Book Review - The Puffin Book of Funny Stories

The LibraryThing entry says by Helen Cresswell, but it's more collected by her and with introductions by her (and one of the bits is excerpted from one of her books).

I strongly suspect I got this when I was still in primary school.

The book is a bunch of funny excerpts from funny books some of which were aimed at children.

Reading it back now, I am fonder of some of the stories than I was and the collection will always have a special place in my heart for introducing me to Three Men In A Boat.  The book used The Cheeses, which makes sense because it's one of the funnier free-standing bits and of the other options both The Packing of the Luggage and Uncle Podger are probably funnier with more life experience.

The book may also have been my introduction to Adrian Mole and one day I will get round to reading Witch Week.

No LibraryThing recommendations, because I don't think enough people have reviewed it.

Book review: The Universe Inside You by Brian Clegg

The author states that his aim is not to give all the information about any one area but instead to give an overview of interesting facts from many areas. He succeeds in this - while I was reading it, I would tell my Mum some of the fun facts when she rang me. So I feel a little churlish saying I almost wish the author had included fewer things so he could spend more time on less so there would be less bouncing about between topics. Less bouncing about might also make the book read more smoothly, and might have ironed out a couple of peculiarities, for instance, on one page there is a truly terrible description of enzymes, what they are and how they work, and then, not more than two pages later, there's a perfectly good and workable description of the same thing.

The book is a fun race through some interesting science, but I am left with a feeling that less would have been more.

Book Review - How Long Is a Piece of String?: More Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life by Rob Eastaway

This reads a lot like Horrible Histories but for maths and aimed at an older audience.

I know what I'm going to say is an odd sort of complaint, but I could have done with more book. What there is is gold, but I think they could have gone further into the maths without losing their audience.

That being said I appreciate the practical ways they suggest that a reader can do to to prove the maths in the book and the links to papers which go further into the maths.

Yearly Book Location Data Viz

The yearly update on where the books I have read are set. There's been a slight increase in non-UK set books, but in total, still more than half are set in the UK.

For UK-based books:  

Still completely dominated by England. Theoretically, there should be one set in Scotland but I have had forgotten to write down the name of the book so it is not counting (until I can find it again).

Book Review - As Good As It Gets - The Story of St Helens' Grand Slam Class of 2006

This book is about the glorious, all-conquering Saints team that won every trophy 🏆 available to them in 2006.

It’s written by Mike Critchley who works as the sports editor for one of the local papers, the St Helens Star.  He sets the team’s year in context, not just of rugby league, but also the team’s importance to the town.

It’s wonderfully one-sided.  It’s also written in authentic Northern gibberish in parts, to the point that I feel like asking my London correspondent if it makes any sense to someone not from my neck of the woods.

The pro-Saints angle actually quite nice, because it’s so common that Saints don’t get the credit they deserve.  It does occasionally leave me wanting more information or analysis than the book gives.  But that’s understandable because it is quite clearly designed to be an happy overview of that glorious season, not an in-depth rugby analysis book.

The book is also rather obviously pro-Daniel Anderson.  Which makes sense.  It was a season of success that was partly down to his tactical choices and player rotation.  It should actually have been his second title.  Saints would have won the title the year before if Sean Long hadn’t had his face broken in a match against Wigan. No part of that last sentence is an exaggeration.  But the book chooses to do this not just by bigging up Daniel Anderson, which is reasonable, but by putting down Ian Millward at any opportunity.  I have no idea what Mr. Millward did to the author but it must have been something.  (It's Ian Millward and the author is a journalist so I presume Millward swore at him.)

That, and a couple of “I do not think it means what you think it means” word usage issues, are the only problems I found.

It was interesting to get an insight into how a successful team works, and how it really is all the little things and building things up step by step.  The Ade Gardener section, and indeed Gardener’s own analysis of both season and how wing-play works in rugby league, was probably the most interesting part, but there were lots of interesting tidbits.

As for an actual number of stars, this is 5/5 for a Saints fan, 4/5 for rugby league fans and probably 3/5 for other sport fans.

Yearly Book Location Update

It's only a month late ;)

As you can see, the variety hasn't improved much. In my defence, I've been reading a fair bit of non-fiction which isn't set anywhere in particular, and the books I have read that are set somewhere particular are either fantasy worlds or written by Plutarch with notes like 'citadel x is probably modern day y'.

Book Review - The Piranha Club: Power and Influence in Formula One by Timothy Collings

The ever wonderful L got me this as a present a couple of years ago and has been very patient waiting for me to read it.

I almost want to write two reviews, one for F1 fans and one for other readers.  Because, despite a few flaws, I would utterly recommend this for anyone with more than a passing interest in F1.  If you've not got an interest in F1, you're really not the target audience.

Both reviews would make one similar complaint - what Collings needs, even more than someone to thoroughly proof-read the book (I'd complain less, were this not supposed to be the revised edition), is someone to help him organise his thoughts.

The book follows a mostly chronological path, beginning with Enzo Ferrari and carrying on to the present day (which was 2003).  Which makes sense, and it was interesting to get an overview of how the sport developed and changed, through the prism of the teams and team bosses.

Only sometimes the book randomly jumps so Ron Dennis and Frank Williams get introduced before Ken Tyrrell, for no obvious reason, especially as Ken Tyrrell was also a garagiste.

And then we suddenly get a section on the skulduggery of the 1993, 1997, 1999 and 2003.  And each individual section is very good (especially the 1997 bit, which, as a Ferrari fan, I remember *differently*), but the whole would have been so much better with an introductory paragraph to the chapter (which is called Tempestuous Times) and and intro to each section.  For the price of five extra paragraphs, the chapter could have gone from 'really good' to 'excellent'.

Following that chapter we jump back to 1997 (admittedly to a really excellent chapter on Jackie Stewart, Stewart Racing and how to organise an F1 team).  

The jumping also affects the flow of his introductions to team managers, so we get Paul Stoddart doing his thing in the 2003 section of 'Tempestuous Times', before he, Minardi, and why he bought Minardi are introduced a chapter and a half later in '2001 - A Political Odyssey'.

I think the lack of organising principle is why, particularly in the early chapters, you quite often get an anecdote on one page, only to have it be repeated over the page.

All those complaints are utterly unimportant if you're an F1 fan though, because the book has so much interesting stuff, especially about how things work (or don't work) on the business front, and some of the personality background on the team leaders.

And Bernie.  Oh the Bernie stuff was interesting.  Particularly Stirling Moss saying that Bernie was a half decent driver.  There is a man whose opinion I respect in these matters.

I keep forgetting how old Bernie really is.  Because I always assume that he's Ron Dennis's age, and he's not, he's 16 years older, which I think is because one reaches one's business years about 20 years after one reaches one's racing years.

Collings also tries to predict the future, and while there's a reason that's a mug's game, he does get some of it right.  The imbalance in the prize money has lead to other teams going bust, and is still causing ructions between the remaining teams.  He's right that it will probably be the EU Commission that eventually gets it sorted (courtesy of complaints from Sauber, where Peter Sauber has left F1, rejoined, and then sold his team).

He's also right in predicting the rise of manufacturer teams such as Renault, and teams that are part of larger organisations, where they're basically extended marketing departments (looking at you so much Red Bull), at the expense of truly privateer teams.

Where he's wrong is the effect that that's had on who the team bosses are.  Contrary to what Collings predicts, they are still mostly ex-racers and mad petrolheads, for example Christian Horner (and if anyone wants to horrify us all by digging out *that* centrefold of Horner, now would be the right time) and Toto Wolff.  The bosses of big companies don't have the time to devote to just one part of their brand that it would need for them to truly run a Formula 1 team, so they're going to try to hire the best they can and those people are going to come from the same motorsports-enthusiastic places they've always done, they're just not doing it under their own names now.  And I don't think you could.  Gene Haas apart, and time will tell if he stays, you need a pre-existing business empire to enter F1 nowadays.

And Bernie still prevails.  As I suspect he always shall until he's bored of it.  The book was written before the present Concord agreement was signed and therefore ends on a note of 'how will the teams ever agree to a new one, and how will Bernie cling on to power?'  Sound familiar?  The book also has a fantastic anecdote that explains why Bernie remains,

"At various times, he has left a room, during a meeting, after suggesting that the team principals present decide among themselves who the new leader should be, only to return and find they had spent so long arguing about the air-conditioning levels, or something similar, that no-one had even proposed a replacement leader." (pg 137)

Now, yes, it's one of those anecdotes that's probably far too good to be true, but it sounds infinitely plausible and I suspect the same thing would happen now.  He is what keeps F1 moving, and I actually do worry about what happens post-Bernie, and I think the 'Bernie out' people should consider that before they get too vociferous. But yes, in short, definitely read it if you're an F1 fan. Not so much if you're not.

Book Locations Update

Following on from last year's post on the topic (http://fulltimesportsfan.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/book-locations.html), I've been continuing to track the where the books I've read are set.

Books set in the UK still heavily outnumber everything else, and the vast majority of those are set in England.

Part of the problem is that I read a lot more non-fiction than fiction and it tends to be less clearly set in one place, because either science moves or people move. Since the next few books on the 'to-read' list are also non-fiction, I doubt this is going to change.

Book Locations

If I may direct you to a thing that @nwbrux (on Twitter) is doing, where he's using LibraryThing and GoodReads to try to find the most famous book from each European country - http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/tag/famous%20books%20by%20geography. (Inspired by this mentalfloss thing doing the same for each US state -http://mentalfloss.com/article/56377/most-famous-book-set-each-state).

Other than being very happy that Kidnapped got a mention for Scotland, and hoping that The Three Musketeers gets a mention for France, I have suddenly become aware that the other thing I think of when you say French book isn't a novel per se (Asterix for the win) and neither is the thing I think of when you say Dutch book (the Diary of Anne Frank).

Anyway, I did a quick blast through the books that I have reviewed on LibraryThing (because it's common knowledge function is useful when you can't quite remember where on of the Aubrey and Maturin books is set), and I have found that I really need to read a more varied selection of books.

And that Brazilian one is pushing it a bit because they literally only just touch there in HMS Surprise, but the whole "you debauched my sloth" thing is too magnificent to ignore.

It's even worse if I look at the UK-based books:

(Yes, all of the Welsh ones are Torchwood books.) Add to that that most of those are set in London or the Home Counties, it definitely means I need to read a more varied set of books.

Book Review - Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis by Deborah Hayden

Normal people don't give books about syphilis to their friends for their birthdays.  Then again, normal people don't then go on to write book reports about books about syphilis so I think L and I are equally weird.

Mostly Pox: etc left me curiously unsatisfied.  It's not that I believe or disbelieve that various historical figures had syphilis (although I'm highly unconvinced by the Schumann chapter), it's the author's methods I have issues with.  Syphilis is referred to throughout as the 'great imitator' and yet most of the time, other suggestions for what could be the cause of the symptoms shown in each "case" are not mentioned, never mind being discussed and shown to be unlikely.  The one exception to this is the chapter about Hitler where the discussion about the symptoms he had that resembled Parkinson's disease is ended with "just because he had Parkinson's doesn't mean he didn't have syphilis."  Which is a fair enough point, but when you're claiming all the symptoms are due to syphilis, it's a bit rich.

The symptoms are another problem.  A list of them is in appendix A.  Not only would I have preferred them earlier in the book, but they're so spectacularly vague and at the same time, wide-ranging.  Do not give this book to a hypochondriac who has ever had sex because they will convince themselves they have syphilis.

The other problem is that a lot of the symptoms resemble those of heavy metal poisoning, particularly mercury poisoning.  Now quite obviously, being poisoned by mercury doesn't rule out having syphilis, especially given that mercury was used as a treatment for syphilis, but it was also used as a treatment for a great many other things.

One of the other aims of the book was to examine how on-going syphilis, or more particularly the parts from secondary syphilis onwards, affected the work of the various "patients".  I have never really appreciated the idea of focusing on one aspect of an artist's life and using it to explain <i>everything</i> they've ever dine and I found this book had the same problem as most works in this vein.  It takes the attitude that this one thing explains all the great masterworks (and excuses the drivel) but never mentions the average.  If having syphilis was so much on the minds of Oscar Wilde and James Joyce that it was their idée fixe when they wrote the Picture of Dorian Gray and Ulysses, then why was it not on their minds when they wrote other things?

(There's a highly cryptic remark about Nora Joyce "but the future of another woman he met that month, his life partner and the mother of his children, Nora Barnacle, is known." (pp 241) Now, I've given her a quick wiki and can see no sign on that of doom and dread, so I'm none the wiser.  Does anyone have any idea what they could be referring to?)

Hayden does something quite clever by interleaving the "known cases" where the suffer has made admission of their disease with the "suspected" cases.  I recognise a good rhetorical trick when I see one, because it enables you to go, 'see how x had the same symptoms as y, and we know x had syphilis, so y *must* have had it too' without quite being so blunt about it.

I've left the Hitler chapter till last for a reason.  One, no matter how well researched the rest of it is, you get a distinct feeling that the author was working up to that chapter, it being 54 pages, when the next longest (about Oscar Wilde) is 29 pages.  Now there's perfectly good and sound reasons to stop after the Hitler chapter, because the book is mostly chronologically ordered, and after 1945 penicillin became available as a treatment for syphilis, reducing the number of people affected in total and almost entirely preventing tertiary syphilis from developing.  Two, I can't actually compete with the criticism that Hayden, to her credit, includes in her book, which says it is unfair, "to put the whole weight of the holocaust on the frail shoulders of that poor woman of the streets if she ever existed."  (Pox pp 257, which gives a reference to Ron Rosenbaum 'Explaining Hitler' pp 197)  Because it does seem to be a rather simple-minded attempt to explain Hitler's hatred of Jews so that it makes sense, rather than being a product of the times.  Because obviously, if there was a reason, it can't happen again, right?!  Three, she quite often cites David Irving, without mentioning his lies on some other World War 2 related issues.  We're talking about a man who was described by a high court judge as someone who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence." (Mr. Justice Charles Gray, Irving v Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstadt)  I'm just going to suggest that, if possible, you find someone else to cite.

So yeah, I may have had issues with that chapter too.

In short, it's a lovingly crafted, well-written book, with excellent sourcing and footnoting, with the exception of David Irving, but I feel it's rather too hasty to make it cases without providing a bedrock in some of the "maybe" cases.