Category: Books

I didn’t much like the Book. Tellingly, I kept calling it “Forgetfulness”. There were strengths: The analysis of social economic & demographic transitions. Four Prosperity Levels are recognised Levels 1-4, the explanation of people moving up the Levels interesting.  An impressive list of matters are improving, slavery, oil spills, HIV infection, battle death, smallpox, nuclear … Continue reading Review : Factfulness; Ten Reasons We Are Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better than You Think by Hans Rosling et al (2019) Assessment 3 out of 10

Magisterial, but not a light read. It runs to 832 closely printed pages, plus notes, an index and 40 illustrations. It includes 25 full page battle plans, which would make an excellent guide for a tour of the battlefields. The key questions are addressed of why the War was fought and why did it continue … Continue reading Review: Europe’s Tragedy; a New History of the Thirty Years’ War by Peter H Wilson ( 2010) Assessment 9 out of 10

A beautiful hard-back of 154 pages produced in an edition of 1,500 copies, with “financial assistance from the Friends of the Center of American Places.” The first half is a series of essays on religion and geography by the Oxford educated, Chinese-American Yi-Fu Tuan, a Master (literally) of human geography and landscapes, the second some … Continue reading Review: Religion; from Place to Placenessless by Yi-Fu Tuan and Martha Strawn(2010) Assessment 9 out of 10

Scholastic local history edging onto the European stage. “Jersey 1204” was commissioned by the States of Jersey in 2004, from two eminent Cambridge Medievalists. Publication marked 800 years since Jersey’s establishment as a separate jurisdiction, a continuity which almost nowhere else, except Guernsey, can claim. Two different scales are applied. At a large scale this … Continue reading Review: Jersey 1204; the Making of an Island Community by JA Everard and JC Holt (2004) Assessment 9 out of 10

Brilliant, original and thought provoking: a study of human & animal evolution, with profound implications for human history. Wrangham’s thesis is that domestication reduces reactive aggression, striking out in fear and anger. The domestication syndrome includes lighter bones, reduced dimorphism, smaller brains without reduced intelligence, and facial paedomorphism, where juvenile features continue into adulthood. Domesticates’ … Continue reading Review: The Goodness Paradox; How Evolution Made Us More and Less Violent by Richard Wrangham (2019) Assessment 10 out of 10

A key text of “humanist” geography, placing human experience centre stage. Yi Fu Tuan is an Oxford-educated Chinese American geographer. He originally researched geomorphology, then landscapes, writing the volume of the Oxford edited “World Landscapes” series on China. He then became a, probably the, guru of “humanist” geography, putting man himself, and man’s experience, at … Continue reading Review: Space and Place; the Perspective of Experience by Yi Fu Tuan (1977) Assessment 9 out of 10

A  Book I wouldn’t have read without the Reading Group, ; a wonderful biography providing a doorway to philosophy and art. Nietzsche was initially a Classical philologist. With his first book “The Birth of Tragedy” he showed how Wagnerian opera mirrored Greek tragedy. Apollo was reasonable and logical and associated with painting, architecture &, in … Continue reading Review: I am Dynamite; a Life of Frederich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux (2018) Assessment 9 out of 10

Published in 2005, 60 years after the end of the Occupation, with assistance from Jersey Heritage Trust and Société Jersiaise, it is based on extensive documentary research. It is both scholarly and admirably balanced. • Showing that the situations in the four separate British Channel Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark, were different. In Jersey … Continue reading Review: The British Channel Islands Under German Occupation 1940-45 by Paul Sanders (2005) Assessment 8 out of 10