July non-fiction round-up
This month, Bookhugger’s publishers have a wide-ranging selection of non-fiction titles – from classical, pop and jazz music to exploration in hot and cold extremes, from a must-read history of philosophy to observations on the soul-sapping world of work, and countries in economic and environmental crisis.
Stranger to History, by Aatish Taseer
As a child, all Aatish Taseer ever had of his father was his photograph in a browning silver frame. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his father, a Pakistani Muslim, remained a distant figure. It was a fractured upbringing which left Aatish with many questions about his own identity. Stranger to History is the story of the journey Aatish made to try to understand what it means to be Muslim in the twenty-first century. Starting from Istanbul, Islam’s once greatest city, he travels to Mecca, its most holy, and then home through Iran and Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father’s home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Aatish’s own divided family over the past fifty years.
Learning to Live, by Luc Ferry
From the ordered universe of the ancient Greeks to the shadows of Nietzsche’s nineteenth century, Learning to Live shakes the dust from the history of philosophy and takes us on a fascinating journey through more than two millennia of humanity’s search for understanding — of the world around us and of each other. Both a sparkling and accessible history of Western thought, and a courageous dissection of how religion and philosophy have converged and clashed through the ages, Luc Ferry’s blueprint for a new humanism challenges every one of us to learn to think for ourselves, and asks us the most important question of all: how can we live better?
Ship of Fools, by Fintan O’Toole
Between 1995 and 2007, the Republic of Ireland was the worldwide model of successful adaptation to economic globalisation. The success story was phenomenal: a doubling of the workforce; a massive growth in exports; a GDP that was substantially above the EU average. Ireland became the world’s largest exporter of software and manufactured the world’s supply of Viagra.
The factors that made it possible for Ireland to become prosperous – progressive social change, solidarity, major State investment in education, and the critical role of the EU – were largely ignored as too sharply at odds with the dominant free market ideology. The Irish boom was shaped instead into a simplistic moral tale of the little country that discovered low taxes and small government and prospered as a result. There were two big problems. Ireland acquired a hyper-capitalist economy on the back of a corrupt, dysfunctional political system. And the business class saw the influx of wealth as an opportunity to make money out of property. Aided by corrupt planning and funded by poorly regulated banks, an unsustainable property-led boom gradually consumed the Celtic Tiger.
This is, as Fintan O’Toole writes, ‘a good old-fashioned jeremiad about the bastards who got us into this mess’. It is an entertaining, passionate story of one of the most ignominious economic reversals in recent history.
Franklin, by Andrew Lambert
From ‘the outstanding naval historian of his generation’ (David Cannadine), a gripping story of the Arctic, propelled by the need to recover the truth about one man’s fatal mission.
In 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin led a large, well equipped expedition to complete the conquest of the Canadian Arctic: to find the fabled North West Passage connecting the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. Yet Franklin, his ships and men were fated never to return. The cause of their loss remains a mystery.
Shocked by the loss of all 129 officers and men, and sickened by reports of cannibalism, the Victorians re-created Franklin as a brave Christian hero who laid down his life, and those of his men. Later generations have been more sceptical about Franklin and his supposed selfless devotion to duty. But does either view really explain why this outstanding scientific navigator found his ships trapped in pack ice seventy miles from the magnetic north?
Andrew Lambert re-examines the life and the evidence with his customary brilliance and authority. He discovers a new Franklin: a character far more complex, and more truly heroic, than previous histories have allowed.
The Blue Moment, by Richard Williams
There have been many books about Miles Davis, one of the twentieth century’s most protean musical figures, but The Blue Moment is unlike any other work on the subject.
Richard Williams takes as his starting point the making of Kind of Blue, Davis’s most celebrated album, and shows how movements in art, philosophy and music fed into this meditative, melancholy masterpiece, first released in 1959. The haunting palettes of Picasso, Matisse and Yves Klein influenced the mood of a culture that valued the colour blue so highly; and the blues, mediated by jazz and other kinds of music, had become the sound that signified ‘coolness’.
Williams tells the story of album’s creation in miraculously few hours in a converted Manhattan church and elegantly sketches the roles of the other five musicians who played on the recording. This is then the foundation for an ambitious exploration of Kind of Blue’s influence on the whole course of late-twentieth-century music, which moves in surprising directions through the labyrinth of sound.
Davis’s album was profoundly influential on his bandmate John Coltrane, and they both haunted the avant-garde composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Lamonte Young, who in turn were responsible for transmitting that influence into rock music, touching artists as diverse as John Cale and the Velvet Underground, The Who, Soft Machine, Brian Eno and early Roxy Music, and Talking Heads and U2. The Allman Brothers reworked passages from Kind of Blue in their long improvised jams; and the Grateful Dead’s extended concert performances owed much to that strain of jazz. James Brown’s most copied riff, from ‘Cold Sweat’, was a reworking of ‘So What’.
Richard Williams traces the echoes of Davis’s creation in the enduring success of the German ECM label, whose reverberant, brooding sound has defined the work of Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and Jan Garbarek, and in the static, minimalist music of bands such as Supersilent and The Necks.
This is a beautifully crafted journey through some of the most important music of our time.
Why Mahler?, by Norman Lebrecht
A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, his music offers more than the usual listening satisfactions. Many believe it has the power to heal emotional wounds and ease the pain of death. Others struggle with the intellectual fascination of its contradictory meanings. Long, loud and seldom easy, his symphonies are used to accompany acts of mourning and Hollywood melodramas. Sometimes dismissed as death-obsessed, Mahler is more alive in the twenty-first century than ever before.
Why Mahler? Why does a Jewish musician from a land without a name capture the yearnings and anxieties of post-industrial society? Is it the music, is it the man, or is it the affinity we feel with his productive peak – a decade when Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Joyce and Mahler reconfigured the ways we understand life on earth?
In this highly original account of Mahler’s life and work, Norman Lebrecht – renowned writer, critic and cultural commentator – explores the Mahler Effect, a phenomenon that reaches deep into unsuspecting lives, altering the self-perceptions of world leaders, finance chiefs and working musicians. Part biography, part travelogue, part hitchhiker’s guide, Why Mahler? is a multilayered exploration of the role that his music plays as the soundtrack to our lives.
When a Billion Chinese Jump, by Jonathan Watts
When a Billion Chinese Jump tells the story of China’s – and the world’s – greatest crisis. With filthy water, choking emissions and an unsustainable appetite for resources, China’s development has taken our planet to the environmental edge. Now it faces a stark choice that will affect us all: accept catastrophe or make radical change.
To explore the response, award-winning correspondent Jonathan Watts travels from mountain paradise to blasted desert, through eco-cities, coal mines and industrial wastelands, examining the challenges facing those at the top of society and the problems and hopes of those below.
His travelogue will interest anyone concerned with economic development, energy security, globalisation or climate activism. At heart, it is not a call for panic, but an expression of hope that – despite political constraints – individual choices can make a difference.
Consistently attentive to human detail, Watts vividly portrays the diversity of a country too often viewed as a faceless machine. No reader of his book – no consumer in the world – can be unaffected by what he presents.
Thank You For the Days, by Mark Radcliffe
Approaching 50, Mark Radcliffe decided to write about his life, most importantly, his time in music. But crucially, he only wanted to write about the most interesting days and not the dull ones in between. With predictable good taste, Mark takes his title from the Kinks’ song and has written an entertaining, funny book worthy of such a pedigree.
Mark’s family life is covered by ‘The Day My Mother Hit Me With a Golf Club’ , his school life by ‘The Day I Ruined a Perfectly Good Suit’ and ‘The Day I Got My First Guitar’; through his epiphany of the power of music in ‘The Day I Met the Band Who Changed My Life’ and his star struck meeting with childhood hero, David Bowie. Many other stars are covered too, for example in ‘The Day I Went to Kate Bush’s House for Cheese Flan’, and ‘The Day Mick Jagger Was Taller Than Me’. He’s very funny when recounting his days working at the BBC in ’80s and ’90s (how, when bored, he and colleagues invented a fictional department), winning Stars in Their Eyes as Shane MacGowan and so on. Yet, among the laughter are more sober days, such as the one when he learned John Peel had died.
A cracking read and a potted history of both one man’s life and his love affair with music, Thank You For The Days is a uniquely entertaining memoir that will appeal not just to music fans but to connoisseurs of British popular culture.
The Lost City of Z, by David Grann
David Grann ventures into the hazardous wild world of the Amazon to retrace the footsteps of the great Colonel Fawcett and his followers, in a bracing attempt to solve one of the greatest mysteries. It is an irresistibly readable adventure story, a subtle examination of the strange and often violent encounters between Europeans and Amazonian tribes and a tale of lethal obsession.
Daughter of Dust, by Wendy Wallace
Leila understands from early on that she is not part of normal Sudanese society. Her parents are unable to care for her, so she is banished to a strict orphanage, along with children born outside marriage. At school, Leila and her best friend Amal are called ‘daughters of sin’. Her pretty sister, Zulima, is married off to a much older man, while the nannies say an abandoned girl is lucky to get an offer of marriage at all. At the age of ten, both Leila and Amal endure female circumcision. Suffering appalling prejudice, and thought to bring the ‘evil eye’, Leila remains outgoing and brave and manages to get an education. She goes on to marry, have four children, and divorce, yet even grown up she continues to know the stigma of being abandoned.
Undaunted, Leila founds her own charity to help those shunned as outcasts and she continues to work tirelessly to dispel prejudice. This beautifully written, graceful memoir perfectly evokes the heat and colour of the North African desert and tells of the true friendships that are born out of adversity.
The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, by Tony Schwartz
Through his years of intensive work consulting to companies including Procter & Gamble, Sony, Toyota, Microsoft, Ford and Ernst & Young, with his firm The Energy Project, Schwartz has developed a powerful program for changing the way we are working that greatly boosts our engagement and our satisfication with our work and increases our performance. In this book he marshalls a wide range of powerful evidence from business research and psychology that shows that the current model of work — in which people are treated essentially as machines that should be able to perform at top speed for extraordinarily long hours, be able to multi-task, be always accessible and online, withstand often harsh and emotionally punishing treatment, and be primarily driven by the need to make profits – is not only not optimal, it is specfically counter-productive because it saps us of our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy.
In order for us to perform at our best, we must make a set of key changes in our work lives — and in order to develop the full potential of their work force, our managers and companies must institute changes that will provide us with the regular physical renewal, emotional reward, mental focus and stimulation; and sense of purpose and significance that we need.
