Robert Burns: A Life

This book is Ian McIntyre's seminal biography of the Bard of Ayrshire, the one and only Rabbie Burns, arguably the most celebrated poet in history and an indisputably unique character. I won't give a potted summary here because if you're interested in Burns's life (which is a sparklingly glorious mess) you can read about it on Wikipedia, although I would much more recommend reading this book, as it is deeply scholarly, eminently readable, and thoroughly entertainingly insightful. It's taken me a while to finish reading this - for the past three years I've picked it up every January with the intention of using it as material to construct a properly-informed toast to the Bard's Immortal Memory on Burns Night, but either Covid lockdown prevented me from throwing a Burns Night or I simply didn't read it fast enough; but now finally I have finished it and used it to sketch a toast* that I think does justice to the legacy of this truly singular man. I highly recommend this book: it is a passionate but unbiased portrait of the artist, well placed into his historical context, and sheds a great deal of light upon the eternal qualities of the poetic life.

* I was going to use the sketch of my toast as the basis for this post, but then reflected that it would be a betrayal of the intimate event that Burns Night is; if you would have wanted to hear it you simply should have been there. Burns's character and legacy is so diverse that if this annoys you I implore that you should read this biography along with as many of the Bard's songs, poems, and letters as you can, and write and share your own for the same occasion, as at least then it will truly be your own toast.

Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes

This book, composed by Rob Wilkins based on autobiographical notes made by the subject, Terry Pratchett, is a brilliant biography. I won't say too much about his life or character as portrayed herein as in an early (post-wise) recommendation I think everyone should read this book - it's a heartfelt and complicated and beautiful image of the man who probably has done the most anyone has done for fantasy fiction since Tolkien, and I do not say that lightly.

    Wilkins's prose is passable enough but it's the pictures carried therein that really move this book to something brilliant - one really gets to know Pratchett in an intimate sense, from his childhood as an under-achiever to his unwanted death to dementia.* Some of the earlier chapters are genuinely idyllic - his lifestyle throughout the 1970's read to me like some kind of fantasy it was so much so. One also gets a thorough picture of the blue-collar attitude he took to the business of writing novels - perhaps most perfectly displayed in the discussion of when Pratchett took six months of sabbatical to rest his mind, and then following this when Wilkins (as was at the time his personal assistant) asked him what he did with his time off, Terry grumpily replied "I wrote two books." Further from this though is an image of a man with an insatiable aptitude for practical learning - even though he'd never done particularly well at school, Terry would take an interest in something and learn the skills to master it. From his room full of old hardware that he never dared throw away in case it might still prove useful to the brilliant story of how when he recieved a knighthood he bought a small knob of metal from a meteor, found a local blacksmith and learned himself how to smith metal, personally mined a bunch of iron, forged a sword using this iron and the meteor-metal he'd obtained, and got knighted using exactly that sword.** Basically the man was a living legend, full of so much humour and wisdom that I sincerely believe the Discworld series will survive for centuries to come.

    As already said, I would recommend this book to anyone. It's a lovely read. But if you are already a fan of Pratchett's work, or at all interested in the kind of character who could produce such diverse and prolific literature - this is a must-do.

* I will say that this book, especially in the latter chapters dealing with Pratchett's struggle with early-onset Alzheimer's, is a hardcore manifesto for the right to self-dying. The tragedy of everything that you are, that you know yourself to be, degrading as your body decays, is an abhorrence, and though before reading this I had qualms about it, since, I am fully on Terry's side and think that one should be able to of sound mind & heart choose the time & method of their exit from this world should they, their family, and their medical authorities foresee nothing left for them but loss and pain. After all, if there's one thing Terry taught us overall, it's that Death is a friendly dude just doing his job.

** Tangential I know, but as a D&D dungeon master I've always had it in my head that were I to plan a campaign set in a magical post-apocalyptic England, then 'Terry Pratchett's Meteor Sword' would have to be a legendary item. I haven't worked out its stats yet.

Jesus: A Biography from a Believer

This book by Christian and biographical historian Paul Johnson is an interesting little creature. I've just speed-read it because I'm giving it to my mum for her birthday and I wanted to check it was the kind of thing she'd find interesting and edifying.

   Honestly I'm not really sure who this book is for. Pretty much all of the biographical details are lifted directly from the Gospels,* which is fine and all considering it was written by a Christian, but it makes the book of little apologetic value for non-believer readers who may well doubt the veracity of the New Testament texts at face value; and for Christian readers adds nothing that was not already present in those same texts except maybe a sprinkling of vaguely-insightful commentary here and there. There are several fairly helpful passages explicating historical bits of contextual culture or politics or norms, but none of these are things the average Christian reader couldn't find in a halfway-decent study Bible, and none of it really goes far enough to be again of much apologetic value to non-Christian readers.

   All that said, it is nice to have the life of the Messiah straightened out without having to dive chapter-and-verse between four different books trying to assemble a chronology; instead Jesus's life story is organised more by thematic blocks; early life, miracles, teaching, conflict with religious leaders, crucifixion, and afterwards. I don't know who I'd recommend this book to honestly, which is a shame because Paul Johnson's biography of Socrates was incredibly illuminating. Sorry mum, I hope you like it anyway.

* He does make good mention of the fact that Jesus is included in the official non-Christian histories by both Tacitus and Josephus, but doesn't dig into this a whole lot and it's more just an off-the-cuff reference.

Phoebe

This book, a story* worked out of some hardcore biblical scholarship by Paula Gooder, is an innovative imagining of a snapshot of life in the early church, told through the eyes of a woman called Phoebe, who was a deacon of the church in Corinth and widely accepted as the person entrusted with the task of delivering Paul's letter to the Roman christians.

   I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped, largely down to the writing style. It has a chronic case of telling-not-showing, repeats chunks of character and plot information so often that in places it feels almost patronizing to readers' presumed memory or capacities for reading fiction, is painfully bland in places despite clear efforts to inject humour into some parts, and to top it all off the only character who doesn't come across as totally 2-D is Paul - who doesn't even feature in any single scene of the book** and is left as an enigmatic figure of communal who-know & hearsay.

   All that lit-snob pedantic savagery aside, I do completely understand and support her scholarly choice to minimize creative license in reconstructing a navigable 1st-century Rome & hypothesizing the personal history and context of Phoebe, and despite the poor execution of it in text I do think Paula Gooder has successfully spun a wholesome, believable, gospel-centred tale out of all her academic notes.**** I'd recommend this book to some folks - in fact having finished it I'm lending it straight to my mum - only if going into it with open expectations. I'm pretty confident that most people going in looking for a novel-type story will be rather disappointed, but people looking for a resource that helps engagingly flesh out Christian life in the context of the very young church, in particular the impact of Paul's pastoral theology on relationships across social divisions (slaves and freefolk, Jews and gentiles, etcetera) within the Christian community, then I think this book does actually provide a unique resource to help deeper imagine oneself into that.

* Not a novel. For which I'm happy to broadly forgive all complaints listed above regarding her narrative style.

** For both theological & historical reasons, I'm very glad this happened to also be the sole redeeming feature*** of the prose in and of itself.

*** Other than the gospel, obviously, which needless to say the story itself and numerous characters within it do strive to convey clearly and properly. But as great as evangelism in prose form is, Gooder can't take creative credit for coming up with the nub of that bit.

**** The story's 216 pages long for 85 pages of notes/references/etc. Hearty enough a ratio to wipe away any last expectations that this was a novel, don't you reckon?

A Philosophy of Walking

This book by Fréderic Gros is, as the title suggests, a philosophical stroll through the nature and psycho-biosocial mechanics of, and historically-significant figures associated with that simplest human means of locomotion. Or should I say perambulation? Probably. It deals in utter magnificently eloquent terms with the silences, solitudes, slownesses and strangely metaphysically inspiring spaces found when one walks: Nietzsche, Nerval, Rousseau, Kant, Rimbaud, Thoreau and Gandhi get their own chapters examining the purposes and uses of the "art" of pedestrian travel; I'm fairly sure the book was written as such that this shines through the text but it may be a facet of just my own over-egged poetic reading, that the book works even more fantastically than it presumably still does otherwise should one take the whole notional field of "walking" as the metaphor for the dogged, day-by-day, step-by-step human travel through their own life - I certainly found it yielded many insights personally that were not necessarily there in the text itself with a grasp of such in the halfway-back of my mind. I loved this book and you can very probably expect to see a second post on here about it in the years to come, on the inevitable re-read.

Socrates: A Man for Our Times

This book is a biography of western philosophy's foundational figure by Paul Johnson - and my goodness, is it excellent. Dealing with his ideas deftly, and embedded in their original contexts, he brings the man to life that even Plato barely manages to fumble; the picture painted of ancient Athens, the raw challenges of Socrates's credo that one's life should be examined, directed with meaning and purpose, that it is open at all points to moral or intellectual challenge for not living up to its own purported standards; his monotheism, his reputation as a soldier and athlete, and statesman of the democratic society - or how these images of the man were skewed by philosophers and playwrights toward ulterior political or cultural ends after his willing submission to the death penalty for his "blasphemies"; even his amusingly-sketched relationship with his overbearing wife and their life of happy poverty - this is historical biography done to perfection, thoroughly entertaining to read but you can virtually smell the rigour of research on every page and I learnt more about Socrates through this one book than in that whole module of ancient Greek philosophy that - actually, now thinking about it I didn't take when I was an undergrad... OK maybe I'm thinking of Keanu's refs, but you get the point. Anyway, one last punt - the subtitle; Johnson does throughout pepper the text with considerations of how the life & thought of Socrates parallels those of numerous other thinkers across the history of western life & thought - and though in my view didn't expand this as fully as I'd have liked to see does draw some really interesting contemporary application points out of it all. Definitely worth a read for anyone who's a fan of philosophy, history, or both.

Corbyn: the Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics

This book, a study of Jeremy Corbyn's unexpected landslide victory of the Labour Party's leadership race and its implications by Richard Seymour, is a riveting and challenging read. I bought it as a Fathers' Day present for my dad, whose interest in politics has been stirred by the resurgence of the meaningful alternative to neoliberal hegemony that Corbyn provides and that is increasingly becoming a powerful force in British politics: I took it to a festival he was lined up to speak at but given certain events this week (BREXIT) he's been facing even stronger than usual criticisms, culminating in Labour MPs calling for this democratically-elected suppported-by-majority-of-party-members highly-principled man to step down, and so he pulled out.
   To be honest I'm too disgusted with the British public at the current news to bother writing much reflection about this book. I'm just going to briefly say what it's about then rant a lot.
   Seymour is a keen historian and commentator, and while his left-wing bias does show through it's clear that he's not an unthinking Corbynista - the book delves into some deep scrutiny of problems with Labour and with British politics in general that have been developing for decades, and which Jeremy Corbyn is uniquely poised to try to change (or, as currently looks more likely, to fall victim to). There are incredibly complex and well-rooted defence mechanisms of the conservative establishment in British society, supported by the anti-intellectual culture and non-proportionally-representative structure of our 'democracy': Richard Seymour does an excellent job of walking us through the last few decades of the Labour Party, its slow and deliberate killing-off of grassroots working-class support through New Labour, its desperation for electability-at-all-costs dragging it relentlessly to the right, these two factors robbing Labour leaders of the possibility of countering the status quo and promoting social justice by establishing clear narratives about what is wrong with our societies and economies. Corbyn has been hounded, ridiculed, aggressively targeted by the government, by corportate powers, by the mainstream media, by vast swathes of Middle Englanders, and by his own party. I fully recognise that his leadership style is not the slick presidential one of Blair or Cameron, his voting record is led so consistently by principle above the whip and so many in Parliament distrust his capacity for uniting the party, his ideology is distinctively one of democratic socialism which (given neoliberal hegemony) it is fashionable to say is dead these days. He doesn't wear expensive suits or show adequate respect to monarchs whom, to be fair, he doesn't believe should exist in the privileged aristocratic vacuum that they do. But the Labour Party has been dying slowly for years (hence why self-indulgent liberal lefties like me often lend support elsewhere) - maybe our current state of affairs is so royally messed up that the advocation of peace and equality truly is 'completely unelectable'; nevertheless he has the mandate of Labour's members, and for the party to have spent the year since his election trying their best to oust him one way or another is a disgrace and makes a shambolic mockery of the British political left. How can we have enough solidarity to make meaningful gains against the conservative establishment if we can't accept an (admittedly quite boring but by pretty much everyone's account very nice) imperfect leader and make the best of having him in that position? Corbyn's leadership should prompt opportunities to completely challenge and change the way we do politics: both reframing narratives about social and economic issues to re-engage working-class voters with the political system and help them understand policies that will actually benefit them, as well as reforming the manner in which political conversation is held in the public eye to make it kinder, less grounded in tribal rhetoric, appealing to reason and people's propensity for goodness rather than stimulating fear and division. We somehow find ourselves in a Britain in which people trust Eton-Oxbridge-educated professional defenders of the privileged elite telling them that what's best for them are policy sets that anyone with a scrap of economic literacy should be able to tell are thinly-disguised entrenchments of that very same elite privilege. Yet on that same austerity-swallowing Brexit-voting island, a gentle bearded man, who wears cardigans knitted by him mum to the House of Commons, who has spent his entire adult life campaigning for social justice, for the poor, against war and racism and discrimination of all kinds, is reviled as a national traitor because of the angle at which he bowed at a memorial.
   Anyway. My own furiously bubbling intent to emigrate aside, this book is an excellent insight into the problems facing our contemporary democratic system and the Labour Party's place in it, putting Jeremy Corbyn into a context in which he is shown for what he is: an opportunity for real tangible change. Maybe he won't win a general election, maybe he will - but with the support of the Party and its members he is the perfect leader to reshape the way in which British politics occurs, and shift its parameters to the left. This is something definitely achievable, and of urgent importance in our political climate, where the gap between rich and poor continues to grow and far-right sentiments boil into personifications like Nigel Farage who have contributed to a normalisation of xenophobia. Richard Seymour writes well and clearly, and at no point slips into either the empty utopian vision-spouting nor the empty dystopian scaremongering that books on party politics often do. He maintains balance and objectivity, showing Corbyn as a genuine figure of possibility and hope.

[If you're interested in these problems but can't be arsed to read a whole book, check out this, this, and this Guardian opinion pieces, or even better this and this blog post from Another Angry Voice.]

The Worldly Philosphers

This book, Robert Heilbroner's classic overview of major thinkers in the history of economics, is truly excellent. I've been using it to base a series of informal discussions on, for a student society I help run that aims to push for critical analysis and pluralism in the university economics curriculum - we were doing a three-part talk on how economics has grown and evolved as a subject, and this book was a good place to start in terms of giving a general outline.

   I've already spent a good twenty hours or so over the past month condensing this book into three thirty-minute-long chunks of digestible information, and there's so much depth of explanation I could now go to in terms of the book's content that it'd end up being far too long of a post for me to be able to be bothered to write, so I'll only give a very brief (well, as brief as it'll go without being dull or vacuous) overview.
   Heilbroner gives us the story of what economics is, told from those who thrust it forwards into intellectual frontiers as-then unexplored: from the recesses of pre-modern history where, despite millennia of scarcity, trade and debt, it had yet to develop as a field of study; through its gradual coalescence into a vision of society as capitalism took hold of 18th century Europe, until Adam Smith first undertook to draw from the ideas of many thinkers of his day a complete theory of how nations' wealth worked, grew, fell, failed, expanded. Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo and their not-so-cheerful theories of inevitable poverty-based automatic population controls and viciously competitive profit-erosion followed, and the classical school of economic thought began to take shape. This entire system of thinking was recorded in a comprehensive survey by J.S. Mill, around the time where mid-to-late-19th century Europe was growing restless from the continual misery inflicted upon the working masses by processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and generally just capitalism[isation]. In moral response to the broadening inequalities and exploitations, utopians sprang up, most as eccentric in character as bizarre in theory (Saint-Simon and Fourier sound like great fun); but on the serious side a pair of bitingly-logical analytic socialists named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels here developed ideas that would expose the fundamental internal inconsistencies of capitalism; ideas that would start revolutions and shape the next 130 years. However great the social impact of the radical leftist thinkers however, academic economics had taken a very different turn - economists like Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall, Francis Edgeworth and Stanley Jevons had begun reforming the subject into mathematical-based abstractions and models, and inevitable detachment from the more basic questions of underlying assumptions and political implications. This was the beginning of the birth of the neoclassical school of thought (which now dominates all economics studies, hence the recent national push for pluralism). Other than Thorstein Veblen (whose bottomless cynicism exposed the brutally-selfish heart of all society, primarily economics, which he also emphasised the post-industrial-revolution dependence of on technological development) and Joseph Schumpeter (who showed the limits of economics against an object of study that is, frankly, unpredictable), the book nears its end on John Maynard Keynes; the giant of 20th century thinking who, with impeccable clarity and rationality, showed governments the best way of breaking out of a slump - by compensating for depressed investment and stimulating consumption with a kick-starting burst of public-sector spending. His ideas declined in fashionability throughout the 20th century though, and while a few of the less-debatable aspects have been incorporated into post-Keynesian neoclassical economics, his grand vision of society is no longer prevalent within the academic ring of those professing to be economists. The book ends on a provocative note about the conflict between where the subject has gone now (well into thinking of itself, thoroughly problematically, as a science) and where these key figures in its evolution saw it as going; if economics continues to be dominated by maths and models instead of insightful observation of actual economies, then "worldly philosophy" is dead. Again, hence that whole campaign thing.
   I'd recommend anyone read this book; especially if you're interested in economics or politics or history or philosophy or sociology or whatever, and compulsory if you're a student of economics. Heilbroner's done an amazing job of conveying the core theories of the big thinkers simply without diluting them, and the grand narrative of how the "dismal science" has grown up is interspersed with delightfully colourful mini-biographies of those who helped push it forwards (these are extremely enjoyable; Robert Owen and J.M. Keynes in particular just had awesome lives), and a topic that has the potential of considerable stultification becomes lively, fascinating, and a joy to read about.