Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama

This is the book that Barack Obama published before he entered politics, in his mid thirties. In the preface, written in 2004, Obama says that after re-reading the book he wishes it were cut by some 50 pages. I’d cut even more.

By the last hundred pages I was thinking, hurry up already! It just seemed to go on and on, and I was thinking, do I really need to know all this stuff?

Barack Obama was approached by a publisher to write this book after he gained some notoriety for being the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

In the preface the author says that he felt the story of his mixed race upbringing – a white American mother and a black Kenyan father – ‘might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience’.

While the book is well written, and provides some compelling insights into what it’s like to grow up African-American in the United States, I did feel it was too long.

This is a shame, because I feel if it had run to 300 pages instead of 440, and if Obama had been able to make his points about race, identity and politics more pronounced, that the book would have been more of a success.

As it stands, I feel you read this book more out of interest due to Barack Obama’s current status. If he was just another unknown author this book would not be in print.

For students of political science, perhaps the most interesting insight in the book is that Obama came to his religious faith via his political organising work. Well, for me that was the most interesting revelation of the book. Perhaps this points to the Senator’s current successes.

I wrote favourably about Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope a while ago on this blog. Somehow I wish he had written Dreams From My Father after that book.

The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg

This is my first Melvyn Bragg book, and I was very satisfied with the experience.

Bragg has a good, clear writing style and intuitively knows which word to use and where. His intellectual and aesthetic judgements I found to be very agreeable.

For example, when talking about Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Bragg likens Twain’s accomplishment to that of Chaucer’s. I couldn’t have agreed more.

In fact, in the sentences leading up to this pronouncement, I was hoping as I read that he would draw such a conclusion and agree with me that the language of Huckleberry Finn is one of the most amazing literary achievements in English.

Bragg sets his book out in a nice easy time line, and treats the English language as a major character, almost like an adventurer, travelling far and wide and picking up all sorts of exotic words and phrases and expressions, then weaving them back into the language itself, like a tapestry.

First we have the invading Germanic tribes, then the Norman conquest of 1066, bringing in a wealth of French words. French would actually become the official language, that of the English monarchs and business and administration, for some 300 years.

Once the English language had again been liberated, we got the wonders of Chaucer’s poetry, which used to great effect the common English spoken by the people.

After the English language had won back the state, it went on to conquer religion.

The Bible had not been translated into English, and hence the commoners could not read it. They had to rely on the clergy that could read Latin. This allowed great power to reside with the church.

William Tyndale thus went about translating the Bible, most of it later used for the official King James version. For his trouble, Tyndale was executed. It’s extraordinary we don’t know more of Tyndale, as there are so many expressions he gave the English language that we all use: ‘scapegoat’, ‘let there be light’, ‘the powers that be’, ‘fight the good fight’, ‘stumbling block’, ‘sea-shore’. And on and on.

After Tyndale, another great: William Shakespeare, who gave us some 2000 words and expressions.

English then moved onto America, where it expanded again.

Happily, Bragg also gives us a chapter on Australian English, highlighting our propensity to put an ‘o’ and an ‘ie’ in front of our words. Sickie for sick day, arvo for afternoon, to name but two.

One of the things I really enjoyed about this book were the long lists of words and where they came from. The provenance of most English words would surprise most English speakers, words we take for granted as being quintessentially English. As it turns out, this isn’t necessarily so.

I really learnt a lot from this book on English. Maybe only dullards like me find this a fascinating subject. If you’re a fellow dullard, you will find this book very enjoyable.

A Farewell To Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

I was recently watching the First Tuesday Bookclub hosted by Jennifer Byrne on the ABC recently and they were discussing this book. Most panelists raved about A Farewell To Arms, except the show’s host.

I’d always meant to get around to Hemingway, so I thought I’d give this particular novel a go. Jennifer Byrne criticised the book as being utterly bland in its writing style.

To my surprise, I very much agree with Jennifer Byrne’s critique. This is probably the blandest prose I have ever read. I know there are ‘understated’ writers, or minimalist writers, who eschew too many fancy effects and like to keep their prose as pure as possible of any excessively wordy adulterations. But this is ridiculous!

Hemingway’s simple, unaffected prose for me was lacking in any kind of expression. In fact, it's lifeless. I could not figure out what he was trying to say. I was baffled as to what the whole point of the book was.

Usually with this kind of style the sum of the whole eventually adds up to a picture or theme or statement.

I mean, there’s supposed to be this great love story at the centre of A Farewell To Arms, a relationship between an average man and woman, yet there’s just not enough – for me – expressiveness. This leaves me, as a reader, struggling for understanding.

Plus the juxtapositions of the novel don’t seem particularly thought out. The main character is working at the war front, and suffers some terrible injuries. Then he falls in love with one of the nurses. He goes back to the war. She falls pregnant and dies giving birth.

I couldn’t see how the whole came together to comment on the nature of love in wartime. This is what I’m guessing the novel is about.

Let this not be seen as a negative review of Hemingway’s novel. I would still be interested to read some of his other novels, perhaps his later work. I just can’t see what he’s trying to get at.

My theory is that the problem lies with his friendship with Gertrude Stein, that high priestess of modern writing who tried to create a kind of ‘cubist’ style in literature.

Hemingway may have styled himself as a straight shooting, no frills, ‘authentic’ male writer, yet his mentor was the exotic, fruity Gertrude Stein, with her fashionable Parisian set.

His clean, pure writing style may be just that, all style and no substance.

Rape, by Joanna Bourke

Many moons ago I read a terrific book by Joanna Bourke called An Intimate History of Killing. The book investigated the actual practice of killing in war. It was an utterly fascinating book, full of things you wouldn’t expect.

So when I saw another book by this same author at the library I decided to pick it up.

Joanna Bourke must be a nut when it comes to sifting through masses of psychological and historical texts. This history of rape is dense with conflicting psychological reports, studies and opinions.

So dense in fact that at about half way through the book I put it down for about a month and wondered if I would even return to it.

The author also wades through a lot of feminist opinion. So much psychological minutiae is argued over and sifted that my head got quite dizzy.

For some reason, once I got past a lot of the theory and into more of the real life examples, I got through the rest of the book. Bourke in the last third of the book concentrates on rapes that occur in the home, in prison, and in the military.

The chapter on prison rape I found very shocking, even though I knew a bit about what happens. Rape is used in prison to assert power. He who gets raped is turned into a female.

In the final analysis Bourke weighs up the countervailing opinions on male sexuality. Are all men rapists? Is rape taught by society? Is rape natural to man?

Joanna Bourke finds (and I agree with her analysis), that rapists are weak men who hate themselves. Rapists also fear women.

I thought about this last statement as I was reading about the huge amount of pack rapes done in the military. Why do men have to do this in a group, and then kill the victim? It’s like their trying to slay some kind of demon.

I confess to not being a good reader of books so steeped in psychological speculation. Some of the unwieldly sentences used in psychology make you wonder if you are having the wool pulled over your eyes. The author spends a lot of time writing, ‘in other words’, in order to explain some impenetrable prose.

For those studying rape I presume this would be a good book, with its huge bibliography and well indexed research. For the lay reader, it may not be such a cheery book.

In Defence of Food, by Michael Pollan

This is my second book by Michael Pollan, the other being his phenomenally popular The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I read through quickly in a couple of days.

In Defence of Food I didn’t sweep through as easily, but nonetheless it’s also an excellent book.

Perhaps the reason I had to read a bit slower in part was because the book talks a bit about the scientific aspects of food and nutrition.

One theory says this, another says that, and in the end it can get quite confusing. Add to this the fact that science was never my strong point, and you see why some sections I plodded through.

Yes, the title of the book is weird. A defence of food, you say? Also the subtitle of the book will throw readers off: the myth of nutrition and the pleasures of eating.

In a nutshell: much, most in fact, of the food we see on our supermarket shelves is not real food. Rather it is highly processed food broken down into bit and pieces. Food has more and more been turned into a bizarre kind of chemistry. Vitamins that have been stripped from food during processing are then later added in.

Pollan describes the early process of grinding wheat into flour, and how so many vital nutrients were stripped from the whole food in the process. Later on when vitamin deficiencies were discovered in the population’s diet, the vitamins were simply added back into the food as a supplement.

This idea has gotten our of control in our own day, with the Coca Cola company now adding nutrients to their drinks.

Pollan calls this ideology ‘nutritionism’ (actually, the word is taken from an essay by Australian writer Gyorgy Scrinis).

This is where science has broken foods down to their nutrients – vitamins etc. – and taken them out of the context of the actual food.

For example, instead of eating a lovely sweet, juicy orange for the simple pleasure of it, you extract the needed nutrient out of it, vitamin C, stick it in a tablet and munch on it like a medicine.

This kind of thinking has overtaken our approach to food. Add to this the amazingly complex array of studies and findings into what food does and you have a population that is utterly clueless when it comes to what to eat.

(Most fascinating for this reader was the fact that fat does not necessarily cause heart attacks and cancer. More likely, we learn, it is the absence of plant foods from our diet. Hence the last thirty years spent over eating low fat foods has led to us being chronically unhealthy.)

Pollan quotes a study by an Australian researcher, where a group of diabetic and overweight middle aged Aborigines were sent back to the bush for seven weeks to live only on their indigenous diet. Rather than their usually crappy Western diet, they went back to eating shellfish, crocodile and witchetty grubs. Their health improved dramatically.

So what to do? The answer is quite simple. Avoid processed foods. (Ironically, Pollan says that any food advertising a nutritional benefit should not be touched.)

Eat food. By that Pollan means real, whole foods. Don’t eat TV dinners that you microwave and that have an ingredient list a mile long, full of chemicals you have never heard of. So buy whole, real vegetables, and cook them yourselves. Join a co-op if you can, or even better, grow something in your back yard yourself.

Eat mostly plants. Pollan says we can be fairly confidant of the research that shows a diet rich in vegetables and fruit will help to protect you against cancer and heart problems.

So cut down on your meat. (Although Pollan says there is nothing wrong with eating meat from a health perspective, as long as the portions are modest.) You could become what is known as a ‘flexitarian’ – vegetarian for part of the week, meat eater for the other part.

Pollan has a terrific final sentence which probably best sums up his book: ‘The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many thing to worry about, but ‘health’ is simply not one of them, because it is a given.’

This short 200 page book I feel would make a terrific gift for anyone exhibiting the signs of confusion about what to eat. It’s based on common sense: eat whatever people have always eaten, and avoid man made food based on crackpot scientific theories about what is best for us.

Nature produced the tomato, the apple, the potato for a reason: to enjoy and be eaten.

Stuffed and Starved, by Raj Patel

It seems that, going by the blurb on the front of the book, Naomi Klein had a near out-of-body experience reading this book.

What did I miss in Stuffed and Starved? The book purports to be about ‘markets, power and the battle for the world food system’. Its title points to the irony of so much food now being produced, yet one half of the world is stuffed, that is, obese, while the other half is starved.

I had two difficulties with the book.

Firstly, it’s written in that breathless, smart-arse style. The author highlights one paradox after the other in the most self-congratulatory manner. This is the style of an author saying, look at me, I’m quite smart. The experience is like trying to swim through molasses.

Secondly, the book seems incoherent over all. It’s a hodgepodge of different subjects that doesn’t gel into one overall theme. You go from soy production in Brazil to the rise of the supermarket culture, yet I couldn’t discover how it all worked together as a theme.

The last thirty pages or so I just skimmed through. I felt like Mr Patel was wasting my time.

I should have known better when I read a blurb somewhere saying that the author was quite opinionated.

Or perhaps I’m just a dopey reader with a really short concentration span.

Having recently read Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food, I’d urge readers to buy yourself a copy of that book, or his equally excellent, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

If This Is a Man / The Truce, by Primo Levi

This book I recently 'liberated' from the shelves of an opportunity shop in Brunswick for $2.00. It seemed a crime to have it sitting there in the dank, musky atmosphere of an op shop, collecting dust with a lot of other crappy titles.

I must confess: I tried to read If This Is a Man many, many years ago, and put it down after a few pages. For some reason, it didn't hold my interest. Inexplicable, I know.

Alas, so many years on I seem ready for this extraordinary book.

Looking at the publishing date on the inside of the book it shows 1958, but this is the date that it was translated.

Primo Levi actually wrote it straight after the war. His prime aim was to 'bear witness' to what had happened. It was of utmost importance that people know the truth of what happened.

Published in 1947, the book was pretty much a flop, but was revived years later and is now studied in school and considered a classic.

On the basis of its revived fortunes Primo Levi decided to write a sequel, The Truce, which relays Levi's long journey home from Auschwitz.

The two short books are now commonly published together, as is the case with my Abacus edition. As the introduction says, together the books form a kind of descent into hell, and a resurrection from hell.

Of the two books, I found the first book to be the strongest.

It has a strangely serene, wise, gentle, philosophical tone that you don't expect. It's almost like the author is writing some Proustian novel. In some sections of the book you detect a wry, gentle sort of humour.

This is extraordinary to me for two reasons. One, that it was written so quickly after Levi had experienced the horrors of the camps. Two, the very nature of what he had experienced called for extreme anger.

Yet as he notes in the afterward for the two books, where he tries to answer the most frequently asked questions to his books and experiences as a prisoner of Auschwitz, he was always of a gentle disposition. Hate did not come easy to Levi, even after his experiences.

Hence the book has a surreally serene atmosphere. Bodies pile up, death surrounds everything, cruelty is everywhere, is indeed necessary even for inmates to survive, yet Levi keeps a bemused tone at the Nazi's self-deluding grandeur and obsession with categorising everything, as if this will allow them to control everything.

Of course nothing can stop the madness of their leader, and the Russians eventual arrival to liberate the camps.

If This Is a Man ends on a bit of a cliff hanger, and Levi takes up his pen again in 1963 to write The Truce, a book that deals with Levi's post camp struggle for survival and his long trip home to Turin in Italy.

The most moving part of this book is the end where he describes his recurring dream, where he imagines that he is back at Auschwitz, and that the liberation by the Russians is all an illusion. The Nazis are the reality, hell is normality, and the life of a free man is an hallucination.

As mentioned earlier, the book comes with an afterward where Levi answers common questions. This section is fascinating, as Levi answers the questions that we, as readers, most commonly think of. Why didn't the Jews resist? How much did the German population know?

The most fascinating insight in this afterward is in the survivors' attitude to their experiences.

Those who had no political affiliation, or understanding, found it hardest to deal with their experiences. Whereas those who belonged to some political movement, or had some idea of how politics worked, were better able to continue on with their lives undisturbed.

For this latter group, they could at least say their experiences had had meaning.

I look forward to reading other books by Primo Levi.