Octob er 2011 Books

OK. I’ve had a spell on holiday in southern Spain. In Andalucia – you know: Seville, Granada, Cordoba and Malaga way. If you haven’t been, you really should visit the Alhambra in Granada. Book online well in advance of your travel date, otherwise you may not be able to get in. Let’s get going with the Non-Fiction books that I’ve read this month. First off, I followed up last month’s Donne biography by reading Felicia Wright McDuffie’s To our bodies turn we then which explores in great detail aspects of his poetry and prose. It’s an eye opener. Then came the heartbreaking tale of how Zana Muhsen failed to rescue her sister from the Yemen in A promise to Nadia. John Man’s Xanadu is mainly a biography of Marco Polo, but is at least as much as about what China, Tibet and Mongolia were like when he was there. Fascinating. Linda Leaming’s Married to Bhutan is a love story with that country and its people. It makes fascinating reading. Stephen Hawkin and Leonard Mlodinow wrote The Grand Design which, as you might expect is about cosmology and the universe. It may need revision if those neutrinos have managed to travel from The Large Hadron Collider to Milan faster than the speed of light. But then a lot else will need to be rewritten as well. Haruki Murakami wrote about his marathon running habits in What I think about when I talk about running. And, finally, the mind blowingly stunning book edited by David M Wilson of The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott. The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott David M Wilson Little, Brown & Co., 2011; iv + 94 ISBN: 978-0-316-17320-1 This is the story of an incredible survival. When he saw how useful photographs might be in reporting on the 1901 – 1904 Discovery Antarctic expedition, Captain Robert Scott appointed Dr Herbert Ponting as the expedition’s photographer for the 1910 – 1913 Terra Nova expedition. The intention was for Ponting to record all the work – scientific and exploration – that the members of the team were involved in. When Scott saw the early results he asked Ponting to teach him photography. This was in the old, slow days of plate cameras and guessed exposures. Ponting also taught each of the leaders of the separate teams at Scott’s request. In those days the Royal Navy required its cartographers to sketch the landscape they were mapping. This applied to the Antarctic as to anywhere else. The difficulty here was that sketchers needed to do their work with bare hands in severely sub-zero temperatures, risking frost bite. So it was a slowish procedure. On one page in this book the sketches and photographs of one landscape are directly compared, to the benefit of photography. Scott may have been new to photography but he was a quick learner. To start with, his photographs are beautifully composed. Perhaps unintentionally, they also demonstrate the vastness of the hostile Antarctic environment compared to the frailty of human beings and all their equipment, dogs and ponies included. Scott photographed the early stages of the South Pole journey. They used ponies to climb the Beardmore Glacier. One photograph of the team spread out in a long line, with each man walking beside a pony hauling a sledge, suggests the individual’s isolation at times. Another photo of a sledge piled high with equipment, pulled by three men at the traces and a fourth man pushing tells us of the immensity of the task the Polar team undertook. In one sense, it is a pity the camera was sent back from the top of Beardmore because it was too heavy. But in another sense I don’t want to see the record of these incredibly brave men getting progressively weaker as they struggled back from the Pole having found that Amundsen had got their first. Once the expedition got back to England Frank Debenham pooled all the photographs. Later he passed them over to Ponting. He died intestate and insolvent. Somehow a set of contact prints of Scott’s photographs survived to be auctioned in 2001. The author of this book – a great-nephew of the Dr Edward Wilson, a member of the team that died – with the agreement of the owner of the photographs has compiled this incredible and beautiful reminder of that expedition. So now for fiction’s turn. Marilyn Chin wrote Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, a surreal collection of 41 linked stories about the adventures of a pair of Chinese twins whose grandmother owned a restaurant in California. Jody Hedlund’s The Preacher’s Bridge is a fictionalised biography of John Bunyan (author of The Pilgrim’s Progress) and his wife. Now for murder-mysteries and thrillers. Edward Marston’s The Amarous Nightingale is set in Restoration London. The setting is described in excellent and clear detail. The solution to the problem of finding the killer is a surprise, which is a good thing in a murder novel, I think. Dana Stabenow’s Fire and Ice is a murder set in Alaska which could be set anywhere in the world: it focuses so tightly on solving the murder that the setting is largely irrelevant. Arnaldur Indridason’s Jar City is set in Iceland and takes you deep into the heart of that society before exposing the killer. Tshombe Kelly’s killer can only be found through Sarah’s Diary. And is somewhat elusive. And, at last, romances. Sandra D Bricker’s Always the baker, never the bride has the talented pastry chef taken from the shop she works in to a new employment and, ultimately, to be her employer’s wife. Ciana Stone’s All in time combines romance with science-fiction, which is not always the best of combinations, but works this time. Sylvia Day’s Catching Caroline is a pair of slightly gruesome stories involving romance and vampires. Colleen Gleason’s Lavender Vows on the other hand, restores your faith in the romance novel. Christine Courtenay’s Trade Winds is a good story. My last romance of the month was Bella Andre’s page-turning From this moment on.