Casey Cep (2019)

A biography of a book that was never actually written. Actually also the biography of at least two people who never met but nonetheless interacted strongly, one an alleged multiple murderer and one a notable novelist.

Harper Lee returned to the area where she grew up to research and study the case of Willie Maxwell, a sometime preacher and woodsman who was himself murdered at the funeral of the woman he himself was strongly suspected of murdering – and whose murderer walked free despite his confession and the abundant eye witnesses. It’s a compelling story, and it’s a tragedy that Lee never in fact published the book she devoted years to creating.

It’s easy to hear the echoes of In Cold Blood, both in Lee’s endeavours and in this text. It’s gripping and fast-paced, and inhabits the Alabama land where the action occurs just as much as Capote inhabited rural Kansas. It’s amazing that such an engaging book can be constructed from events that are essentially lacking in any conclusions: we don’t know Maxwell’s guilt for sure, nor Lee’s intentions of how to tell the story, so the book rests entirely on process and location, and very much succeeds.

4/5. Finished Tuesday 29 March, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Carole Hooven (2021)

Testosterone is perhaps the only hormone with a personality, one that’s often blamed when violent things happen. It’s interesting to see a “biography” of it that’s so grounded in the biochemistry and the limits of what’s experimentally verifiable. The fact that testosterone is entwined into so many fates of growth and development makes it a hard subject for study.

One aspect that jumped out at me was the extent to which evolution creates mechanisms that are the opposite of engineered, for example having the same hormone control several systems that are to some extent in competition, or create systems that run-away without being inhibited (rather than stay quiescent without being stimulated).

Grounding to firmly in the biochemistry is also a weakness too, though: it’s a little too reductionist, a little too fast to dismiss psychology and how testosterone might affect feeling, and therefore affect behaviour indirectly beyond the strict biochemical pathways. I can accept that psychology is a hard regime in which to do fully-grounded experiments: but that’s true for all complex systems, and so its perhaps better to go looking for the general shapes of behaviour rather than focus so much on the details – and dismiss out of hand areas where these studies can’t be performed.

3/5. Finished Monday 28 March, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Sarah Rainsford

Perhaps slightly mis-named: the sub-title suggests that Sarah Rainsford saw a lot of Cuba in Fidel Castro’s time, whereas she actually arrived much later, as Raúl Castro’s reign was coming to an end and reforms were starting uncertainly to swirl. That’s a minor point, though, and this is a well-described and insightful autobiography, full of colour and the thoughts and feelings of modern Cubans that only a really dedicated journalist can extract.

This being a book about Cuba, Graham Greene is also part of the cast, as are several or his contemporaries. Re-visiting Greene’s haunts and the places that he used in writing Our Man in Havana shows the changes that have occurred in high relief, as socialism swept away the old regime without really creating anything substantial to replace it.I think reading this book really helps to understand Greene’s work better.

3/5. Finished Friday 25 March, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Nina Jankowicz (2020)

Very topical (I’m writing this during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine), an exploration of how the information space has become a theatre of conflict, whether in a hot or a cold war. The author works in communications, and has a detailed grasp of the ways in which readers and viewers can be manipulated using media. Her central thesis is that the existing fractures in a society can be widened and exploited by a clever and resourceful aggressor, and used to shape belief and behaviour – but also, more importantly, to destroy individuals’ trust in information itself, and to diminish their participation in their own society. This in turn opens-up the way for tiny fringe groups to achieve outsized influence, by suppressing the participation of the majority. It’s a frustrating dynamic, not least because the remedies are elusive: one can’t adopt the tactics of the disruptors without further contributing to collapsing trust, but approaches based on evidence seem doomed to fail when they can be attacked without limit.

Jankowicz is especially revealing about the importance of locally-grown elements to propaganda managed from abroad, whether by knowing agents or (more effectively) by “useful idiots” who spread the disruptive talking points. Reading this book sharpens your sensitivity to these things, and I’ve seen it happening even with respected figures during the current conflict.

4/5. Finished Friday 11 March, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Robert Jordan (1990)

A book I wanted to like, but didn’t. I found it slow and mired in stereotypes despite the protagonists including several very strong and powerful women and societies of women. It didn’t work as well as it could have done.

There’s also a stylistic element that I found frustrating. The story, and the history of the world, are revealed as they’re learned by the young-adult central characters, who are sufficiently rural and provincial to not have know much of it before. As a style it means that the reader shares their ignorance (and emerging knowledge) – but also means that events often only make sense in retrospect (or not at all). Perhaps this is a semi-realistic take on how the “quest” narrative would actually be experienced from the inside, but it doesn’t enhance the storytelling.

2/5. Finished Friday 4 March, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)