The Hemlock Cup, Bettany Hughes

I got Bettany Hughes’ books because when I graduated from my BA, she was awarded an honorary fellowship by my university. So naturally, after her speech, I was curious about her work. My problem with her book on Helen of Troy was mostly the organisation, and I had that problem again too; she begins at the end of Socrates’ life, jumps forward and back with foreshadowing, tells you about people’s deaths and then mentions them again a few pages later…

I can also imagine that a lot of people would find it a dry read. I found Socrates fascinating, learning about his character; I was sometimes doubtful about how Hughes could really have pieced together certain details about him. There’s plenty of references and so on in the back of the book, but then there’s also careless mistakes like referring to Elektra and Ismene’s brothers. (It’s Antigone, not Elektra. Wrong tragedy, wrong tragedian.) That makes me a little unsure of how to take it all — and of course, Socrates didn’t write down his philosophy in the way that Plato or Aristotle did, so everything we have is second or third hand anyway.

An interesting book, at any rate, but not as fascinating as the one on Helen. I actually read it while reading Jo Walton’s The Just City, to which it makes an interesting non-fictional companion!

Rating: 3/5

Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise, Steve Jones

Starting with coral and working his way around, Steve Jones covers a lot of different topics to do with evolution, geology, the environment, and the impact us humans are having on said environment. This was probably the most compelling of his books that I’ve read, but I have to say I still didn’t find it breezy: fascinating as coral is in many ways, it’s not that fascinating to me.

Also, Jones clearly has a thing with Darwin — it’s not exactly that he copies Darwin, but he certainly emulates his works and interests, trying to present them anew to this century’s audience. Something about the way he’s always harping back to Darwin is starting to get on my nerves.

Rating: 2/5

Y: The Descent of Men, Steve Jones

This book is another of Steve Jones’ updates/responses to/homages to Charles Darwin’s work. It’s probably remarkably different in many ways, in terms of the content, but it is an interesting read. I do think Jones goes a bit too much into gender essentialism — I played rough with my sister and the local boys, which the female-bodied are allegedly hard-wired not to do — and sometimes his constant reiteration that the Y chromosome is dying out seems a little hysterical, like maybe it might give fuel to the men’s rights people.

And if he could maybe stop talking about promiscuous gay men causing the spread of AIDs in every book, that’d be great. (I don’t care how true it may be, straight people get AIDs too, thank you very much.)

There is interesting stuff here in terms of genetics, foetal development, even the development of the human race as witnessed by the Y chromosome. Honestly, though, I’m not finding Jones’ work that fun to read — it seems to drag on forever — so once I’ve finished the last one I have out of the library, that’ll be it.

Rating: 3/5