Stuart Austin

Mostly about books...

My new Scythe

My lovely wife has organized a new Scythe for me. They are tough to get in the UK but in common usage in her part of Poland – apparently her Dad uses one daily to cut some salads for the livestock. So one will be on its way here shortly. Yippee!

The only downside is that I am incredibly clumsy these days so I have had to assure her that I will not cut my foot off with it.

I’m Down by Mishna Wolff

I really really wanted to enjoy I’m Down: A Memoir – US link/ UK link. My daughter Frances really loved it and the reviews were amazing:

“This buoyant memoir is rich in detail but never feels over embellished…I’m Down manages to be light and triumphant because of the hilarious child-goggles Wolff wears while spinning her tales.”
- ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
… and loads of others…

But it just didn’t do it for me. Former model and now screenwriter Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black neighborhood in Seattle with her single father, a white man who truly believed he was black.

‘He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains and a Kangol – telling jokes like Redd Fox, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. You couldn’t tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried’
- writes Wolff

And so from early childhood on, her father began his crusade to make his white daughter down. Unfortunately, Mishna didn’t quite fit in with the neighborhood kids: she couldn’t dance, she couldn’t sing, and she was the worst player on her all-black basketball team. She was shy, uncool, and painfully white. And yet when she was suddenly sent to a rich white school, she found she was too ‘black’ to fit in with her white classmates. “I’m Down” is a memoir that has every ingredient for awesomeness but fails. It seems like a great longer magazine piece but there is not enough there for a book. Let alone enough to examine issue of what it means to be black or white in America as the publishers optimistically have it.

Read the précis, and author interviews and you will already have the meat of the book. All you get by buying I’m Down: A Memoir – US link/ UK link is pages and pages of filler (and a fantastic cover photo).

Frances Austin

My pretty daughter Frances:

The Junior Officers’ Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey

I’ve talked about The Junior Officers Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars – US link/ UK link by Patrick Hennessey before but as I have now actually read it all I will talk about it again. I loved the book. I have been out to Iraq and read many of the books about the two current wars and with Baghdad Business School – US link/ UK link by Heyrick Bond Gunning the Junior Officers Reading Club represent the best personal books about the Iraq conflict. It is an excellent first-hand account of a young enlistee’s transition from MTV loving student to professional soldier. Attempting to stave off the tedium and pressures of army life in the Iraqi desert by losing themselves in the dusty paperbacks on the transit-camp bookshelves, Hennessey and a handful of his pals from Sandhurst military academy form the Junior Officers’ Reading Club. By the time he reaches Afghanistan and the rest of the club are scattered across the Middle East, they are no longer cheerfully overconfident young recruits, hungering for action and glory. Hennessey captures how boys grow into men amid the frenetic, sometimes exhilarating violence, frequent boredom, and almost overwhelming responsibilities that frame a soldier’s experience and the way we fight today. It also explains the passion for violence inherent in these young men. The almost complete lack of fear – at least until the end of the firefight.

One slight complaint (made by many other as well on Amazon) is the misleading title. The Junior Officers Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars – US link/ UK link does not talk much about books. After these complaints Hennessey has appended his original London Review of Books article that originally inspired the book to my paperback copy. With that small proviso this is an excellent book and is highly recommended.

The beautiful Marta Wais Austin

…isn’t she just sooo beautiful!

American Railroads

There is an excellent piece in the Economist detailing how America’s system of rail freight is currently among the world’s best, and how high-speed passenger trains could ruin it. Well worth a read.

Ted’s nightmare

I found this on Cute Overload. It really represents Ted’s worst nightmare. I wonder where I can get such a coat?

Cold War Secret Nuclear Bunkers by Nick McCamley

Cold War Secret Nuclear Bunkers: The Passive Defence of the Western World During the Cold War – US link/ UK link is for nuclear weapons aficionados only. It tells the story of the secret defence structures built by the West during the Cold War years. The book describes in considerable detail a vast umbrella of radar stations that spanned the North American continent and the North Atlantic from the Aleutian Islands through Canada to the North Yorkshire Moors, all centred upon an enormous secret control centre buried hundreds of feet below Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. This is complemented in the United Kingdom with a chain of secret radars codenamed ‘Rotor’ built in the early 1950’s, and eight huge, inland sector control centres, built over 100′ underground at enormous cost. The book reveals the various bunkers built for the U.S Administration, including the Raven Rock alternate war headquarters (the Pentagon’s wartime hideout), the Greenbrier bunker for the Senate and House of Representatives, and the Mount Weather central government headquarters amongst others. Developments in Canada, including the Ottawa ‘Diefenbunker’ and the regional government bunkers are also studied. In the UK there were the London bunkers and the Regional War rooms built in the 1950’s to protect against the Soviet threat, and their replacement in 1958 by much more hardened, underground Regional Seats of Government in the provinces, and the unique Central Government War Headquarters at Corsham. Finally the book examines the provision, (or more accurately, lack of provision), of shelter space for the general population, comparing the situation in the USA and the UK with some other European countries and with the Soviet Union. The book’s focus is primarily on the UK infrastructure with less detail elsewhere. But for the British constructions it is unbeatable.

Wisdom

The artist… is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable.” — Bertrand Russell

Some of us manage to be both simultaneously.

Why don’t the French get as fat as us and the Americans?

The French paradox is a strong internet meme: Why don’t they get as fat as Americans, considering all the baguettes, wine, cheese, pate and pastries they eat?

The answer is researched and out. It’s because they use internal cues — such as no longer feeling hungry — to stop eating, reports a new Cornell study. Americans, on the other hand, tend to use external cues — such as whether their plate is clean, they have run out of their beverage or the TV show they’re watching is over.

“Furthermore, we have found that the heavier a person is — French or American — the more they rely on external cues to tell them to stop eating and the less they rely on whether they felt full.”

explained Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab in the Department of Applied Economics and Management.