and published this and a second book, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphics in the 1960s. They have remained in print ever since (having both been revised a couple of times – including in the case of Red Land, Black Land in 2008, which is when the audio book version that I listened to is from.

This is very much an introductory prime, written in an accessible, chatty style. I can imagine it being on the preliminary reading lists for all manner of courses on Egyptology, to get people into the swing of it before they go on to read the drier, more academic texts. In fact in many ways it’s got the same vibes as Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guide series (which I also listened to on audio). And if you’ve read the Amelia Peabody series you can see where some of the inspiration for the various plots came from as well as spotting the various real life figures that popped up in that series (Theodore Davis, Arthur Weigel et al) as their discoveries and tombs are referenced.

Your mileage on this may vary depending on how much you like your history books with asides. I really like that (well when it’s an author whose voice I like!) and I found the audio book experience for this a real delight. I listened to the whole thing across about four days, and liked it so much I’ve bought Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphics in audio too!

Red Land, Black Land is available as an audio book and as a paperback in its current revision, but not on Kindle or Kobo. If you’re tempted to buy secondhand, pay attention to the age and edition that you’re looking at – as from looking at the reviews on Goodreads it would seem that it did change and update a lot over time – especially given that there’s 30 years between the last two updates and scholarship can move a lot in that time!

Happy reading!

*and if you look at the history modules that I did for my degree you will see this born out!

Book of the Week, memoirs, new releases, non-fiction

Book of the Week: I Shop, Therefore I Am

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Lets just take a moment for the fact that my pick this week is a book that came out last week so I am actually topical and sort of on time for once. Lets mark it, because it happens less often than it ought to, considering the number of advance copies I have of things!

Cover of I Shop, Therefore I A,m

I Shop, Therefore I Am is Mary Portas’s second memoir – I haven’t read the first, but I think this picks up where the first one ends – with Mary starting a new job in charge of window displays at Harvey Nichols. During her time there (which starts in the late 1980s), it transformed from a department store somewhere mostly patronised by older ladies from the Home Counties and in the shadow of their neighbour down the road Harrods, to a headline making store at the cutting edge of the fashion industry.

I grew up watching Absolutely Fabulous (not quite when if first came out, but not *that* long after that) and part of the joy of reading this is getting to see the impact that that show had on the store. But it’s also fascinating to see the mechanics of how the shop worked at a time which (in hindsight) was basically the heyday of the high street. I worked in retail for my first Saturday job was in a clothing store, but the behind the scenes of that was nothing like this – I was at a much lower level but also the clientele was very, very different. I also really liked Mary Portas’s writing style and her voice. She balances the day to day of what she was doing with fun gossipy insights into high fashion and celebrity. And she also seems incredibly normal and down to earth with it that it’s easy to forget that she was moving in really high powered circles until she suddenly mentions how upset they were when Princess Diana died because they all saw her in the store all the time, or when she gets Naomi Campbell to do her instore fashion show.

This is a really good read that would work whether you remember the time that Mary is talking about or not, but I think you’ll get different things out of it depending on whether you remember the time before internet shopping or not! It would also be a great Christmas book for someone who is interested in fashion.

My copy came from NetGalley, but it came out last week and I’m expecting to see it in all the bookshops ahead of the festive rush, especially because it made a bunch of the anticipated book lists earlier in the year. And of course it’s also in Kindle and Kobo.

Book of the Week, new releases, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Entitled

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I mean, I’d be shocked if any of you are surprised by today’s pick if you saw yesterday’s reading list, because I am somewhat predictable BUT this really lived up to the hype and is worth reading.

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York is a joint biography of Prince Andrew, Duke of York and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. It’s written by Andrew Lownie, whose previous book was The Traitor King (which I also read on a holiday!) but has also written about The Mountbattens and Guy Burges. Lownie says in the introduction that he asked the Duke and Duchess to participate in the book – who then tried to prevent the book from happening. He says he approached more than three thousand people as part of the process of writing this book, of whom only around a tenth responded. All of which is to say that he wants you to know that he’s really tried to get the whole picture about the couple. It’s a joint biography but it’s also a look at the way that the couple remain incredibly intertwined nearly 20 years after their divorce. Andrew of course was forced to retire from public life after his disastrous Newsnight interview in 2019, where he tried (and failed) to answer questions about his relationship with the paedophile former financier Jeffry Epstein.

Now you may have seen the headlines generated first by the serialisation ahead of publication, and then the think pieces afterwards about what it means for the future of the couple. Or of course the headlines this week when Sarah Ferguson was dropped by a series of charities after an email from her to Epstein emerged from after the time when she said she had cut all contact with him. And you may think that given all that, what is the point of reading the book, surely all the best bits are already out there.

Well. Yes, the biggest revelations are already out there, but I think reading the book really brings home the scale and volume of it all. And although a lot of the focus of scandal in recent years has been on him (and indeed the serialisation headlines), her behaviour is worth reading about too – according to this she’s a charming people person and great sales person, locked in a cycle of spending, debt and then grift and deals to try and bring it round to a point where she then repeats the pattern.

In The Traitor King, Lownie made a persuasive case that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were active and willing participants in the Nazi intrigues that surrounded them as part of a concerted effort to benefit themselves and improve their positions and I think it changed significantly the way that the couple are viewed. This isn’t changing the way that the Duke of York is perceived – it’s putting all the pieces together and adding in the background information to really cement the idea that he’s up to his neck in scandals around sex and money. And between the two of them – in Lownie’s telling – they present a big challenge for the British monarchy to deal with at a time when there are less and less “working” Royals and also perhaps less public fondness for the institution as a whole.

I bought my copy of Entitled at the airport but you should be able to get this basically everywhere – as long as they haven’t run out of copies. And at Birmingham last week, they only had copies in one of the bookshops (and as I said on Saturday I didn’t manage to get it in any of my pictures!) and not many of them. But I’ve seen it in any bookshop of any size that I’ve been into since early August, and it’s obviously in Kindle and Kobo and audiobook too – although those e-versions have already had a edit, which is a good reminder to us all that ebook files are changeable, and your hard copies are not – once you’ve bought the original version I mean.

Happy Reading!

books

Book of the Week: Breakneck

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Happy Tuesday everyone and today I have a non-fiction pick for you – and it’s a book that’s only come out in the last month or so, so I’m even timely for once!

Dan Wang is a Chinese-Canadian, who now works in academia in the US as a research fellow but who was previous a China analyst looking at the country’s technological capabilities while living and working in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Breakneck is his attempt to put all of this work into one place and to look at the differences between China and the US. He sees the US and China as fundamentally similar in some ways – but that China is an engineering state and the US is a lawyerly one. He says this isn’t a grand theory to explain everything but a framework to put the recent past in and to help understand what might happen next.

I found this really fascinating and illuminating and really liked Wang’s framework as a lens to view China and its relationship with the US through. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about China and trying to understand the current geopolitical situation as part of my day job so on a macro level this is interesting to me. But on a micro level, my little sister and her now husband moved to China in the summer of 2019 and I was really looking forward to visiting them and seeing China – and then the pandemic happened and they were stuck where they were and we were stuck where we were. They came back in 2021 and a lot of the stories that they have told me from their time in Beijing fit in with what is being set out here.

This is a really thought provoking book that is also a glimpse at China beyond the big cities that people outside of China have heard of. I don’t know enough about China to be able to analyse this on a scholarly level (duh!) but as a casual reader and consumer of world news it made a lot of sense to me!

My copy of Breakneck came via NetGalley, but it’s out now and hopefully should be relatively easy to get hold of if you’re in a bookshop with a decent non-fiction section. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, non-fiction

Book of the Week: White House by the Sea

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After last week’s Inauguration recommendsday, this week I’m back in the US presidential adjacent sphere with my BotW. It may have taken me a couple of weeks to read – but that’s because it’s a nice if US sized paperback and I didn’t want to wreck it by putting it in my work rucksack!

Kate Storey’s The White House by the Sea is a whistle stop tour through the history of the Kennedy family at Hyannis Port. Yes it’s more than 300 pages long, but that’s not a lot of pages to cover three and a bit generations of a very large family. That means that you’re not going to get lots of detail on everything that happens in the Kennedy family – but you don’t necessarily need to know all the details of everyone’s lives to follow it either.

You’ll probably find it easier if you know at least the main beats: Joe and Rose had a lot of children of whom Joe Jr died in World War Two, Kathleen died just after the war, JFK was assassinated while president, RFK was assassinated while running for president, Ted kept considering running for president and Rosemary was given a lobotomy. There are also a lot of grandchildren – many struggled in various ways to live up to their family’s legacy and some of them also died tragically young. There. That’s about all you need to follow the family’s love affair with this part of the Massachusetts coast – and the effect that it had on a small town that found itself at the centre of national attention because of its most famous residents.

Storey has conducted lots and lots of interviews with the people of Hyannis Port and those connected to the Kennedys so it does feel like you’re getting new insights into the subject. I’ve still got Ask Not on the to read pile, and will report back on that one too but this is certainly worth reading. I have long come to the conclusion that the Kennedy family wasn’t a great one to marry into, and nothing here has changed my mind but it remains fascinating to see the outsize impact of one family on America.

I got this one for Christmas and it’s probably going to be a special order job rather than a wander into the bookshop and find a copy book, but if you’re interested it’s worth it.

Happy Reading!

book round-ups, books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: US Presidents special

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As you may have noticed, the US presidency has changed hands this week, so for recommendsday this week, I have a few books – and other posts to point you at if you want a US politics fix. And I’ve even got a photo of the White House from my time in DC in 2018 to fancy it up a bit!

First of all, let me point you at my JFK adjacent post – which has got a whole lot of fiction and non fiction about the Kennedy family – and I’m currently reading even more on top of that with the White Hiuse by the Sea nearly finished and also Ask Not waiting on the pile. There’s also post I wrote for the first Trump Inauguration eight years ago, which has a bit of cross over too.

Then there’s Kate Anderson Brower who has written a lot about The White House and what it’s like to live there. There’s First Women, First in Line and Team of Five – about the wives of presidents, the vice presidents and the club of former presidents respectively – there’s a bit over overlap between them so maybe just pick the topic that interests you most.

And if you want a bit of lesser spotted presidential scandal, there’s also Rachel Maddow’s Bag Man about Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s disgraced VP.

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, books, non-fiction

Book of the Week: The Divorce Colony

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It’s Tuesday again and as I said yesterday we are hurling towards the end of the year and I’m trying to finish the Reading challenges. Today’s pick covered me off for South Dakota…

It is well know that laws in the US can vary from state to state. And most people have probably read a book or watched a movie where someone goes to Reno for a quickie divorce, but what you might not have come across is the period in time where South Dakota was the location of choice for obtaining a divorce. April White’s The Divorce Colony looks at this time and some of the women who went to the frontier of the US to end their marriages.

This focuses on four society women who made the trip to Sioux Falls and the different challenges they faced. I found the women themselves fascinating as well as the quirks and tribulations of divorce laws. As social history it is fascinating and an illustration of how much has not changed as well as how much has.

My copy has is a hardback, and it’s probably going to be a special order and the Kindle price has dropped since I bought a hard copy!

Happy Reading!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: October Quick Reviews

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There are not many of these this month I’m afraid, largely because I’ve read a lot of books from series, including a complete re-read of Lily Bard, but also because I read a few things that I didn’t like and don’t really want to write about either! But you’ve got two, so that’s something, and they’re both non-fiction, so maybe I should say it’s a non-fiction special and style it out? Except I’ve told you that now so it doesn’t really work does it?

Murder: The Biography by Kate Morgan*

This is a really interesting and incredibly readable look at the legal history of the crime of murder in England and how the statute has developed and evolved over time. It picks out the key cases that have shaped the law’s application – some of which you will have heard of, others you may not. If you’re a reader of crime fiction, this is really interesting – as you can see the development of things that you’ve seen in classic murder mysteries but in real cases. It also includes the development of corporate murder and manslaughter statutes and their success (or lack thereof) in the latter half of the twentieth century. Interesting and thought provoking.

Unruly by David Mitchell

I saw someone somewhere describe this as “Horrible Histories for grownups” and I think that’s not a bad comparison. This is a look at the Kings and Queens of England from King Arthur until the death of Elizabeth I from the comedian and actor (and history graduate) David Mitchell. It’s quite sweary at times and it’s full of pop culture/modern day references which I think is where that Horrible Histories comparison comes from, but I think it’s also got some comparators in the podcast world – with things like You’re Dead to Me and Even the Rich – as well as some stand-up comedy that goes on. I enjoyed it, and I learned a few things – mainly because it focuses on the early kings more than the later ones who are the ones I usually read about!

And there you go, that’s your two – they wouldn’t make bad Christmas books if you buy those for the people in your life and Unruly is in proper paperback now (as opposed to airport paperback like my copy) too so it’s more stocking sized now as well.

Happy Reading!