octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I found this book in a second hand book shop, and never having read much about this particular NZ politician I thought I'd give it a go. Granted, his politics are not mine so that could be colouring my reaction, but it's not the best autobiography I've ever read. I think in some ways it's both too detailed and not detailed enough. Muldoon seems to reference half the people he's ever met, from horticultural society to Parliament, and considering that the time period being written about takes place before I was born, nearly all of them are unfamiliar. I expect to his contemporaries, this was a more interesting tactic, but from my perspective less people, more fully covered would have been more successful. As it is, the coverage of events is rather superficial - in many cases, events described seemed more of a sparsely fleshed out list than anything else, which I found frustrating to read.

That being said, there are still some elements of interest. Muldoon's known for being a combative character, and that does come through in entertaining fashion. I note that not two paragraphs into the book, he's diverged from family history to grumbling about unions, so clearly he can't help himself! And every so often, buried in the text, surfaces a remark so dryly witty that I laughed out loud. Clearly an interesting man, whatever you think of his politics, but I do wish this book had more of the man coming through.

First off, this book has a seriously good title. How can you not want to read a book with a title like that?

The rest of the book doesn't quite live up to it. Don't get me wrong: I did like it, for the most part. The writing was clear and explanatory, even if it did get a little bogged down when describing the statistical reasoning behind some of the cyclical extinction arguments. It's just a very hard title to live up to.

That being said, the book's a few decades old now, so how the theories it describes fit in with astronomical understanding today is something I just don't know. I'll probably be Googling after writing this, though, and that should say something - that the book interested me enough to Google, at any rate. Edit: I've looked it up, it appears the Nemesis theory today is pretty much assumed to be unreliable. Oh well, interesting idea while it lasted, and yay science for being self-correcting!

It has a pretty slow start, but this first volume of Janet Frame's autobiography improves as it goes along... until you find that you've finished it without actually stopping for dinner. There's a sort of gentle mesmerising effect that's heightened by the familiarity of the natural world - to New Zealand readers at least. And I might have experienced Otago and Southland some generations on from Frame, but it's still very recognisable even over distance. In fact, the point where I felt closest to her was in Frame's schoolgirl insistence that what she wanted to write about were the subjects of her home - the little native wax eyes instead of those flashy foreign nightingales, for instance.

Place should have an influence on writing, and Frame's realisation of her place, and how it affected what she wanted to write, is the central theme of this book I think. It was certainly, for me, the most interesting.

A brief biography of Dorothy McKibbon, who ran the Santa Fe office of the Manhattan Project. McKibbon wasn't a scientist or a soldier; she didn't live in Los Alamos. In many ways she was a step removed from the action there, yet still a fundamental part of it: sending scientists and their families up to the mesa, helping them settle in to life in New Mexico.

The Manhattan Project is an interest of mine, and I've read a number of books on it. Some of them are very good indeed, yet the reason I like this book so much is that it's quite unlike those others. It doesn't go into the science; it doesn't centre around the scientists; it's not actually all that in depth. What it does do is paint an attractive picture of a normal woman who ended up working an extraordinary job. Not what she expected when she was offered a position as secretary, that's for sure! But her very normality is what makes her appealing. I got a real sense of personality here, is what I'm saying - and a very different perspective to the more usual sort of MP biography. And I like biographies that give different perspectives, they tend to help round out history in general I think.

I didn't enjoy this short collection as much as the one (by the same author) that I read yesterday. Part of that, I think, is because there's a much more genealogical focus in Manihikian Traditional Narratives. I'm pretty ignorant of Cook Islands history and culture, so the long lists of names kind of lost me. I can see that it's probably a very useful resource for those with a bit more knowledge than me though!

The highlight of this book is the stunning black and white pointillist illustrations by the Raratongan artist Rennie Peyroux. It's worth taking a look at just for those.

This is really a book of two parts. The first third is an overview of the events surrounding Chun Doo Hwan's accession to the leadership of South Korea in 1979. (I knew nothing of Korean history, and found this overview relatively easy to follow if rather dry in tone.) The remaining two thirds of the text are essentially reproductions of primary documents. It's here that the book is most uneven - some of the primary texts are the most interesting things in the book (interviews and investigative reports, for instance). But very large chunks of it are legal documents, and with the best will in the world reading law is a painfully soporific experience.

A family of credulous idiots believe the random anecdote of a perfect stranger without bothering to check the truth of it. Kerfuffle ensues. I expect the whole is meant to come across as farcical and frothy but in many places it's just silly. There is an underlying cleverness, however, and that's dragging it up from one star for me, but mostly I was just glad it was over quickly.

Short but interesting little book that take a close look at a small handful of exorcisms in 16th and 17th century France and England. The author makes no bones about his sceptical approach; he tends to categorise cases of possession as coming under mental illness, fraud, or the desire to exhibit a "good" (i.e. politically useful) demonstration of a particular faith. Not being religious myself, I've some sympathy with this approach! It was the use of exorcism as a political-religious tool that I found most interesting, though - it's not anything I'd come across before, but it made a very unsubtle sort of sense. ("Hey, Huguenots, watch this Catholic cure possession with a communion wafer and be converted!") Dunno how many fell for it, but points for trying.

Loren Eiseley is my favourite science writer, and as I worked my way through this book I was initially a little disappointed. I read him for his images and language, and yet half the book isn't by him at all! But as I read, my expectations began to readjust.

Eiseley takes a detailed look here at the influence of the zoologist Edward Blyth on Darwin's theory of evolution. I'd never even heard of Blyth, but the evidence is convincing: Darwin had heard of him, and used his work as a (pretty much unacknowledged) stepping stone in the development of his own. A large section of this book is therefore given over to reprinting three of Blyth's papers (also his eventual obituary by a contemporary). These were interesting reads, even if they don't reach Eiseley's level of science writing - but what does? And there was plenty of Eiseley to content me, especially in his concluding essays on the place of man in evolutionary thought.

Informative, well-researched, and absolutely worth the read.

A strong argument for social welfare, birth control, and divorce, this is the frankly horrifying story of McCourt's childhood. As one of the charity workers come to inspect their home offers, it's more akin to life in a Calcutta slum than anything else. (I wanted to reach through the pages and slap the useless father - don't know where he ended up, but I hope it's somewhere rotten.) The stranglehold religion had on that culture drags like an anchor. Reading about how teenage McCourt had to go around his delivery job ripping out newspaper pages that related to contraception was deeply frustrating, given how badly the entire impoverished community was in need of it.

It's kind of astonishing to think that a life like this is living memory for some - although clearly it is for many still in less developed parts of the world.

The real strength of this story, though, lies in the voice. It'd be easy for this to descend into misery-porn, and yet it doesn't. That's due to the very controlled narrative. It reads as easy and ignorant, a perfect child's voice, but it can't have been a simple thing to replicate. A lot going on under the surface there I think.