What I Read On My Holidays

Yes, those holidays that ended last month. Better late than never. Here are the books I found the most interesting.

'The Guggenheim Mystery' by Robin StevensI enjoyed The Guggenheim Mystery by Robin Stevens, an entertaining middle grade novel, featuring Ted, a twelve-year-old British boy who visits his American relatives in New York and finds himself solving an art heist mystery. This is a sequel to The London Eye Mystery by the late Siobhan Dowd, who died the year that book was published but had planned to write a New York sequel. Ted is presumably on the autistic spectrum, although he’s never labelled as such, and some parts of his characterisation seemed a little unlikely. He has amazing powers of memory, logic and pattern recognition which he uses to solve the mystery, but he also somehow copes amazingly well with the noise, confusion and changes to his routine during his holiday, without any meltdowns and with everyone around him being consistently understanding and accommodating. Still, it’s nice to read about the positives of neurodiversity and children with autism spectrum disorders and their siblings, classmates and friends would relate to many of the scenes in this book. The mystery is interesting and cleverly plotted, and I liked the behind-the-scenes look at the Guggenheim Museum.

'The Palace Papers' by Tina BrownI had The Palace Papers by Tina Brown on reserve at the library for months and it became available just as Prince Harry started promoting his memoir, which meant that I had had more than enough of royalty by the time I finished reading this. The Palace Papers is a gossipy, well-researched history of the British royal family over the last twenty-five years. It focuses on the women who schemed and plotted to marry into royalty — Camilla Parker-Bowles, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle — while also covering some of the many recent royal scandals. These include phone hacking by the press, servants selling lurid stories, Harry’s mental health problems and drug abuse, and Andrew’s financial scandals and friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and civil court settlement with a young trafficked woman. But mostly the book is about how utterly pointless the modern royals are, with their existence depending on positive press coverage. Some of the royals (notably William and Kate) seem to ‘manage’ the press more effectively than others, but no one comes out of this book well. The late Queen tended to ignore dangerous problems (notably, Andrew), Charles is self-pitying and selfish, Camilla has no morals, Andrew is a spoilt brat, Edward and Sophie are money-grubbing. Harry comes across as a vulnerable and damaged man who never grew up, while Meghan is depicted as shallow, rude and deluded. I finished the book wondering why on Earth intelligent young women such as Kate and Meghan would want to join such a dysfunctional family – surely if they’d wanted a wealthy lifestyle, it could have been achieved more easily than by marrying a prince? I have zero interest in reading Prince Harry’s Spare, but unfortunately, Australians are required to continue to have some interest in Britain’s version of the Kardashians, because whoever is on the British throne is also our nation’s Head of State.

'The Hidden Life of Trees' by Peter WohllebenI then read a lovely book about trees. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben is an engaging, chatty account of how trees protect themselves and their young, adapt to challenging circumstances, fight for resources with other species, and share information, food and water with each other via a network of roots and fungi (the ‘wood wide web’). Trees can live for hundreds and even thousands of years and the author describes some amazing trees – for example, a single quaking aspen in Utah that covers 100 acres, with forty thousand trunks growing from the same roots, and a beech stump that was cut down five hundred years ago but has been kept alive all that time by neighbouring beeches feeding it sugar. The author is a German forester and he focuses on Central European forest trees, with a few mentions of North American trees. He is not an academic or a scientist, and although there are footnotes, this book is as much about the author’s feelings as about scientific evidence. Sometimes he makes assertions that seem dubious – for example, that humans can subconsciously detect when trees are stressed and that this affects the humans’ well-being when they walk through an unhealthy forest. Some readers may also object to his frequent anthropomorphising of trees (for example, when trees are described as “cruel” or “ruthless” or “caring”) and his somewhat disorganised and repetitive prose. However, I found this a fascinating and enjoyable read and I ended the book with a renewed appreciation of trees.

'Clinging to the Wreckage' by John MortimerFinally, I read the first volume of John Mortimer’s very unreliable memoir, Clinging to the Wreckage. Mortimer, the author of Paradise Postponed and the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, was a prolific playwright, screen writer and novelist, as well as a barrister and Queen’s Counsel. This volume describes him growing up as the only child of an eccentric and violent barrister, who refused to admit he was blind and insisted his long-suffering wife act as his scribe and guide dog. Young Mortimer attended Harrow and then Oxford, managed to avoid war service due to his own poor vision, joined the Crown Film Unit to produce propaganda films, then bowed to parental pressure to go into the law profession, all the while churning out a number of entertaining novels, plays and scripts. There is a lot of name-dropping, exaggeration and embellishment as he describes the literary, theatrical and legal worlds of London, but his anecdotes are usually amusing and engaging. In the introduction to this book, Valerie Grove accurately notes that he tends to portray himself as “a hapless and often bewildered onlooker, to whom stuff happens”. So, for example, he claims to be baffled when his twenty-year marriage to novelist Penelope Mortimer starts to crumble. He fails to mention his multiple extra-marital affairs or that he requested his wife have an abortion and sterilisation during her eighth pregnancy, and that while she was recovering from that operation, the poor woman learned that actress Wendy Craig had given birth to her husband’s son. (He also neglects to mention he was kicked out of Oxford when staff found he’d been writing ‘amorous’ letters to a schoolboy.) I puzzled over what all these women found attractive about him. It certainly wasn’t physical beauty, but perhaps they found his story-telling irresistible.

The best part of this book for me was his discussion of censorship. As a QC, he defended the publishers of Last Exit to Brooklyn and then the publishers of Oz magazine when they were charged with publishing “obscene” works. English law stated that a literary work was “obscene” if it “tends to deprave and corrupt those likely to read it”, although publishers could avoid conviction if the work was judged to have “artistic merit” and publication was in the “public good”. He successfully argued on behalf of the publishers of Last Exit that the book’s depiction of homosexual prostitution and drug abuse was so revolting that it would turn all readers away from these practices. He makes a number of sensible points — for example, that no-one is forced to read a book or watch a television show that they know will offend them, and that “if books had the effect claimed for them by the censors, every English country house would have a bloodstained butler in the library, dead with a knife between his shoulder blades.” His many examples of the Lord Chamberlain’s demands for script editing (“Wherever the word ‘shit’ appears, it must be replaced by ‘it’) would seem at first to be an amusing look at the olden days, except we have the current example of Roald Dahl’s books being bowdlerised (no mention of ‘fat’ or ‘ugly’ allowed anymore and ‘white’ and ‘black’ in ‘white with fear’ and ‘a black cape’ must be removed). The more things change, the more they stay the same.

‘Kill or Cure? A Taste of Medicine’ Exhibition

This new exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales looks great.

Kill or Cure Exhibition State Library of NSW

“From the influence of the stars and the phases of the moon, to healing chants and prayers, to the knife-wielding barber-surgeon and game-changing scientific experiments, Kill or Cure? takes you behind the curtain of western medicine’s macabre history.

Explore our many treatment rooms with instruments that will make your skin crawl. Hear quack doctors spruiking dangerous cures from behind the interactive walls. Meet the bloodletting man and learn why veins were opened to restore health.

The Library’s extensive rare books collection reveals some of the powerful and enduring ideas from western medicine that have since been debunked, and those we take for granted today.”

Lots of fascinating, gory exhibits about bloodletting, leeches, plague and scurvy! It’s free and will be at the State Library’s Exhibition Galleries in Shakespeare Place, Sydney until January 2023.

And after you’ve visited the exhibition, if you want to learn even more about the weird and wonderful history of medicine, why not read (or re-read) Dr Huxley’s Bequest: A History of Medicine in Thirteen Objects?

Dr Huxley's Bequest paperbacks

Five Feminist Books

Happy International Women’s Day! I thought I’d mark the occasion by recommending some feminist books. Social media has its uses and there are lots of interesting feminist blogs and online forums, but sometimes you just want a well-argued, well-edited volume written by someone who knows what she’s talking about.

I do try to keep up with the latest books from young feminists (for example, I’ve read Princesses and Pornstars by Emily Maguire, Fight Like A Girl by Clementine Ford and How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran), but I often find myself underwhelmed by these books. They tend to be memoirs, heavy on anecdotes from the lives of the authors and their friends, but skimpy on historical facts, scientific evidence and feminist theory. There is nothing wrong with books about the personal experiences of women, but when these authors are white, heterosexual and famous, their experiences don’t necessarily have universal appeal or relevance. Still, these particular authors aren’t writing for me. Hopefully, the young women (and men) buying those books find them thought-provoking and life-changing. And if those readers ever decide they want to learn more about feminism, they could try some of these feminist books from the last fifty years:

1. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)

'The Female Eunuch' by Germaine Greer

You cannot possibly claim to be well-informed about feminism if you haven’t read this book. Despite Germaine Greer’s scary reputation, this is really not a difficult read. It’s a clever, provocative, funny, infuriating argument about how and why women have been oppressed for centuries, backed up with hundreds of cultural references. It’s not her best book and it contains plenty of statements I disagree with, but it’s a great introduction to her work.

2. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem (1983)

'Outrageous Acts' by Gloria Steinem

While Germaine Greer was busy being a bolshy intellectual, Gloria Steinem was disguising herself as a Playboy Bunny in order to infiltrate the toxic world of men’s clubs. This book is a collection of some of her best-known magazine articles, including I Was a Playboy Bunny, If Men Could Menstruate and In Praise of Women’s Bodies, as well as essays on Marilyn Monroe, Linda Lovelace and Alice Walker. Ms Steinem’s focus is American political and social life, written in a warm, funny, inclusive manner, although there are also essays on international issues including female genital mutilation and the politics of food. Those who think intersectional feminism was invented in the last five years might find their beliefs challenged by this book.

3. Stiffed by Susan Faludi (1999)

'Stiffed' by Susan Faludi

Susan Faludi is an American journalist best known for her 1991 book Backlash, but Stiffed is a great read for those who falsely believe that feminism only benefits women. Ms Faludi began by investigating a group of male domestic violence perpetrators who’d been ordered to attend counselling. Her initial assumption was that “the male crisis in America was caused by something men were doing unrelated to something being done to them.” What she eventually discovered, after years of interviews with male factory workers, athletes, military cadets, sports fans, porn stars, evangelical husbands and more, was that many men felt betrayed after losing jobs, skills and life roles in America’s post-war cultural upheaval, but were unable to work together to form a male equivalent of the women’s liberation movement. Her research is meticulous, but it’s the men’s personal stories that make this so fascinating.

4. Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences by Cordelia Fine (2010)

'Delusions of Gender' by Cordelia Fine

This is a book to press upon people who believe that girls are inherently emotional and chatty and unable to read maps, while boys are innately superior at rational thinking, designing bridges and running the world. Dr Cordelia Fine, an Australian cognitive neuroscientist, analyses the current research and produces a compelling argument that there is very little difference between male and female brains, with the small cognitive variations that do exist easily explained by the different social and cultural worlds experienced by girls and boys from birth. This is often a very funny and entertaining read, especially when she’s taking potshots at Simon Baron-Cohen, but there’s a hundred pages of footnotes and bibliography to back it up.

5. Bluff Your Way in Feminism by Constance Leoff (1987)

'Bluff Your Way in Feminism' by Constance Leoff

You probably won’t be able to find a copy of this, but it’s a little gem of a book, rocketing through five thousand years of feminist history, from Aristoclea and Sappho, through Aphra Behn and Susan B. Anthony and Simone de Beauvoir, to Audre Lorde and Maya Angelou. There are also lots of hilarious feminist quotes, useful explanations about the different types of feminism, and a handy glossary if you’re confused about terms such as ‘biological determinism’ and ‘parthenogenesis’.

You might also be interested in reading:

How Not To Be A Boy by Robert Webb

‘Dr Huxley’s Bequest’ Shortlisted for Young People’s History Prize

Dr Huxley’s Bequest has been shortlisted for the Young People’s History Prize in the 2018 NSW Premier’s History Awards. The other shortlisted books are The Fighting Stingrays by Simon Mitchell and Marvellous Miss May: Queen of the Circus by Stephanie Owen Reeder, both of which look fascinating.

'The Fighting Stingrays' by Simon Mitchell

'Marvellous Miss May' by Stephanie Owen Reeder

Dr Huxley’s Bequest has also been added to the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge list for Years 7-9. There’s a good list of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) book recommendations for students in Years 3-9 here.

Plus, National Science Week starts tomorrow and Children’s Book Week is the week after that and then it’s History Week. SO MUCH EXCITEMENT!

Adventures in Self-Publishing: What’s This Book About, Anyway?

Way back in 2012, I wrote this on Memoranda, in response to a reader’s question:

“Shannon asked me about the new book I’m working on, so I composed a long blog post on the subject, complete with jokes and a cool photograph of a turtle. But then I read over it and realised I didn’t feel comfortable revealing that much detail about a writing project that’s at such an early stage, it doesn’t even have a title, let alone a publisher.

So I deleted the post.

But it wasn’t a complete waste of time, because I also realised that writing that post had made me feel more confident about this new book. After I finished ‘The FitzOsbornes at War’, I flipped through my mental catalogue of Ideas For Books and decided I needed to write something that would not be the start of a series, would not be a complicated family saga, would not include scenes of heart-rending anguish, and would not require much research. This next book would be fun and easy to write!

Of course, it hasn’t turned out quite the way I’d expected. I’ve spent the past six months compiling a vast folder of notes and diagrams and photocopies, but feel I’ve barely started on the research. It isn’t a complicated family saga, but at the heart of the story is a mystery that requires far more complicated plotting than I’ve ever before attempted. It was supposed to be a stand-alone novel, but I already have ideas for a sequel and I’m not even sure the book would be best described as a ‘novel’. Plus, there’s at least one scene of heart-rending anguish…”

And five years on, I’m still working on that book, although at least now, I know what it’s about.

Dr Huxley’s Bequest grew out of several ideas. One of them was sparked by my irritation at shoddy articles about health and medicine in supposedly reputable newspapers. One particular Australian journalist, who clearly had no scientific education whatsoever, specialised in what I came to think of as ‘blueberries cure cancer’ stories – that is, articles that misrepresented or ignored scientific research in favour of sensational, fact-free assertions by celebrities and self-proclaimed experts who had no medical qualifications. I have a science degree and have worked in health sciences for most of my adult life, so I could see these articles were utter rubbish, but what about other readers? People were spending lots of money on these useless ‘cures’ and sometimes putting their health at risk by following harmful advice.

I was especially concerned about teenagers who dropped science subjects early in high school because they hated maths or decided science was boring or difficult. Scientific literacy is just as important in modern life as being able to read and write and interact socially. Science doesn’t always have to be learned in a classroom, though. Some of my favourite reads in recent years have been popular science books – books written by experts who are good at explaining complex scientific ideas in an entertaining and informative way. But those books are all aimed at adults. Where are the popular science books for teenagers, especially teenage girls?

It’s not that there are no Australian books about science for young readers. There are thousands of colourful, interesting books for primary school students on a wide variety of science topics, from astronomy to zoology. There are science books for older students, too. There are well-written and well-designed text books used by science teachers in the classroom, but they’re not intended for general reading. I’ve also seen books with eye-catching titles and cartoon covers, along the lines of There’s a Worm on My Eyeball!, full of disgusting facts and clearly marketed at boys.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop girls picking up these books and some girls do like them, but I was interested in writing something more thoughtful and philosophical, although still entertaining – a book that would appeal to teenage girls who were interested in history and stories and people, but thought science was difficult, dull and only for boys. I decided a history of medicine, from superstition to science, might be a good way to introduce the beauty, creativity and power of scientific thinking. The book needed a framing narrative, so I came up with Rosy and Jaz, two very different thirteen-year-old girls who are thrown together one summer holiday because their parents work at the same college. A mysterious bequest sends Rosy and Jaz on a race against time to identify thirteen strange and wonderful artefacts – which turn out to tell the story of medicine, from the superstitions of ancient Egypt to the ethical dilemmas of genetic testing.

Rosy and Jaz find themselves arguing with Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen, being horrified by the Black Death, body-snatching and eighteenth-century surgical techniques, and scrutinizing modern homeopathy and the anti-vaccine movement. They uncover the secrets of the brain’s anatomy in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings, and find a link between herbal medicine and Vincent Van Gogh’s masterpieces. They learn how the discovery of penicillin demonstrated the benefits of having an untidy desk, why an Australian scientist thought it would be a good idea to drink dangerous bacteria, and how traditional Aboriginal remedies might save lives when modern antibiotics fail. And there’s more:

What does aspirin have to do with secret agents, revolution, stolen treasures and explosions?
Can unicorns cure leprosy?
Who thought it was a good idea to use heroin as a cough medicine for children?
Is grapefruit evil?
Did a zombie discover the cure for scurvy?
Does acupuncture really work?
Did the bumps on Ned Kelly’s head predict his fate?
And how exactly did parachuting cats save a village from the plague?

It’s a little bit like Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, but about the history of medical science rather than the history of philosophy. (Incidentally, whenever I said this to publishers, I got blank looks. How can you work in the publishing industry and not have heard of Sophie’s World?! It was an international best-seller! It won awards! It was made into a film and a TV series and even a computer game! And by the way, it was the reason the narrator of the Montmaray Journals was called ‘Sophie’.)

Anyway, this is how Dr Huxley’s Bequest starts:

CHAPTER ONE

Afterwards, Rosy always blamed the turtle.

‘It wasn’t the turtle’s fault,’ said Jaz, as the two girls sat in the courtyard beside the pond, eating salt-and-vinegar chips.

‘You weren’t there, Jaz. You didn’t see his evil expression. He knew exactly what he was doing. None of it would have happened without that turtle.’

The turtle in question raised his head and turned his beady yellow gaze upon them.

‘Look,’ said Rosy. ‘He’s doing it again. Malevolent, that’s what I call him.’

‘How do you know it’s a boy?’

‘He’s got a beard.’

Jaz peered closer. ‘I think that’s a bit of lettuce stuck to its chin.’

‘After all that everyone here’s done for him, too,’ Rosy went on. ‘Feeding him. Cleaning his stupid pond. And how did he repay us? With treachery and disloyalty and, and … dirty tricks! Just imagine the disaster that would have befallen this college if we hadn’t come to the rescue.’

‘Well, considering there wouldn’t have been a problem if you hadn’t –’

‘Malicious,’ Rosy said quickly. ‘That’s what he is. Mephistophelean.’

‘That is not even a word.’

‘It is. It’s from Mephistopheles. Remember, that stone demon spitting into the fountain in Science Road?’

‘Oh, right,’ said Jaz. ‘Faust. The quest for knowledge.’

‘Exactly,’ said Rosy.

The turtle lunged at a passing dragonfly, snapping off its wing and a couple of legs. The unfortunate insect tumbled onto the surface of the pond and the turtle gulped it down, then twisted his wrinkled, serpentine neck in the direction of the girls.

‘He does look a bit sinister,’ Jaz conceded.'Dr Huxley's Bequest' turtle illustration

Text and illustration © Michelle Cooper

More in Adventures in Self-Publishing:

Why Self-Publish?
Editing
To Tweet Or Not To Tweet
Designing a Book Cover
Turning Your Manuscript Into A Book
All the Mistakes I’ve Made (so Far)