Laurence Waters. Oxfordshire Railways (1991)

     Laurence Waters. Oxfordshire Railways (1991) Peter gave me this book, a collection of photographs covering the main and branch lines in the (present) Oxfordshire. Since most of the lines in Oxon were GWR, most of the photos show that line. The emphasis is on locomotives, with precious little rolling stock, but there are a few interesting shots of stations, junctions, and the like. The lower photo on page 85 shows a the Great Western Society excursion lined up in front of No 17 Sapper at the Bicester Ordnance Depot in 1973. Roger, UP and AR are easily recognisable. Cool!
     Photo reproduction is fair, considering when the book was printed. The map is too small, and is clearly drawn for someone already familiar with Oxfordshire and its railways. Like most books of its kind, it has little appeal outside the world of railway enthusiasts, however. Modellers will find some useful information here and there, but on the whole it doesn’t add to the typical modeller’s information. But I liked it. **½ (2006)

Arnold Bennett. A Man from the North (1912)

     Arnold Bennett. A Man from the North (1912) I’ve not read any Bennett before this, so I don’t know how characteristic this is. It tells, in a rather discursive style, the story of Richard Larch, a young man who arrives in London with dreams of literary and cultural success. He has the imagination, but lacks the application and obsessiveness needed for literary success.
     Essentially, he drifts, spending his money on mild amusements such as the theatre and good restaurants. But he does his work diligently and well, although with no apparent enthusiasm, and gets his reward. He is promoted to what amounts to the third-in-command at the law firm for which he works, a reward that moves him to accept his place in society: a solicitor’s clerk with good prospects. He courts an old acquaintance, Laura, the red-headed cashier at a vegetarian restaurant that he initially patronised to save money. The book ends with his imminent marriage to this good woman, one of his own class, whom he sees as providing pleasant physical company, a suitable number of children in due course, and the domestic comforts and support he needs for his work.
     Along the way to this settling for mediocrity, he almost makes a permanent liaison with Adeline, a woman of livelier disposition, whom he meets through her uncle, another dreamer with too much imagination and not enough persistence. But he then still expected the spark of desultory romance to flare into passion. Absent that bright flame, he lets her go. He attempts a novel, which he recognises as trash, a recognition that puts an end to his career as a writer. Yet even as he prepares for marriage to a good and decent woman, he imagines that his son will inherit his literary talents, and dreams of encouraging and nurturing the talents of an as yet unborn child.
     Apart from an amiable disposition, diligence at work, and a willingness to help others, Larch has no major virtues. One gets the impression that he is as incapable of great viciousness as he is of great art. Fundamentally lazy, terrified of failure, yet too often recognising its signs in himself, he is a man whose success consists of adapting himself to his circumstances. He experiences some happiness, and provides some for others, and may, in the end, become a contented man, but one with a faintly melancholy memory of the great ambitions of his youth. In other words, a very ordinary man. It’s Bennett’s talent to make us care about him. **½ (2006)

Michael Pollan. The Botany of Desire (2001)

     Michael Pollan. The Botany of Desire (2001) Pollan looks at the relationship between humans and four domesticated plants: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. His begins with the thesis that these plants have become successful in the evolutionary sense by becoming domesticated. Just as bees and flowers have co-evolved, so have these domesticated plants and we humans. That is, we have adapted our social behaviour and technology to these plants. They supplied a human want; we reciprocated by cultivating them. We plant, water, fertilise and protect them. Not a bad bargain, for the plants. At least in the short term of a few millennia.
     Domestication works only when plants have sufficient genomic variability that they can produce variations that satisfy some human need or desire. That’s why trees, by and large, have not been domesticated, merely managed. The same principle holds true of domesticated animals, too, of course, as Jared Diamond has argued in Guns, Germs and Steel, a book that Pollan lists as one of his sources and influences. It’s helpful to take Pollan’s plant’s eye view, since it reminds us that we are not, after all, in control of nature. The Judeao-Christian take has been that God gave us the Earth to rule it. Fűllet die Erde, und machet.sie euch unterthan, it says in Luther’s version of Genesis: Fill the earth and make it subject to you. No doubt this view intertwines with the western notion that reason should rule over the passions of the body, and with the Christian suspicion of passion and bodiliness.
     Pollan begins with the thesis that domestication has been as much an advantage for plants as for humans. But when he has done tracing the history of the potato, it’s clear that the thesis needs a subtle refinement: we do not domesticate nature or any natural being. We can at best co-operate with them. His description of modern agribusiness, of monocultured crops growing (if that’s the word) in sterilised soil is terrifying. This business model is unsustainable, and will kill us. The hybris of thinking we can make nature do what we want will do us in. It’s part and parcel of the mindset that sees economics and ecology not only as disjoint but as in opposition. I think this mindset is insane. Genetic engineering will provide at most a short-term fix. Adding Bt-coding genes to potatoes, corn, and other crops will merely, eventually, produce beetles that are immune to Bt. It’s only a matter of time. Update 2013: this has already happened with corn.
     Although Pollan did not set out to write a tract against industrialised, corporate agriculture, that’s what his book morphed into. It’s to his credit that he didn’t rewrite the book as if that insight, stumbled on after many months of research and writing, had been his from the beginning, He takes the reader along the same path he took. What starts out as an entertaining survey of gardening and agriculture carried by a history of four emblematic plants becomes a plea for a truly ecological sense of economics. We should, I think, all know that the common root of these two words, eco-, is Greek for “house” or “home”. If we don’t keep our house in order, we will have no home.
     Not that the Earth will mind. One species more or less makes little difference. There is always something in the gene pool that will produce a creature to fill whatever niches are left empty by our disappearance. *** (2006)

James Herriot. All Creatures Great and Small (1970-73)

     James Herriot. All Creatures Great and Small (1970-73) I've had enough of politics for a while. Watched the debate of the Provincial party leaders last night. Steve Paikin is an excellent moderator, and kept the debate going smoothly. He really likes politics, and politicians, too, a rare sentiment these days.
     I've just finished reading the first Herriot omnibus, a very pleasant book. I didn't read his books when they first came out, but I watched the TV series several times. It reran for years on PBS. So while reading the book, I saw the characters as portrayed on TV, which both helped and hindered, as some of the descriptions were at odds with the appearance of the actors. Never mind, it was a pleasant read, a series of anecdotes that add up to a portrait of the writer and his clients.
     Herriot can be sentimental, and is at his best in straightforward story telling. He has a talent for the illuminating detail or remark. His courtship of Helen Alderson was expanded for the series; perhaps Herriot advised on some of the details of what he merely refers to here, the long walks they took, the times Helen came along on his rounds, and so on. Herriot doesn't pretend to be better than he is. He has a temper and self doubts. He doesn't let us in on his innermost thoughts very often, and when he does, we get a fair amount of his feelings for the Dales and their inhabitants. As I've said, these tend towards the sentimental, but his delight in the landscape, the people, and his profession is genuine, as is his regret for the passing of some of the old ways, tempered by his recognition of the value of the new. The book isn't exactly a page turner, but its anecdotal structure and plain style (leavened with a dry and pleasant wit) makes it a good bedtime book, one that one may put down and take up again without losing one's place. I will never read it again, but I will give it to someone who can appreciate its plain virtues and pleasures. *** (2006)

Erika Chase. Read and Buried (2012)

     Erika Chase. Read and Buried (2012) Lizzie Turner, guiding light of the Ashton Corners Mystery Readers and Cheese Straw Society, helps solve the murder of Derek Alton, former best-selling author, who’s shot in her living room while trying to follow up on his failed moves the evening before. The complications are Lizzie’s relationship with the police chief Mark Dreyfus, the presence of several women who succumbed to Dreyfus’s smarmy flattery years earlier, and a handful of sketched in back-stories that amount to little more than comic-strip landscapes. Clothes and food figure, as do two cats who have no personality at all: they’re just animated scenery. I trust the Society for the Prevention of Literary Exploitation of Cats takes notice. The feel-good ending, set at a Christmas dinner, includes a baby born to a single mother who’s ditched her abusive boyfriend, hints of a December-December love story, and assorted other too-good-to-be-true stuff. It's written in bite-size chapters, the dialogue is brisk and supposedly Southern, and the characters are comic-strip level, which is all they need to be. Fluff, in other words, well-executed and enjoyable if you’re in the mood for it, which I was. **

ZITS (Book review)

     ZITS Zits focusses on Jeremy, a 15-year-old high-school freshman. Katheryn had this compilation; I believe she received it as a Christmas present. The writer/artist has captured the agonies and delights of mid-adolescence with excruciating accuracy. The Toronto Star runs the strip every day, but I see only the Saturday versions, so I was pleased to get the week-day fillers, which develop the characters even more. This strip presents a much more realistic view of teenagers than the Archie series. It is a true comedie humaine, not merely a string of gags. The writing is superb, the draughtsmanship a wonderful combination of the real, the expressionistic, and the bizarre. Great strip, great book. *** (2005)
     This is the last entry for the 2005 book reviews.

JoAnn Roe. The Real Old West: Photographs by Frank Matsura. (1981)

     JoAnn Roe. The Real Old West: Photographs by Frank Matsura. (1981) Matsura arrived in Conconully, Washington State, to take a job as cook’s helper in the local hotel. He quickly established himself as photographer, however, and when he died ten years later of tuberculosis, people from miles around attended his funeral. His photographic skills are evident in this selection of some 150 images, all taken in the Okanogan (NB the US spelling) on both sides of the border. He himself is a puzzle: very little is known of his antecedents, and the few clues haven’t apparently helped much in discovering his Japanese family, nor the reasons why he left there.
     But his pictures tell us a good deal about him, because he was able to capture the trust of his subjects, all of whom gaze into the camera with self-possession and self-assurance. He also took pains to record the business and social life, and the landscape of the area. I found this book in Donalda (Alberta) in the summer, and bought it because of its photos of buildings and transport; but in the several times I’ve looked through it this year, I came to admire Matsura’s sense of composition and his skill in presenting the characters of his portrait subjects. A very good book, with a mystery at its heart. *** (2005)

Simon Watts, ed. The Art of Arthur Watts (2003)

      Simon Watts, ed. The Art of Arthur Watts (2003) When we first went to England, my grand-parents had a pile of old Punch magazines. We children perused them thoroughly, for the pictures of course. Most of them we could not understand, but we did like the drawings. I remember full page cartoons with many wonderful details. Some of these I now know to have been drawn by Arthur Watts. Visiting Lee Valley Tools in Edmonton, I came across a copy of this book, a compilation by Arthur Watts’s son. The drawings charmed me again, and I bought the book, putting it aside as a Christmas present to me, which in due course it became. I’ve spent a couple of delightful hours looking at the pictures again, and reading the brief biography.
     It seems Watts also produced posters for the LMS, so I shall have to look for those. He was a keen sailor, and wrote articles for a yachting magazine, illustrated by himself of course. Simon also reprints a series of six short essays on the art and craft of drawing in back and white, which give some insight into Watts’s philosophy. He emphasises simplification, ironically, really, as he detested modern art, and often made satirical allusions to it in his own work. Yet those allusions were extremely skilful: Watts could have done work in the modern style if he’d wished. A book worth looking at repeatedly. Unfortunately, some of the originals were stolen from Simon Watts home as he was preparing the book, and on the last page he asks for help in recovering them. I don't know oof any success in recovering the drawings. *** (2005)

M. C. Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet (1993)

     M. C. Beaton Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet (1993) It looks like Dr Bladen killed himself by accident while attending to a horse, but a second murder changes that interpretation, and Agatha and James Lacey (the handsome but gun-shy ex-colonel neighbour whom she fancies) turn up clues that Detective Bill Wong has overlooked. Seems money and jealousy came together to provoke murder. The book is light-weight fluff, but entertaining enough. I read it almost at one go in about 2½  hours.
     Agatha’s on-going, somewhat over-coy not-quite-courtship of James Lacey can be a bit tiresome. Other sub-plots, such as Bill Wong’s life story, miscellaneous neighbours’ joys and sorrows, etc, are sketched rather than narrated. It looks very much as if Beaton wanted to write a more complex book, but a ruthless editor pruned her manuscript down to the little that’s needed to make the puzzle and its solution plausible, with just enough hints to make Agatha’s world believable while you read about her. She’s a decent sort, really. I’ve read some of the later books, and unfortunately they don’t get better. This is the 2nd book in the series, later on they do get married, but their little ship of love encounters some very rough waters. **

Ronald Weinland The Prophesied End-Time (2004)

    Ronald Weinland The Prophesied End-Time (2004) Weinland exhibits several of the characteristics of a crank, chief among them the claim that everybody else is wrong, an obsessive focus on a single main claim, marshalling of supposedly supportive evidence, misinterpretation of facts, misunderstanding or ignorance of relevant data, and an utterly arbitrary interpretation of whatever evidence he finds.  Weinland is a self-styled prophet. It seems God vouchsafed him a true revelation of hitherto hidden truths while he was on a Mediterranean cruise and passed the island of Patmos where John claims to have written his Revelation. The hidden truth is that the tribulation is at hand, and Weinland knows exactly when it will happen.
     The book is incoherent, repetitive, and only the kind of fascination one feels when watching a wreck kept me reading. Weinland joined the Worldwide Church of God founded by Herbert W. Armstrong. After Armstrong’s death in 1986, this organisation broke up into dozens of splinter groups, one of them being Weinland’s. In 2011, he was convicted of breaking the tax laws of the USA by siphoning off church cash for his personal use, which is a common failing of cult leaders. In 2012 he started jail sentence.
     I looked him up on the web; the rage and vituperation aimed at him by former fellow Armstrongites is amazing. Skeptics’ blogs are considerably more polite, since he is after all a garden-variety con-man and crank, not much different from dozens like him. Since 2004 he has prophesied the start-date of tribulation several times, the most recent being May19 of this year.
     The book was an experience that I don’t intend to repeat. For more about cranks and crackpots and how to recognise them:
http://www.skepticblog.org/2010/07/08/martin-gardners-signs-of-a-crank/
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
     Although these pages deal with science crackpots, they apply just as well to theological crackpottery. Weinland's predictions rest on a goodly number of pseudo-scientific notions, which I think is always a sign of religious weirdness. It's rather pathetic that so many religionists want the imprimatur of scientific respectability.

Agatha Christie Peril at End House (1932)

     Agatha Christie Peril at End House (1932) One of Poirot’s most famous cases, in which he almost fails to solve the puzzle The story is set in a Cornish resort town with the usual cast of vaguely upper-middle-class characters and their servants. Christie allows herself a little wit and character development, but as in all her earlier books, she focusses on the plot. This one works well, in part because a couple of subplots are well integrated into the main story. As in most of her early tales, Christie tries a variation on a standard plot, the murder by mistake. In this case, the intended victim is in fact the murderer, and almost gets away with it. Since Christie’s time, this variation has itself become a standard plot. The TV adaptation was especially well done, as I recall, with a satisfying amount of period detail, and the kind of acting that hints at hidden depths in the characters, which made them more engaging than Christie's originals. **½ (2005)

Nick & Helen Mika. Canada’s First Railway (1985)

     Nick & Helen Mika. Canada’s First Railway (1985) A history compiled as commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the first train on the Champlain and St. Lawrence Rail-Road. It consists of narrative, the few pictures (all conjectural) of the Dorchester and the carriages it hauled, a couple of sketchy maps, and reprints of newspaper articles and other documents. Clearly a labour of love, and very good as such. But one does want to know more, and Mika’s limited research makes those questions acute. Still, worth having and reading. **½ (2005)

John Mortimer. Clinging to the Wreckage (1982)

     John Mortimer. Clinging to the Wreckage (1982) A paradoxical memoir, mixing pain  and happiness, gloom and laughter. Mortimer knows  the frailties of human beings, including his own. I found this memoir moving, and, despite its melancholy, oddly uplifting. I think he wrote a continuation; if so, I’ll want to read it, too. *** (2005)