ResoluteReader: December 2024

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Cyprian Ekwensi - Jagua Nana

Jagua Nana is a remarkable, but forgotten, novel. Set in Nigeria in the immediate aftermath of independence, it centres of Jagua Nana, a forty-five year old sex worker who retains her skills, beauty and fantastic dress sense. She is an icon of Lagos, a woman whose clothing and makeup sets the fashions for everyone else. And a woman who is desired by many men.

Jagua wants to settle down and have children. She hopes to do this with Freddie, her twenty something lover, a school teacher, but one who has ambitions. Freddie wants to go to London, to study at the inns of court and return to Nigeria a lawyer who can help transform the country into a modern democracy. Jagua's plan is to pay his way, and ensure he qualifies, then returns and can help her lead the life she dreams of.

But the tension between her life as a sex-worker, relying on her clients from the exotic Tropicana club to keep her in the life she has, pressures her relationship with Freddie until it snaps. Unable to see past Jagua's sex with other men, Freddie moves to England without Jagua's help. In his absence Jagua is cut adrift, finding solace and excitement in various dalliances and relationships in the country around Lagos. Here her urban street skills are a hindrance in navigating the countryside and its more traditional life, but also offer new ways of thinking to those stuck outside the capital. Her good looks do no harm either:

Here in Ogabu, men dressed well but sanely. Women were beautiful, but not brazen. They had become complementary to the palm trees and the Iroko, the rivulets and the fertile earth. TGhey were part of their surroundings as natural as the wind. Whereas in Lagos man was always grappling to master an environment he had created. It was money, money, yet more money.

Freddie's sudden return as a promising young politician standing in the local election as a radical, democratic and anti-corruption candidate upsets the apple cart. Initially, unable to see past his recent marriage to a young woman, Jagua initially decides to destroy him by supporting the other candidate. But the personal tensions become intensely political.

Jagua Nana is a remarkable novel because its story is a deeply personal one set against the backdrop of Nigeria's emergence into post-colonialism. It's intensely political, but with a small p, because it doesn't take up big questions of struggle. Rather it is focused on the consequences of individual and very personal decisions and sacrifices, made within bigger contexts. But front and centre are the stories of women's lives - stories that show how women fight to change things, to achieve their dreams and to break free of the limitations forced upon them by their social circumstances.

I loved this book. It was first published as part of the African Writers Series, curated by Chinua Achebe. I was very lucky to find a copy randomly in a second hand book shop, which proves it is always worth taking a punt on an unknown writer. See if you can hunt it down.

Monday, December 30, 2024

Michael Patrick F. Smith - The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood and Transformation in an American Boomtown

One of the mistakes that environmentalists have been guilty of in the past is forgetting that behind every oil, coal, gas and fracking site are dozens of workers. The fossil fuel industry is both a uniquely devastating part of capitalism, and also a massive employer. This is why the British Campaign Against Climate Change produced a number of pamphlets aimed at the trade union movement to argue that a "Just Transition" to a sustainable economy could both create jobs, and transition workers from the fossil fuel industry to alternative employment while protecting terms and conditions. That remains, I would argue, a central task of both the environmental and trade union movement.

The Good Hand is an insight into the lives of the men and women who are behind the fossil fuel industry. Michael Patrick F. Smith lived and worked in New York as a playwright, singer and jobbing actor. In 2013, as the fracking (shale gas) boom exploded in North Dakota he headed up to the oil fields to try and make his fortune. Arriving in Willston, North Dakota, the centre of the boom he finds himself, alongside hundreds of others, trying to get work in a boomtown where rents are rocketing and McDonalds cannot (or won't) pay enough to hire enough staff. Living in a flophouse, where three or four men share a living room sleeping on bunks or airbeds, Smith trudges the streets trying to get a job.

This is oil boom capitalism. But its also capitalism that has shed any dignity. There's plenty of money sloshing around to ensure that the bars, sex clubs, and drug dealers are able to make a killing from the young, lost, alienated and immigrant labour. The work, when Smith eventually makes it into an oil job, is uniquely dangerous. There are safety briefings, but the chances of injury and death are ever present. The long hours, long distances, drink, drugs and pressure to work faster contribute to a workplace safety record near the bottom of the graph.

Smith is an incredible story teller. His experiences however are shaped in this remarkable book by his upbringing in a abusive and dangerous family. His father was violent and sexually abused his sister. Smith notes that there are two topics of conversation for oil workers meeting for the first time - the job, and paternal violence. It is, Smith thinks, because of this background that he is determined to make it in the industry - to be come a "good hand", a reliable worker in the eyes of his compatriots.

Because the other aspect to this alienated world of work is that workers make themselves a community. The shared danger, drinking and drugs, and the hell of life without proper public services and housing, means that men learn to love and defend each other. Even if they are often at each others throats. There are stories here that allude to the love that they develop for each other. Sometimes this is actual sexual relationships, and it's interesting that Smith notes that homosexuality isn't that frowned on, except for a few jokes. In this intensely macho world that seems surprising. That said, this is barely a bastion of liberalism. In his time on the North Dakota prairie Smith meets just one trade unionist.

Nor are there many progressives. The chapter where Smith confesses to the men that he voted Obama had me holding my breath. Here it seemed the jokes about "someone having an accident" might be very real. Smith, in fact, is shocked to find Willston almost entirely white. There are a few black workers, who are to the men from the region mostly figures of curiosity and fun. In turn the immigrant workers are shocked, upset and angered by the racism. It is when Smith realises that he has just accepted the "innocent explanation" for the name of a bar called the K K Korner that he begins to realise how much he has been changed.

Smith's time on the oilfields is a life changing experience - not because of the work. But because of the people. As an explanation of working class life, in the rarefied, high-stakes and sometimes high-paid world of booming fossil fuels, it is often difficult to read. This is a place of drugs, drink, casual violence and deep misogyny. But there are also moments of real beauty and solidarity. People standing up for each other, defending each other or simply putting a hand on someone else's shoulder at a time of need. It's a tough read, but it tells you more about the reality of the "American Dream" than any rhetoric from Trump or Biden will. Smith writes movingly, but never patronisingly about his life, work and the people of America. It's highly recommended.

Saturday, December 28, 2024

Richard Grunberger - Red Rising in Bavaria

The Munich, or Bavarian, Revolution is an often neglected part of the amazing German revolutionary wave that took place at the end of 1918 and into 1919. The German Revolution was important for two reasons. Firstly it effectively ended the slaughter of World War One as sailors, soldiers and working people struck, marched and created workers councils. Secondly, it extended a hand of solidarity and hope to the people of Revolutionary Russia, briefly opening up the hope that the Soviet Republic would not remain isolated. The revolutionaries of Munich certainly understood this second aspect of their struggle. But what was the nature of the Munich rising itself?

Richard Grunberger's account of these events "Red Rising" is a readable, if problematic account. It was, as he abley describes, in 1919 that the counter-revolutionary Freikorps began their fascist reigns of terror. Practising for events under Hitler. The "Reds" in Munich executed 10 hostages. It was probably a tactical error, and certainly not one supported by the majority of rebels. But the counter-revolutionaries outnumbered this slaughter ten to one. Over one thousand revolutionaries, participants, by-standers and completely innocent people were killed in the orgy of violence that suppressed the revolution.

Unfortunately there is very little here about the revolution from the bottom up. Grunberger is more interested in the individuals who led, or put themselves at the head of the movement itself. He is fascinated more with their individual eccentric behaviours than with trying to understand the real dynamics of the movement. Kurt Eisner, the Prime Minister of the Bavarian Republic in the initial phases of the revolution, who was assassinated in February by the right-wing, seems to have been a volatile and unusual character. Franz Mehring, the leading German Marxist and biographer of Marx, described Eisner as an "aesthetic dilettante". It's probably an accurate depiction.

Eisner's weakness was to try and find a way between bolshevism and Social Democracy. His quest for a revolution without Bolshevism meant he failed to see the threat from the right, or their handmaidens in the SPD. But he was not alone in this. Those that followed frequently made the same mistake. The most able leader seems to have been Eugen Leviné. Leviné did not allow the fledgling Communist Party to inistially support the rising, saying, according to Grunberger, "We can only take part in a republic of councils if it is proclaimed by the councils - and if the majority of them are communists". It seems a sensible policy - focusing on revolutionary movements from below, not the arbitary declaration of a Council Republic from above. Leviné's eventual participation was a recognition that once the battle was engaged Communists could not abstain. Though for Grunberger it's more of a reversal of position rather than an act of principle from a position of enormous weakness.

There are some real political weaknesses with the book. But there are stylistic problems too. Grunberger's descriptions of people are sometimes very off. The SPD leftist Erhard Auer is described as a "huge man with large hands" for no apparent reason.

Despite it's limitations there are some real glimpses into moments of working class power and bravery during the Munich Revolution. For those who only know the name Dachau because of the later concentration camp there, remember the workers of the town who fought the fascists there long before the Nazis came to power:

In the fighting that follow Red troops advanced into Dachau... At a cricial moment in thebattle workmen and women from the Dachau ordnance factory disconcerted the defenders by wading into the melee and shouting amidst the hail of bullets, "Don't shoot at your brothers!" When the White hesitated before firing on civilisans, the Red attacks pressed home their advantage, diarmed some of the enemy and drove the rest northwards from the town.

Similarly, Grunberger quotes from an eyewitness to an early meeting in the revolution, when a worker cuts through the rarefied debates of professors including Max Weber:

The crowd was so tightly packed that the waitresses 'ate' their way through it like woodworms. One was barely aware of the alcohol and tobacco fumes or human perspiration, because it was so important that the things that mattered could be said. Suddenly a pale young workman mounted the rostrum and said simply "Have you, or you, made an armstice offer? Yet we ought to do it - not the gentlemen in office. Let us seize a radio station and let us ordinary folk address the ordinary folk on the other side - right away there'll be peace." As he said this a problem occurred to him, and with a touching gesture in the direction of Max Weber's fellow academics o nthe platform, the young man continued: "Here these Herren Professoren, they know French! They'll know how to say it the way we mean it."

Sadly there is too little such flavour of "ordinary folk" in the book. It is these people and their hopes that made the German Revolution, and sadly this book doesn't deliver enough of this. That said, for a subject that is badly neglected in the literature of the Revolution, it is a decent overview. Socialists should read it to be reminded of the need to build revolutionary organisation ahead of the crucial battles. Otherwise we are, as Leviné famously said at his trial, "Communists are all dead men on leave".

Friday, December 27, 2024

Joan Nabseth Stevenson - Deliverance from the Little Big Horn: Doctor Henry Porter & Custer's Seventh Cavalry

An almost uncountable number of publications have been written about the Battle of the Little Big Horn. In a genre of history that has no shortage of books, the defeat of Custer and his men by the combined might of the Lakota, Dakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho has been analysed, debated and obsessed about, almost from the moment Custer's command was extinguished.

There are a good number of microhistories that focus on particular individuals or experiences at the Bighorn. Deliverance from the Little Big Horn is one of these, though because its focus was on the only medical Doctor to survive the battle, and his experience with Reno and Benteen as they were besieged overnight, it is an unusal and rewarding read for those who are interested in the Battle.

Doctor Henry Porter was a contract surgeon with the US Army. This meant he was one of a handful of civilians to accompany the Seventh Cavalry on their expedition to slaughter the Native Americans. Porter was not armed and was not expected to fight. His job was to help injured troops on the trip and during any confrontation. The other doctors with the troops were killed with Custer, or early in the battle with Porter. In fact Porter's friend and fellow medic James M. DeWolf was killed a few metres from Porter, because he took a slightly different route up the hill during Reno's disastorous and panicked retreat from the first encounter with the Native American forces. It was to Porter that Reno famous denied he had fled. "That was a charge" he said.

Only a small section of the book is devoted to the battlefield experiences of Porter. It must have been a horrific situation as Porter used limited resources to patch up and keep alive a growing number of severally wounded soldiers. Most of these were bullet wounds. Porter did not have to deal with many arrow heads. But he did have to amputate and provide urgent care. Saving up to 68 men. One important detail that Joan Stevenson's book does explore is the complete rejection of germ theory by the US medical establishment and hence the doctors down to Porter on the battle field. Interestingly this would probably have made little difference on the battlefield as there was hardly any water for cleaning equipment or hands. But in the aftermath of the encounter Porter, as was common at the time, was more concerned by the bad smell from dead animals and men, and its impact on the wounded men's injuries.

When relief finally arrived Porter ministered to the men on an arduous trek to the vessel that was to take them down the Yellowstone river to Fort Lincoln near Bismarck in North Dakota. All the way Porter cared for the men.

Porter's dedication wasn't reflected in his treatment by the Army. As a contract surgeon he was expected to be at the beck and call of the military, but could be terminated almost without notice. In the immediate aftermath of the Custer defeat Porter set out again with General Terry on a classically pointless military adventure that failed to confront the Native Americans. Along the way though Porter was witness again to a military failure as the soldiers, following weeks of poor diet of hardtack and bacon, feel sick to scurvy.

In the miltary austerity of the next few years, Porter gained and lost contracts. He eventually became a successful doctor in Bismarck, and travelled the world. Dying in India trying to see the Taj Mahal. He also campaigned for better treatment, and pay, for medical professionals in the US army. Whether he eventually accepted germ theory is not said.

Joan Nabseth Stevenson's little book is an excellent account of medicine in the US army at the time. It is clearly a work of love, but written with a serious scholarship and knowledge of the Battle itself. For those interested in military medicine who know little of events in July 1876 this will be a good introduction. Stevenson has little to say about the wider context of the war, and makes no real comment on the overall strategy of the US government. To be fair to her that's not what the book is about. She does conclude with Porter's testimony into the conduct of Major Reno on the battlefield. He, along with the other surviving civilians, had little good to say. The officers, as is the military want, kept their deepest thoughts to themselves for the "good of the regiment". Porter's honesty did him credit. History has been less kind to Reno. The victorous Native Americans however were still being slaughtered.

Thursday, December 26, 2024

Kent Nerburn - Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce

If you happen to be travelling in Yellowstone National Park you might drive on Chief Joseph Highway. Its a somewhat unusual name. Roads in the US tend to be named after US military heroes, not their adversaries. But Chief Joseph, or Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, to give him his Nez Perce name was one of the most famous Native American leaders during the period after the Little Bighorn. In 1877 the Nez Perce Native Americans made a journey of almost 1200 miles from their ancestral homelands, across huge areas of what are now Wyoming and Montana trying to reach safety. Chief Joseph was one of Nez Perce chiefs, though for reasons that Kent Nerburn explains, he was not actually the supreme military leader that the US military, media and white population thought he was.

This account of Joseph, by one of the most talented non-Native American chronicllors of their history, begins with the first encounter the Nez Perce had with European settlers. This was the meeting between them and the Lewis and Clarke expedition, sent out from the East to learn more about the lands that would become the USA. The Nez Perce and the explorers got on well. So much so that later encounters were often marked by misunderstanding, confusion and tragedy. By the 1860s the US government was trying to force the Nez Perce to sign a treaty that would give up their lands so that settlers and gold hunters could use it. Some bands of the tribe did sign, but many, including Chief Joseph's, did not. A difference that became enshrined as the Treaty and non-Treaty Nez Perce.

Nerburn recounts the history of this period, as indignities and falsehoods grew, with the Nez Perce increasingly being forced into confrontations with the whites. By 1877 it was increasingly difficult for the Native Americans to avoid conflict, and more and more pressure was put on the non-Treaty Nez Perce to relocate. Refusing to do so, the Nez Perce were threatened with War. Thus began the long trek of the Nez Perce as they tried to escape and find sanctuary.

It is a gripping tale. The Nez Perce fled, intially with hope of finding a place to live, then simply to escape the persuing military. A series of confrontations took place as the Native Americans skillfully defeated the ill-equipped and under experienced troops. It might be described as a sort of fighting retreat, except the Nez Perce didn't think they were retreating. The telegraph and local journalists created a news story that was followed from coast to coast. Joseph became the supposed leader, though he was at the start only one of several other chiefs. Joseph infact was the least beligerent, the more warlike leaders unknown to the press. As the Nez Perce fled, lurid and racist stories followed behind and in front. Terror gripped the plains out of all proportion to the acts of the Native Americans, though as they travelled they did, under force of arms and increasing desperation commit acts. It is notable that by this point Yellowstone Park was open to tourists. Some of the first where indeed captured and killed by Native Americans. The history of the US war on its indigenous population is surprisingly close in time to our own.

Eventually the Nez Perce were defeated at the battle of Bear's Paw. They were a few tens of miles from the Canadian border and safety. Their defeat is remembered for Joseph's alleged speech that said he was no longer fighting. Promised much, but in reality offered little, the Nez Perce were relocated to Kansas where they became victims of racist and unscrupilous Indian Agents. Their they would have languised if Chief Joseph and others become skilled at public opinion. Joseph used every opportunity to speak to the press, to audiences and to visitors. He was skillful at highlighting the great injustice his people had suffered and how they only wanted to go home. Arthur Chapman, a translator, also wrote vast numbers of letters pleading the Nez Perce case.

There was some success. Many of the Native Americans did eventually return, though Chief Joseph was never allowed to. In fact he never again saw his own daughter, barred from visiting the lands she had been relocated to.

The tragedy of the Nez Perce is told brilliantly by Kent Nerburn's book. He highlights how the Nez Perce "war" as it is sometimes known arose out of the racist and genocidal policies of the US government that saw the Native Americas as people to be pushed and pulled from their homelands to wherever they were least in the way. It also demonstrates how, far from being the uncivilised people that racist politicians, military leaders and journalists thought they were, the Native Americans were skilled and careful politicians in their own right. And frequently far better soldiers than the US troops. Perhaps Kent Nerburn's greated achievement in this book is rescuing all the Native American leaders other than Joseph. But he also shows how many of the whites were also willing to show kindness and assistance to the Nez Perce after their capture. Even in the 1870s there were those who recognised the injustices of US settler colonialism. But Nerburn never lets you forget that the real heroes, and the ones that forced the US state to back down several times, though political campaigning and a fighting resistance, were the Nez Perce. Let's hope one day they receive adequate recompense for the injustices made against them. A superb read.

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Alex J. Kay - Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing

One of the photos in Empire of Destruction is of Richard Jenne, a four year old child who was murdered in the "special children's ward" at Irsee Monastery by the head nurse, one Sister Mina Wörle. The killing of young Jenne was part of the systematic murder of patients with mental health issues by the Nazi regime. Jenne was probably one of the last children killed under this barbaric plan. Notably he was murered by Wörle three weeks after the end of the war. For her role in killing up to 100 children Wörle got just 18 months imprisonment.

The death of Richard Jenne is one moment in the mass killing undertaken by the Nazi government. It serves as a stark reminder of the human story behind the figures for Nazi mass murder. It is well known that over six million Jewish people in the Holocaust. In addition millions of others were systematically killed. These include people with mental and physical disabilities, Russian prisoners of war, Gypsy and Roma, Russian civilians and others. These mass killing each "possessed a racial (and racist) component". But Kay argues that central to them all was that how the Nazi regime considered these groups a barrier to Germany's ability to win the war. It is difficult or impossible, he argues, to separate "German wartime stratgy from Nazi genocidal racal policies". This approach is not universally accepted among historians of the Nazis.

Kay explains:

In view alone of this intertwinement of war and extermination, it makes a great deal of sense to consider the different strands of Nazi mass killing togheter rather than in isolation... This of course means going against the grain of most scholarship on the subject by examining the genocide of the European Jews alongside other Nazi mass-murder campaigns.

In contrast to those who argue that the Holocaust must be considered separate to other mass killings, Kay argues that "taking an integrative approach to Nazi mass killing in no way contradicts the view - advocated here, too - that the Holocause was an unprecedented phenomenon."

I will not quote from any of the horrific eyewitness accounts to the murder, the description of events or the testimony of survivors. The book is perhaps one of the most difficult books I've ever read. There are relentless accounts of murder. Despite having read several books on the Holocaust and visited concentration camps and other places of Nazi killing, I don't think I've been quite so shocked and upset before. Indeed Kay explicitly warns the reader that the book is "harrowing". But reminds the reader that his "extensive use of testimony from survivors and other victims hopefully goes some small way towards giving them a voice". Bearing witness like this is of course important.

But also important is Kay's central argument that the racist policies of the Nazi regime, combined with their war aims allowed this to happen. It also built upon racist, antisemitic, eugenic and Malthusian ideas that predated Hitler. But once the regime was in power, and when the war had started, they took on an importance to the Nazis that was not anticipated. The logic of war, led to mass murder. For instance, Kay writes how the German military's systematic attempt to stop partisans in Eastern Europe was tied up with their belief in living space for Germans:

The measures taken by German forces in the context of their 'pacification' campaign constituted an attack on a substantial section of the Soviet population and, simultaneously, on the national and ethnc fabric of the state. These so called anti-partisan operations were in effect an attempt to depopulate the Soviet countryside. German forces massacred hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians, destroying thousands of homes and, indeed, entre villages in the process... The vast majority of the victims... had little or no connection to guerilla resistance, and virtually all of these deaths had a racist component.

It is worth noting that there were murders on this scale on the western front, which highlights the racial dimension to the war. Understanding all this however means comprehending Nazism as something more than antisemitism. There were "specifically Nazi motivations for mass killing", but no "monocausal explanation" for the "actions of the perpetrators" says Kay, and concludes:

The answer we seek can be found only in the interaction of tseveral factors converging in a specific historical circumstances. The conduct of the Holocaust perpetrators... cannot be unexplains in terms of their ideology alone, and yet cannot be understood without it.... The prevalence of radical ideological convictions during the years in querstion point to a shared and defining historical context.

Hundreds of thousands of Germans under Hitler, "by virtue of a certain set of circumstances and the events of the preceding decades, were particularly radicalised and mre inclined to pursue extreme solutions to perceived problems." Those solutions murdered over ten million people.

Kay's book is an important study, that opens up a way of approaching mass murder and the nature of the Nazi regime. I am not quite sure he is able to the bottom of what the specific set of circumstances that led to the Nazi regime was. While he is right to point to the historical roots of mass murder in Germany, including the prevelant racism and eugenics, I also think we need to look deeper at the way the context of the end of World War One shocked and frightened a generation of the German middle classes, and allowed Hitler to mobilise by promising to stop the Marxists. In this context Richard J Evans recent Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich is good to read alongside Kay's book because it shows how those at all levels of the Nazis' machine were drawn to fascism and Hitler and motivated to do what they did. That said, Kay's history is important both to remind us of the horrors that took place and help us understand how they were organised. Never Again.

Kershaw - Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris

Kershaw - Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis

Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution

Mazower - Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe

Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution

Sunday, December 22, 2024

Robert Dees - The Power of Peasants: Economics & politics of farming in medieval Germany (two volumes)

Robert Dees' The Power of Peasants is an explicit Marxist examination of the role of peasants in German, and wider European history. For that alone it should be celebrated. His central thesis is that the defeat of the German peasantry during 1525 led to the stagnation of the Germany economy, preventing the peasantry from further developing agricultural production. This, in turn, meant that the Germany failed to break free from feudalism until many centuries after other European countries. Its an important argument, that places the role of the producers central to historical development. The problem is that the book, at 1800 pages, obscures these insights with a huge amount of material. Since I have been asked to review this book elsewhere, I will post a link to that article when it is published.

Related Reviews

Scribner & Benecke - The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints
Bak (ed) - The German Peasant War of 1525
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Scribner (ed) - Germany: A New Social & Economic History, 1450-1630, Volume 1

Friday, December 20, 2024

Shourideh C. Molavi - Environmental Warfare in Gaza

This short book tackles an aspect to the Israeli war on Gaza that is often neglected. Shourideh C. Molavi is a researcher with Forensic Architecture and in this book she studies the way that the Israeli state has used environmental changes to consolidate and facilitate its war against Palestine. The book was written and published in the midst of the latest genocidal war, which has now raged for over a year, and it should be said it is not a study of the environmental impacts of that (or earlier) wars. It does not cover, for instance, the pollution, emissions, or destruction to infrastructure and environment that arises out of the bombing or the use of military vehicles. It is rather, a more detailed study of the environmental aspects to Israel's method of warfare.

The book begins with Palestine's oranges. Illustrated by many colour maps, it explores how citrus cultivation, once a staple of Palestinian agriculture, has almost completely disappeared in Gaza. Instead a variety of non-traditional crops, such as strawberries or even pineapples and broccoli have been used. Molavi explains that this is because the methods of warfare that Israel uses have systematically destroyed Palestinian agriculture, both as a result of their dislocation of the Palestinian people and their land, and as a result of the destructive nature of war. In the introduction she writes:

This layered colonialty and the ways in which apartheid and occupation policies are activiated in Gaza become visible when weobserve the historical transformation of its agricultural lands, the forced transtions in cultivation practices adopted by Gazan farmers, and their relation to the stifled urban development of Palestinian cities within the strip... Far from an understanding of the environment as a passive landscape - or a mere setting for conflict - we consider how Israeli settler-colonial practices make use of environemal elements as an active tool of military warfare.

In 1951, the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion made a speech which famously said that the new state would "make the wilderness bloom". It was an explicit statement of a core idea of settler colonialism, that the land was empty or, indeed, it had been used wastefully and destructively. The new "Israeli landscape" Molavi says "was largely cultivated through the multifaceted and by now well-documented eco-colonial practices of the quasi-governmental Israeli organisation, Keren Kayemet L'Yisrael, the Jewish National Fund". While the JNF claimed to be acting in a positive way, its policies actively displaced, destroyed and deforested enormous areas. The destruction of the Gazan citrus industry was a major consequence of policy in this era. Indeed the JNF actually chose trees that emphasise a particular image of the landscape:

The JNF's preference for European-looking pine is not surprising given the historical matrix of European colonialism within which the Zionist movement emerged. Cultivating trees that conform to the Picturesque Western ecological sensibilities further demonstrates Israel's European-style environemntal values, while also pushing forward a new historical narrative on the landscape that naturalises a more 'civilised' colonial presence.

Forests she says are "weaponised" to "erase Palestinian presence in strategically important spaces, providing camouflage for military objectives".

Moving to more recent times, Palestinian farmers have experienced repeated destruction of their lands and crops. At the core of Molavi's book is a study of how the Israeli state uses herbicides to clear areas. This is done to ensure that "line of sight" exists for military incursions. Farmers frequently must deal with the loss of their crops as the herbicide blows onto their fields, in addition to the risks of sniper bullets and explosions. Molavi shows how the timing of the flights that drop the herbicides is done when winds blow towards the land and people of Gaza. No warnings are issued, despite the State's obligation to protect civilians under occupation.

At times the book feels more like an academic study. This is, of course, important. It matters that researchers like Molavi document the methods by which Palestine has been erased and attacked. The scientific rigour at the centre of the book is bleak testimony to a forgotten aspect of oppression. This changes in the afterword where Molavi documents the very personal loss of a Palestinian journalist Roshdi Yahya al-Sarraj, killed during an Israeli airstrike, in October 2023. This tragic episode reflects the disregard for life that is emblematic of the Israeli occupation and its "environmental warfare". But Roshdi's life, work and indeed that of all those who contributed to the research, and all those who continue to resist and farm in Palestine, are testiment to the resiliance of the Palestinian people. As Molavi concludes, "as long as this desire... to create a settler ecology out of the ecology of Palestine continues, novel and subversive frontiers of resistance to confront it will also continue to blossom."

Thursday, December 19, 2024

Karen Joy Fowler - Sarah Canary

Sarah Canary is a strange and disconcerting book. Its titular character, the anonymous woman who appears in a Western railroad camp as if from nowhere, never speaks. Her very existence, however, draws around her a network of unusual characters - a Chinese railroad labourer, a escapee from an asylum and a feminist sex rights campaigner, - who find themselves compelled to protect and look after her. Sarah Canary is so named because almost the only noises she makes are musical - though there are no recognisable words, and despite the love and protection some of those around her display, she never seems to respond. The central question provided by this living enigma is never answered. The reader has to fill in the gaps.

The picaresque adventures that follow Sarah's arrival in the US show different aspects of the tough frontier life in the US west. Racism, lynching, mob violence and drunken abuse and fighting, as well as attempted sexual assault on the feminist. Through this Sarah Canary seems to float, walking off into the wild lands, or being carried off by unscrupulous people who want to exploit her, displaying her "uglyness" for all to see as an exotic attraction.

There's a lot to unpick here. It is easy to read the book expecting some great twist, or unmasking, whereby Sarah Canary is revealed to be a visitor from outer space, or some other character on an important quest. Reading the book like this will leave the reader unfulfilled for two reasons. Firstly there is no explanation. Secondly, it would mean missing some wider themes. In particular I was struck by how the ugly woman at the centre of the story, badly dressed and out of place in the violent frontier "male" world, is used to provoke a discussion about women themselves. The feminist Adelaide Dixon, who's speeches on the rights of women to enjoy sex, and have equality politically and economically, go down like a lead balloon, also finds herself without a hearing from Sarah Canary. Despite this Dixon sees Sarah as an asset, not least because she mistakes her (or does she) for a woman who has recently gained notoriety for killing her abusive husband.

But the most interesting character is Chin, the Chinese labourer, sent out into the US to make his fortune, who escapes from debt bondage, finds work and a lot of racism, whose loyalty to Sarah is unchallenged. He follows her, like a sort of terminator, never giving up and never waving. Yet is unclear on exactly why he is doing this. Until her disappearance becomes the reason he returns to China. There he remembers her, and perhaps loves her, till the end of his days.

Sarah Canary is a lovely book. The adventures are over the top, comical and dark. The distinct episodes have the feel of one of those dark Netflix series that dwell on human suffering, but also remind us of the love and kindness out there. It is a classic. But it is not an easy read, nor does it offer any straightforward conclusions.

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Alex Callinicos - Trotskyism

Published in 1990 by the Open University this book on Trotskyism seems a surprisingly choice for academic publishing. The author, Alex Callinicos, is a long standing Marxist and Trotskyist activist in the British Socialist Workers' Party. This then, is not a frustrating academic study, but one that starts from the point of view that despite its seemingly small scale, the Trotskyist movement is both important and significant, as well as being a valid revolutionary position. Readers will be pleased not to have to wade through some ivory tower denunciation of Leon Trotsky, the Russian Revolution, or indeed revolutionary politics in general.

Callinicos begins his study of Trotskyism by placing it in the context of Leon Trotsky's life and revolutionary work. Trotsky was a leading figure in the Russian Revolution, an experienced revolutionary activist and a Marxist author. The key question for Trotsky, and his followers, was the nature of the Soviet Union in the era after the rise of Stalin (and by implication the defeat of Trotsky). Trotsky's argument that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers state shaped both theory and practice. In the aftermath of Trotsky's death and the expansion of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence into Europe this posed a question for the movement. How to reconcile this with the central tenet of Marxism, which Trotsky himself had fought for to the end - that socialism was about workers' self-emancipation. As Callinicos says:

The post-war transformaton of Eastern Europe by the USSR in its own likeness presented Trotsky's heirs with the following dilemma: to abandon his identification of the overthrow of capitalism with state ownership of the means of production or to revise the classical Marxist conception of socialist revoution as 'the self-conscious indpedent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. 'Orthodox Trotskyism', as [US Trotskyist James P.] Cannon was the first to call it, consisted in taking the second horn of this dilemma.

Attempting to grapple with the implications of this led to a process of disagreement and then division among the revolutionary movement. As Callinicos notes one of the features of the Trotskyist movement is its tendency to split, but he argues that this arises out of the nature of the movement's politics. About the early post-war decades he writes:

This process of fragementation... should not conceal the fact that the parties ot the various disputes shared certain crucial assumptions, in particular the belief that the USSR, CHina and Eastern Europe had broken with capitalism and begun, albeit in a bureaucratically deformed manner, the transition to socialism. These assumption give orthodox Trotskyism certain essential features which underline, and help explain, its infinite sectarian differences.

But, "by seeking to preserve the letter of Trotsky's theory, [orthodox Trotskism] deprived the latter of much of its substance". History would repeatedly demonstrate that the USSR, China and Eastern Europe were not socialist, and certainly didn't act in the interests of the working class. This in itself was enough to derail many individuals and groups. More problematic was the problems it caused for understanding "the agency of socialist revolution". For some Trotskyists, Callinicos argued, the contradictions led them to abandon revolution, with Marxism and Trotskyism becoming a realm of academic debate or historical books. Isaac Deutscher being a prime example of this problem.

For other Trotskyists the failure to be clear on the historic role of the working class led to them championing other movements, or other non-working class revolutions as being the alternative. Still other Trotskyists moved to the right and became their own enemies. A minority of Trotskyists however took the brave path of trying to take the core revolutionary ideas of Trotsky and reintegrate them with a new analysis of the Soviet Union. First and foremost among these, for both myself and Callinicos, was Tony Cliff's approach which culminated in his theory of State Capitalism. Cliff's break with orthodox Trotskyism began after doubt was cast on Trotsky's idea of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state. It was able to develop and flourish because Cliff held onto that central Marxist idea of workers' self-emancipation. The rest is, Trotskyist history.

Callinicos' book remains an interesting and important study of the movement. It is, nonetheless, a product of its time. Today Trotskyism is in many senses weaker than in 1990. Written in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the hope for a renewed revolutionary politics untainted by Stalinism remains in these pages. But the development of the organisations that could lead that has been stunted. In part this is because of the lack of working class struggle during the intervening years. Its hard to orientate a political organisation on the working class if that class is only fighting intermitently. Nonetheless there are some signs of life, and the clarity of Trotskyist analysis remains far superior to that of other left, and Stalinist groups. That said one of the key ideas of Trotsky - that of the United Front - which remains a crucial tactic even during periods when there are limited workers' struggles, does not feature much in the book. Perhaps this is a reflection of the period, but it is perhaps something that contemporary readers will find missing.

Callinicos points out in his introduction that the book is coloured by his own knowledge and experience, which means that there are areas of the Trotskyist movement (in Asia and South America for instance) that aren't covered in enough detail. However this short book remains of great interest and, with its central discussion on Trotsky's legacy and what it means for revolutionaries, I has a lot to offer comrades today.

Callinicos - Making History

Callinicos and Simons: The Great Strike: The Miners' Strike of 1984-5 and its Lessons

McGarr & Callinicos - Marxism and the Great French Revolution
Callinicos - The New Age of Catastrophe

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Rachel Kushner - Creation Lake

I read Creation Lake while off sick from work, devouring it in a couple of days. Two parallel news events however seemed apposite. The first was the killing of US healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which seemed, at least on initial evidence, to be linked to the way that privatised healthcare denies insurance claims, leaving poor people to suffer. The second was the ongoing British inquiry into Spycops, the infiltration of leftwing and environmental groups during the 1970s, 80s and 90s by police, which often "destroyed lives".

Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake deals with just such a spy, a covert agent, sent into environmental groups to discredit them by encouraging acts of violence. It is hard not to imagine that Kushner didn't have the British Spycops in mind when she wrote it. Indeed her own spy, a freelance operative rather than a state agent, Sadie Smith, refers to similar events were cops fathered children. She herself is prepared to use sex and love to manipulate her targets, dividing her opponents and creating false ideas of loyalty.

Set in France in the recent past, Sadie is trying to undermine a group of harmless, if eccentric, communalists in the rural countryside concerned, alongside the nearby farming communities, about the draining of aquifers by multinational corporations. Sadie's infiltration is aimed at discrediting the movement by encouraging it to go further than any individual members want to go - toward violence.

Entering the movement though means Sadie has to assimilate the movement in part. Since this is France, the movement's politics are shaped by the heirs of Guy Debord, those influenced by his situationalist films and ideas. Sadie hacks the emails of one Bruno Lacombe, the ideological leader of the movement, whose abstract thoughts on human nature, evolution, geology and society's construction are highly influential. As she obsessively reads these emails, Sadie is drawn to their rarified nature - pulled into Lacombe's world, even as she despises those who follow him.

There's a lot of exposition here, and I lost some patience with Kushner's use of Lacombe's emails to tell a wider story. But Sadie is well drawn, and her descent into obsessiveness, even while she doesn't become a member of the movement is fascinating. You get a real sense of the way living secret lives messes you up. Nonetheless she remains an unpleasant, manipulative, and emotionless person. There's no love for anyone else - in the movement or indeed within the opposition. All of which leads to a rather satisying ending for the activists's side, and an ambiguous one for Sadie. Creation Lake has a lot in it for leftists looking for an unusual take on the spy novel that reminds us that spy's don't have the glamour of James Bond, but are dirty, backstabbing thugs who care little for ordinary people.

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Andrew Chaikin - A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts

Despite developments and commitments from various space agencies to return humans to the moon, over fifty years after the first moon landing in 1969, it seems such explorations are a long way off. The achievements of the US state in putting men on the moon between 1969 and 1972 seem, today, somewhat perplexing. They by many different metrics incredible achievements. Yet today they seem out of time. Even futuristic. When we think of them today, particularly in the light of commitments to return to the moon, the landings themselves seem solely technical achievements. Few people can name more than one of the men who landed on the moon. Even in the 1970s Neil Armstrong and Alan Shepherd were usually the only names that the public could remember.

Andrew Chaikin's book tells the history of the moonlandings with an attempt to move beyond the technical story. It is based on a myriad of interviews with astronauts, ground crew, scientists and their partners. While many of these stories have been told previously, and there are only a certain number of anecdotes that can be told from a Space Race that was barely a decade long, there is still much of interest. Those who remain fascinated by space programmes in general and Apollo in particular would be advised to read Chaikin's book, even if you think you know the stories. What he does with the book is to rescue the humanity of the process, and place that at the front of what is essentially a techincal story.

He beings with the horror of Apollo 1's launchpad fire and the deaths of its three astronauts. It is a moment that shocked the world, and reshaped the space programme itself. In some respects it professionalised the Nasa machine, turning it into a safety conscious, self aware programme. The shock, and bad publicity, was both a spur and a warning. Chaikin's account of Apollo 1 links it to the growing awareness among Nasa and the astronauts themselves of the uniquenes of the moon landing process. While the accident of Apollo 13 had the world watching as the astronauts and mission control fought to bring the ship home, it was not an accident that led to a massive transformation. Apollo 1 personified the risks and costs of going to space.

But, Chaikin's theme really develops with a scientific issue that he places front and centre of the story - the question of geology. While going to the moon was always supposed to be about the science, in effect it was never about the science. The "contingency sample" that Neil Armstrong was badgered about by mission control in the first minutes of his landing was needed, because something had to be brought back. But the science was secondary, especially in the minds of the astronauts. This was transformed for Apollo 15 as key personnel fought to include proper geology training, and Apollo 15's crew were highly trained to know what to look for. In some ways Apollo 15 was the key mission. Forgotten in many regards today, Apollo 15's moon walkers looked at the landscape in a completely different way to their predecessors. Their ability to make informed guesses about rocks and materials was a significant step forward and transformative to the mission.

Arguments about whether or not humans are needed to explore were put to rest with Apollo 15. The final two missions took this to further extremes. Though it seems remarkable that the only true "scientist" to land on the moon did so with the final mission. Harrison "Jack" Schmitt's contribution was unique, and his inclusion was a massive boon for scientists even today.

Chaikin's account of the centrality of the geology to the moon flights is illuminating, because it is the one of the few ways in which human emotion becomes part of the story. The excitement of the astronauts on Apollo 8 to see Earthrise, is not really about exploration. It's about them comprehending the Nasa's achievement. The excitement of the latter moon walkers at a coloured rock, or the absence of volcanic debris, is telling because it comes from a shift away from the moon trips as being purely about achievement and more about exploration.

This then makes Chaikin's wider story - of the eventual budget cuts to the space programme even more tragic. As Apollo was really becoming something "for all mankind", it was stopped. Sadly Chaikin doesn't explore this enough. With Vietnam the backdrop, and protests demanding funding for social programmes, health and education, Chaikin could have used the opportunity to explore whether or not Apollo was a valid use of scant resources. It is interesting to know that Nixon considered cutting the programme after Apollo 11, the first landing, and almost chopped everything after Apollo 15. Happy to parade with the astronauts or invite them to dinner, he was also concerned to ensure that budget cuts didn't affect Vietnam, falling on the space programme instead. In fact the US could have gone to the moon, and provided healthcare and education for all. They didn't want to because that was not their priority. Cutting Apollo made it look like they cared. When in effect they didn't.

There are other absences in Chaikin's book. He doesn't enquire, even in passing, why no women or non-white people went to the moon - or were even considered. He also fails to explore some of the more personal stories. Duane Graveline, for instance, a doctor who was one of six scientists including Schmitt, selected for possible moon exploration, dropped out for "personal reasons". These reasons aren't discussed by Chaikin. It was actually because he was going through a divorce and that would tarnish Apollo's "all American" image. Graveline turned out to be a deeply flawed and unpleasant character - married six times, accused of violence, sexual abuse of minors and losing his medical license - so he was no loss at all. But Chaikin could have used this event to discuss more about the nature of Nasa's choices for missions and the pressures on the astronauts.

While the book centres on the astronauts and to a lesser extent their families and mission control, other figures are only there in passing. Many are not mentioned at all. Though we do learn about hundreds of workers losing their jobs as the budget cuts bite. Chaikin's focus on the Apollo astronauts and their voyages illuminates their individual careers, and their life after the moon. But it doesn't really help the reader understand Apollo within wider American society. There are hints of this though. Chaikin reports that Frank Bormann, commander of Apollo 8, which circled the moon in late 1968 received a telegram out of the blue on this return. The author, now doubt refering to Vietnam, to the Civil Rights movement and perhaps the growing counter-culture movements as well, simply saud "You saved 1968". Apollo in this sense was served to reassert US self-identity. To demonstrate that the nation was powerful and unassailable.

This is perhaps best illuminated by a comment that Chaikin makes right at the end of the book. He says that the Apollo missions were the "last great act undertaken by the United States out of a sense of optimism". This is, in fact, entirely inaccurate. Apollo was undertaken precisely because the US was in imperialist competition with the Soviet Union. This was why the cuts were made so quickly, why only a single scientist was sent to the moon, and why neither the US nor anyone else has returned. Apollo was undertaken with great cynicism. The despair of workers, scientists and astronauts was the result of that.

But read Andrew Chaikin's book for a different reason too. For the joy of the astronauts on the moon. For what they learnt about the moon. And most importantly because it reminds us that humanity can achieve a great deal. Let's hope that future generations can solve Earth bound problems and then take our questioning and inquisitive selves back to the moon.

Thursday, December 05, 2024

Richard J. Evans - Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich

In his preface to Hitler's People noted historian Richard J. Evans asks, "Who were the Nazis?" What motivated them, and why did people follow them? Most importantly perhaps, he asks "What made otherwise normal people carry out, or approve, terrible and murderous atrocities against Nazism's real and supposed enemies?" This is not just a historical question for Evans. He argues that such questions have "gained new urgency and importance" as democracy is once again under threat from "strongmen and would-be dictators".

Understanding fascism in general, and Nazism in particular, benefits from a detailed study of history, and as the far-right and fascists gain ground, Evans is write to draw parallels to try and understand what is happening today. So how does Hitler's People do this?

Evans begins with a good, and lengthy, account of Hitler's own life, particularly his rise to power. In this he dismisses simplistic and crude reasoning behind his dictatorial policies. He concludes that it was "Hiter's ideological obsessions that provided the essential foundation for everything that happened in the Nazi movement and the Third Reich". Importantly this was not just Hitler's antisemitism. The Nazi leader's obsession with the "stab in the back" narrative, his hatred of the German Revolution and Communist politics and his racist beliefs in German "race" supremacy, directed his activity. But he could not have done it without "a close circle of immediate subordinates to sustain him, bolster his public image, boost his self-confidence and carry out his ideological programme."

The first section of the book looks at the closest of these, figures like Goring, Himmler, Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg. Later sections look at lower levels of the Nazi machine and government - from those who planned the Holocaust, to Generals and individual figures who ran the Concentration Camps. There are many similarities. Many of the figures, including key Nazi leaders, had authoritarian fathers. And it is interesting to see how abusive and bullying parents shaped their later behaviour. Evans however doesn't narrow down the Nazi regime to such simple arguments: "When there were millions of people... who grew up in families dominated by an authoritarian father, did only some of them become Nazis?" Too much "stress" has been put on these factors by historians like Joachim C. Fest, argues Evans. Instead, he says:

Individual murderers in all countries, whatever the political system that governs them, commit their crimes in violation of punishments on them, while Nazi murderers and fanatical supporters of Hitler were legitimated by the Nazi movement and the Third Reich. Nazism released people from the normal constraints that society imposes on the violent and abusive desires that exist to a degree among all of us, and actively encouraged people to act them out. Ideological and historical context in the end was more important that individual psychology.

This can help explain how people were freed up to behave as they did. But it is not enough to explain why the Nazis gained support and eventually power. Understanding this requires looking deeper. One key point that Evans repeatedly notes is that the majority of the people who he describes have a deep-seated hatred toward the left, and Marxism/Communism. This hatred rests in the fear of revolution, and the anger at the German Revolution that they saw as ending Germany's ability to fight in WW1. This affected even those who didn't join the Nazis, but were around them. The far-right German Chancellor in 1932, Franz von Papen who helped bring Hitler to power, but never joined the Nazi Party, despite playing a key role in the government demonstrated this well. Evans writes, "conservatives like Papen put the destruction of democracy and the extirpation of 'Marxism' above any lingering conern for humanity, legality or decency."

But combined with this hatred and fear of Communism is the class basis of the support for the Nazis. As Evans explains:

Most Germans who belonged to the educated middle classes, the so called Bildunsbürgertum, comprising people with university degress and professional status, welcomed the coming of the Third Reich and collaborated with the Nazi regime to the end.... Under the Bismarckian Empire they had enjoyed a secure and respected place... a position they lost with Germany's defeat in World War I, the Revolution of 1918, the creation of the Weimar Republic with its enthronement of democratic rights ... and the advent of the feared and hated (and largely working-class) Social Democrats. If relatively few of them were Nazi fanatics, the great majority still openly or tacitly supported Hitler because they saw in him the guarantor of social order, national pride, economic stability and cultural tradition.

For some, the Nazis offered more - they offered work and stability in difficult economic times, as well as a chance to express their abhorrent ideas. The "solidily middleclass" Paul Zapp "served Nazism... because it offered a way out of career problems". But Evans is careful to point out that Zapp's prior politics meant that "he had no difficulty in executing [the regimes] decrees in the most murderous and brutal possible way." Zapp was head of a Sonderkommando that followed the German army into Eastern Europe killing hundreds of Jewish people in mass shootings.

Evans concludes that

Neither a concentration on individual pathology on the one hand, nor a sweeping account of national identity on the other, can explain how hundreds of thousands of Germans committed unspeakable atrocities behind the Eastern Front and elsewhere, as camp guards, SS killers, ghetto officers and others, and beyond that, remotely, sitting at their desks in Berlin. An explanation has to be found at an intermediate level between these two extremes.

It is notable that few of those whom Evans discusses abandoned their support, acknowledged wrongdoing, or the horrors that they had been party to. This is because those functionaries of the Holocaust came to the Nazis from "a right-wing familial and social milieu, in which antisemitism was common and German nationalism a given."

But as Evans says, understanding the Nazis rise to power means also understanding how a section of German society was driven wild by the threat to their very existence posed, even abstractly, by the left and the Communists. The economic crisis of the late 1920s, the defeat of Germany in WW1 and the German Revolution meant that a generation of middle class people felt their whole worldview threatened. To most of them Hitler offered salvation. They formed the ranks of the Nazis, and many went on to become part of the Holocaust that murdered millions of Jews, opponents of the regime and many millions of others the Nazis deemed unfit. Some, from higher class positions, were also attracted to Hitler, and not a few of these were also attracted by his promises.

Perhaps the only other thing to add, however, is that the book reminds me that the Nazis almost did not succeed. At crucial points before their coming to power, they were divided and weak. Had the left not failed to unite, and had it offered a radical alternative to Hitler, history could have been very different. Understanding the Nazis is one task for the current period. But another is remembering how they could, and can, be defeated. As Richard J. Evans concludes:

Only by situating the biographies of individual Nazi perpetrators, with all their idosyncracies and peculiarities, in these larger contexts, can we being to understand how Nazism exerted its baleful influnce. By doing this, we can perhaps start to recognize the threats that democracy and th eassertion of human rights are facing in our own time, and take action to counter then.

This excellent book is part of that fight.

Sunday, December 01, 2024

John Gribbin - The Universe: A Biography

John Gribbin is one of the longest, and best regarded, popularisers of science. His multiple books have spanned biological subjects and scientific biography, but he is perhaps best known for his books on physics and astronomy. This "biography" of the universe claims to be constructed along the lines of a classical biography, and is recommended as a good introduction to the historical development and possible futures of the universe.

Before he begins at the beginning, with a chapter on the "Big Bang" and associated ideas, Gribbin outlines how we understand the universe - this is less about the technology scientists use to explore and examine the universe, rather its about the conceptual ideas that humans have developed to understand physics at their most basic level. In particular there are outlines of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, before Gribbing tackles the question of whether there might be a theory of everything.

Exploring the early development of the universe in the immediate aftermath of the Big Band Gribbin has to tackle two complex questions that can be difficult for people new to the concepts outlined here. The first is the question of universe expansion and the second the question of dark energy and matter. These topics are explained simply and accessibly, though its notable that some of Gribbin's writing is slightly dated. He writes before the proof that the Higgs Boson exists, which underlines a central tenet of physics as we have it. There are also references to space missions and experiments that have since got underway.

I found the book most of interest in its chapters on the development of more mundance and closer to home subjects. Despite my intense interest in the structure of the universe, I found myself more entranced by Gribbins exploration of how elements form, and then the processes of planetary formation. In the section on the development of life in our solar system, Gribbin offers a good overview of theories, though he himself is clear he is most convinced that life originated in the "GMCs [Giant Molecular Clouds, in the material from which stars and planets then formed". He argues that the more common place idea that life began in "warm ponds" on Earth, "where complex organic molecules brought to Earth by comets" formed the basis for life, is a "conservative" idea.

I'm not sure that this is entirely fair, and it probably depends on the definition of life in this context. Amino acids certainly do exist in GMCs, but whether that was the place were life as most people understand it began seems open to discussion.

John Gribbin's book The Universe is a very fast read, a good overview of really big history, and a nice starting point for further reading. It's accessible and interesting, and where it is dated it is only because the author is writing on subjects were research is very cutting edge.

ResoluteReader