Ivan Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America

James Gilchrist Swan was a remarkable individual. Born in 1818 he spend most of his life in the Pacific North West, now part of Washington state in the US. Having travelled widely before arrival there, he took on a number of roles for the US government and other interests, becoming an Indian Agent, a temporary representative of a railroad company, and other such frontier roles. He was also a collector for the Smithsonian Institute, buying Native American art and tools for their collections. In addition Swan was a politician, a hunter, a painter and above all a writer. Today he would likely be called an anthropologist (indeed that is how he is described in his current, all to brief, Wikipedia entry). 

Swan lived among the Makah tribal group for many years, learning their language and customs, and documenting almost every aspect of their lives - from religious beliefs and mythology, to fishing practices and art. His book on the Makah was eventually published by the Smithsonian and remains an important account of their history and culture. But Swan was also a prolific writer in two other regards - his letters to all and sundry, and his diaries, which he kept for decades. These he filled daily recording in detail his life, work and internal thoughts.

Ivan Doig's Winter Brothers is Doig's study of these diaries, written while spending a winter season in the North West, visiting places and sites related to Swan's life. Doig is a magnificent writer, his own personal history, and the travelogue, expertly intertwined with extracts from Swan's diaries. At times this can be a little hard to follow as the reader has only italics to separate contemporary from historic. But it is worth pushing through as both illuminate each other.

Doig is a great novelist and biographer. But it is Swan that shines through the book, his love for life and people is wonderful. His respect for the Native Americans and their way of life, even if he is driven to distraction by some individuals, seems remarkable for the time. The closeness of his life with them, and the documentation of their culture is made with scientific rigour, but also honesty. 

But the diaries are also very touching. Swan's struggles with alcohol, his love for food and the way that life, death and love affect him through decades are moving. Doig's interaction with these aspects, as well as the insights he brings from his own youth in Montana make this a remarkable work. 

On finishing I noticed that my copy of the book has the name and number of a hotel scribbled on the inside back cover. This hotel, it turns out, is on one of the many islands in the Salish Sea, a place that Swan explored in detail and the location of his last, expedition. One of the previous owners was clearly enjoying the insight into the area offered by Doig's book while visiting the region. I can't imagine a better introduction to the place, it's people and history.

Related Reviews

Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun

Corinne Fowler - Our Island Stories: Country walks through colonial Britain

Having thoroughly enjoyed Corinne Fowler's previous book Green Unpleasant Land I was very pleased to pick up this, her most recent book. It takes a look at the close links between the British countryside, colonial history and class struggle. Unusally, as the subtitle suggests, it is constructed around ten walks, in landscapes as varied as the Western Isles of Scotland, the Lake District and North Wales. On each journey Fowler is accompanied by a historian, artist or writer who adds their own perspective to the events and landscape, often in deeply personal ways.

I was expecting much of the book to focus on the way that Britain's wealthy had benefited from slavery. Fowler has been central to the investigations that have highlighted the extensive links between National Trust properties and slavery. So I expected that much of the book would focus on how the wealth from slavery had been used to construct huge country houses and large estates. This is, of course, true. Fowler writes about the Conservative MP Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, whose "massive portfolio of property still includes the Drax Hall estate on Barbados, which, founded by the Draxes in the 1650s, still cultivates sugar cane today. His planatations, historically, were worked by enslaved people." Drax, like many other landowners, owes the family wealth to the labour, blood and sweat of enslaved people.

Important though these insights into our countryside are, this is not all there is to Fowler's book. I was repeatedly struck by a more dynamic relationship between colonialism and the landscape. This is, perhaps, best shown by the walk Fowler takes us on around the town of Dolgellau in North Wales. Now principally known as a base from which visitors can explore Snowdonia, it once was at the epicentre of a global trade in wool. Dolgellau's wool was "distinctive" and often called "Welsh plains". It was a "cheap, coarse and durable... strong fabic" and "at the height of production, 718,000 yards of webs were produced almost entirely for export with around eighteen mills operating in and around Dolgellau."

The nature of Welsh Plain cloth made it idea for clothing enslaved people in the Americas and the West Indies. Fowler quotes the historian Marian Gwyn, "who found that in 1806 just three plantations in Clarendon, Jamacia ordered over 8 miles of fabric; 15 percent of this was woollen and from north Wales". The brutal reality of this is brought home to the reader as Fowler quotes from various advertisments from the 1700s which aim to identify and recapture escaped slaves. These frequently note that slaves escaped wearing Welsh wool.

As the example of Welsh Wool demonstrates, Fowler's book explores much more than the flow of  wealth from slavery into the hands of wealthy merchants and bankers in Britain. It also shows how that money was used to transform Britain's landscape, its people and its economy, in order to squeeze more wealth out of the slave trade. Dolgellau's growth was driven by the money the local economy made from manufacturing wool for the slave trade: "Around 1690, Welsh plains clothed 97,000 enslaved people in the Caribbean and North America.. by the mid-eighteenth century - the period when Dolgellau's smart houses started going up - this number grew to just under 2 million yards for some 279,000 enslaved people."

Thus the slave trade, in terms of the development of the town, is literarily written into the landscape if we look for the expansion of housing and development. It is also written there in terms of the transformation of the local economy and, as Fowler further develops her argument in later chapters through the enclosure of land and the transformation of the peasantry.

For the slave commodities made and sold from Britain like wool, iron, or copper required labour. They also required the creation of a new proletariat, and the destruction of historic ways of organising the rural economy. For many landowners the wealth they got from slavery drove these processes forward, impoverishing local workers, destroying traditional agriculture and manufacturing and concentrating workers in bigger and bigger industrial concerns. As Fowler points out, the wealth from slavery did not "trickle down" to the employees in Britain, instead if was concentrated in the hands of the already rich, and allowed them to exploit workers more:

Transatlantic slavery permeated the lives of rural working people: sheep-shearers, wool-carders, spinners and weavers. Not that these people were made rich by slavery: on the contrary, their lives were often harse. The money was bing made by people far higher up the economic ladder: landowners with sheep-grazing pasture, wool-merchants, slave-traders and their backers.

In fact I would go further. The wealth from slavery allowed the destruction of older economic relations, to the detriment of the population. British workers ended up sicker, poorer and dying earlier as a result of the industrialisation bring by the slave trade.

These workers, even in times of great hardship, often spoke out against slavery. Fowler describes the Lancashire cotton workers whose struggle to support the North in the US Civil War was born out of opposition to slavery. She also notes the rebellions and revolutions of the slaves themselves who fought their masters and occasionally, such as with the Haitian revolution, won.

The final aspect of this book that is worth noting is the personal stories of Fowler's walking companions. Their knowledge of the history of colonialism adds greatly to Fowler's work, as does their art and poetry. But it is perhaps most interesting regarding the modern countryside. Repeatedly her Black and Asian friends tell her about their own negative experience of such walks. Feeling like and outsider, experiencing racism or, for instance, never seeing someone like them working or living in the country. 

Part of challenging that racism has to come from a real recognition that the British countryside was never a pastoral idyll. The history and landscapes of rural Britain have been shaped by capitalism, class struggle and colonialism. As Corinne Fowler's wonderful work shows, slavery, imperialism and colonialism are written into the very countryside, into the shapes of small rural towns, and into the history of the people who lived there. For those of us who love the country, and who want to know its history, this is an indespensible work.

Related Reviews

Fowler - Green Unpleasant Land
Howkins - The Death of Rural England
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle
Blackburn - The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
Fryer - Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain
Rediker - The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery & Freedom

Ben Rawlence - The Treeline: The last forest and the future of life on earth

There is a crude, but attractive, solution to climate disaster that has been on offer from various NGO, environmental groups, multinational corporations and governments at different points over the last fifty years. Plant trees. Trees, we hear all the time are the "lung" of the planet. Their loss contributes to a warming world and their planting will fix the problem. If only it was so simple.

Ben Rawlence's recent book The Treeline is a fascinating study of a specific set of trees - those that make up the boundaries between two climatic regions - the frozen wastelands and the warming, more comfortable bits. "The earth is out of balance" says Rawlence, and "the treeline zone is a terrritory in the grip of a large geological change, confounding and challenging our ideas of the past, present and future."

The book, part travelogue, part scientific account and very much a celebration of trees, ought to have been huge. Not least because the treeline itself, wrapped like a wavey line along the north pole, is very long indeed. But Rawlence explains that the book's length was constrained by his discovery that only "a tiny handful of tree species make up the treeline" and just six of them are the "familiar markers of the northern terroirtoies: three configfers and three broadleaves". For those confused by these terms there is a hand guide at the back of the book.

As the world is warming the treeline is moving, sometimes remarkably rapidly. As Rawlence travels around the Treeline, he meets people that are living, herding, surviving in areas were there should be no trees, and where the arrival of trees is both surprising and transformative. Take his visit to Norway.

The Sámi have been saying for at least fiften years that winters are getting 'weird'. The amount of light hasn't changed and the soil is the same, but more rain and more heat have made all the difference. The downy birch loves the warmer waether. It used to be confined to the dips and gullies on the plateau, out of the icy winds, but, unleashed by the warmth, it is storming over the top and out into the open, moving upslope at the rate of forty metres a year. And enormous amount of territory is being transformed from tundra into woodland at a lightning pace.

Here we encounter the unanticipated problem caused by those who would simply plant more saplings. Trees don't always help ecological systems. This is for several reasons. The trees encroaching onto areas were they were previously absent destroy ecologies and landscapes. Their presence transforms the space they move into:

The greening of the tundra is closely linked to more warming as the birch improves the soil and warms it further with microbial activity, melthing the permafrost and releading methane - a greenhouse gas eight-five times more powerful than carbon dioxide in its warming effects over a shorter timeframe. 

Another problem is that that the trees that are exploding outwards aren't creating the same, historic forests that nuture and protect biodiversity. Where "old growth" forest "created a diverse forest full of hundrds of different kinds of plants", the old trees simply cannot grow in time. Instead fast growing species are blocking the potential for other trees to evolve their own space and support biodiversity such as the lichen that feed reindeer. Rawlence paints a picture of sometrees "racing over the tundra" while other species don't get a look in. It has tremendous consequences for animals like reindeer and the people who live on them.

One of the most important strengths of The Treeline is that Rawlence refuses to isolate the ecological systems from human society. 

The landscape we have grown up in and taken for granted in a few short generations are not timeless at all, but a human-shaped moment in a continuous drynamic of changing colours of blur ocean, white ice and green forest on a ball of rock, surrounded by gas, spinning in space. 

Countless generations have labourerd on their lands, relating to the species, encouraging, nuturing and fighting for an ecological space. Climate change is arriving like a massive hammer, smashing up complex relationships and undermining historically viable systems. The people who suffer first and foremost are some of the poorest - indigineous communities that are forgotten and neglected - yet also are often those with some of the best answers to solving ecological problems. Though it is very likely that many, such as the reindeer herders, will simply disappear from their current economic niche.

Rawlence also identifies as second factor. If we cannot ignore the role of humans in shaping a landscape, we cannot also ignore the role of the economic systems they create. Its unusual to read it in a book on ecology, so its worth highlighting this:

The breaching of the ecological ceiling of the planet was only enabled and accelerated by a specific recent economic model: industrial capitalism and its political export, colonialism.... our collective survival on the planet almost certainly depends on moving beyond it.

It's a stark choice. For readers who like easy solutions, there are plenty of examples that Rawlence gives, were small groups of people and individuals are fighting to protect and understand trees and the related economic systems. But these brief moments, in time and space, of rewilding are likely to be swallowed up by the vast forces unleased by industrial capitalism. Planting trees on its own is not going to cut it. Ben Rawlence's book is a celebration of trees, ecology and human life - through a study of the tree line in many different places. It's also a call to arms.

Related Reviews

Bourgon - Tree Thieves: Crime & Survival in the Woods
Rackham - Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape
Rackham - The Ash Tree
Bensaïd - The Dispossessed
Slaght - Owls of the Eastern Ice

Suzanne Heywood - Wavewalker: Breaking Free

In 1975, when Suzanne Heywood was six, her parents announced that they were going to follow in the path of Captain Cook's third voyage and travel around the world by sailing boat. To Suzanne and her younger brother this was a bolt from the blue. It would be, her father said, a three year trip. The youngsters thought it was a tremendous adventure. The idea of a young family making such an epic journey captured the minds of many. Journalists and camera crews followed preparations, and the ship, Wavewalker, was sent off by an appropriately large group of the great and the good, and many curious onlookers.

The youngsters found it thrilling, but quickly things began to be a lot more confused. In the eyes of Suzanne, her father was a brilliant explorer, a worthy person to follow Captain Cook. But problems began to develop. Inevitably, the trips was not as easy as expected. Tensions developed among those on board, and as days, became weeks and then months, things were not quite so clear.

Wavewalker is a fascinating book, because it uses the medium of Heywood's memoires to explore something far beyond the voyage itself. The three years, became four, then five. Eventually Wavewalker and Heywood's family spent a decade sailing 47,000 miles. The reminiscences are often what you might expect from such a voyage. Suzanne remembers whales, adventure and exotic ports. But when, in the Indian ocean in the midst of an enormous storm, a giant wave smashed into Wavewalker and badly injured Suzanne, we begin to see the real tensions in the project.

For this book is not really about Wavewalker's voyage. It is really about how the obsessions of adults impact upon their children. Suzanne's father could not see beyond the voyage. Her mother, despite her professed hatred of sailing, could not break from him. Suzanne has recreated the experiences from her own diaries, recollections and interviews with the crew that come and go. She also has her father's logbooks and own writings, that paint a different picture - one of family unity and enjoyment. But, Suzanne increasingly, and desperately, wants to return home, but her parents won't allow anything to get in the way of their dreams. They see the voyage as a the best education young children could have. The intergenerational tensions become simmering hatred.  

The readers follow Suzanne as she becomes forced increasingly to rely on her own devices. Self reliant and wary of forming friendships because these are only ever temporary - it is not hard to see that Suzanne is actually depressed, and suffering enormously. She is desperate to learn, yet her parents see education as a irrelevant to the voyage. Her mother, in particular, blocks Suzanne - playing loud music while the girl studies, mocking her and only supporting her father's goals. 

This leads to some shocking moments. When Suzanne is having emergency surgery on a remote island for injuries sustained in the storm, her mother can barely be with her. Eventually, as a teenager, Suzanne is left in charge of her brother, while her parents voyage onward. Later we learn that her mother has told her father, that either Suzanne leaves the ship or she does. Suzanne is left to fend for herself, in a situation that frankly is shocking. Eventually she phones Childline, the counsellor telling her "None of this is your fault... You’re coping with far more than is fair."

What is shocking about Suzanne's account is her parent's seeming lack on interest in their children's own needs. They seemed to see them as extensions of their own selves - sharing interests, beliefs and so on. Suzanne is expected to take on the traditional female roles of kitchen work, while her brother works on deck. When she asks questions about religion, beginning to develop her own ideas about the world, her father mocks her as the "token Christian" rather than engaging with her and encouraging her to think. 

Suzanne shines through however as a independent, brave and clever girl. As she grows older on the endless voyage, she fights for space to learn and educate. In the most deplorable of circumstances she passes exams via correspondence courses, having to beg her parents to make sure she gets to the exams. While she never gets the dress she craves - her parents essentially take her money - she does eventually break free and get to university.

This book is very unlike those I would normally read, and this review is not easy to write. I got it after reading Suzanne Heywood's article in the Guardian, a selection of extracts, because the book spoke to me about relationships and family. While I cannot claim to have shared her experiences, I felt that Suzanne spoke to me about some of what I have experienced in my own life. Reading Wavewalker was then a deeply moving personal experience as well as a sad insight into another's life. 

When her family learn that Suzanne is writing this book, they react with shock and anger. It is clear that the tensions and fissures within the family that were created in the 1970s and 1980s are never resolved, because her parents can never admit their failure. Wavewalker then, is a on one level a tragic tail of parental failure. But on the other it is a tremendous story of a young woman who refused to give up on her dream, and overcame incredible odds to do that. My heart was with her on every page, though my mind was often elsewhere. 

Monisha Rajesh - Around the World in 80 Trains

Monisha Rajesh's Around the World in 80 Trains promises the reader an account of a 45,000 mile "adventure". Her journey certainly must have been a personal adventure, crossing Canada and the United States and Russia, travelling through South East Asia, exploring China and even taking the train in North Korea and to Tibet. But sadly there's no thrill of a journey for the reader, and unfortunately Rajesh seems to spend most of the time sneering at the trains she and her partner travel on, and the people they meet.

It is hard to put into words exactly why I disliked this book so much. In part it is the framing of the book. Refreshingly Rajesh doesn't pretend to be something she isn't - she criticises those who claim not to be tourists by donning the "traveller" mantel.  She rightly points out that once you travel you are a tourist. She also celebrates the randomness of travelling by train, where "no matter how many journeys I took, or how awful the train, each one brought an element of surprise or wonder". But she has strange ideas about why other people travel, "driven by the weather, the prospect of sex or dwindling funds". 

Despite being aware of her "privilege" as a relatively well off traveller in some of the poorest parts of the world, she also displays a strange failure to understand the people around here. Writing about a fellow traveller arrested in Bangkok, she comments "the idea of wilfully committing any kind of crime in Southeast Asia never failed to baffle me". The choices made by people who commit crimes are rarely the ones they'd like to make, being closely tied to wealth and poverty. Rajesh just doesn't seem to get it and comes across as tone deaf.

At times Rajesh has interesting insights, at others she comes across as the sort of traveller that she claims she isn't - "Leaving my job, my home and my possessions had quietened the noise in my head. My immediate concerns were were to eat and where to sleep. The less I carried, the less I worried". Must be nice.

At the end I was frustrated and disappointed by this book. I didn't enjoy the authors' attitudes to most of the people she met and her commentary on the places, trains and cultures she saw seemed superficial. Unusually this travel book didn't make me want to travel. Not recommended.

Related Reviews

Theroux – The Old Patagonian Express
Theroux - Riding the Iron Rooster - By Train through China
Theroux - Dark Star Safari
Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

Caroline Wickham-Jones - Orkney: A Historical Guide

This updated classic historical guide to Orkney is the perfect book to read if you are lucky enough to visit the islands. Caroline Wickham-Jones was a renowned expert historian and archaeologist who lived in Orkney, and there's a real sense of personal touch to the historical summaries and guides: "Bring a torch" she encourages the reader on occasions. 

The book is divided by time period, a short historical overview in chapters dedicated to Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age Orkney followed by the Picts, Norse and Earl eras and then 18th, 19th and contemporary history. The book covers a lot because there's a lot to see in Orkney, a place where recent history is often closely linked to ancient eras. It also means that there is a constantly stream of new things to examine in the islands, so the book benefits from a new chapter on "recent archaeological discoveries", which includes, among other things, Norse burial sites in Papa Westray and the hugely important Ness of Brodgar.

On occasion I found the book a little too compartmentalised. The fantastic Neolithic tomb of Maeshowe is described in detail, and Wickham-Jones mentions the Viking graffiti in it, but doesn't offer translations or information until the section on Norse history. A casual reader using the book as a guide book might easily miss these links. I was also surprised to see little or no discussion of enclosure, displacement or clearances relating to the sites mentioned or the history of Orkney. Given the role this played in the transformation of Orkney's farming landscape I was surprised by this.

Nonetheless this is an extremely useful book that every visitor to the islands ought to read as an introduction to the history and landscape of Orkney.

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Irving - The Fatal Lure of Politics: The life and thought of Vere Gordon Childe
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Richards - The Highland Clearances
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Eric Newby - The Last Grain Race

In 1938 the four-masted sailing ship Moshulu left Belfast to sail to Australia. Early the next year it returned home to England, its cargo holds full, the first of half a dozen ships racing in the Last Grain Race. For decades sailing ships had travelled between England and Australia, racing to bring their cargo home before anyone else to commander the best prices. But 1938/1939 would see the end of an era, as World War Two and oil powered cargo craft transformed the terrain of trade on the sea.

Moshulu's voyage would now be a footnote in the history of capitalist trade had it not been that one of its crew was the 18 year old Eric Newby, who would go on to have a famous career as a author and travel-writer. Nearly twenty years later Newby reconstructed the voyage from his diary and photographs and the result is this classic book.

Newby arrives on board the ship a complete newbee. His knowledge of sailing is limited to the exaggerated stories told to him by family friends and novels. The bullying mate sends him to the very top of the main mast on his first day onboard in Belfast docks to test his capability. Newby survives, but the experience at the dock side is very different to the reality he'll experience 20 metres in the sky during a gale. 

The next challenge is the crew. The sailors mostly hail from Sweden and Finland, bitter rivals and the atmosphere of the 1930s is dominated by nationalistic sentiment. The crew argue, fight and drink together, though they're all committed to the voyage. Newby has to prove himself - as a drinker, as a fighter as a seaman before he is accepted by the majority of the others. Some of them never to accept this "Englander", though they all seem to tolerate him - not least because they can get the youngest to do the dirty jobs.

Life above decks is often dangerous. Below decks is dangerous, dirty and violent. The sailors are obsessed with food, food which is barely edible on occasion. The bedbugs, dirt and smells combine to make Newby regret his life choices. And yet, as with any group of workers in difficult conditions, relying on each other in perilous circumstances, the sailors knit together as their collective experiences solidify them into a crew that Newby himself is part of. By the return trip Newby is better prepared, experienced and almost as tough as the others. Leaving the ship in England is a poignant moment. He won't return - the outbreak of war sees to that. But he will never forget the experience. This classic of social history is much more than the "true adventure" story it is now marketed as, its a funny and insightful account of the hardships of those who crewed sailing ships - very badly paid for a very dangerous job.

Related Reviews

Newby - Love and War in the Apennines
Slocum - Sailing Alone Around the World
Philbrick - The Heart of the Sea

Marco Polo - The Travels

Marco Polo's Travels wasn't actually the book I expected. It isn't the travel account I'd expected it to be, rather its a description of people and places. Nor do you find out much about what happened to Marco Polo himself, beyond a brief overview at the start and some potted references. However, despite the repetition ("the people here are all idolaters, using paper money and subject to the Great Khan") and the comments that mark it out as an oral account ("you must know..."), as well as the nagging suspicion that Marco Polo didn't actually go to all these places (his description of a Giraffe is unlike any I've ever seen) there is a lot here of interest.

Firstly, particularly in the sections on what we would now call the Middle East and China, there are some fascinating accounts of different cultural norms. Polo is particularly interested in religion-noting about almost every place he visits how many people are Muslim, Jewish, Christian or "idolaters". He notes the tensions and conflicts between the faiths, which usually seem to arise from the ruler's personal interests. But he also notes that some places are remarkably tolerant when compared to modern times.

The Tartars do not care what god is worshipped in their territories. So long as all their subjects are loyal and obedient to the Khan and accordingly pay the tribute... you may do as you please about your soul. They object to your speaking ill of their souls or intermeddling with their practices. But concerning God and your own soul do what you will, whether you be Jew or page, Saracen or Christian, who live among the Tartars. 

Also of interest are Polo's comments on marriage in the different cultures he visits. On occasion, I suspect Polo is simply writing for an audience with salacious interests. In the province of Pem, he tells us, "when a woman's husband leaves her to go on a journey of more than twenty days, then, as soon as he has left, she takes another husband... and the men, wherever they go, take wives in the same way". While he clearly exaggerates at times, its also clear that many local rulers take hundreds of wives. Polo never says what the women think of this, and glosses over how they are treated - though is clear women are often simply taken from their families and communities by a local lord for sex.

Its difficult to know what to conclude about The Travels. Is it a travelogue? If so its clearly untrue, exaggerated or unclear in places. Nor is it history, though some of it clearly can be attested to by other records. It perhaps is of greatest interest to those looking for what's there in passing, rather than detailed accounts - the general treatment by Polo of relations between men and women, his lack of racism - while faithfully recording the colour of peoples' skin and his clear desire to tell his readers (and listeners) all the marvellous things he has seen. 

My edition is a 1982 Penguin, based on a 1958 translation by R.E.Latham. It would benefit perhaps, from a more modern translation, and a more detailed commentary.

Terence Wise - To Catch a Whale

Terence Wise is best known today as the author of multiple books on military history. But in his younger years, after being demobbed in the 1950s, he travelled on the final three voyages of the factory whaling ship Balaena from 1957 to 1960. Wise had no connection with the sea, but a sense of adventure and a love of the outdoors, and his account tells the story of his learning to ropes to being a full blown whaling veteran at the end of his first voyage.

The Balaena was an enormous ship. Purpose built as the main processing vessel for a small fleet of hunting boats, it had a crew of almost 500 men. Most of these were essentially workers at sea. Men like Wise were almost exclusively employed to prepare the ship for the arrival of whales and process the whales themselves. Wise's main job was driving a crane, though he was also directly involved in cutting up and processing aspects of the whales and gives a detailed account of conditions and the work involved.

While this is a fascinating memoir of working life on a factory ship, I found it unpleasant in several places. Wise is acutely aware of problems with the whaling industry. While he didn't know it at the time, the British industry was coming to an end and he was on the final voyages of the Balanea. But from listening to older hands, it is clear that the number of whales has collapsed from a few years previously. In fact he describes an extended period in the middle of the voyage when no whales are found and how this plays with the minds of the crew on board. 

But Wise's awareness of whaling and his interest and curiosity about the whales themselves cannot hide the violence of the industry itself. The ship and its crew are coated in blood and oil, Wise vividly describes the stench and the vast number of whales being processed (when they are found). It reads like the massacre it is. Wise also comments on the criticisms of the industry - despite legal restrictions young and pregnant whales are taken, and there is clearly plenty of general destruction. The tenders bringing back whales to be processed actually use whale carcasses as giant fenders to protect the ships. There is also the pollution - rubbish and unneeded equipment, clothing, paint etc is simply dumped into the ocean.

So Wise's book should be chiefly read as an account of a (thankfully) forgotten industry. The mass industrial slaughter of whales ought to be consigned to the history books (and generally has - the much very different hunting of whales in places like the Faroes should not be confused with the industrial slaughter that Wise was involved in). As such, Wise's account is of most interest for its description of life as a whaler/worker on factory vessels. Much of it is a description of tedium, drinking, fighting and discussions about sex. The working conditions are dangerous and deplorable, and Wise at least notes that back on shore the trade unions wouldn't stand for it. Though he seems to think somehow the crew are above complaining.

Most of the men long for shore visits, and in Cape Town and the Caribbean they behave deplorably as they drunkenly cause chaos around the town. Wise at least distinguishes himself by trying to see some of the sites. But actually there are several unpleasant accounts here - Wise receives a Dear John letter on his return journey, though he doesn't seem to see the contradiction in criticising the adulterous affairs of sailors wives and his own visits to brothels. On one occasion he has sex with a 17 year old prostitute. The behaviour of the other crew is also sometimes unpleasant - there is at least one occasion when a group of men (not Wise) sexually assault and abuse a woman. Wise at least is appalled by this himself. 

So this is an un-sanitised account of the reality of the whaling industry as it entered its declining years. Sixty years later it reads best as an honest historical account. At times humorous and fascinating, at others deeply unpleasant.

Related Reviews

Richards - The World Hunt: An Environmental History of the Commodification of Animals
Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction
Philbrick - In the Heart of the Sea

Richard A. Hamilton - Arctic Journal Northeastland

In the 1930s scientific expeditions were dispatched all around the world from British universities. One of the less known, but nonetheless important trips, was one made by ten men to North East Land, a huge ice cap north-east of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago. Its an empty land, populated by bears, seals and in the spring and summer some birds. The team was there to map, observe and experiment. One of the members, and the team's physicist was Richard A. Hamilton. Later a well known scientist in 1935 he had just graduated from Oxford. His observations in Northeastland helped scientists understand the propagation of radio waves in the upper atmosphere - crucially important as radio became a global form of communication.

During the 18 month expedition several of the scientists kept personal journals and this book is Richard's carefully transcribed by his daughter Elspeth. The journal is personal. As such there is little about what Richard, and others are doing on particular days. Rather the entries focus on the details of the day - the sledge trips, cooking, conversations, feelings and frustrations. We learn about the reality of crossing a massive icecap during a spring thaw, the difficulties catching near wild sledge dogs as well as Richard's musings on the beauty of the place. There is also plenty of travel to and from observation posts (and later on Richard makes an epic journey with a fellow scientist to map a segment of the island). But very little about what he is doing when he observes Polaris, or studies the ionosphere - in fact there's more here about the personalities of the different dogs. 

It is tempting to feel frustrated by these omissions and not read on, but that mean missing what the journal is really about - the experience of being in a remarkably remote and very challenging environment. So Richard tells us of the difficulties baking bread or hunting seals, the seemingly petty factionalism that develops between members of the team and the joy they have when hearing news from home. 

Today we look back on 1935-36 and think about the Germany and the Nazis. Richard often refers to members of the expedition discussing politics or arguing about things. But the outside world barely impinges on their time. Bizarrely they manage to listen to the Boat Race on the radio, and they hear of George V's death. But of larger events - say the Spanish Civil War - Richard notes nothing. Oddly though the team does send messages and Richard refers to at least one meal spent composing a message for Mussolini, though we do not know the occasion or text of the message.

I was also struck by the reading material the scientists took with them. There are some novels, including Pickwick Papers, but oddly (to me) mostly they seem to enjoy reading accounts of other polar expeditions. Richard gets annoyed at Scott's diary from his fatal trip to the South Pole, chastising the British hero for his failure to compliment Amundsen's success.

In these Covid times, armchair travellers might well find the mundane accounts a fascinating and safe alternative to real adventure. Those who travel to the poles for modern expeditions will probably enjoy the minutiae of the expedition. It is of course, likely to be very different today. I doubt contemporary scientists shoot Reindeer to feed their sledge dogs, and then shoot the dogs before leaving for home. But I suspect that his Richard's self-effacing descriptions of learning to ski or drive a sledge will be fascinating to those who travel to the ice today.

Related Reviews

Slaght - Owls of the Eastern Ice
Pollack - A World Without Ice
Hooper - The Ferocious Summer; Palmer's penguins and the warming of Antarctica
Lopez - Arctic Dreams

Richard Carter - On the Moor

This charming little book follows Richard Carter as he walks and ruminates on The Moor above Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. The Moor he tells us is a "large tract of open, uncultivated upland, usually acidic, usually covered in heather." Such descriptions of course are accurate in a scientific sense, but they don't capture what moors are like. Those of us who enjoy walking on them know that they change by the minute - moving from bright sunshine and heat one minute to the dark, frigid, rain swept places seemingly in seconds. They are at first glance devoid of life except for the sheep that graze on the all covering heather, yet walks are frequently disturbed by grouse and a careful observer will see much else of interest.

Carter's book describes walking on The Moore and the things he thinks about when up there. His rambles of the mind often make connections between the place and other, deeper issues. An expert on Charles Darwin he often finds links that take him, and the reader, back to the question of evolution. A break for a cup of tea is an opportunity to discuss James Dewer's invention of the vacuum flask and his failure to patent the technology. A visit to a trig point means a discussion about mapping. These and the inexorable increase of entropy and are part of parcel of Carter's mental meanderings as he walks and gazes.

Carter is an entertaining and well-read author. His work is filled with poetry, literature, history, and wider theoretical discussions and the humour is never forced upon the reader, rather it comes out at opportune moments (there's an delightfully original pun about Wheatears and Chaffinches for instance). On occasion Carter takes up polemical battles - such as the constant relocation of the Moor in Wuthering Heights to the wrong part of Yorkshire by filmmakers and tourist boards. They're the sort of arguments that seem highly important to some, yet immaterial to others. Readers can agree or not, but enjoy Carter's barely repressed rage at the unfairness of it all. Having said that, it would would be churlish of me to make too great a point of my disagreement with him over his championing of nuclear power - though one can appreciate the author's fear that more turbines will destroy his beloved countryside.

Bookshops are filled these days with books about nature. Few of them understand that nature is an interaction between human society and the wider world. Richard Carter's walks and rumination remind us of the connectivity between all things, and they might lead you up a path, onto a moor and a walk to touch a trig point.

Jonathan C. Slaght - Owls of the Eastern Ice

Reading a blow by blow account of someone studying for a PHd might not be the most exciting of book choices, but Jonathan Slaght's account of his studies of Blakiston's Fish Owl is absolutely riveting. These particular owl's are extremely rare. They live in Japan and Primorye, an extremely remote part of Russia, north-east of Vladivostok and near the mutual border with China and North Korea. This is a genuine wilderness area, of tiny frontier towns, few roads, vast expanses of forest and some unusual ecological systems. Slaght know's the area relatively well and he is well acquainted with Russian and Russia. But he is very much an outsider. Many of the people he meet with are gobsmacked to meet someone from America and he's bombarded with questions about the life they expect him to lead based on their knowledge from television.

Slaght's plan is spend several seasons locating pairs of owls, then tag and trace their movements over the next few years. Plans, of course, seem very straightforward when they are written in the comfort of offices. But the reality of the cold, desolate and wet wilderness makes things very difficult indeed. Slaght could not have succeeded without a supporting cast of conservationists and colleagues. These men (and they are all men) have more experience than he does, and are more knowledgeable of the surroundings. They know locations, people and, crucially, the owls. They are also wonderfully eccentric. Slaght quickly learns to drink vodka - visitors who come to their hut to see the America inevitably bring a bottle of vodka with them. Slaght learns that Russian vodka often only has a foil cap. Once opened the bottle is always drained - why would you need a screw on lid? At one celebration when he has finally managed to tag an owl, Slaght gets very drunk and wakes with a terrible hangover. It turns out the guests that night had brought cleaning fluid not vodka.

Fish owl's are fascinating creatures. They live off fish and seek a space with open water, nesting in the trunk of a dead tree nearby. They have a unique mournful cry that a pair will duet together, and look (from both the pictures in this book and Slaght's description) like a bedraggled grumpy bird that Slaght describes at one point as looking like "feathered golems". They are also huge - as big as eagles.

Primorye is wilderness, but it is being opened up by loggers. The logging companies threaten the bird's landscape but ironically often provide the support infrastructure that the conservationists need. Slaght recognises that he has to work with the companies to protect the owls and, together with his colleagues, seems to have some success. There is a similar convoluted relationship with the hunters of the region whose actions threaten not just the owls, but also the rarer tigers. 

Oddly enough, for a book focused on fish owls, I felt that I wanted to know more about the birds themselves. They are elusive and I suspect few people who read this book will have heard of them before. But because Slaght focuses on the story of his studies, we tend to learn about the owls as he does. It means that the totality isn't really brought together. 

But the book is more than just an account of these studies. It is a fascinating account of the human ecology of Primorye. The people here are poor and buffeted by wider social, environmental and economic forces that appear, as if by magic, to transform their lives and landscapes. Their confusion at the idea of western people studying the owls is made plain by several people Slaght talks too. But so are their wider hopes. There's a poignant moment when when Slaght is in his van, two older women stop them and ask how to get treatment. Confused by this, Slaght learns that rumours where that a team of doctors were driving an X-ray van around the region helping people. Slaght has to dispel the myth though the story underlines the remoteness and lack of infrastructure in the area.

It's possible to read Owls of the Eastern Ice on many levels. It is firstly a fascinating insight into the hard work, science and boredom that goes into much crucial conservation work. It is also an entertaining travelogue of the type that opens up an entirely different community to outsiders eyes, though Slaght is not so crude a writer that this feels patronising or obtrusive. Finally it is a study of a rare and endangered animal that helps us understand how wider capitalist economics can threaten and transform an entire landscape. I highly recommend this fascinating read - even if you've never heard of Blakiston's Fish Owl before.

Related Reviews

Tudge - The Secret Life of Birds
Carson - Silent Spring
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
Weiner - The Beak of the Finch: Evolution in Real Time

Julia Boyd - Travellers in the Third Reich

It is a cliche to say it but "hindsight is a wonderful thing". It's a phrase that repeatedly came to mind as I read Julia Boyd's highly interesting and critically lauded book that looks at Hitler's Germany through the eyes of visitors in the 1930s. It is with only a slight amount of tongue in cheek that she can write in an opening line to one of the final chapters that the "year 1939 was not a good one for Germany's tourist trade" because for much of the 1930s the opposite was true. With Hitler's grabbing of power in 1933 the regime was keen to promote itself was positively as possible around the globe and expanded its promotional work enormously. Thousands of people travelled to the country, encouraged by posters from travel agents like Thomas Cook who urged people to see the country for themselves. In particular many tourists came from England - Germany had been a popular pre-WW1 destination and the 1920s saw a resurgence of this.

The 1930s bought a variety of people. From political activists and diplomats trying to understand, change or negotiate with the Nazi regime to tourists, musicians, academics and fascists who each had their own reasons for travelling to the country. As Boyd explains many of them were bemused, but then caught up into the sights and spectacles of the Nazi state. The regime was adapt at linking propaganda with the tourist experience, and many travellers, not just politicians or diplomats received a heavy dosage of Antisemitism and anti-Communism with their operatic performances or encounters with Nazis. Even people from the left seemed unable to clearly understand what was taking place, and while they rarely feel under Hitler's spell, they often found their experiences jarred with their expectations. More often than not though, many visitors simply found their latent anti-Semitism confirmed:

John Mynard Keynes... who readily sang the praises of Jewish friends... wrote, 'Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semitic fr the poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kin of Jews, the ones who not imps but serving devil, with small horns, pitch forks and oily tails'. He added how unpleasant it was to see a civilisation 'so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jew who has all the money and the power and the brain'.

Boyd has an eye for anecdote and plenty of ironic humour. But beneath much of these accounts is a real sense of dread. Not everyone was blind the regime. The Summer Olympics of 1936 allowed many to get an understanding of what was taking place, even though the experience was heavily choreographed and sanitised of Antisemitism. One athlete remained behind after the games and went swimming to suddenly see signs forbidding Jews to enter, he was told that this was because the Olympics were finished. Others used the opportunity to tell the world what they thought of Hitler. Halet Çambel was the first female Muslim to take part in the Olympic games and "was astonished by her fellow athletes' apathy to National Socialism". She loathed the Nazis and would have preferred not to be in Berlin at all. When asked if she would like to meet Hitler, she famously said, 'No.' Others noticed the hypocrisy of their own countries. Archie Williams, a black 400 meteres gold medalist from the USA returned home and was asked in a newspaper "How did those dirty Nazis treat you?" He replied that he had not met any, "just a lot of nice German people. And I didn't have to ride in the back of the bus."

Nonetheless the over-riding theme of Boyd's book is that very few travellers actually did hate the regime and many came away after expecting to hate it, finding much to celebrate. In the case of some, like academics, Boyd argues that they

chose to travel int he Third Reich because Germany's cultural heritage was simply too precious to renounce for politics... They allowed their reverence for the past to warp their judgement of the present. As a result they wilfully ignored the realities of a dictatorship that by 1936 - despite the Olympic mirage - was unashamedly parading itself in all its unspeakable colours.

While this is no doubt true, I also think that one of the other factors is that the material Boyd works from tends to come from the higher class end of the spectrum who tended to have right-wing inclinations. This is not to say the lower classes did not travel to Germany in the period, on the contrary I was fascinated to find that 1000s did go on package tours. But the material that survives, letters, articles, diaries tends to come from the middle and upper classes, and their prejudices were more inclined towards the regime. Some of these were extremely anti-Semitic, and many of them approved of the key political line of the regime which was that Germany was a bulwark against Communism.

But it is also true that the Nazis were adapt at hiding their true faces. I was quite shocked by how many people visited Dachau concentration camp. It was a veritable tourist destination, yet few of these visitors realised that they weren't meeting real inmates, well fed and looked after. Instead they were meeting SS men in costume. The reality dawned for many, far to late, with Kristallnacht in November 1938 which Boyd sees as a moment of profound realisation for many of the naive visitors.

Boyd points out that even a serious a left-wing black thinker as W.E. Du Bois was confused by his time in Germany. That said, on his return to the US, he noted that he detested the antiSemitism, but enjoyed his time in the country, but realised that "It would have been impossible for me to have spent a similarly long time in any part of the US without some, if not frequent, cases of personal insult or discrimination. I cannot record a single instance here.... It was not at all deceived by attitudes of Germans towards me and the very few Negroes who happened to be visiting them... Theoretically their attitude towards Negroes is just as bad as towards Jews, and if there were any number of Negroes in Germany, would be expressed in the same way." He did conclude though, that "ordinary Germans were not naturally colour prejudiced".

With hindsight, many of the accounts in Boyd's book are shocking in their naivety (or for their latent racism). Hindsight gives us a much clearer picture, but it is still surprising that so many people accepted without question the demands of the regime when they visited - joining in the with Hitler salute, adorning their caravans with Swastikas, or even, for one highly respected conductor acceding to demands that he remove music by the Jewish composer Mendelssohn from his programme. It is easy to say "I would have behaved differently" and perhaps many readers of this blog would have. The question is why didn't more people behave differently then?

Today, as we witness a new growth in fascist and far-right movements in Europe and beyond, we should read Julia Boyd's book for its insight into how fascists organise and can conceal their horrific plans with more acceptable politics. But I also was struck by the similarities with a generalised acceptance of antisemitism in the 1930s by large numbers of people, and the way that a general Islamophobic mentality has been created by governments and the media today. We will do well to learn the lessons from Julia Boyd's book which uses a previously ignored set of materials to illuminate the darkest period of European history. An excellent, if frightening read.

Related Reviews

Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution
Moorhouse - Berlin at War
Kershaw - To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949
Mazower - Hitler's Europe

Glyn Robbins - There's No Place: The American Housing Crisis & What it Means for the UK

Glyn Robbins' There's No Place was published just before the Grenfell disaster and Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, so it is incredibly pertinent for understanding why both those events were such disasters for poor, working class and predominantly non-white people. By studying eight widely different US cities with their correspondingly diverse examples of housing, Robbins' exposes the UK's own housing crisis and the frightening direction that public housing may take if policy continues to emulate the US mindset.

At the heart of Robbins' book is an expose of how public housing has been transformed by both US and UK governments. Writing about the "founding principle" of UK council housing, he explains:

it was designed to meet general need and available to anyone, irrespective of income. This universality was never part of US public housing and has contributed hugely to its character and problems. Similarly the UK [Housing and Planning]Act  hopes to eliminate the permanent tenancy agreements that most council tenants have had since the 1980s. Thus the Tory government launched an assault on the qualities that have made council housing the most secure, affordable and popular form of rental housing in the UK, hoping to move it towards the conditional, marginal and transient condition of its US equivalent.

The dismantling of the UK welfare state by successive Tory and Labour governments has seen a transformation in the fortunes of council housing - "The proportion of council tenants has fallen from 30 percent of households in 1979 to eight per cent in 2015". As Robbins' explains, this has gone hand in hand with a demonization of council housing as something only for the very poor and dispossessed, with a suggestion that only those who have failed live there. This is contrasted with the aspiration of private home ownership which is seen as being successful.

As he explores the different US housing experiences, Robbins' places the UK experience in a wider context. The rush to build expensive apartments, demolish social housing and push out working class communities from expensive inner-city land is certainly not confined to the UK. Nor is the way that landlords use every available loophole to squeeze as much rent from their tenants as possible. Just as the Tory housing Act seeks to undermine permanent tenancy rights to make it easier to push people from their homes, US rules have aided the landlord over the renter. So as communities are broken up and pushed apart, and rents rise, cities are transformed into spaces for the wealthier population. Writing about New York, Robbins' concludes:

Distilling the housing essence of New York City is almost impossible. But the hidden truth about the ultimate capitalist city is that it's dependent on non-market housing. It could not be the dynamic diverse place it is without the combination of public housing, rent control and various other forms of sub and non-market accommodation that enable people from a variety of economic backgrounds to live there.

The assault on public housing is not simply about profits for landlords, or companies that want to erect huge steel and glass palaces on former historical housing, it is ideological as well:

Implicit within current US and UK housing policy are two shared and inter-linked ideological objectives. First is the attempt to destabilise and destroy any sense of entitlement that exists around non market housing.... Second is the attempt to make all non-market tenants pay higher rents, based on the assumption they could if only they'd try harder! 

Much of the book is a series of discussions about actual or potential evictions, demolitions and the breaking up of communities, which would make it all a little dispiriting if Robbins' didn't put resistance to these processes at the heart of his story. While many of the activists he quotes have had awful experiences of poverty, racism and state indifference, they have also won some inspiring victories. Robbins' is able to show how communities can be at the heart of fighting for their futures, if only they get organised. That said, it is also essential that state policy is changed. It is not enough to resist evictions or privatisations on a case by case basis, we must also build movements that can win a more rational housing policy, and Robbins' points out that both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn reflect this.

There is much to inspire and anger in this short book. In showing how bad things in the US are, Robbins also shows how good things can be with some great examples of how different forms of public housing have worked, and why. But he also sets the reader a task - unless we stop the destruction of public housing, the future for many thousands of tenants will be bleak.

Readers in London can hear Glyn Robbins speak at a book launch of There's No Place at Bookmarks, the Socialist Bookshop on September 28, 2017. Full details here.

Related Reviews

Jones - Chavs
Klein - Shock Doctrine
Minton - Ground Control
Hanley - Estates

Francis Parkman, Jr. - The Oregon Trail

This fascinating account of North America in the mid 19th century is a description of Francis Parkman's expedition into lands remote from the eastern "settlements". Parkman initially accompanies the settlers' heading west towards Oregon, and his accounts are fascinating insights into how the settlers viewed the world, and how they themselves were seen. It's notable, in this description how Parkman sees the settlers as only being interested in personal gain:

Yankee curiosity was nothing to theirs. They demanded our names, where we came from, where we were going and what was our business. The last query was particularly embarrassing; since travelling in that country, or indeed any where, from any other motive than gain, was an idea of which they took no cognisance. Yet they were fine-looking fellows, with an air of frankness, generosity and even courtesy, having come from one of the least barbarous of the frontier counties.

That said, he is scornful of them at times:

On visiting the encampment we were at once struck with the extraordinary perplexity and indecision that prevailed among the emigrants. They seemed like men totally out of their element; bewildered and amazed, like a troop of schoolboys lost in the woods.

Parkman's trek did actually have a purpose. It was, in part, simply about a young man with money wanted to see the wilderness. At the same time, it was the opportunity to hunt as many animals as possible, particularly buffalo.  Ironically, he, like many of his contemporaries shared a belief that these animals were so numerous that they could be killed without consequence - "Thousands of them might be slaughtered without causing any detriment to the species".

But it for Parkman's commentary on the Native Americans which this book shall likely be chiefly remembered. Parkman went to live with one of the tribes he encountered for a number of months. He rode with them, ate with them, hunted with them and watched their preparations for war. His accounts are frequently sympathetic, though he essentially sees them as a backward, savage race with childlike simplicity. The Native Americans, are, in Parkman's eyes untrustworthy, bloodthirsty, and prone to robbery. He also understood that things were changing:

These men were thorough savages. Neither their manners nor their ideas were in the slightest degree modified by contact with civilisation. They knew nothing of the power and real character of the white men, and their children would scream in terror at the sight of me. Their religion, their superstitions and their prejudices were the same that had been handed down to them from immemorial time. They fought with the same weapons that their fathers fought with, and wore the same rude garments of skins.

Great changes are at hand... With the stream of emigration to Oregon and California, the buffalo will dwindle away, and the large wandering communities who depend on them for support must also be broken and scattered.The Indians will soon be corrupted by the example of the whites, abased by whisky and overawed by military posts.

There's no doubt that Parkman sees this as a good thing. White civilisation was to be emulated and aspired too - its reality was to be contrasted with the barbarism of Native American life. Sadly, while Parkman's book is full of interesting observation about Native American life in this period and with the tribes he encounters, its tempered by his racism and white supremacy. So read this book for the descriptions and the account of a country in the process of huge transformation, but do so knowing that opinions like Parkman's would help destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people, and the environment they depended on.

Related Reviews

McLynn - Wagons West
Cronon - Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Cronon - Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties

Bruce Chatwin - In Patagonia

Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia completely revived the market for travel books. Becoming the bible for thousands of South American backpackers inspired by his pithy and amusing accounts. Framed by the story of his attempts to obtain a replacement of his Grandmother's lost piece of brontosaurus skin, Chatwin travels back and forth across the countries of Patagonia describing the people he meets and their links with famous historical events.

Frankly though, I found the book tiresome. Chatwin has undeniable writing talent. But his emphasis seems to be on the eccentric, and particularly eccentric European immigrants. As such his account is largely devoid of stories reflecting the mass of the population but rather an obscure (and relatively dull) section of those who'd recently come to the continent.

That's not to say that this isn't interesting. The Welsh community of Chubut is fascinating, as are Chatwin's retelling of the Butch Cassidy stories and his extensive account of his Grandmother's cousin Charley Milward, the adventurous sailor who originally found the fossil remains, is also entertaining. But what about the indigenous population (who are only here as a backdrop to tales of other people). What about those who did the farming, or worked in the huge cities?

In Patagonia failed to give me any picture of what the place and its people were really like, beyond a few interesting characters, and as a result I found myself very disappointed.

Richard Holmes - Falling Upwards: How we took to the Air

Richard Holmes' eclectic and slightly random history of the early days of ballooning is one of those books that is read for enjoyment rather than a detailed history of the subject. The early balloons were very limited technically and travelling in one was often a life or death matter. In fact, as a result, ballooning was a popular spectator sport and daredevil performers (frequently women in titillating outfits) often hung from the baskets, spent whole days and nights in them, or performed tricks. The Edwardian "balloon girl" Dolly Shepherd, used to hang on a trapeze at several thousands of feet in altitude before dropping under a parachute. She had many male admirers, though working class women seemed to love her as a "portent of women's rights".

A few individuals saw the potential for scientific investigations from the new flying machines, though unsurprisingly the first real application of the balloon, other than entertainment was military. Two fascinating chapters here deal with the role of the balloon in the American Civil War and during the Prussian siege of Paris (the one that preceded the Paris Commune for my socialist readers). In the former the balloon tended to be used as an observation device, and in the case of the South, a propaganda device. During the 1870 Paris Siege however the balloons took on an enormous propaganda role as they were used to take millions of letters and messages (and the occasional politician) from the besieged city.

France seems to have had a long relationship with the balloon. Poets, scientists and writers (and often combinations of all three) rode them, and fell in love with them. One, Camille Flammarion saw the future in the balloon,

Whither sales this ship? It sails with daylight, clothed,

Towards the Future, pristine and divine; towards the Good,

Towards the shining light of Science seen afar

Writing before the Franco-Prussian war and the military role of balloons, perhaps Flammarion could be forgiven for his belief that the balloon would help bring the shining future closer. Certainly his own travels made him think that the balloon took him to a different place,

This absolute silence is truly impressive; it is the prelude tot that which reigns in the interplanetary space in the midst of which other worlds revolve. The sky here has a tint which we never saw before... Planetary space is absolutely black.

The book ends with the age of exploration, and the Swedish explorer S A Andree, whose doomed trip to try to visit the North Pole relied on scientific and technological innovation over common sense. The three travelers who perished may have inspired and excited the newspaper reading public, but the detailed account in Falling Upwards left me thinking they were publicity obsessed idiots whose faith in engineering was misplaced because it ignored the realities of the natural world.

Holmes' earlier book, The Age of Wonder was a masterful history of the era when science and literature were holding out for a new world, where technology might free human kind. It explored the scientists and their circles striving to understand the cosmos. Falling Upwards covers a similar subject and period, but sadly I found it didn't really hold together as a book and came across as a series of anecdotes not worthy of the book's subtitle, however fascinating they might be.

 Related Reviews

Holmes - Age of Wonder
Verne - Five Weeks in a Balloon

Horatio Clare - Down to the Sea in Ships

This lovely little book details the authors two voyages with the crews of two ships, the Gerd Maersk and tje Maersk Pembroke. The first a state of the art super container ship which Horatio Clare joins in Felixstowe, leaves temporally in the Middle East, and rejoins in South East Asia. The second is an older cargo ship, crossing the Atlantic. Both voyages have similarities, but both are very different experiences. From mid-Atlantic storms to the voyage along the Suez Canal.

Along the way Clare bonds closely with the crews. Joining the ships with the permission of the shipowners, but with freedom to write what he wants, he tells the stories of low pay, long voyages and hopes and fears of the seamen. Their complaints (lack of beer on board) and their stories of disasters and duty free shopping are often funny, but sometimes tragic. You get a real sense of a body of seamen, united by shared experiences. But there are darker sides too. Many who make up international shipping crews are Filipino, suffering lower pay than their white colleagues, they often suffer racism and discrimination rarely becoming officers despite years of loyal, low paid work.

There are even darker tales. Clare tells of stowaways cast adrift, of ships that cuts back on training and equipment to maximise profits. He quotes from reports by UK inspectors on the state of ships, that "could have been written fifty or a hundred years ago":

"The crew accommodation was no longer provided with heating; there were insufficient fruit and vegetables on board... There were insufficient life rafts, the sanitary water system was inoperative and there was no fresh-running water. There were no nautical publications and charts were incomplete for the operational area.. The ship was dangerously unsafe as the engine room bilge wells were full of thick black oil... There was insufficient diesel fuel on board for the voyage..."

However bad it is on some ships, Clare's two voyages demonstrate that not all ships are like this. The camaraderie and comradeship, the way the crew work together in some of the toughest and most dangerous situations is very powerful. It is people like this, earning very very little, that move the goods around the world that keep consumers happy. This book should make everyone remember the blood, sweat, tears, and suffering behind the stuff on the shelves.

Leo Hollis - Cities are Good for You

Marx and Engels argued that a prerequisite of capitalism was the displacement of people from rural areas into towns and cities. This separation between town and country was one of the defining points of capitalist society for them, creating as it did a metabolic rift between humans and the natural world.

In the two centuries of so since the birth of capitalism Marx and Engels' insights have been proved right time and again. Today, as a majority of the human population live in cities (3,303,992,253 in 2007 according to the UN) the problem of the "rift" is even more important given the threat of environmental crisis.

The solution however is not some return to a rural past. Leo Hollis' new book is a celebration of the city and its potential, as well as an exploration of the problems for citizens of urban areas. Hollis goes so far as to say that the city is the best chance we have for survival as a species.

Some cities, particularly in the developing world, are growing enormously. In the next five years Yamoussoukro in the Ivory Coast will expand by 43.8 percent, the Chinese city of Jinjiang by 25.9 percent, but London and Tokyo will only grow by 0.7 and 1 percent respectively.

Once in the city, people are shaped and dominated by it. Hollis tells us that "the city offers more chances of making connections than anywhere else.... it is these 'impersonal, superficial, transitory' relationships that make the city so unique and important." Hollis makes much of the energy given to a city by its people, and he celebrates the idea that cities can be designed to maximise that energy. "Can we design an urban space to encourage people to kiss?" he asks rhetorically, and indeed demonstrates that properly thought out spaces can make people linger and relax.

One of the strengths of this book is that it presents interesting aspects of urbanisation to the non-specialist. Hollis gives us studies that discuss how people flow through streets, or where they congregate to chatter on the pavement.

Over the decades various architects have sought to design the ideal city, a rational place to maximise comfort, health and pleasure. Ebeneezer Howard for instance, inspired by utopian novels of the 19th century, came up with a design for a future city in his Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform published in 1898. He argued that

"Human society and beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together... Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation."

Howard's idealism here, echoes Marx and Engels in their hope that the rift between town and country would end in a socialist society, but it also reflected the belief that cities needed to be redone from scratch. Not surprising that Howard's ideas became influential for later town planners - the new Garden Cities of the early 20th century were built along similar lines to Howard's plans.

This quest for the better city is one that has always concerned urban planners. But it has also been a concern for those living in cities as they grow, develop and change. From the early days of skyscrapers when residents worried about being cast into shadow, to those who try to redesign streets in order to encourage walking. But Hollis is also rightly worried about the direction that cities are moving in today. He points out how our space is being restricted and taken from us, quoting the author Anna Minton:

"Who controls the roads and the streets is... enormously important to how cities function. Today there has been no public debate about the selling of streets at all. Instead, as ownership of British cities goes back to private landlords, the process of removing public rights of way is buried in the arcane language and technical detail of the most obscure parts of planning law... there is an adage in highway law which says 'once a highway, always a highway'... In many British towns and cities, this common-law right is being quietly eroded."

Hollis thus celebrates those movements that have sort to defend and challenge this attack on public space; the book is recent enough to note the Occupy movements, and discusses Lefebvre's Right to the City as a slogan and tactic. The Right to the City, Hollis argues following David Harvey, is more than being about ownership of space in a city, it is about access, democracy, control and involvement.  Taking the pressing issue of housing Hollis argues that instead of allowing homes to be foreclosed during the credit crunch, instead

"the city could buy the property from the banks at a good price, creating manageable housing cooperatives, guaranteeing that families can stay where they are and maintain their participation in the life of the city."

The problem is, of course, that capitalism doesn't work like that, and here, as with Hollis' other wonderful suggestions of how cities could be cleaner, safer and more involving for citizens, I fear that what is lacking is a strategy to challenge the forces that really shape cities. These are, of course, the forces of capital and the state's "armed bodies of men". This isn't to say Hollis is not aware of these problems, his understanding of the roots of the 2011 British riots in police racism demonstrates this. But Hollis' strategy to reach the better city seems to be based mostly on electing enlightened politicians who can bring about reform.

Of course, a good mayor can make enormous differences to a city, and Hollis has some great examples, particularly from South America. But he stops short of showing how the energy of the citizens themselves can really begin to alter power relations in society and rebuild their city. It would have been interesting to hear the author's thoughts on the way that great revolutionary movements of the past - the Paris Commune of 1871 or Red Petrograd in 1917 for instance - reshaped their urban environments.

Hollis claims that "most of us now live in suburbs where there are fewer people and sprawl allows us to live behind fences". This is a strange idea, given the descriptions he gives of the mass overcrowding in cities around the world, but perhaps reflects the audience his book is aimed at.

I did notice one significant error. Hollis claims that Friends of the Earth support plans for HS2 the High Speed Rail link being built in the UK as a way of reducing emissions. As far as I am aware, this is not true, as can be seen in FoE's response to the draft HS2 consultation here, where they say "current High Speed Rail plan will do little to cut carbon emissions".

These minor criticisms aside, this is an interesting and stimulating book for those thinking about alternatives to the unsustainable society that we currently live in.