BOOK REVIEW - Annotated List of the Birds of Berkshire County, Massachusetts by David P. St. James

This fall, two unusual bird species were observed in the Berkshires: a dickcissel, normally found breeding in the grassy fields of the Midwest and wintering in South America; and a northern wheatear, a resident of the Canadian Arctic in summer but mostly found throughout Asia and Europe. 

Finding a species uncommon in an area is not only exciting–an addition to a life list or a locality list–but could be important in the study of local ecosystems, perhaps indicating changes in the environment

Ornithology began with meticulous record-keeping, and the body of knowledge is forever expanding with the constant accumulation of data. 

Most ornithologists, amateur or professional, have their own methods of obtaining and verifying sightings–whether plant, insect, mammal or bird–using the centuries of ornithological literature, which has expanded so much, I personally have bird books residing (and possibly breeding) in piles in front of bookcases. At least the piles are organized.

But it takes a dedicated scientist to gather information from many sources, both historic and present day, and organize the data so they are available to all. One of our well-known local naturalists, David St. James–a gentle, brilliant soul–was such a man. 

He may have worked as a biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife but, throughout his life, he noted everything he saw, whether it related to work or to the natural history of the Berkshires.

Often. St. James–sometimes as scruffy as an old woodsman in layers of sweaters, well-worn sneakers or rubber boots and a billed cap–could be found wandering the woods listening for warblers or scanning Richmond Pond for winter ducks or hiking along a mountain trail in search of a hawk or owl nest. 

In the evenings, he recorded all he had seen, noting everything about each sighting.

St. James amassed a wealth of information not only on his own, but also gathered pertinent data from reference books, from Christmas counts and from other local birders and began working on an annotated list of Berkshire birds, an important addition to the existing literature.

You may go to other books of birds of the area and find out when a species was initially observed and how common it was, but the information will be only as updated as the publication date–for example, Hoffmann’s guide, 1904.  

Periodically, different works update this info in their texts and, flipping from book to book, you may follow the sequence of a species’ sightings and frequency of occurrences.

Original review on: heberkshireedge.com

Book Review - The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Like other works by Louise Erdrich, the story of The Round House is rooted in the lives of Native Americans. These are not people living in conical tents and wielding battle axes. 

They are a ‘regular’ community in which teenagers talk about Star Trek and people drive to work. The story begins with a drive that a thirteen-year-old named Joe takes with his father, as they go looking for his mother, who’s taking longer than usual to get back home.

This is, perhaps, the most fateful drive of their lives. As they head for a grocery store, where they think the boy’s mother might be, they see her driving past – in the opposite direction, meaning homewards – at a furious speed. 

Following her home, they discover a terrible event, one that’ll change their lives forever. The mother, Geraldine, has been brutally raped, with a degree of violence that has left her utterly traumatised.

From here on, Joe’s world becomes a pre-occupation with getting justice, trying to understand what happened to his mother, and coming to terms with his own adolescent desire for an attractive older woman.

This is also where the illusion of Native Americans being absorbed into mainstream modern American society develops many cracks. 

Getting justice for Geraldine is that much more complicated because she is Native American and the perpetrator may be non-Native; and the place of crime may be outside tribal jurisdiction. 

The story also places practical tribal wisdom against the lenient attitude of urban law towards a certain class of crimes. Among Geraldine’s own people, what her rapist would get is death, for such a crime can only have such a punishment. But the courts of American law might see things differently.

The crime at the core of the story leaves Joe and his parents lacerated. Connecting with them means feeling some of their pain. That’s why this book can’t be called a mere page-turner – it’s not casual reading; it leaves a deep impression.

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Original review on: http://www.hindustantimes.com

Book Review - The Impostor by Javier Cercas

Enric Marco was one of the most famous men in Spain. As President of the “Amical de Mauthausen”, an association of Spanish survivors of the Nazi camps, he spoke eloquently about the evils of Fascism. 

In a speech given to the Spanish Parliament in 2005 his account of his experiences in a concentration camp had the children of deportees in the gallery in tears. This wasn’t all. 

He had fought on the Republican side in the Civil War, been persecuted by the Franco regime and then, as Secretary-general of the CNT (the Anarchist trade union) been influential in the transition of Spain from dictatorship to democracy. Quite a life! What a hero!

But then came exposure; he was unmasked. He had never been in a concentration camp, though he had been in Germany during the war as a volunteer worker. His anti-Fascist credentials were soon questioned. 

If he had lied about the concentration camp, why should he be believed about anything? Yes, he had been a magnificent and compelling speaker about the horrors of Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain, but he was still an impostor, mocked and reviled.

Anyone who has read Javier Cercas’ novels – especially Soldiers of Salamis and Outlaws – will recognise that Marco’s is a story made for him. These books explored the unreliability of memory and personal testimony and of what may have been generally accepted as historical truth. 

Nevertheless, he was reluctant to write about Marco, despite the urging of friends, among them the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. He had met Marco and found him even in his nineties to be unstoppably loquacious and fertile in denial, self-justification, and self-pity.

Happily he went ahead. The book is written as a”novel without fiction,” with Cercas’ own feelings and reflections always to the fore. This was the method of his remarkable account of the failed military coup of 1981, Anatomy of a Moment. It worked then; it works now.

Cercas has immersed himself in the archives, talked with historians and journalists who have covered the Marco story, interviewed his acquaintances, friends, former admirers, and spent hours, days, weeks listening to the old man – well over 90 by now – and trying to make sense of his life. 

In some of his memories or claims, those relating to the Civil War, there would appear to have been an element of truth amidst exaggerations and even impossible assertions. There were puzzles not easy to resolve. 

Why for instance did he have a civil servant’s pension? Was this, as some said, because he had perhaps been a police informer in at least the early Franco years? Or was there some other not discreditable explanation?

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Original review on: http://www.scotsman.com

Book Review - How To Build A Car by Adrian Newey

Adrian Newey’s written a book – and it’s quite superb. Granted, you may need a certain all-encompassing fascination of every aspect of F1 including the nuts and bolts to be riveted by it all (which I was), but How To Build A Car is so much more than just what its title implies. It’s also the story, told with eye-opening candour, of his life and loves.

You will find in it some of his original freehand drawings of, for example, the hugely influential Leyton House 881 nose shape, together with an illuminating explanation of the car’s concept and the thoughts behind it. 

You’ll find every single one of his designs for March, Williams, McLaren and Red Bull explained and explored. But not in a dry textbook way; he explains this and everything else within the context of the circumstances of the team and his life at that time. 

He talks about his creative block when he was a designer at Beatrice, trying simultaneously to hold down that job, race engineer Patrick Tambay in F1 and Mario Andretti in IndyCar, keep together his marriage and be a recent first-time dad. 

Little wonder the finer details of an airbox configuration might have escaped his attention back then. He will move on from the difficulty of the relationship with a partner straight into the weakness of a gearbox casing almost in a stream of consciousness.

He’s part-nerd, part-rebellious teenager in a middle-aged man’s body, part-artist and part-creative genius engineer. Turns out he’s also part-writer. In this latter persona he opens out in a way that his somewhat shy, reticent front in the spotlight doesn’t allow. 

The Adrian in this book is the one his friends know – like he’s talking with a group of them over dinner and a few glasses of wine. He might recount you the tale of how he was expelled from school or how he popped a wheelie on a Suzuki in the Magny-Cours paddock and ended up in a heap in the Camel hospitality area. 

But there’s some heavy stuff in here too including, obviously, Senna’s death at Imola 1994 and he doesn’t shirk from deep self-analysis of that whole horrible episode and its aftermath.

You might be fascinated to know how he worked out that there was an aerodynamic dead zone aft of the front wing on one of his cars – discovered by physically walking up the wind tunnel when it was in operation, armed with a cloth and a stick. 

He’ll tell you what sort of pencil he uses for his drawings and you’ll believe him when he says: “I always try to draw with passion. In other words, I have to believe what I’m drawing will be the next step forward.”

He’s also terrific in giving insight into the drivers he’s worked with: from Mario Andretti to Sebastian Vettel, taking in Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill, Alain Prost and others along the way. And he’s fabulously indiscreet about those he feels has done him a disservice along the way, even those he acknowledges a debt of gratitude to. 

Want to know how he really feels about Ron Dennis? Or Patrick Head? And why? It’s all in here. Also, did you know that Mercedes offered him a job as recently as 2014?

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Original Review on: http://www.motorsportmagazine.com

Book Review - Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Winter is published in the UK on the same day in November as Ali Smith’s Winter. Both writers are now two books into their seasonal quartets, each of them having begun with Autumn.

Knausgaard got there first, kickstarting his cycle in his native Norway one year earlier in 2015; Smith had the last laugh by writing the better book and making the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize.

Not that Knausgaard’s book would have qualified. His seasonal volumes are not novels but, according to the back cover, “memoir/essays”. However, the many pieces within are often too general to count as memoir and too short to be termed essays.

This isn’t the only instance of difficulty in pinning Knausgaard down. The jury is still out on whether his other series, the acclaimed My Struggle project, can tidily be categorised as “fiction”. 

Doesn’t an author’s relived and reimagined account of adolescence and adulthood merit the cross-breed classification of “fictionalised autobiography”?

How we pigeonhole Knausgaard’s Winter and how it measures up against Smith’s book of the same name is, in the end, immaterial.

What matters of course is its quality as a standalone book. But it’s worth noting that, unlike Smith with her seasonal sequence, Knausgaard has changed tack, branched out and attempted something artistically different.

His enterprise is bolder and as such, riskier. A bad season from Smith is a weak novel, nothing more. A bad season from Knausgaard is a weak link which jeopardises the entire project. So does Winter work? 

Answering that requires an evaluation not only of content but intent. Both Autumn and Winter are odes to Knausgaard’s unborn daughter. The books are divided into three months.

Each month contains 20 “essays” – or rather two – or three-page discussions of, or meditations on, a range of topics. Some unfold in a single, unbroken paragraph, others are more reader-friendly.

Knausgaard prefaces each monthly section with a letter to his child in which he comments on her development and his state of mind. Then the months begin and he proceeds to explore what the book jacket calls “the wonders of life”.

A quick scroll through the book’s contents renders the publisher’s blurb laughable, for while Knausgaard muses on bona fide wonders such as the moon, the brain, water and atoms, he also devotes his attention to some less miraculous subjects: manholes, Q-tips, toothbrushes and windows.

Also included are profiles and character sketches, concepts and perspectives (Hollow Spaces, Vanishing Point, The Social Realm) and extended thoughts on animals, body parts, feelings and habits.

Whatever the topic, whether concrete or abstract, ordinary or extraordinary, Knausgaard proves to be an expert examiner. With satisfying regularity he comes in at oblique angles and finds unexpected facets and original insight. Ingvild Burkey has skilfully translated. Lars Lerin’s illustrations capture the beauty and the bleakness of the season.

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Original review on: www.thenational.ae

Book Review - The Home That Was Our Country by Alia Malek

Syria is an ongoing tragedy and for many Syrians living abroad, their homeland is nothing but a memory. The country they knew no longer exists.

Alia Malek, an award-winning journalist and civil rights lawyer who was born in Baltimore to Syrian immigrant parents, has released a new book titled: “The Home That Was Our Country.”

In the book, Malek tells the story of Syria through her grandmother’s apartment building and the Damascene neighborhood that surrounds it.

Malek decided not to write about the bombing, the war zone and the political factions, but to focus on the lives of ordinary people. “It’s so utterly human and relatable and accessible. I think a lot of the humanity of Syria (is) lost when we only focus on what is happening at a military level or at a political level.

You know, Syrians themselves are entertaining, are intelligent. They’re the best people to tell their own story. That’s why, you know, I kind of invited the reader to come experience this as if they were a member of the building, or a member of the household or a member of the neighborhood.

That’s the only way that I was going to be able to break through the sort of stone-facedness with which I think a lot of us are looking at Syria these days,” Malek said in an interview with media personality Lourdes Garcia-Navarro.

The story begins with her great-grandfather, who was born under Ottoman rule. Malek acknowledges that “Origins” was the most challenging chapter to write. She follows her family under the repressive regime of former Syrian leader Hafez Assad and his son Bashar.

“It was a fascinating activity. You have to wade through… what is legend and lore about a family and sort of start trying to piece together what is actually real,” Malek said.

Her research for the book began when Malek moved to Damascus in 2011. She had arrived in Syria to finish restoring her grandmother’s house at a time when the entire region was experiencing the winds of change and she wanted to write a book about her grandmother, Salma, which she had been planning to do for a long time.

During the two years she spent researching her family, she became increasingly worried about her safety and theirs.

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Original review on: http://www.arabnews.com

Book Review - THE DAWN WATCH Joseph Conrad in a Global World By Maya Jasanoff

I turned my back on reading Joseph Conrad in 1967. This was also the year that I published “A Grain of Wheat,” my third novel, which I wrote soon after reading Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes.” 

I could not put words to what repelled me, because, despite the unease, his influence on my work was unmistakable, and long lasting. 

“A Grain of Wheat” marked a dramatic shift for me away from the linear plots and single points of view of my first two novels to the multiple narrative voices and diverse temporal and geographic spaces of my later works. The difference in style was a result of my encounter with Conrad.

The majesty and musicality of his well-structured sentences had so thrilled me as a young writer that I could cure a bout of writer’s block simply by listening to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or reading the opening pages of Conrad’s “Nostromo.” It instantly brought my mojo back.

I am not alone in being so impacted. In Gabriel García Márquez’s “Hundred Years of Solitude,” the sweep of history and dictatorships that litter the social landscape of the novel reminded me strongly of “Nostromo,” Conrad’s complex epic about an imaginary South American republic. 

García Márquez’s title even seems to nod at the fictional historical tome contained within Conrad’s novel: “Fifty Years of Misrule.”

In her fascinating book, “The Dawn Watch,” the Harvard professor Maya Jasanoff offers detailed background on the evolution of Conrad’s books, describing how each was a sort of reckoning with Western conquest and advancing globalization. 

We learn, for example, that “Nostromo” was written as Conrad delved into the oral and written sources about the “liberation” of Latin America that often ended in Western-backed dictatorship. 

As he was writing, he was taking in news of the crisis over the Panama Canal, an episode of political and military manipulation in which America emerged as a new, wily imperial power. 

In other words, Conrad and García Márquez were drawing from the same well of post-colonial Latin American history.

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Original review on: www.nytimes.com