Category: Non-fiction

Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

It’s taken me a couple of months to read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (first published in 1991), Jung Chang’s book about her grandmother, her mother and herself, telling of their lives in China up to and during the years of the violent Cultural Revolution. Her family suffered atrociously, her father and grandmother both dying painful deaths and both her mother and father were imprisoned and tortured.

Needless to say that this is a harrowing book to read, but it’s also an eye-opener (for me at any rate) about what happened in China under Mao.

Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was briefly a Red Guard at the age of fourteen, and then a peasant, a ‘barefoot doctor’, a steelworker and an electrician. She came to Britain in 1978, and in 1982 became the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. Wild Swans  won the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year. She lives in London.

In Wild Swans she casts light on why and how Mao was able to exercise such paralysing control over the Chinese people. His magnetism and power was so strong and coupled with his immense skill at manipulation and his ability to inspire fear, it proved enough to subdue the spirit of most of the population; not to mention the absolute cruelty, torture and hardships they had to endure.

I wondered how she knew so much about what happened to her mother and grandmother (I don’t know nearly as much about mine) but in the Introduction she explains that when her mother came to visit her in London they talked every day for months. She talked about their eventful lives – her grandmother had been a concubine of a warlord general and her mother had joined the Communist underground at the age of 15. She also recorded sixty hours of her memories.

I wrote a bit about the book in a Book Beginnings post at the end of last November, when I’d just started to read it. It’s a personal story, reflecting the twentieth century history of China. A remarkable book, full of courage and spirit.

  • Paperback: 720 pages
  • Publisher: HarperPress; New edition edition (1 Mar 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0007463405
  • ISBN-13: 978-0007463404
  • Source: borrowed from a friend

This Isn't Fiction Reading Challenge

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Last year I read just 12 non fiction books, a very small percentage of all the books I read. So, this year I’m aiming to read more widely, perhaps cutting back on reading crime fiction, which made up more than half my reading last year. When I saw that Birgit is hosting a non fiction challenge I thought that it would give me a push in that direction.

All non fiction genres are allowed!

Books must be at least 100 pages long (excluding appendix and annotations)!

Books must be read in their entirety and not just in part (which consequently excludes encyclopedias, then again who in their right mind would want to read one of those from beginning to end)!

No picture heavy books – you’re supposed to read not just look at pretty photos (that said, books should have a 75:25 text/picture ratio – if it’s a big tome with 300 or more pages, then it may be a 50:50 ratio)!

ARCs and re-reads are allowed!

So, what’s it going to be for you?
  • 5 Books – Kindergarden
  • 10 Books – Elementary School
  • 15 Books – High School
  • 20 or more Books – College

After looking at my list of unread non fiction on my LibraryThing catalogue I found that I have 30+ books, so I should find plenty of choice to go for the High School  level and maybe even for the College level. Most of them are autobiographies/biographies, with some history and a touch of philosophy and travel.

The Day Gone By: an Autobiography by Richard Adams

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

This book has been sat waiting patiently for me to read it for some years now. I can’t remember when I bought it, but I bought it because I loved the other books by Richard Adams that I’d read – Watership Down, the story he originally told to his children to while a way a long car journey, Shardik, The Plague Dogs, and The Girl in a Swing.

The Day Gone By is his memoir of his early life from his 1920s childhood at home with his parents in Newbury, Berkshire, to his time at boarding school, then life at university in Oxford and his service in World War Two, up to his return home in 1946 and his first meeting with the girl who became his wife.

He was born in 1920, the youngest child of George and Lilian Adams. The early chapters are about his earliest memories, full of wonder at the natural world around him. It was his father, a doctor, who taught him to recognise and love birds and the countryside. These chapters convey vividly his family’s idyllic post-Victorian pastoral lifestyle. His talent for storytelling came out when he went away to pep school at Horris Hill at the age of 8:

To Horris Hill’s lack of electric light I owe more than I can tell. Indeed, it may very well have been the greatest blessing of my life, for it was this that made me a dormitory story-teller. The shadowy, candle-lit dormitories of winter; or those same dormitories in the fading twilight after sunset; these were the settings for a story-teller such as no electrically lit room could ever provide. (page 138)

At first the stories he told were from those he’d read, but when he had no more to tell he was forced to make them up. During the day he began thinking about what he was going to tell the other boys at night.

The Day Gone By is a detailed account of his early life throwing light on the society in which he lived, the class structure and attitudes and above all the changes that were brought about by the Second World War. His experiences during the war are equally as detailed, conveying the effect it had on his life:

To anyone at all who lived through it, in whatever capacity, the Second World War was an enormous, shattering experience. It was – and I say this in all seriousness – difficult to believe it was really over; one could not remember what things had been like before. Anyway, that no longer mattered much: they weren’t ever going to be the same again. (page 379)

His style of writing changed in the section on his wartime experiences, almost as though he was using the language he spoke at the time. I liked his reflections on life; his opinions on the terrible suffering and cruelties of the war years are especially moving.

The Day Gone By: an Autobiography by Richard Adams. Penguin Books. 1991. 399 pages.

This is the last book completing the What’s In a Name? 5 Challenge – a book with something you’d find on a calendar in the title.

Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Dervla Murphy was born in County Waterford, Ireland. In a Book Beginnings post I wrote about how when she was ten she decided she wanted to cycle to India. And that is what she did 21 years later.

Full Tilt: Dunkirk to Delhi on a Bicycle, first published in 1965  is an account of her journey in 1963, which took her through Europe, Persia (Iran), Afghanistan, over the Himalayas to Pakistan and into India. She travelled on her own, with a revolver in her saddle bag. I’m full of admiration for her courage and determination.

Reading this book made me wonder about the countries she cycled through and how they’ve changed since the early 1960s. It would certainly be a different experience if anyone tried to do the same these days! T

Here are a few quotes to give a taste of the book:

The border between Persia and Afghanistan

The only indication of the Persian-Afghan frontier is a seven-foot stone pillar, conspicuous from far across the desert, which lucidly announces ‘Afghanistan’.  Here I stopped to photograph Roz [her bicycle]. Three miles further on a long branch served as Customs barrier and beside it lay a very young soldier in a very ragged uniform, sound asleep with one hand on his rifle. I quietly raised the barrier for myself and continued towards the Customs and Passport Office two hundred yards ahead.

There, no one took the slightest notice of either my kit or my passport, no uniformed officials appeared and no series of dingy, uncomfortable offices had to be visited. (page 47)

The concept of time:

… people here have no concept of time as we understand it. The majority wear watches as ornaments and I was diverted to discover that they can’t read the time and don’t see why they should learn! Yesterday is over, today is something to be enjoyed without fuss, and tomorrow – well, it’s sinful to plan anything for the future because that’s Allah’s department and humans have no business to meddle with it. (page 58)

Dervla Murphy loved the Afghan way of life and deplored the modernisation of countries:

The more I see of life in these ‘undeveloped countries’ and of the methods adopted to ‘improve’ them, the more depressed I become. It seems criminal that the backwardness of a country like Afghanistan should be used as an excuse for America and Russia to have a tug-of-war for possession. (page 69)

Her thoughts on the attitude of Westerners:

… what an artificial life is led by the foreign colonies in these Asian cities! The sense of their isolation from the world around them is quite stifling. At a dinner party tonight I met a European couple who have been in Kabul for eighteen months without once entering the home of an ordinary Afghan – and they are not exceptions. The attitude is that the ‘natives’ are people to be observed from  a discreet distance and photographed as often as possible, but not lived among. The result is boredom and an obsessional longing for home leave, (page 101)

This was not her attitude as she stayed with local people wherever she could, accepting their food and lodgings which was given freely – they would not let her pay for anything and would have been offended if she had insisted.

Her essentials for a five-month trip – she needed less than I would want!

… the further you travel the less you find you need and I see no sense in frolicking around the Himalayas with a load of inessentials. So, I’m down to two pens, writing paper, Blake’s poems, map, passport, compass, comb, toothbrush, one spare pare of nylon pants and nylon shirt – and there’s plenty of room left over for food as required from day to day. It’s a good life that teaches you how little you need to be healthy and happy, if not particularly clean! (page 105)

Her views on ‘Progress’:

The more I see of unmechanized places and people the more convinced  I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the relationship between Man and Nature.

…

people now use less than half their potential forces because ‘Progress’ has deprived them of the incentive to live fully. (page 149)

… I don’t know what the end result of all this ‘progress’ will be – something pretty dire, I should think. We remain part of Nature, however startling our scientific advances, and the more successfully we forget or ignore this fact, the less we can be proud of being men. (pages 149 – 150)

I enjoyed Full Tilt, as much for her descriptions of the places she visited as for her thoughts along the way. I’m not sure that I would find her easy company though!

Weekend Cooking: Cakes Please!

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Yesterday was CatsPlease on my blog and today it’s CakesPlease! I used to bake cakes every week, but haven’t done so for years.

Mary Berry's Baking Bible P1080218Earlier this year I got the baking bug after watching The Great British Bake Off, and I was so taken with Mary Berry that I bought one of her books – Mary Berry’s Baking Bible. For the first time I bought a cookery book to read on my new Kindle Fire, partly because I have lots of cookery books and there’s no room for any more and also because the Kindle Fire has colour and the cover has a built-in stand so I can stand it up on the kitchen table to refer to it easily whilst cooking.

This contains a huge range of cakes, biscuits, traybakes, breads, buns, scones, hot puddings and pies, souffles and meringues and cheesecakes! Over 250 classic recipes.

Mary Berry writes:

Cakes are made to be shared so, once you have mastered a recipe, invite your friends and family to enjoy the fruits of your labour with a good pot of tea – happy baking!

So, I’m sharing the recipe for the Banana Loaf, which I made earlier this week and as I can’t physically share it here are my photos. First the ingredients:

  1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/ Fan 160°C/Gas 4. Lightly grease a 900g loaf tine then line sides and base with baking parchment.
  2. Put all ingredients into a mixing bowl and beat for 2 minutes until well blended. Spoon mixture into the loaf tine and level the surface.
  3. Bake for about 1 hour, until well risen and golden brown. Leave in the tin to cool for a few minutes then turn out, peel off the parchment and finish cooling on a wire rack.

This is what mine looked like:

It tasted delicious!

For more Weekend Cooking posts see Beth Fish Reads.

Scottish History

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Ever since we moved to live just south of the border with Scotland I’ve been interested in learning more about its history. My knowledge was limited to the basics and mainly related to the monarchy – Robert the Bruce, Mary Queen of Scots, James VI of Scotland and I of England, the Jacobite Rebellions, and Bonnie Prince Charlie and so on.

Many books have been written on Scottish history and when I saw this little book some years ago I thought it could be a good place to start to find out more:

A Short History of Scotland by Richard Killeen is by its very nature a summary account and a basic introduction. There are 31 short chapters covering the period from Prehistoric Scotland up to the Twentieth Century – all in 69 pages, including coloured illustrations of people and places.

I found the early chapters the most interesting (maybe because it was mainly new information for me) covering the early periods – Iron Age Celts, Roman Scotland and later invaders – Anglo-Saxons, raiders from Dalriada in Ireland (Irish Celts), Picts and Vikings.

Much of the book is the history of the monarchy. Kenneth MacAlpin was the first King of Scotland (9th century) but not of all modern Scotland – he never established himself in the Borders, which was held by the Anglo-Saxon Northumbrians. Northumbria had formerly extended from the Humber right up to the Forth, and it was not until Malcolm II (1005-34) won the battle of Carham in 1018 that the land north of the Tweed became part of his kingdom.

The book traces the history of Scotland through the various battles for power and control – the Norman settlement of the lowlands founding abbeys and cathedrals, the contest for the crown between John Balliol and Robert Bruce (both members of the Norman aristocracy) and the intervention of Edward I of England in choosing John Balliol as king in 1292 and claiming formal overlordship for himself and his successors.

Scottish kings had paid feudal homage to English kings before the 1290s. As far back as 1174, William the Lion had acknowledged himself the formal vassal of Henry II. Such acts did not imply that Scotland was a dependency of England. In the first place, England and Scotland hardly existed in the modern sense. The age of centralised states with uniform laws, secure boundaries with centralised administration – all things we take completely for granted – lay well in the future. (page 28)

Edward’s actions triggered Scottish resistance, with William Wallace winning victory over the English at Stirling Bridge in 1297. Wallace was then defeated within a year at the Battle of Falkirk. Robert the Bruce gained the crown, and in 1314 defeated Edward II at the Battle of Bannockburn: ‘the battle which confirmed Scotland as an independent kingdom.’ (page 31)

Moving forward in time, Killeen describes the history of Scotland until the Reformation as ‘a guignol of intrigue, faction and murder mixed with solid achievement.’ The rest of the book includes chapters on the Stewarts, Mary Queen of Scots, the Union of Crowns (1603), the Civil War, Glencoe, the Act of Union (1707), Scottish Enlightenment, the Clearances and the Industrial Revolution.

Reading this little book has spurred me on to read more detailed histories and I’ve started with Neil Oliver’s A History of Scotland. More about that another time.