Simon Sebag Montefiore - The World - A Family History (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2022) *****

An insane undertaking, an incredibly ambitious project, a brilliant achievement and an exceptional read. 

Readers - exhausted, crushed, enlightened - will look at the world and history through a different lens after having read this book. Its author - Simon Sebag Montefiore, the author of the equally excellent "Jerusalem, a Biography" - introduces you in a very personal way to the individuals and their families that shaped our history, from the very first days up to the corona crisis and the invasion of Ukraine. 

He describes all major civilisations from a same time perspective across the globe, bundled in chapters based on the number of inhabitants in the world. The sources used to write this book are so abundant - another 137 pages - that the actual bibliography of the book is to be found on his website instead of the book itself. 

Sebag Montefiore is a born story-teller, with an excellent feeling for keeping the reader interested in his "characters" and the great plot of history. The book starts with the story of Enheduanna, living 4,000 years ago, princess of the Akkadian empire, daughter of Sargon the Great, who wrote a sad verse of how she was raped by a raiding rebel: "he dared approach me in his lust", a vivid angle of approach to start with the history of humanity, then jumping back a few million years to prehistory to take you along on this fascinating and horrific journey. The story sets the scene for the entire book: a journalistic style of writing: direct, personal, empathic, with a great sense of using the right anecdotes and quotes to bring otherwise boring historical processes to life. 

These distant rulers whom we know - and mostly not - from our history books and history lessons, whose conquests and treaties and wars we may remember, now come to life as if you're part of the events. Sebag Montefiore offers all the personal information that no history teacher would ever (dare) serve you: the power struggles among kings, emperors and presidents, the ruthless extermination of rivals and family members, the power-hungry warlords, whose only interest is their own personal gain, honour and lust. He writes about the dynasties of ancient Egypt, China, Africa and the Americas, about siblings killing each other with cunning, lists or brute force. It seems as if the author enjoys the cruelty and the lust, as if this is a historical gossip colum, but gradually you come to understand that this was - and probably to a large extent still is - the standard practice of how countries are ruled. Human life to many of these leaders is without any value. People are just pawns on their own personal chessboard, and the colour of the pawn does not matter, whether it's the adversary's or your own. 

Here are some random examples, taken for each 100th page in the book: 

• "Berenice solved the problem in family style. Bursting into the maternal boudoir with her posse of killers, she surprised her husband and her mother in bed. Berenice killed her husband, spared her mother and then proceeded triumphantly to Alexandria to marry Euergetes" (p. 100)

• "Shah Khusrau II arrived in Roman territory. The grandson of the Immortal, he was just twenty when a coup against his inept father brought him to the throne, but he had already shown his mettle running Iranian Armenia. His father was blinded then strangled by his voracious uncles, but as generals bid for power, young Kliusrau escaped, accompanied by Shirin, his 'extremely beautiful' Christian queen, and aided by her fellow Christian, the Arab king al-Numan." (p. 200)

• "Blonde and blue-eyed with 'flowing hair and white shoulders', Wal­lada enjoyed a rare life for an Islamic woman in Corboda, now ruled by noble clans. No longer secluded in the Umayya harem, independently wealthy, she appeared in public, wearing silks that showed off her beauty and her figure, recited her poetry in public, competing against men in poetry contests, and set up a school for female poets. She flaunted her lovers. When the religious authorities grumbled, she had lines of poems defiantly written on her dresses: 'I allow my lover to touch my cheek and bestow my kiss on him who craves it.' Around 1031, she fell in love with an aristocratic vizier, Ibn Zaydun.(...) Ibn Zaydun turned nasty, writing to Wallada, 'You were for me nothing but a sweetmeat that I took a bite of and then tossed away the ­crust, leaving it to be gnawed on by a rat.' Wallada got her revenge exposing his affairs with slave boys: 

Because of his love for rods in trousers, Ibn Zaydun,

In spite of his excellence

If he would see a penis in a palm tree

He would turn into a woodpecker" (p. 300)

• (On the slave trade) "'It's not their religion but humanity that makes me weep in pity for their sufferings,' wrote a witness, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, royal archivist and Henry's biographer. 'To increase their sufferings still more they now began to separate one from another in order to make the shares equal. It now became necessary to separate fathers from sons, wives from husbands, brothers from brothers ... ' Much of the slave trade had originally been by demand for domestic slaves who joined family households. Now at the birth of Atlantic slavery, slave traders captured entire families, then tore them apart. Slavery was an anti-familial institution. This small scene, filled with cruelty, hypocrisy and avarice, was the beginning industry that would sweeten European palates and poison socie­ty for centuries. (p.400) 

• "As the Islamic millennium got closer, he (Akbar) called himself the Mahdi or Renewer of the Second Millennium. In 1585, he minted coins that read 'Allahu akbar jalla jalaluhu', which would usually mean 'God is great' but could also mean 'Akbar is God', as he toyed with substituting himself for Muhammad. He pulled back from his own apotheosis, but projected the sanctity of Mughal monarchy, promoting himself as Tamerlanian padishah, Islamic saintly ruler and Hindu chakravartin. (...) As energetic sexually as in all things, he insisted on having the wives of his amirs if he fancied them, and his demands for new girls were 'a great terror ... in the city'. Like all the steppe monarchs, however, he consulted wise women in the family, particularly his senior wife and first cousin, Ruqaiya". (p.500)

• "In 1611, Artemisia Gen­tileschi, seventeen years old and a virgin with curly auburn hair, full lips and a wide face, was painting with the artist Agosti­no Tassi, twenty years older, when he and a male helper raped her, aided by a female tenant. Tassi, who had been tried for incest and would later be tried for trying to kill a pregnant courtesan, promised marriage but then changed his mind, at which her father brought charges. Gentileschi had to relive the agony by giving testimony. Tassi, devious and violent, tried to suborn witnesses and taint her as a whore. Astonishingly, she was then taken to visit Tassi in prison and tortured with a thumbscrew to test her veracity. 'E vero, e vero, e vero,' she repeated. 'It's true!' 'You're lying in your throat,' Tassi shouted. He was found guilty, but his sentence was later overturned." (p.600)

... you get the gist. Juicy stories, lots of quotes, very personal anecdotes as if you're witnessing the action yourself, and deepening the interest in these incredible amounts of characters whose names you risk to forget once the page has been turned. A quick calculation: there's an index of 37 pages with on average 40 names per page, which means that there are about 1,500 characters in the novel of our history. 

The amount of information you get to absorb is enormous, humongous, colossal, gigantic and immense. In one word: monumental. This may seem terrifying at first, but the writing is so good that you just keep reading. Our history is fascinating, gruesome, horrifying, and yes, there are major shifts in history that led to change, such as climate change, trade routes, technological inventions, and religions, but the main drivers from what we understand are the egos and personalities of individuals, most of whom seem to have considered themselves as unique, irreplacable, geniuses and even divine, while from reading the book you can only see them - with today's Western eyes - as pathological, narcissistic power-hungry megalomaniacs. 

The paradox of the book is that while it's all-encompassing, it's also intimate and personal, it's grand and detailed, it's detached with balanced observations from a political and cultural perspective yet with an often understandable and human appreciation or disapproval of the behaviours of the protagonists, making it objective and subjective at the same time. 

Simon Sebag Montefiori has been smart enough to guide us through this shocking narrative with sub-chapters that come with attractive titles that make you want to read further. In this sense, the writing is closer to journalism than to scientific historical writing. It's as entertaining as it is instructive. 

The effort to have collected all this is by itself hard to imagine, but to write it with such enthousiasm, with such sustained controlled and well-paced quality of writing till the 1262nd page is even more astonishing. 

An easy contender for the non-fiction book of the year. 

Books of the Year 2022

I read 33 books this year, some astonishingly good, with a very clear winner in the "Fiction" list, Olga Tokarczuk's "The Books Of Jacob", an absolute masterpiece of modern literature, one that is beyond category and a must-read. The winner in the non-fiction list Joseph Henrich's "The Secret Of Our Success", a fascinating book about the interaction between nature and culture, and how the distinction has become irrelevant in humans because of their mutual influence. The fiction list contains for once some more French books, but that is the result of the holidays in France. 

Not all the books on the list date from this year, of course, as we did some catch-up reading too. 

Fiction

1. Olga Tokarczuk - The Books Of Jacob *****
2. Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease To Understand The World *****
3. Douglas Stuart - Shuggie Bain ****½
4. Damon Galgut - The Promise ****
5. Fernanda Melchior - Paradais ****
6. HP Lovecraft - At The Mountains Of Madness ****
7. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr - La Plus Secrète Mémoire Des Hommes ****
8. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo - Le Fils De L'Homme ****
9. Hervé Le Tellier - L'Anomalie ****
10. Georges Perec - Les Revenentes ***½

Non-Fiction

1. Joseph Henrich - The Secret Of Our Success *****
2. Nicholas A. Christakis - Blueprint - The Evolutionary Origins Of A Good Society ****½
3. Daren Acemoglu & James A. Robinson - Why Nations Fail  ****½
4. David Graeber & David Wengrow - The Dawn Of Everything ****½
5. Bart D. Ehrman - Heaven And Hell - A History Of The Afterlife ****
6. Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist ****
7. Steven Pinker - Rationality ***½
8. Oded Galor - The Journey Of Humanity ***½
9. Philip Matyszak - Vergeten Volkeren ***
10. Russell Blackford - The Tyranny Of Opinion ***

Daren Acemoglu & James A. Robinson - Why Nations Fail (Profile Books, 2012) ****

"Why Nations Fail" is "brilliant in its simplicity" we read on the cover, and in a way this is a good description of this excellent book, even if this 500-page book is more complex and richer than the quote might suggest. 

Acemoglu is Professor of Economics at MIT, and James Robinson a Political Scientist and Economist at Harvard University. 

Their core message is simple: 'inclusive institutions' such as democracy and citizen participation in decision-making lead to prosperity, whereas 'extractive institutions' in which the elites rule with autocracy, poverty is the eventual result. They give good examples of situations where culture is identical, but the political organisation of the country leads to different outcomes. One is the town of Nogales, divided by the border between Mexico and the United States, which results in a totally different level of prosperity for its inhabitants on both sides. Another example is the divide between North-Korea and South-Korea, in which the former is led with dictatorial rule, and where, despite the ruler's rhetoric, only the elites experience prosperity, and in which the former, thanks to its democratic institutions, have economic growth, creative enterpreneurship, global trade and prosperity. 

Yet other factors play a role too, such as centralised government which can ensure longer term stability, rule of law and other aspects of organising society. In fact, you need both to be really prosperous, as history shows. He gives examples of highly succesful increases in production when centralised government takes over (as with the Bushong in pre-colonial Congo or with the early Soviet-Union), but this is doomed to fail in the context of an 'extractive economy', where the wealth is distributed very unequally. 

They counter the wrong assumption that economic wealth is the result of cultural, geographic, or meterological differences. 

Both authors give a myriad of examples throughout history - the importance of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution - and geographically, with a lot of attention to the United Kingdom, but also covering the entire globe, with attention to South-America, the Middle-East, Africa and Asia. 

Another aspect is the need for 'creative destruction', a term once coined by Joseph Shumpeter, in order to make change possible. You need different voices, different perspectives, and especially new and disruptive technologies to change the current state. 

What both authors write does not come as a real surprise. We all know that people are better of in democracies than in dicatorships. We also see that wealth is better distributed in democracies than in autocratic states. The value of the book is that they provide the framework for it, and with lots of evidence. Now that the patterns are clear, the only depressing conclusion is - of course - that there is no clear recipe to move from an 'extractive' situation, where the elite oppress the masses, and possess all the wealth of the country, to an 'inclusive' state, where democracy and rule-of-law reign. 

The book is not really an eye-opener, but it substantiates what many already assumed. We can only with that its content can be read more widely across the world, and do its tiny part in educating people to fight autocratic and theocratic regimes, allowing people to choose their own destiny. 

HP Lovecraft - At The Mountains Of Madness (Design Studio Press, 2020) ****

Despite having a - very selective - interest in good science fiction and horror movies, I never read anything by HP Lovecraft, one of the fathers of science fiction horror writing. The story "On The Mountains Of Madness" dates back to 1931, and gives the report by one of the scientists participating in an antarctic expedition, and discovering an ancient civilization that actually largely predates even mammal evolution. 

The novella is reprinted here in its full length - this is not really a graphic novel in the strictest sense - and illustrated with the spectacular drawings by French artist François Baranger, who is a concept designer for movies and games. When my wife first saw the drawings from a distance, she thought they were photographs, and I think that is not only because of the detail of the drawings, but also because of the amazing play with light, darkness and shadows. 

It reflects the story well in that respect. The Antarctic expedition ventures in this world of light with ice and snow landscapes with a sun that does not set, with a scientific mindset that is all for observation and academic clarity and that is suddenly confronted with the impossible, with the irrational, with darkness, mystery, evil and death. 

As said, it is the first time I read anything by Lovecraft and I understand now what the attraction is. The novella is written in the first person, as a journal or report of a scientific expedition that nobody will believe. Lovecraft's style is at the same time full of scientific facts, and minute observations (biology, physics, meteorology, archeology, architecture, ...) while at the same time full of subjective emotions about what he and his colleagues are witnessing, ranging from admiration, wonder, suprise, dread and existential angst. The ancient creatures they encounter are referenced from the mythology that Lovecraft created in other novels before this one. 

The most stunning feature of his writing is his capacity to create a universe without so much as a plot. Nothing much happens, apart from encountering something that defies reason. At the same time, your eyes can relish the fantastic drawings, whose lines of inspiration are each time written in italic in the text, so that you know what it actually refers to (although that is not so difficult to assess). 

Both the writing and the illustrations together make this an unforgettable reading experience. 

Fernanda Melchior - Paradais (Fitzcarraldo, 2022) ****

One more success novel published by Fitzcarraldo, and their blue covers come as a quality label for good literature. 

"Paradais" by Fernanda Melchior clearly fits in this list. It is the story of two boys, one rich and one poor. The former, Franco or Fatboy, lives in a luxury gated compound with shared swimming pool, and is very much in love with the wife of the neighbours, and the latter, Polo, is the pool boy and gardener's assistant. Both live in completely different worlds, but they share the adolescent's anger, uncertainty, lust and black-and-white vision of the world. They want to move forward, have their endeavours rewarded, to be taken seriously, to be men, to be recognised, to do meaningful things. In their free time, they make schemes to achieve their material goals: sex and money, inspired by the alcohol they steal from Fatboy's family. 

Fernanda Melchior deals with her story brilliantly. Because you can anticipate how it is going to end, like any Greek tragedy, but still the story is captivating, and despite the evil intents, despite the foul language and brutal fantasies of the two boys, you empathise with them, with their situation, their rejection, and you want them somehow to succeed, even if you know that's impossible, and even if you know that it would be morally rejectable. 

She writes like the boys testoron rages through their bodies, full of energy, with no pause, with no moment of relief, just the endless need to move the narrative forward through intense dialogues, raging interior monologues complaining about the cruelty of other people and the world, and fantasies, dreams and more fantasies. 

Judge for yourself: 

"That was the kind of grief Polo woke up to each day, before the sun had even appeared at the window, just as the neighbour's cockerel was clearing its throat to com­ pete with his mother's phone alarm. Polo would grumble and toss and turn on the floor, on the sweat-soaked petate, his mouth dry, his eyes glued together with sleep and his temples throbbing with the headache that now never went away, no matter how many Alka-Seltzers he drank. He would aim to get up and out as early as he could - Lord knows he tried to avoid his mother's sermons - but she al­ ways got their first, when he was still on the floor battling his exhaustion, and she would launch straight in: wasn't he ashamed, crawling home in the middle of the night and creeping in to his own house like a thief, and all for a piss­ up! Don't lie to me, you little creep, don't you dare lie to your mother! I can smell the stench of booze on you from here, you useless drunk! It's only Wednesday and you're already out getting leathered, just look at the state of your face. Seriously, who do you think you are, Leopoldo? Who the hell do you think you are, you little shit?
There wasn't a day Polo didn't ask himself the same thing, every morning, with a bread roll and a mug of luke­ warm coffee in his belly, which, on a good day, he would manage to reach the bridge without chucking up, his overalls laundered but still grubby thanks to Zorayda's in­ept hands, his face dripping with sweat and the salty wind spray that he pedalled against on his way to Paradais. Who was he, really? A little shit, his mother would say. But her little shit, at the end of the day, the 'little miracle' of the girl who got shafted yet still worked her way up in the world. He had her thick lips, the same amber eyes and wiry hair that went coppery in the sun's rays, and now he too was at the service of the same family of sharks. The muchacho as the residents called him, that's who he was: the lawn waterer, the tree pruner, the turd scooper, the car washer. the chump who appeared the second those assholes whis­ tled for him: the dogsbody. How had he sunk so low? he asked himself, without an answer. And how the fuck was he going to get out of there? Again, he didn't know. He had nothing, not a single thing to call his own. Even his salary went straight into his mother's pocket, every last peso, exactly as she'd dictated: Polo owed her, to make up for his colossal fuck-up, the opportunity he'd gone and pissed down the drain. Now it was his turn to work like a bitch, to follow Urquiza's ridiculous orders; his turn to sleep on the floor like a filthy animal while the money he earned went towards paying off his mother's countless debts and feeding the baby growing inside Zorayda's hor­ rendous belly, while that slob spent her days lounging on the rocking chair, watching cartoons - with the fan on, of course - instead of taking care of the house and cooking their meals, as they'd agreed. From the start he'd tried to reason with his mother, make her see how unfair it all was: first, it wasn't his fault his cousin couldn't keep her legs shut. Why did he have to give her his bed and sleep on the floor, on the hard concrete floor with only a thin petate under his aching body and a rolled up old t-shirt for a pillow? Why didn't they send Zorayda packing instead? She was a total pain in the ass, a freeloader, a conniving bitch who felt no shame waddling around town with a gut like a pregnant cow as if she'd been blessed with that 'little miracle' who could belong to just about any guy in town, genuinely any of them; if only Polo's mother would listen to the shit people said about her, how the little prick tease would fool around with the bus drivers, the delivery guys who stopped by Dona Pacha's store on Tuesdays, the loan sharks who passed through town on their way to Pado de Toro, and even with the boys who delivered tortillas on their mopeds, there wasn't a single one of them she hadn't rolled about with on the mucky floors of truck cabins, or on the back seats of cars, or standing bent over like a bitch in heat behind the storage rooms and animal sheds, or wherever the urge happened to take her. Why didn't his mother leave her to sort out her own shit? The little skank had asked for it. Why didn't she send Zorayda back to the aunts in Mina, let them clean up her mess? But his mother wouldn't hear it. (p. 41-42)

Every sentence is full of rebellious anger, of revolt, of lack of perspective, lack of understanding and dreams, opportunities, and fantasies being blocked and stopped. 

It's not a long story, only 118 pages in this edition, but a real joy to read. 

Her longer novel "Hurricane Season" is said to be even better. Can't wait to get my copy of this one too. 

Ottessa Moshfegh - Lapvona (Jonathan Cape, 2022) **½

I liked the basic storyline when I read the inside cover of the book. I like its cover art and its publishing quality. 

The story takes place in medieval times, in a fictive town. This level of abstraction brings us to a more symbolic plane in which the events could reflect today's society. And to a larg extent it is. The lead character, Marek, is a deformed boy who lives with his father outside the borders of the town, but with some contacts within the town, especially the son of the lord of the castle, Villiam, who is a ruthless ruler who couldn't care less about the drought that hits the land and impoverishes all his serfs, and who is aided by Barnabas, the priest. 

Religion and power rule, and the characters in the book try to live despite this unholy alliance. Despite some strange plot twists, the characters remain rather flat, with little opportunity to really feel empathy with them. They act, they do things, but you never really get under their skin, as is often the case in literature from the Middle Ages, but then at least the author could have used more stylistical technique to recreate the literary context about which she writes, but she doesn't. I will not disclose the ending, in case you might still be interested to read the book, but that too is disappointing. None of the characters are interesting, the story meanders too much, and there is not much joy to be had from the writing itself, and in the end, what is the moral of the tale ... I am not sure there is one. 

Philip Matyszak - Vergeten Volkeren (Omniboek, 2021) ***

 It's interesting to understand the quirks of history. Why did some people and tribes continue to exist, and why did others vanish? And how did they vanish. In English the book is called "Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World". It's furthermore a nice publication, that I could not resist to buy when I saw it in the bookstore. There are full-page maps for each tribe, with nice pictures of archeological finds and other visuals. 

The book covers a wide time span, from 2700 BCE to 550 CE, and includes overview of fourty different tribes, some of which are known, such as the Amorites, or Hethites, the Philistines or the Medes, some are less known, such as the Bactrians or the Catuvellauni. 

It's more a reference manual than a book you would actually read from A to Z even if I did that. The summary is short for each tribe, but well documented. Although I think it is bizarre that often the Bible is mentioned as the reference, without actually emphasising that the Bible is not a reliable source of historic information, as if it was one more factual source next to academic archeological or historical findings. 

That being said, it is instructive and broadens our perpsective on history. 

Haruki Murakami - First Person Singular (Vintage, 2021) ***½

Any new Murakami book is a treat, even the ones that are less ambitious than his greater works, such as this one, a collection of eight short stories bundled together with no intrinsic relationship, except that all stories are written in the first person singular, and possibly Murakami's voice is more personal and the topics closer to his real life, or at least they could be. 

Like in all Murakami stories, something unusual happens to ordinary people in ordinary settings. The atmosphere is friendly, intimate even, but alienating. For instance, in "Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova", the narrator explains that - in his youth - he wrote a review of a Charlie Parker album that did not exist. Until so many years later he finds a copy of exactly that album in a jazz record shop in New York. Murakami's love for music, and then especially jazz and classical music is omnipresent in the book, and one story is about a Beatles album. 

The weirdest story is possibly about a speaking monkey (no spoiler alert - the story basically begins with this), and even if this is highly unusual, as the narrator will tell you, it also appears not to be surprising or disturbing either. The narrator and the monkey have long conversations. The actual unexpected event happens later in the story (and I won't tell you that). 

It is fun, it is deep too, despite the mundane and ordinary contexts. The stories are about 'what makes life' and 'what choices do I make in life' and 'who am I actually in this weird place'. Murakami's light and elegant style, his repetitive presentations of options to be decided, are actual challenges for the rationality of our thoughts, about probabilities and plausible things. He makes us wonder why things - and people and animals - are what the are and what they might mean to us (or him, as an individual). And by doing this, he is also sufficiently the literary craftsman to make it captivating, to keep the attention going, putting the reader for the dilemma to speed up things to know what's going to happen next, or to read very slowly and relish his beautiful dialogues and sentences. 

It is surely not one of his major works, more a kind of in-between publication, but any Murakami fan will enjoy this one too. 

Allaa As Aswany - The Yacoubian Building (Harper, 2007) ***

The Egyptian author, Allaa As Aswany, is an dentist by training, educated in Chicago where he lived for seventeen years, is possibly better known as a political commentator and founder of a political party. His articles have appeared in numerous international newspapers. 

In "The Yacoubian Building", he describes Egyptian society in a form of satire. All characters live in this building - that actually exists on 34, Talaat Harb Street in Cairo - and have completely different backgrounds and levels of wealth. There are servants, officers, an editor-in-chief of a French-speaking newspaper, a very wealthy business man, a lawyer, a poor young woman, a wealthy ageing playboy and his dominant sister, the son of the doorkeeper, a Christian shirtmaker, the corrupt secretary of the Patriotic Party. 

All the characters interact because they live or work in the same building (some in luxurious appartments, some on sheds on the roof). The characters are relatively 'flat' in the sense that they do not really evolve in the course of the novel, and many of them are of course caricatures of the groups they represent. 

The novel itself is not of high literary value in my humble opinion, but its real power lies in As Aswany's courage to address topics are that are rarely addressed in Egyptian or even Arabic literature: sexual abuse of women and homosexuality. He also tackles the hypocrisy of those with power and education, and his compassion for the people with limited perspectives on life are not new to Arabic literature, yet they reach a quite essential level in "The Yacoubian Building". 

In short, it's interesting but not great. I can applaud his courage to denounce social injustice. 

If you have not read anything by an Egyptian author, I can recommend to start with Naguib Mahfouz and Nawal El Sadawi. 

Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease To Understand The World (Pushkin, 2019) *****

Please read this: 

"In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring's fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court. This was not easy. When the Allied forces caught him, the Nazi leader was dragging a suitcase with more than twenty thousand doses, practically all that remained of Germany's production of the drug at the end of the Second World War. His addiction was far from exceptional, for virtually everyone in the Wehrmacht received Pervitin as part of their rations, methamphetamine tablets that the troopers used to stay awake for weeks on end, fighting in a deranged state, alternating between manic furore and nightmarish stupor, with overexertion leading many to suffer attacks of irrepressible euphoria. "An absolute silence reigns. Everything becomes alien and insignificant. I feel completely weightless, as if I were floating above my own airplane," a Luftwaffe pilot wrote years later, as though he were recollecting the silent raptures of a beatific vision rather than the dog days of war."

 Or this: 

"The night gardener used to be a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing. He told me that he had had the beginnings of a brilliant career but had quit altogether after encountering the work of Alexander Grothendieck, a world-famous mathematician who revolutionized geometry as no one had since the time of Euclid, and who inexplicably gave up mathematics at the height of his international fame, leaving a bewildering legacy that is still sending shock waves through all branches of his discipline, but which he completely refused to discuss, right up to his death in 2014. Like the night gardener, when Grothendieck turned forty, he left his house, his family and his friends, and lived like a monk, holed up in the Pyrenees. It was as if Einstein had given up physics after publishing his theory of relativity, or Maradona had decided never to touch a ball after winning the World Cup."

Two random pieces of text, extracts of this amazing book - part literature, part science, part biography, part history - that brings us five stories - five texts if you want - on topics that are related to science. Labatut's texts are little symphonies of factoids, linked together in an incredibly powerful prose, balanced, surprising, disciplined and at the same time luxurious and fast. 

The first extract above comes from the first story, "Prussian Blue", the history of cyanide. German scientist Fritz Haber managed to extract nitrogen from the air, which was used afterwards on a commercial scale as fertiliser, savings millions of lives, yet he also upgraded it to develop Zyklon B, the gas that killed millions of Jews in concentration camps during World War II. The first story is also 99% fact according to the author. 

As we move forward, the reality of the historical figures become more literary, with fiction starting to creep in, in the form of dreams, unwritten thoughts by the scientists, dialogues that never happened. 

The other stories are all about the real boundaries of science, the tipping point of understanding, but also the tipping point of some dark and unfathomable danger that could wipe out mankind. 

In the second story, the mathematician and soldier Karl Schwarzschild solved the field equations in the theory of general relativity in 1915, and writes this to Albert Einstein from the front, but when Einstein answers, the soldier is already dead.

The third story is about the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki and the German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. The mathematic challenges and the discoveries by both men of course elude me, as they do with possibly 99% of all mathematicians, but the story is about what Grothendieck discovered at the heart of mathematics and never wanted to discuss, terrified by the horrors his findings might cause.

Of course we also have the fight between Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg over the right perspective on quantum physics. They too fundamentally changed our view of reality, while at the same time also providing the physical insights that led to nuclear weapons.

Labatut said in an interview that "This book is about what happens when we reach the edges of science; when we come face to face with what we cannot understand. It is about what occurs to the human mind when it pushes past the outer limits of thought, and what lies beyond those limits". 

This is a work of fiction, but based on some of the most advanced and terrifying scientific discoveries. 

Labatut's prose and writing skills make this an exceptional reading experience. 

I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

Virginie Despentes - Vernon Subutex 2 (Grasset, 2015) ***½

This is part two of the trilogy. Vernon Subutex, the record store owner disappeared in the first part and became homeless. Now, his former friends and other people, with less honest interests, find him back among the other homeless people (Charles, Olga, Laurent). Despentes keeps adding characters and all of them get the same depth of exploration. To her credit, they are all interesting, recognisable, genuine. She digs in their pasts, creating a very broad canvas in which the original plot - the search for the lost tapes of Alex Bleach the rock star - becomes a little bit too distant, yet her writing is so energetic, fast and politically incorrect, that as a reader you stay glued to her narrative, that rushes forward in the present tense, in a language and vocabulary that is young, and makes you feel part of what's happening. 

Her characters, often relatively marginal to what is happening in society, are often more honest than the world around them, the world of fast food, fast sex, fast culture, fast money. 

I had wanted to read the third part this year too. It's waiting on the shelf. 

Steven Pinker - Rationality (Allan Lane, 2021) ***½

In "Enlightenment Now", Steven Pinker advocates for better use of rationality and scientific thinking in our everyday world, which leads to progress for all thanks to better technology, better decision-making and more democracy and humanism. 

In "Rationality" he gives a course in rationality, with all its different components: logic and critical thinking, probability and randomness, Bayesian reasoning, rational choice and expected utility, signal detection and statistical decision-theory, game theory, correlation and causation. This interesting overview will of course not bring much new to scientists or other highly educated readers who are familiar with the basics of our rationality. 

To me, the content of this book, together with some deeper insights in cognitive sciences should be compulsory in any school curriculum. 

"We should be creative in changing the rules in other arenas so that disinterested truth is given an edge over 'myside' bias. In opinion jour­nalism, pundits could be judged by the accuracy of their forecasts rather than their ability to sow fear and loathing or to fire up a fac­tion. In policy, medicine, policing, and other specialties, evidence­ based evaluation should be a mainstream, not a niche, practice. And in governance, elections, which can bring out the worst in reasoning, could be supplemented with deliberative democracy, such as panels of citizens tasked with recommending a policy. This mechanism puts to use the discovery that in groups of cooperative but intellectually diverse reasoners, the truth usually wins. 

Human reasoning has its fallacies, biases, and indulgence in my­thology. But the ultimate explanation for the paradox of how our species could be both so rational and so irrational is not some bug in our cognitive software. It lies in the duality of self and other: our powers of reason are guided by our motives and limited by our points of view. (...)  So, too, is impartiality the core of rationality: a reconciliation of our biased and incomplete notions into an understanding of reality that transcends any one of us. Rationality, then, is not just a cognitive virtue but a moral one".

One of the biggest unresolved issues in the use of rationality, and a topic that has rarely been investigated, also not here by Pinker, is the fact that people use all the methods of rationality in concrete and non-complex tasks. It is only when a certain level of abstraction and complexity has been reached, that our rational tools no longer seem to work and that other factors start interfering, such as emotions, beliefs, ideological values, self-interest. We have the tools, we just don't use them all the time. So the question remains how we can extend these tools to all our thinking and decision-making. 

In any case, the book is a worthwhile overview of all the aspects of rationality, but for most highly educated readers, it will come as a confirmation of existing knowledge rather than as an eye-opener. 

Oded Galor - The Journey Of Humanity (The Bodley Head, 2022) ***½

Oded Galor is Professor of Economics at Brown University and the founding thinker behind the Unified Growth Theory, which seeks to uncover the fundamental causes of development, prosperity and inequality over the entire span of human history.

In this book he explores how humans have been able to escape from the 'Mathusian trap' (whenever societies managed to bring about a food surplus through technological innovation, resulting in increase in living standards and reduction of mortality, but only temporarily since the ensuing population growth would deplete surpluses, and so living conditions would revert to subsistence level), by looking at all the factors that could have played a role in the sharp rise of population growth and inequalities between nations. 

He looks at aspects of geographical location, technological development, population diversity, population size, cultural and institutional factors. He goes back to the early days of homo sapiens with a broad perspective to our modern day era, to conclude that 

"the long arc of human history reveals that geographical characteristics and population diversity (...) are predominantly the deeptest factors behind global inequalities, while cultural and institutional adaptation have often dictated the speed at which development progressed in societies across the globe" (p. 232)

The graph below explains this process, as well as giving an outline of the boook itself. Galor's reasoning is well-substantiated, and a much better book than for instance "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari for the dual reason that Galor has evidence for each topic he covers without the need to have strong value judgments or political views on the subject of his research. The fact that he is less value-driven makes his book all the more valuable. 

David Diop - At Night All Blood Is Black (Pushkin, 2020) **½

"At Night All Blood Is Black" is about the fight of two Senegalese brothers, of which one is adopted, in the French army against the Germans in World War I. When Diop is deadly wounded, and begs to be killed to stop his pain, Alfa cannot do it, yet this fact drives him slowly crazy, and requiring the ritual of killing Germans at night, re-enacting what he couldn't do to Diop, and taking each time a chopped of had as a relic, which terrifies his comrades at the camp. He slowly starts turning mad and becoming a demon in the eyes of his friends. 

The first person narrator tells the story of his raids, of his village and home, of the war, of death, of the army ... His tone is incantational, with rhythmic sentences and the endlessly repeated interjection "God's truth", but then so often that it becomes irritating and even childish. Take out this interjection, and the flow of the narrative is not less mesmerising or fluent.

The book received a lot of international literary awards, including the International Booker Prize, and that is a mystery to me. 

Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist (Da Capo, 2007) ****

"The Portable Atheist" is a collection of texts written by famous atheists about their lack of belief in any religion or god. 

You have 47 texts by different authors questioning the existence of god since antiquity, starting with Lucretius and working through history up to our modern times. Texts are from Benedict de Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, H. L. Mencken, Albert Einstein, Victor Stenger, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq. Interestingly, also fiction authors such as Mark Twain George Orwell, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, George Eliot, ... 

As the title says, this is a book with all the noteworthy essential texts on atheism, many of which I already read in the books of Harris, Dawkins, Sagan or through other books. 

It's a great reference book, not one to read in one go, and useful for atheists. With books like this one, I also hope that religious people will read it, preferably with an open mind, but I doubt this will ever happen. 

Douglas Stuart - Shuggie Bain (Picador, 2020) ****½

This book has been widely appreciated and awarded in the last years, and there's nothing I can add to that: it is worth every accolade it received.

It is the story of Shuggie Bain, a boy who grows up in a poor and dysfunctional family in Glasgow in the eighties. The father of the house lives elsewhere but is still a presence, the mother is an alcoholic, his brother cares for him, but has his own challenges, and his elder sister is more pre-occupied with her own life. We follow the family over a long period of time, long enough to get to know each of them in detail: their life dreams, their mishaps, their continued courage to move forward despite the hardships, the gossip of the neighbourhood, the progress and the relapse, the anger and the love. 

Shuggie tries to zigzag his way through these chance events, trying to get some control over what is happening, or at least over his own life in this context of repeated setbacks. Yet to Stuart's credit, this novel is not a long complaint about social injustice and human hardship, it is also a book of love, of hope, of dreams and of human warmth. The characters are likeable, charming even, and you wish all of them to succeed and to do better in life. Stuart brought a fictitious family to life in a way that's rarely been done in literature. 

On the downside, the book is long and often repetitive, obviously somehow needed to depict the Sisiphean struggle against poverty, but I think it could have been a lot shorter without losing its qualities. 

I also learned about the religious football divide in Glasgow, with Rangers supporters being Protestant while Celtic fans supporting the Catholic Church. 

Olga Tokarczuk - The Books Of Jacob (Fitzcarraldo, 2021) *****

Some novels create an entire universe to dwell in. Books that come to mind are "Lord Of The Rings", "Les Bienveillants", or "2666". Their sheer size and the introduction to a reality about which you knew nothing before - immersing you now in full and in minute detail in an alien universe with which you gradually grow more familiar, page after page, character after character - makes this a unique and memorable reading experience. 

The author's incredible effort to create a universe, 900 pages long, full of detail and coherent, well-paced, rich in style and full of different perspectives, requires the same effort from the reader. Superficial or quick reading will not work. As the reader, you have to submit yourself to the work, become part of it to the extent that it will be high on your mind for the period it takes to read it till the end. 

The story is about the real person called Jacob Frank, who lived in Poland in the 18th Century. He was the leader of a jewish sect, and he proclaimed to be the Messiah, and he converted to the catholic faith to demonstrate that he was the bridge between all abrahamic religions. The fact that a jewish community was willing to convert to christianity obviously served the agenda of the Polish catholic church, some secular leaders, while leading to the ex-communication by the jewish community. 

I have applauded Olga Tokarczuk's writing before, especially the brilliant "Flights", which received a 5-star rating, but this novel is even better. Tokarczuk must have researched this book for many years in order to provide such a complete picture of all that happened during Jacob Frank's life, even if this novel is not a historical novel in the purest sense. It's a literary work of art, and her angle of approach is to create dozens of perspectives in the stories and the lives of the people who girate around Frank. Frank's perspective, even if he is the book's protagonist, is only given succinctly, and rarely. All information we get is indirect, which makes his presence more abstract, mythical, legendary, full of contradictions. 

It's a novel about the human condition, about people struggling with their poverty, their friendships, their beliefs, their hunger for power, their allegiances, their lusts, their love and their fears. The myriad of stories leads to a kaleidoscopic view of what actually happened, sometimes clarifying, often obfuscating. 

What makes this an absolutely brilliant novel: 

- the knowledge: as mentioned, an extremely well-researched book, full of real-life figures, but also about the little facts of life during 18th century Poland: the food, the living conditions, travel, world views, and then especially the jewish literature of Talmud, Kabbalah and Zohar. Tokarczuk does not explain or describe or educate us on all these topics. No, they are just part of the background, unexplained often but present as if a given.

 - the writing: like many good authors, the pleasure of writing is palpable in almost every sentence. Nothing is cheap or fast or hurried. Every character's story has its own style, its own approach, its own language even. Some characters only come to life through the letters they write to each other, others tell their story in the first person, some others in the third, and in some stories you get stories within stories, with diary scraps interspersing the rest of the narrative. 

- the humanity: just like in "Flights" and other novels by her, there are no real bad guys. She has a tremendous empathy for each character, understanding their motivation and behaviour, while at the same time taking a wise distance, slightly humouristic mocking over the absurdity or the all too human actions that take place. It's a book about moral choices, about indoctrination and tolerance, about open-mindedness and self-preservation, about narcissism and altruism. And to the author's credit, she does not judge, she does not take the moral highground, she leaves every character with its own beliefs, doubts and consequences. 

- the creativity: or maybe I should say the smart and intelligent way she presents things, the offering of obvious things through a different lens, including the Garcia Marquez-like magic realism of Yente, the old woman who is not dead but neither alive, who found her last resting place in a cave, and who watches everything that happens knowingly, including the thoughts and feelings of the book's characters. 

- the coherence: despite the book's length, and despite its dozens of perspectives, its geographic spread from Germany to Turkey, its chronological span over several generations, the quality of the writing is maintained till the very end, as is the perfect composition of the book. Tokarczuk does not guide the reader through her universe. You are thrown in, and like in Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow", you have to work your way through it, trying to find out what's actually happening and how or if it makes even sense. 

I could add some more categories of why this novel exceeds many of the books I've read in my life. 

It's massive, it's brilliant, it's unique. 

It's also right to give kudos for Jennifer Croft for the translation. 

David Graeber & David Wengrow - The Dawn Of Everything (Allen Lane, 2021) ****½

With 526 pages of text, and around 170 additional pages in notes, bibliography and index, this book will take some time to read and to absorb. Its lead author, David Graeber, died in 2020, and was a very influential economic anthropologist and "anarchist activist", very active in the Occupy Wall Street movement. David Wengrow is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at  University College London.

Despite the label of "anarchism" that Graeber carries, this is a scholarly work, even if it's published in the form of popular science. Graeber and Wengrow refute with lots of minute detail and a treasure of references some conceptual mistakes in many existing theories about how humanity evolved, and especially decided to evolve. This last aspect is essential in their thesis that the way societies evolve is as much a question of choice as it is of necessity. They give the example of native american tribes in California, who - despite contacts and interaction with other ways of life - chose not practice agriculture, but to continue to live as hunter-gatherers. "Such choices imply political consciousness: the ability to argue and reflect about the proper way to live". The quality of these life's choices are not only determined by technological innovation. They cite the comments of native american chiefs on the French way of living in the 18th century in what is now the United States, commenting on their poverty, their submission to orders from superiors and their lack of freedom, insights which have been taken on board to develop the enlightenment by French intellectuals. 

In a sweeping overview across the globe and across cultures, Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate the kaleidoscopic nature of human societies, in all their variety, choices, modes of interaction and pace of change, including different modes of operating depending on the seasons, and the acceptance of even different leadership and hierarchy as a result of this. Hierarchical inequality is not the result of size, nor is the existence of aristocracy or monarchy. Smaller settlements may have been very hierarchical and with inequality embedded in them, as much as larger ones could be more based on equality and lack of hierarchy.

In the process, they counter many false assumptions among anthropologists, historians and archeologists, whose lack of perspective, and even lack of words for some type of societies prevent them making the correct analysis and synthesis. Their constant effort to refute what their scientific colleagues are assuming or writing is often a little irritating to the non-specialist: they first have to explain what theories others have, before refuting them with counter-evidence, before expanding on their own ideas. 

Graeber and Wengrow's book is exceptional in its breadth and depth. This is a very erudite, well-researched and balanced book, that actually counters Graeber's label as an anarchist. He clearly was a real scientist, looking at facts and observations of reality to start with, while at the same time loving humanity and trying to understand what can be done to improve democracy and equality. 

If you have time, and if you're interested in society, this is obligatory reading. 

Nicholas A. Christakis - Blueprint - The Evolutionary Origins Of A Good Society (Little Brown Spark, 2020) ****½

"The evolutionary origins of a good society" is the book's subtitle and subject. Its author, Nicholas Christakis has degrees in biology (Yale), medicine (Harvard) and public health (also Harvard). He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab. He is also the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. This broad background, including his ground-breaking work on human networks forms the basis of "Blueprint". 

Christakis is convinced that we carry with us a genetic blueprint for doing good, despite all the wars and atrocities of human history. "Natural selection has shaped our lives as social animals, guiding the evolution of what I call a "social suite" of features priming our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, learning and even our ability to recognize what is unique in other individuals". 

He gives a broad overview of unintentional communities (like shipwrecked people on an island forced to live together), intentional communities (utopianists, hippies, ...) and artificial communities. The last category has been created in Christakis' lab, running groups of people to work toward common goals. Their software programme - Breadboard - identifies the ways of collaboration among groups of people who do not know each other. In 'fluid' societies, in which the participants can choose their friends, but are also tied to social networks, generosity prevails, and because the friends can shift groups and be in various groups, the generosity extends to the whole society in the end, in contrast with 'rigid' societies where such a choice does not exist, leading to more defectors and the ultimate collapse of the system. 

Christakis uses hundreds of examples of the creation of 'societies' in the natural world, among animals, to show the systems they have set up to live together and prosper together. His social network has been tested  in groups of animals, in villages in various parts of the world as well as among students and other study subjects, allowing to compare how human interaction and networks grow. "Bigger populations are better suited to social learning and to maximizing opportunities for valuable innovation." Instead of all the rhetoric of many social scientists, Christakis can show this with the data. Quantifying vocabulary, technology, group membership and interactions, current software is able to map all this into visualised networks that allow to compare (not judge). 

He also discusses the gene-culture coevolution and suggests to have more bridging research between biology and sociology. The answer to the question "Is it nature or nurture?" should simply be "Yes!". 

His view is one of optimism, but not naive, in the sense that he of course acknowledges that humans have both competitive and cooperative impulses, both violent and beneficient tendencies. Our history and our human narratives have to often been focused on the violent part of our humanity, and less so on the beneficial part. 

There is no question that his work and that of his lab deserves wider attention. There is a lot to learn here. 

Russell Blackford - The Tyranny Of Opinion (Bloomsbury, 2019) ***

Russel Blackford is professor of philosophy at the University of Newcastle in Australia. In "The Tyranny Of Opinion" he gives an overview of the boundaries between free speech and harmful comments on others. His angle of attack are the writings of John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'. It is a scholarly book, possibly too scholarly, in the sense that - like a true university professor - he gives an overview of the existing literature on the topic, giving a lot of opinions from other scholars, giving an overview on the current debate instead of giving a frame of reference for the reader to identify where the limits are. He describes the issue, but does not give a sense of direction of how to address it. 

The topic is possibly one of the most important ones to tackle in our times of social media, war propaganda, nationalism and populism. 

Maybe my expectations were too high, or rather, what I expected to learn from the book is not actually in the book itself: a simple framework to identify the boundaries of free speech. As it stands, many of the situations he describes are so familiar that most people who follow current events or are active on social media are aware of: intimidation, self-censorship, conformtiy, harassment, hate speech, religious sensitivities, quenching debate, blasphemy, etc. You would wish a scholar such as Blackford would indicate a clearer line than he does in the book. In the end, it all depends on an assessment of the situation itself (but by which criteria?), with considerations of respect and good taste. He comes with the recommendation for more self-interrogation among liberals, but fails to come with recommendations for society as a whole. 

Would the best policy not be to organise open debates in which all opinions are welcomed and discussed, regardless of their nature? How can this be done on mainstream media and social media? Which role can education play? How can universities become havens of public discussion on new ideas? What can legislators do (for instance: even in most democratic societies, blasphemy is still a criminal offence)?

What was a grey zone before has remained vague after reading Blackford's book.