The Longest Way Home

Title: The Longest Way Home

Author: Andrew McCarthy

Number of pages: 288

Started: 20 February 2013

Finished: 1 March 2013

Opening words:

“Are you awake?” Something in the tone of the voice cut through to my sleeping brain.

“Coming,” I called back.

“What time is it? D murmured.

“Four fifteen.  We’re late.”  The night was still black.  The canvas flapped in a dry breeze.  I grabbed our bags, pulled at the zipper, and we were out.  We slashed along a path through the dry bush lit by a waning moon, loaded into the jeep, and were gone in minutes.  Occasionally at the edges of the beam of light cast by the single working headlamp, a pair of shining red eyes was briefly lit in the darkness.  We bounced on over the dirt track and after half an hour we came to a locked gate.  From somewhere in the night a man appeared and opened it, and we drove into the Chitengo compound.  A few limp fluorescent lights lit the area.  A small young man grabbed our bags and threw them into the back of a decrepit minivan – the kind that are the lifeblood of Africa.  He jumped behind the wheel; we climbed into the backseat.

Plot summary:

Andrew McCarthy explores the tumultuous, complicated, and circuitous route he's travelled to finally settle down with one woman, whom he married last August. Telling this story through the lens of a series of seven exotic trips he's recently taken all over the world (Patagonia, the Amazon, Costa Rica, Baltimore, Vienna, Kilimanjaro, Galway), he'll write about his wanderlust-and other lusts-and connect his obsession with travel with his phobia of commitment. The story will culminate with one of the most momentous-and terrifying-days of his life: his wedding day. A thoughtfully observant writer, McCarthy touches on his personal life, his acting career, and his fascination with travel in a truly captivating manner. Genuine and spirited, The Longest Way Home is the fascinating story of how one man's insight into his relationships with both the people closest to him and the places very new to him allowed him to fully commit to another person.

What I thought:

In my youth, I was a big fan of Andrew McCarthy.  I was therefore really pleased to see that he had written a book.  It sort of falls into the biography genre, but is not a retelling of his Brat Pack days or stardom.  Instead, it primarily focusses around his world travels and his relationship with his partner – where these two things came together and where they diverged. 

I found the book very readable and I liked his reflections on the past and the present.  In many ways, it was quite a gentle book, but it was also quite insightful.

This is not a book about glitz and glamour, but is instead about facing our demons and finding our place in the world.  A good book.

The End of Your Life Book Club

Title: The End of Your Life Book Club

Author: Will Schwalbe

Number of pages: 352

Started: 11 December 2012

Finished: 20 December 2012

Opening words:

We were nuts about the mocha in the waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's outpatient care center. The coffee isn't so good, and the hot chocolate is worse. But if, as Mom and I discovered, you push the "mocha" button, you see how two not-very-good things can come together to make something quite delicious. The graham crackers aren't bad either.  

Plot summary:

Mary Anne Schwalbe is waiting for her chemotherapy treatments when Will casually asks her what she's reading. The conversation they have grows into tradition: soon they are reading the same books so they can have something to talk about in the hospital waiting room. Their choices range from classic (Howards End) to popular (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), from fantastic (The Hobbit) to spiritual (Jon Kabat-Zinn), with many in between. We hear their passion for reading and their love for each other in their intimate and searching discussions.

What I thought:

This non-fiction book chronicled the relationship between a mother and her son as they attended her hospital appointments following her diagnosis with pancreatic cancer.  They used that time to discuss books and it developed into a book club - consisting of the two of them.

It was a touching read and a tribute of sorts to Mary Anne Schwalbe, although I suspect it is down to the individual reader to decide whether she was a saint, a control freak or something in between.  I enjoyed the book recommendations and the insight into the mother-son relationship.  This could have been somewhat of a depressing book, but actually it was rather heart-warming and provided food for thought and book inspiration.

Shakespeare's Restless World

Title: Shakespeare’s Restless World

Author: Neil MacGregor

Number of pages: 336

Started: 24 September 2012

Finished: 29 September 2012

Opening words (from chapter 10):

For centuries, Scottish ships set sail from Leith pier near Edinburgh to make the perilous journey over the North Sea to the European mainland and to the wider world beyond; it was from Leith pier that Scotland faced the world. In the autumn of 1589, a young Scot undertook the dangerous voyage from Leith to Norway and Denmark, returning the following spring. This young man was James VI, King of Scotland, and his ship was beset by such terrible storms that it nearly perished. James came to believe that the storms were more than just the usual bad Scottish weather. They were the work of evil Scottish witches.

ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
ALL: Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Shakespeare opens Macbeth by bringing us face to face with three extremely dangerous Scottish witches. Throughout the play these Weird Sisters cause mayhem on land and sea, and it was probably this kind of malevolent witchly chaos that lay behind the building of a finely crafted ship put on display in Leith towards the end of the sixteenth century, and now kept in the National Museum of Scotland.

Plot summary:

Shakespeare lived through a pivotal period in human history. With the discovery of the New World, the horizons of Old Europe were expanding dramatically - and long-cherished certainties were crumbling. Life was exhilaratingly uncertain. What were Londoners thinking when they went to see Shakespeare's plays? What was it like living in their world? Here Neil MacGregor looks at twenty objects from Shakespeare's life and times, and uncovers the fascinating stories behind them.

The objects themselves range from the grand (such as the hoard of gold coins that make up the Salcombe treasure) to the very humble, like the battered trunk and worn garments of an unknown pedlar. But in each case, they allow MacGregor to explore issues as diverse as piracy and Islam, Catholicism and disguise. MacGregor weaves the histories of objects into the words of Shakespeare's plays themselves to suggest to us where his ideas about religion, national identity, the history of England and the world, human nature itself, may have come from. The result is a fresh and thrilling evocation of Shakespeare's world.

What I thought:

I don’t generally read much non-fiction, but gave this book a go.  It is a book that through a series of objects describes what influenced Shakespeare’s writing and his audiences. 

It was a good read, although some chapters were better than others.  MacGregor was like an old friend guiding the reader through a world of social history.  Very readable – although a few of the chapters didn’t seem entirely worthy of inclusion because they were about things that don’t feature in Shakespeare’s plays.  I suspect a lot of things would meet that criteria.  It was interesting though and there were lots of pictures to illustrate the points that were being made.  Accessible history.

Tickling the English

Title: Tickling the English

Author: Dara O’Briain

Number of pages: 310

Started: 7 March 2012

Finished: 12 March 2012

Opening words:

It was about one in the morning. I was in the passenger seat of a rented car on the M4. The car was being driven by a man called Damon. We were heading back to London after I’d done a gig at a theatre called the Playhouse in Weston-super-Mare.

The night had been a huge success, thanks mainly to the audience, who were chatty and interactive. In particular, there was a man called Chris who had an answer for everything. He told us how his appendix ‘went away’. He told us about the game he plays with his step-son where he lays a hammock on the ground and attaches one end of it to his car, the other to a tree. Then he accelerates away, tautening up the hammock and firing his step-son into the air.

Read a longer extract here.


Plot summary:

Nostalgia, identity, eccentricity, gin drinking and occasional violence... these are just some of the themes that stand-up comedian Dara O’Briain explores in Tickling the English.

O’Briain moved to England many years ago, but when he takes his show on tour around the country - from deserted seaside towns and remote off-shore islands, to sprawling industrial cities and sleepy suburbs - it's clear to him that his adopted home is still a bit of an enigma.

Why do the English pretend to be unhappy all the time?

Why can't they accept they rank about 5th, in everything?

And what's with all the fudge?

But this Irishman loves a challenge; he's certainly got the gregarious personality and the sure-fire wit to bring down the barriers of that famous English reserve, and have a good old rummage inside. Swapping anecdotes with his audiences and spending time wandering in their hometowns, this nosy neighbour holds England up to the light while exploring some of the attitudes he brought over here with him too.

As Dara goes door-to-door in search of England in this part tour diary, part travelogue, the result is an affectionate, hilarious and often eye-opening journey through the Sceptred Isle.

What I thought:

I like Dara O’Briain and am in fact going to see him at the Hammersmith Apollo later in the year. This book gave his observations about the English picked up from touring around the country (and to Ireland). The book was amusing, although not generally laugh out loud funny. I liked his observations about the English, although I suspect if I was of a difficult political persuasion, I might not have been quite so enamoured with what he said. I think there is a lot of truth in what he said about how we will always find the negative in even the best of news – and this reminded me why I often don’t bother to read newspapers.

It was a decent enough read, but Dara O’Briain on the stage is more amusing than on paper.

Unreliable Sources

Title: Unreliable Sources

Author: John Simpson

Number of pages: 562

Started: 14 February 2012

Finished: 23 February 2012

Opening words:

Reporting is an art form which has sometimes been mistaken for a science. People who read the news in the paper or on a website, who listen to a radio bulletin or watch television news, usually imagine they are getting something close to the truth. Instead, they are merely getting something approaching the truth. Anybody who has witnessed an event, and then come across a news report of it afterwards, knows how inaccurate the reporting can be. There are mistakes of fact, of understanding, of interpretation. Journalists are like portrait painters: their work will be accurate and fair, or inaccurate and distorted, according to their individual capability.


Plot summary:

Through many decades of groundbreaking journalism, John Simpson has become not only one of the most recognisable and trusted British personalities, but has transferred his skill to books with multiple bestselling success. With his new book he turns his eye to how Great Britain has been transformed by its free press down the years. He shows how, while the press likes to pretend it's independent, they have enjoyed the power they have over the events they report and have at times exercised it irresponsibly. He examines how it changed the world and changed itself over the course of the last hundred years, from the creation of the Daily Mail and the first stokings of anti-German sentiment in the years leading up to the First World War, to the Sun's propping up of the Thatcher government, and beyond. In this self-analysis from one of the pillars of modern journalism some searching questions are asked, including whether the press can ever be truly free and whether we would desire it to be so.

What I thought:

When I started this book, I struggled a bit to get into it. I think it was in part because I wasn’t necessarily that familiar with some of the people John Simpson was referring to. However, I soon warmed to it and found it really interesting to see how the press has evolved (or not…).

I particularly started to enjoy the book when it moved on to the Wallace Simpson era, perhaps because this is a period of history I am more familiar with. The whole book was a really interesting insight though, and gave a rather concerning sense of how sceptical we should be about what we read in the papers – some things are just made up, others are misreported and others are given as seemingly first hand accounts from people who weren’t even there.

The papers that came out the best were the Guardian and the Telegraph, and it has certainly confirmed my thinking about some of the daily offerings. It was a good, although not entirely easy read that gave a really informative view of how the media shapes us and the world around us.

Yes Man

Title: Yes Man

Author: Danny Wallace

Number of pages: 416

Started: 25 January 2012

Finished: 2 February 2012

Opening words:

In twenty minutes it would be midnight. I was standing in the rain outside the house of a rich banker in Las Vegas.

I checked my pockets. I had everything I needed. The photos. They keys to the car. The silver pocket watch.

Most importantly, I had the gun.

Because I had been asked to kill a man.

And I had said “yes”


Plot summary:

The amazing tale of what happens when you decide to say... YES

What I thought:

This book was one man’s attempt to say “yes” to life. Danny Wallace is someone that I like and I have enjoyed his TV programmes. However, I had mixed feelings about this book. I accept that for this new way of living to work, he had to say yes to everything, but I found it somewhat frustrating that he showed no discernment and embraced any scam offered to him. There is having a hopeful outlook on life, and being a bit of an idiot. This book walked that fine line.

Ultimately, I thought a willingness to say yes won through as showing that life has more opportunities, the more open to them we are, and ultimately he won much more than he lost. I am not sure it is a life that should be embraced quite to whole-heartedly as this though – or perhaps I just need to say yes more.

The Psychopath Test

Title: The Psychopath Test

Author: Jon Ronson

Number of pages: 292

Started: 14 October 2011

Finished: 21October 2011

Opening words:

This is a story about madness. It begins with a curious encounter at a Costa Coffee shop in Bloomsbury, Central London.

It was the Costa where the neurologists tended to go, the University College London School of Neurology being just around the corner. And here was one now, turning onto Southampton Row, waving a little self-consciously at me. Her name was Deborah Talmi. She looked like someone who spent her days in laboratories and wasn’t used to peculiar rendezvous with journalists in cafes and finding herself at the heart of baffling mysteries. She had brought someone with her. He was a tall, unshaven, academic-looking young man. They sat down.

‘I’m Deborah,’ she said.
‘I’m Jon,’ I said.
‘I’m James,’ he said.
‘So,’ I asked. ‘Did you bring it?’

Deborah nodded. She silently slid a package across the table. I opened it and turned it over in my hands.

‘It’s quite beautiful,’ I said.

Read the first chapter here.

Plot summary:

This is a story about madness. It all starts when journalist Jon Ronson is contacted by a leading neurologist. She and several colleagues have recently received a cryptically puzzling book in the mail, and Jon is challenged to solve the mystery behind it. As he searches for the answer, Jon soon finds himself, unexpectedly, on an utterly compelling and often unbelievable adventure into the world of madness.

Jon meets a Broadmoor inmate who swears he faked a mental disorder to get a lighter sentence but is now stuck there, with nobody believing he’s sane. He meets some of the people who catalogue mental illness, and those who vehemently oppose them. He meets the influential psychologist who developed the industry standard Psychopath Test and who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are in fact psychopaths. Jon learns from him how to ferret out these high-flying psychopaths and, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, heads into the corridors of power...


Find out more about the book here.

What I thought:

I was interested to see what this book had to say about psychopathy. I knew it wasn’t an academic text, but anecdote and a form of investigative journalism can be a more accessible route into getting an understanding of such things if you are a lay reader.

The book had potential, and the tale of people such as “Ton” a prisoner in Broadmoor, was intriguing. But I did end up wondering what the purpose of this book was, and I wasn’t entirely that the author knew the answer to this question himself. The main bulk of the book was about psychopathy, but the second half of the book rather drifted from topic to topic and didn’t seem to be very coherent. There felt like there was some crow-barring of subjects into the overall premise of the book. Seeing where David Shayler has ended up is interesting, but I am not sure I necessarily saw a direct connection to the main subject. He appears to be someone suffering from some form of delusion, but not really a psychopath. Then there was a discussion about how a million children in the US are on bipolar medication. A concerning statistic and possibly based on inaccurate diagnosis, but not really relevant to the main topic. I thought the book rambled towards the end and lacked direction. An interesting read, but not a very coherent book.

Point of Departure

Title: Point of Departure

Author: James Cameron

Number of pages: 312

Started: 8 April 2011

Finished: 15 April 2011

Opening words:

I cannot remember when these curious moments of suspense first began, when I would find myself unanchored and adrift in the dark groping for clues as to where I was. Sometimes, indeed, even who I was. These moments came, and still come, at the exact transition between sleep and awakening, lying on the edge of uncertainty: what is this bed, where is this room, what lies beyond it – Egypt, Engalnd, Berlin, Jerusalem, Moscow, Minneapolis, Peking; there have been so many places, and any of them could be the background of this vacuum.

Plot summary:

Reportage resists easy definition and comes in many forms - travel essay, narrative history, autobiography - but at its finest it reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This new series, hailed as 'a wonderful idea' by Don DeLillo, both restores to print and introduces for the first time some of the greatest works of the genre. The classic memoir by one of the great British journalists of the twentieth century, a man who earned universal respect not only for his courage in reporting from dangerous places, but for his candour and independence. "Point of Departure" features Cameron's eyewitness accounts of the atom bomb tests at Bikini atoll, the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the war in Korea; and vivid evocations of his encounters with Mao Tse-tung and Winston Churchill.

What I thought:

This is the first non-fiction book I have read for ages. It was the account of a journalist, James Cameron, who was mainly active post WWII to the 1970s. This meant that they were not periods of history that I have lived though, although some of them were familiar. I think because the book was not giving a perspective on things that I was particularly familiar with, it made the book less accessible/ relevant to me. I did not necessarily understand the politics that was beneath some of the things that happened or that Cameron reflected upon. But that said, it was a book that gave a unique perspective in some major points of history. He was there when atom bombs were dropped 9and became one of the founders of CND as a result). He was there to see Churchill when he was frail and expected to due imminently. For others with a more indepth view of history, I suspect they would have got more out of this than I did, but nonetheless it gave some fascinating insights into 20^th Century world history.

Operation Mincemeat

Title: Operation Mincemeat

Author: Ben Macintyre

Number of pages: 416

Started: 11 August 2010

Finished: 17 August 2010

Opening words:

"In the early hours of 10 July 1943, British, Commonwealth and American troops stormed ashore on the coast of Sicily in the first assault against Hitler’s “Fortress Europe”. With hindsight, the invasion of the Italian island was a triumph, a pivotal moment in the war, and a vital stepping stone on the way to victory in Europe."

Plot summary:

One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and certainly the strangest. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction, and saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different, in one crucial respect, from any spy before or since: he was dead. His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allied armies planned to invade Greece. The brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a brilliant Jewish barrister, the great hoax involved an extraordinary cast of characters including a famous forensic pathologist, a gold-prospector, an inventor, a beautiful secret service secretary, a submarine captain, three novelists, a transvestite English spymaster, an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing, and a dead Welsh tramp. Using fraud, imagination and seduction, Churchill's team of spies spun a web of deceit so elaborate and so convincing that they began to believe it themselves. The deception started in a windowless basement beneath Whitehall. It travelled from London to Scotland to Spain to Germany. And it ended up on Hitler's desk. Ben Macintyre, bestselling author of "Agent Zigzag", weaves together private documents, photographs, memories, letters and diaries, as well as newly released material from the intelligence files of MI5 and Naval Intelligence, to tell for the first time the full story of Operation Mincemeat.

What I thought:

I wanted to read this book because I saw a TV programme a while ago about this World War 2 hoax carried out by the Allies on the Axis powers. I found the idea of such a hoax, sanctioned at the highest level, fascinating.

This was a well written and interesting account of what took place. It was very readable and didn’t assume that you knew all the terminology, but equally didn’t patronise. I found some of the information in the book fascinating. For instance, apparently there were no German agents operating in Britain during the war. They were all caught and dealt with. That in itself was interesting enough. However, the Germans believed there was a network operating here because the British ran hundreds of fictitious German agents that they used to feed (false) intelligence back.

The hoax that this book unfolds was a really fascinating account of a major deception that helped to shape the outcome of the war. I really liked that people were able to come up with such elaborate plots and if they could persuade the right people, they could put it into action.

This story has been told in other ways primarily under the title of The Man Who Never Was, but this was a more extensive account than any of those previously because a number of parts of the story could not be revealed until relatively recently.

It’s possibly a bit more of a book for men, but I thought it was a book that showed British ingenuity under pressure at its best.

The Rules of Life

Title: The Rules of Life

Author: Richard Templar

Number of pages: 219

Started: 2 August 2009

Finished: 16 August 2009

Opening words:

For reasons that are too long and complicated to go into here, I had to live with my grandparents for a couple of years when I was very young. They, like many of their generation, were hard-working, contented sort of people. My grandfather had taken early retirement owing to an industrial accident (a lorry-load of bricks fell on his foot), and my grandmother worked in a large department store in London. Having me dumped unexpectedly on her for a while obviously caused logistical problems. I was too young for school, and my grandfather wasn't to be trusted to look after me at home (men didn't look after children in those days . . . my, how things have changed). Her solution was to tuck me under her wing—on some days physically as well as metaphorically, as she smuggled me past managers and supervisors—and we went to work together.

Now going to work with "Nan" was fun. I was expected to keep quiet and still for long periods and, because I didn't know any different, assumed this was normal. I found that by watching customers—often from my safe refuge under a huge desk—I could pass the time quite happily. Thus was born an immense appetite for people watching.


You can read a list of the Rules here

Plot summary:

Some people seem naturally good at it. Life that is. They seem to sail through, being successful and happy and everything always seems to fall into place. We all know a few of them - those rare people who are happy and positive and make things happen; they have a loving family, great relationships, a supportive network and work they enjoy; they generate goodwill wherever they go and always seem to know the right thing to do -- and then do it. They balance their lives without us ever seeing them frantically juggling, much less let it all drop in a mess on the floor. They are happy and successful, with diverse interests and a zest for life. How on earth do they do it? For most of us, some of the time life can be a bit of a struggle. People are difficult, things don't go our way, there's too much to deal with and we don't know how to make it all alright again. What is it that they know, that we don't? They know the Rules of Life. A simple set of principles that if followed, will hugely increase your chances of more things going your way, and that will guide you smoothly out of the tricky times when they happen. Rules of Work worked. Live the Rules of Life.

What I thought:

The first rule about Fight Club is that you never talk about Fight Club, and so it goes with the Rules of Life. Rule number one is that you never tell people that you have read the book. So clearly by reviewing this I am breaking the rules already…

I like things that help you to break down complex issues into its more simple parts, and I think it is fair to say that life can be quite complex. This book is not going to change the world, and it doesn’t claim to be able to do that, but it is a useful tool to maybe make you think about how you live your life – and if you can do it a bit better.

The style of the book will either suit you or it won’t and, as there are 100 rules, you need to be able to pick out the ones that are most relevant or can make the most difference in your own life. Personally, I think there is no harm (and in fact the potential for much good) to be reminded that we should maintain good manners (rule 38), that we should change what we can change and let go of the rest (rule 16) or that we should be nice to our partners (rule 53). If you look at those and think they are pretty obvious then ask yourself if you actually do it and if you don’t then this book is a gentle reminder that encourages you to actively think about these things.

Will it change my life? No, but it might make me a bit more considerate.

The Optimist

Title: The Optimist: One man’s search for the brighter side of life

Author: Laurence Shorter

Number of pages: 325

Started: 11 August 2009

Finished: 16 August 2009

Opening words:

PREFACE

Summer, 2006.

I was still in bed.
Sunlight beamed through the curtains, flickering as a neighbour’s car pulled out of the drive. I looked at the humps of my arms under the covers. They felt lethargic and heavy. A car revved up outside. I pictured the BMWs and Mercs along the street, beaded with dew, ready to be driven to their places of work by people who leapt out of bed every morning. How did they do it? I stared hopelessly at the ceiling.
What was wrong with me?

Plot summary:

When it comes to bad news, we’ve never had it so good.

Laurence Shorter is feeling anxious. Every time he opens a newspaper or turns on the radio he finds another reason to be tearful. It’s time to make a change. It’s time to be optimistic!

His plan is simple:
1. Learn how to jump out of bed in the morning.
2. Secure personal happiness.
3. Save the world.

The Optimist charts Shorter’s ambitious, year-long, international quest to seek out the world’s most positive thinkers, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jung Chang, Matthieu Ricard, California’s renowned Surfing Rabbi, and Bill Clinton. But optimism doesn’t come easy, and Shorter’s resolve is tested at every corner: by a flagging career, a troubled love affair, and his ever-pessimistic dad.

The Optimist is a hilarious and ultimately life-affirming stand against the grind of everyday strife, packed with reasons to be cheerful.

What I thought:

I was hoping for a somewhat light-hearted look at the nicer side of life. I can’t say that is how I would describe this book. I found it a somewhat self-indulgent quest for a man to try and get his somewhat unwilling female interest to go out with him. Along the way he spoke to lots of famous and not so famous people and then seemed to mock them a bit. I wasn’t very keen on that given that these people openly discussed their lives and philosophies and I felt that the author was slightly mocking them – or at least using what they said for comic effect. I am not sure that I like that trait.

I found the book a bit pointless and never really came to any conclusions so, like I said, I just found it quite self-indulgent.