Genre: History

Review – Cultish

Posted February 19, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Review – Cultish

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

by Amanda Montell

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 309
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

The author of the widely praised Wordslut analyzes the social science of cult influence: how cultish groups from Jonestown and Scientology to SoulCycle and social media gurus use language as the ultimate form of power.

What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . .

Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day.

Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.

I read Amanda Montell’s Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism more or less on a whim, and found myself reading it really pretty fast. It helps that she picked some high profile cults to discuss: like it or not, there’s a certain fascination surrounding events like the suicides of Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate. Most people have also come across the lesser examples she discusses, like fitness groups that seem to have their own language.

All in all, it’s a bit of a history of prominent cults and an examination of similar principles in other arenas — analysing what makes leaders of cults compelling, and how the same tactics work in more prosaic contexts. In and amongst all this, Montell discusses her own brushes with cults: the one her father’s family were involved in, and her own experience of an attempted recruitment to Scientology.

I think a lot of this could have been said in a significantly shorter book, but she did identify some interesting commonalities and ways of speaking, theories about “cultish” speech that do seem to hang together.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Stonehenge: The Story of a Sacred Landscape

Posted February 6, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Stonehenge: The Story of a Sacred Landscape

Stonehenge: The Story of a Sacred Landscape

by Francis Pryor

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 208
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

A beautifully illustrated account of the history and archaeology of an iconic feature of the English landscape, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series.

Perched on the chalk uplands of Salisbury Plain, the megaliths of Stonehenge offer one of the most recognizable outlines of any ancient structure. Its purpose - place of worship, sacrificial arena, giant calendar - is unknown, but its story is one of the most extraordinary of any of the world's prehistoric monuments.

Constructed in several phases over a period of some 1500 years, beginning c. 3000 BC, Stonehenge's key elements are its 'bluestones', transported from West Wales by unexplained means, and sarsen stones quarried from the nearby Marlborough Downs.

Francis Pryor is one of Britain's most distinguished archaeologists. In Stonehenge, he delivers a rigorous account of the nature and history of the monument, while also placing the enigmatic stones in a wider cultural context, exploring how antiquarians, scholars, writers, artists, 'the heritage industry' - and even neopagans - have interpreted the site over the centuries.

Francis Pryor’s Stonehenge: The Story of a Sacred Landscape is a good summary of the current consensus around Stonehenge, inasfar as I understand it. It’s not really much of a step forward from Mike Parker Pearson’s book on Stonehenge from ~2012, which is probably a good place to go if you want something in-depth.

Still, it’s presented beautifully here, with photos, art, coloured maps and plans, etc, and it does a good job of condensing down what we know and how we know it, and theorising from what we do know about the reasons for Stonehenge’s building, the phases of activity there, the traces of those who built there, etc. It discusses Mike Parker Pearson’s theory that the people who built Stonehenge built in wood for the living and stone for the dead, and makes that pretty clear (though I think there’s supporting evidence he chooses not to discuss that would firm up that point).

However, I do keep in mind with Francis Pryor that he does deliberately cherry-pick sources that agree with him (he’s said as much, explicitly, in Britain AD), so it’s important to read him sceptically.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Breakfast Cereal

Posted January 31, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Breakfast Cereal

Breakfast Cereal

by Kathryn Cornell Dolan

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 144
Series: Edible
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

A global history of breakfast cereal, from the first grain porridges to off-brand Cheerios.

Simple, healthy, and comforting, breakfast cereals are a perennially popular way to start the day. This book examines cereal’s long, distinguished, and surprising history—dating back to when, around 10,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution led people to break their fasts with wheat, rice, and corn porridges. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did entrepreneurs and food reformers create the breakfast cereals we recognize today: Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Cheerios, and Quaker Oats, among others. In this entertaining, well-illustrated account, Kathryn Cornell Dolan explores the history of breakfast cereals, including many historical and modern recipes that the reader can try at home.

A while ago I read a history of bread in the US, and found it fascinating, which means that there were some things that just weren’t surprising in Kathryn Cornell Dolan’s Breakfast Cereal: some of the same ideas circulated around plain wholemeal cereals and bread, albeit in slightly different ways. What I hadn’t really appreciated was how very much the modern boxed cold cereals originated from the US, and how ubiquitous they swiftly became: it was really surprising.

The title Breakfast Cereal might suggest Cornell Dolan’s talking about boxed cereal only, but actually she also discusses older and more traditional cereal-based breakfasts (porridge, congee, etc) as well. That said, the real focus is really the boxed cereals, and it’s fascinating that despite their global reach, that is pretty much a US story. Sometimes I quibble about that with the books in the Edible series, where they discuss US history way more than “global” history — but in this case, it seems that the US really was an origin point.

It’s funny to think about how cereal has evolved, and that (like bread) it’s actually a point of contention in terms of health, nutrients, emotional importance, etc, etc.

A slim book, as with all in this series, but interesting.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Space Rover

Posted January 9, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Space Rover

Space Rover

by Stewart Lawrence Sinclair

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 160
Series: Object Lessons
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In 1971, the first lunar rover arrived on the moon. The design became an icon of American ingenuity and the adventurous spirit many equated with the space race. The lunar roving vehicles (LRVs) would be the first and last manned rovers to date, but they provided a vision of humanity's space-faring future: astronauts roaming the moon like space cowboys.

Fifty years later, that vision feels like a nostalgic fantasy, but the LRV's legacy would pave the way for Mars rovers like Sojourner, Curiosity and Perseverance, who afforded humanity an intimate portrait of our most tantalizingly (potentially) colonizable neighbor. Other rovers have made accessible the world's deepest caves and most remote tundra, extending our exploratory range without risking lives. Still others have been utilized for search and rescue missions or in clean up operations after disasters such as Chernobyl.

For all these achievements, rovers embody not just our potential, but our limits. Examining rovers as they wander our terrestrial and celestial boundaries, we might better comprehend our place, and fate, in this universe.

The Object Lessons series hasn’t always lived up to my hopes, with books that seem more like autobiographies than examinations of a type of object. Stewart Lawrence Sinclair’s Space Rover blends the two: there are definitely highly personal chapters, talking about the people who influenced him, and surprising connections to the space program and the space rovers, but he does also discuss the process of creating the rovers, the pitfalls, and the work they’ve done.

He also tries to ask — though not really at very much depth — why we create these rovers, what they do for us, and what they mean to us. I think the answers are complicated and he just touches on a few, rather than being exhaustive. In a way, he only briefly touches on how personally involved we get with the rovers, except that the book itself as a whole is a symptom of that fascination.

Personally, I think that one reason we identify so much with the rovers is that they can be our eyes and hands in a place we could not survive. It’s easy to identify with being the eye behind the camera: more than an astronaut can (having a personality, politics, opinions, needs), a rover can get out of its own way and personify all of us.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Saints

Posted January 7, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Saints

Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic

by Amy Jeffs

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 448
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

In Saints, Amy Jeffs retells legends born of the medieval cult of saints. She draws on 'official' lives, vernacular romances, artworks and obscene poetry, all spanning from the fourth to the sixteenth centuries. The legends' heroes originate from as far east as Turkey and North Africa and as far west as Britain and Ireland. Saints includes such enduring super saints as Brigid, George, Patrick and Michael, as well as some whose legends are less well known (ScoithĂ­n, Euphrosyne and Ia) or else couched in prejudice (William of Norwich).

Jeffs guides her readers from images high on the walls of medieval churches, through surviving treasures of the elite and into the shifting silt of the Thames, where lie the lowly image-bearing badges once treasured by pilgrims. She opens manuscripts that hold wondrous stories of the lives and deaths of wayfaring monks, oak-felling missionaries and mighty martyrs. With tales of demons and dragons, with the stubborn skull of a giant, with stories of sleepers in a concealed Greek cave, Saints will enchant and transport readers to other worlds.

The commentaries following the stories offer a history of each saint and, together, trace the rise and fall of the medieval cult of saints from the first martyrs to the Protestant Reformation. And all this maps onto the passing year: from St Mungo in January to St Thomas Becket in December.

Saints' legends suffused medieval European culture. Their heroes' suffering and wonder-working shaped landscapes, rituals and folk beliefs. Their tales spoke of men raised by wolves, women communing with flocks of birds and severed heads calling from between bristling paws.

Amy Jeffs’ Saints is intended to bring some of the excitement and attention we have for retellings of folklore to hagiographies (stories telling the lives of saints). She’s chosen a small sampling of all the possible stories and retold them, following each with some commentary on its context, meaning, etc. Most of them were unfamiliar to me (I’ve only studied a few Vitae, those which mention King Arthur), so the commentary was much-needed.

Jeffs’ style in retelling the stories is rather personal, informal, sympathetic; she gets into the heads of the characters and has us inhabit them for a few moments, which I rather liked, though it’s not usually how saints’ stories get told. That’s because she really is recounting them as folklore, as stories, rather than with belief — which, for some readers, might not be acceptable, I’m sure.

I would personally have liked a bit more of the commentary, since I have a reasonable feel for what hagiographies are like, but I enjoyed it. The paper cut illustrations add something as well, I think, though I’m not the most visual person.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Lunar

Posted January 1, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Lunar

Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps and Matter

by Matthew Shindell

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 256
Rating: five-stars
Synopsis:

A beautiful showcase of hand-drawn geological charts of the Moon, combined with a retelling of the symbolic and mythical associations of Earth’s satellite.

President Kennedy’s rousing ‘We will go to the Moon’ speech on 25 May 1961 set Project Apollo in motion and spurred on scientists at the US Geological Survey in their efforts to carry out geologic mapping of the Moon. Over the next 11 years a team of 22 created 44 superb charts – one for each named quadrangle on the Earthside of the Moon.

In Lunar, for the first time, you can see every beautifully hand-drawn and coloured chart accompanied by expert analysis and interpretation by Smithsonian science curator Matthew Shindell. Long a source of wonder, fascination and symbolic significance, the Moon was crucial to prehistoric man in their creation of a calendar; it played a key role in ancient creator myths and astrology; and if has often been associated with madness. Every mythical and cultural association of the Moon throughout history is explored in this sumptuous volume, culminating in the 1969 Moon landing, which heralded the beginning of a whole new scientific journey.

Lunar, edited by Matthew Shindell, is a heck of a chunky book that I was lucky enough to borrow (and immediately decided my mother, a lunar nerd, needed to have). It’s full of geological charts of the moon, with commentary on each quadrant, punctuated by short essays on a range of lunar topics — the moon in silent film, the moon in fiction, women and the space programme, ancient Egypt and their understanding of the moon, and so on. There are various images included of relevant stuff like posters for movies about the moon, artefacts, etc.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t absorb half of it, and I’ll have to get another look at it at some point, especially because I’m very slow to parse visual information and I’m positive I missed things.

I suspect it’s most of interest to the real space nerds, given the expense, but if you get a chance to look through it, you should take a look just to wonder at what we’ve achieved.

Rating: 5/5

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Review – Digging For Richard III

Posted December 30, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Digging For Richard III

Digging For Richard III: The Search for the Lost King

by Mike Pitts

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 307
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

History offers a narrow range of information about Richard III which mostly has already been worked to destruction. Archaeology creates new data, new stories, with a different kind of material: physical remains from which modern science can wrest a surprising amount, and which provide a direct, tangible connection with the past. Unlike history, archaeological research demands that teams of people with varied backgrounds work together. Archaeology is a communal activity, in which the interaction of personalities as well as professional skills can change the course of research. Photographs from the author's own archives, alongside additional material from Leicester University, offer a compelling detective story as the evidence is uncovered.

I know most about Mike Pitts as an archaeologist who worked at Stonehenge, so I thought he could bring some archaeology and objectivity to the story of the discovery of Richard III’s burial. And he has a go at it, though sometimes he’s still a bit too sensational and breathless, even as he reports Phillippa Langley’s naivety with a sort of fondness at it. If he wanted to steer clear of that, there could’ve been less focus on Langley’s intuitions (which, while apparently accurate in this case, are hardly a basis for good archaeology — and it’s easy to big them up in hindsight).

Still, he does discuss the relevant history, both the period and a little about the site, and talks about the process of getting funds and permissions for the dig, along with some of the details of the excavation and the order of finds, etc.

I’d say this book probably doesn’t add anything much new if you were interested in the excavation at the time, or got interested and read about it since, but it’s not bad if you don’t know what was going on, if maybe a little dry in places because it is an archaeologist’s perspective more than a showman’s.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Book-Makers

Posted December 22, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Book-Makers

The Book Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives

by Adam Smyth

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 400
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

A celebration of the printed book, told through the lives of 18 people who took it in radical new directions.

This is an extraordinary story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error. Of printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. Some we know. We meet jobbing printer (and United States Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin, and watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the 20th and 15th centuries. Others we've forgotten. We don't recall Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the history of type. Nor Charles Edward Mudie, populariser of the circulating library - and the most influential figure in publishing before Jeff Bezos. Nor William Wildgoose, who meticulously bound Shakespeare's First Folio, then disappeared.

The Book Makers puts people back into the story of the book. It takes us inside the print-shop as the deadline looms and the adrenaline flows - from the Fleet Street of 1492 to present-day New York. It's a tale of contingencies and quirks, of successes and failures, of routes forward and paths not taken. This is a history of book-making that leaves ink on your fingers, and shows why the printed book will continue to flourish.

Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers is about books as physical objects, for the most part: paper, ink, binding, assembly. And he clearly sees them as objects of beauty as well, and is fascinated by the way people have interacted with them as objects, not necessarily (or at least not wholly) based on the contents. He’s illustrated this history by choosing significant figures, such as Wynkyn de Worde, Benjamin Franklin, etc.

Because of his interest in books as objects, he doesn’t really discuss ebooks in any depth at all. They’re briefly mentioned, but that’s it. This is really specifically about books — or to be even more specific, about the history of the codex, rather than stories, or scrolls, or anything else. (He doesn’t say anything specifically anti-ereader, either, for those who find that really gets their goat. He’s just interested in something else.)

I found some of the chapters more interesting than others, and at times he does go in a bit more depth than I was entirely interested in — I felt bogged down by detail at times. Still, if you have a similar interest in books as physical objects, then this is likely of interest to you!

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Dead of Winter

Posted December 15, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Dead of Winter

The Dead of Winter: The Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas

by Sarah Clegg

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 208
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

As winter comes and the hours of darkness overtake the light, we seek out warmth, good food, and good company. But beneath the jollity and bright enchantment of the festive season, there lurks a darker mood - one that has found expression over the centuries in a host of strange and unsettling traditions and lore.

Here, Sarah Clegg takes us on a journey through midwinter to explore the lesser-known Christmas traditions, from English mummers plays and Austrian Krampus runs, to modern pagan rituals at Stonehenge and the night in Finland when a young girl is crowned with candles as St Lucy - a martyred Christian girl who also appears as a witch leading a procession of the dead. At wassails and hoodenings and winter gatherings, attended by ghastly, grinning horses, snatching monsters and mysterious visitors, we discover how these traditions originated and how they changed through the centuries, and we ask ourselves: if we can't keep the darkness entirely at bay, might it be fun to let a little in?

If you’re more into Halloween than Christmas, Sarah Clegg’s The Dead of Winter might bring you some joy. It’s all about the ghosts, witches and monsters of Christmas: we’re not talking Dickens here, but the Mari Lwyd, Krampus, Perchta, the Wild Hunt, and seeing premonitions of your own death.

It’s a relatively short book, but seems pretty well researched, and there are sources listed after each chapter. (Unlike, say, Judith Flanders’ book on Christmas traditions, it at least spells “Mari Lwyd” correctly, and doesn’t pretend it’s exactly the same tradition as  the Klapperbock and similar.) Clegg discusses various customs and how they’re related, and also joyously participates in some of them herself. It’s fascinating how creepy she found some of them (and how well she described that sensation of fun-with-an-edge-of-unease) — definitely wouldn’t catch me doing some of these things!

The book could’ve done with some editing, however, at least in the ebook version: there were at least two sentences that had either no beginning or no ending. The format on Kindle is also kind of annoying, because you have to tap the footnote symbol to go to the footnotes page for that chapter, where all the footnotes are denoted by symbols. I’m not very visual, and it was maddening to try to tell myself what symbol I was looking for to read the corresponding footnote, only to be stymied by the fact that they’re not that visually distinct.

Still, the content was interesting!

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker

Posted December 13, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker

The Bookshop, the Draper, The Candlestick: A History of the High Street

by Annie Gray

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 416
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

What makes a high street? It's certainly not just about the shopping; these thoroughfares are often the beating heart of our towns and cities and, by extension, of the people who use them. As spaces where local life and culture unfolds, our high streets can be playgrounds of personal indulgence and community spirit, or sites of contentious debate and politicking.

Historian Annie Gray takes us down the street and through the ages, from medieval marketplaces to the purpose-built concrete precincts of the twentieth century. Peeping through the windows of tailors, tearooms and grocers, we explore everything from the toyshops of yesteryear - where curiosities were sold for adults, not children - to the birth of brands we shop at today.

Vibrant and enticing, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker is an essential reflection on how we shopped and lived in days gone by - and what the future may bring.

It’s pretty well-established by this point that I love a book that does a deep-dive on a highly specific subject, so obviously I was very tempted by Annie Gray’s The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker, a history of the high street. It starts with a chapter about shopping prior to the 1650s, and then discusses some broad eras from there, with the conceit that we’re going shopping with a certain level of means and a certain shopping list.

I wasn’t always in love with that conceit, I must admit; I wanted less about how “probably you’re quite tired by now and could do with a pick-me-up”, and more just facts. I get other people find that dry and boring, but I find the imaginative flourishes often just act like padding, and obscure the information that you’re reading for. I wonder if another format might’ve worked better, like chapters themed around types of shops (drapers, for instance) or a type of shopping (confectionary, menswear, etc) in order to really highlight how that changes over time.

Regardless, I did find this really fascinating, and it was interesting to reflect on my own experiences of high streets. Cardiff’s is definitely still alive, for instance, and apparently got the top spot in a consumer survey very recently. But where I grew up in Wakefield feels a bit more lacklustre, in part because of the semi-recent Trinity Shopping Centre built a few streets away, obviously designed to draw the life of the town there.

Annie Gray has a surprising optimism about the future of the high street. Certainly I’ve found myself both using my local high street more, coincidentally about the time I started reading this (grabbing stuff from Boots and Superdrug rather than online, for instance, and heading to a local bike shop instead of Halfords when I needed bike accessories), and being frustrated by the shops that have closed and gone away (I’d have patronised an M&S in person if they hadn’t moved to a spot outside of town). As someone returning to cycling, the local high street (such as it is) is somehow a lot more tempting now, especially with the library now sited much closer to it.

Rating: 3/5

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